The American Ballet Company had ups and downs after its public premiere. Kay Swift saw her ballet firsthand two months after its opening in Hartford, in a benefit at Bryn Mawr College, where it was well received. Following that the American Ballet gave its first New York performances, at the Adelphi Theatre. They were there for a week, starting on March 1, 1935. They presented two programs. The first consisted of Serenade, Alma Mater, and a new work called Errante, for which the music was Charles Koechlin’s arrangements of Schubert, and the costumes and lighting were by Pavel Tchelitchew. The second program revived Dreams—the ballet with music by George Antheil and costumes by Derain that had been performed at Woodlands—along with Transcendence, Mozartiana, and a new work called Reminiscence, with music by Benjamin Godard.
The press picked up on all of this enthusiastically, even if they dwelled as much on personalities as on the performances. First there was eager chitchat about the reception Eddie Warburg hosted on February 25 right at the Adelphi. Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, who had become one of the angels to the new company, was there, as were Frank Crowninshield and Marie Harriman. Those same people added luster to the white-tie opening, an event with which Cholly Knickerbocker and other gossip columnists had a field day. By most accounts a milestone in dance history had taken place. The enthusiasm was such that the run at the Adelphi was extended a second week. Since the box-office take was about nine thousand dollars a week and Warburg was paying the dancers’ salaries, this meant that the company could make up its deficit.
Not everyone approved, however. John Martin in The New York Times wrote that Errante was “cosmic nonsense … With all due respect to a platinum and diamond audience that cheered it to the echo, this is exactly the sort of thing the American Ballet must not do if it is to assume the place in the dance world to which it is entitled.” Alma Mater’s rating was that it was “really a revue sketch rather than a ballet.” Serenade was “a serviceable rather than an inspired piece of work.” The only kudos were for Reminiscence, which Martin termed “the real delight of the evening.” In general, Martin felt that the new company, contrary to its advance claims, was too much in the European tradition, and that it was “a colossal waste of time and energy to train dancers in the strict routine of the classic dance.” A number of the pieces were “evidence of the decadence of the classic tradition as it is found in certain European environments, examples of what someone has aptly called ‘Riviera esthetics.’ ” The conclusion was that the company needed to get rid of Balanchine and come up with an American director.1
Eddie Warburg countered Martin’s points in statements quoted in the Times a week later:
Just what one can call American in the arts is always debatable. I do not feel that we should consciously seek American forms, but rather should let them evolve. The most important thing is the quality of production and the fact that we are located here in America.… There seems no question that the ballet is wanted in this country. If it is good it will serve as a focal point for all the arts.2
This issue of the Americanness of the School of American Ballet had become pivotal, and it was up to Warburg to rally forces to the school’s defense. Before he gave his interview to the Times, he had asked Alfred Barr to make written comment on this subject. He wanted something he could quote if necessary. Warburg appears never to have actually used Barr’s letter, but it offered an essential voice of support. Barr wrote,
I think that the School of American Ballet is a valuable and much needed project. While it is true that its methods and aesthetic ideals are imported this can also be said of every other artistic medium which has been developed and assimilated on this side of the Atlantic. To expect a full fledged native ballet overnight is absurd, and to condemn the School of the American Ballet because within a year it is not 100 per cent American is equally absurd.
Barr wanted to be as helpful as possible. “If this isn’t the kind of statement you would like please let me know and I will hit some other tack,”3 he offered.
As with the Harvard Society, Kirstein was the motivating force behind the idea, but Warburg was the one to win over supporters. From time to time, Warburg even had to accompany Lincoln to Lou Kirstein’s offices at Filene’s, especially when Lincoln was soliciting funds from his father. “Lincoln would splutter out some elaborate scheme, and then Lou, with his overhanging eyebrows and bearish growl, would turn and ask, ‘Eddie, do you understand a word he says? Do you think I ought to do it?’ ” There was no end to how much Lou would taunt his son, who had considerably less humor than Warburg. More than once, Lou suggested to Warburg that the only reason he had such strong-willed offspring was that there was a firehouse not far from the family’s home on Commonwealth Avenue, and that it was actually one of the young firemen who had sired Lincoln; Lincoln cringed while his father and Warburg roared. Then Warburg would ask Lou what he had against immortality, and suggest that in truth Lincoln’s latest madness might make the family name famous. Lou would consent, crediting Warburg for his decision.4 One way or another, the two young patrons of the arts forged ahead.
The American Ballet’s next step after its New York run was to take off on a transcontinental tour organized by Alexander Merovitch, who was president of the Musical Arts Management Corporation and had lined up the Adelphi. When the company reached Scranton, Pennsylvania, disaster struck. Dancers, musicians, stagehands, and truck drivers all needed to be paid, and there wasn’t a penny left in the till. Theater managers all over the country sued for expenses already incurred for performances that now would never take place. Eddie Warburg found himself to be “the nearest thing to an asset within miles.”5
As Kirstein put it, “The matter of picking up pieces, restoring morale, paying bills offered little amusement to a generous, eager, and fun-loving young man.”6 But miserable as it made the grandson of one of the wealthiest men in America to find himself being attacked like a common criminal, pick up the pieces he did. His family’s lawyers advised that he didn’t have to answer to the theaters whose plans had been changed, but he took care of the ballet staff, and worked like crazy not to throw in the towel.
It was worth the fight. Warburg and Kirstein had managed to arrange for the American Ballet to link up with the Metropolitan Opera, housed in its grand headquarters at Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway. In the 1935–36 opera season, Balanchine provided dances for thirteen operas, including divertissements for Carmen, La Traviata, and Die Fledermaus. While Lincoln Kirstein was “in love with the whole dusty fabric of the Met,”7 and Eddie Warburg felt that “our ballet, being fresh and modern, visually as well as musically oriented, definitely did not fit into the stodgy productions of the Met,”8 they agreed that they would do what was needed to keep their company alive.
Being at the Met meant that, beyond music and theater critics, the popular press remained interested in them. Now Dorothy Kilgallen followed Lucius Beebe and Cholly Knickerbocker in setting her sights on the American Ballet. Her December 30, 1935, column in the New York Evening Journal was headed, “Maestro Assails Critics of Hi-di-Hi Ballet at ‘Met.’ ”
Mr. George Balanchine is the daring young man who lifted the Metropolitan Opera ballet out of its petticoats, gave it snake hips, a dash of hi-di-hi and achieved more terpsichorean authenticity than has been mentioned around the Met in many a year.
He put a reptilian wiggle in the torsoes of the “Aida” chorus until the dowagers couldn’t believe their lorgnettes. He staged an orgy in “Tannhauser” and was heard to remark:
“This scene is in hell and in hell they don’t dance a minuet.” …
Mr. Balanchine’s ballet kicked the music critics in their aisle seats and sent them choking to their midnight typewriters with words formerly used only in reviewing Harlem floor shows. It was this which delighted, if also slightly disturbed, Mr. Balanchine today.…
“This is why I say the critics know nothing.”
The Wadsworth Atheneum, like the ballet, was also moving along as a vehicle of new ideas. The raised eyebrows of the insurance set in no way deterred Chick Austin and Jim Soby. On December 15, 1934, a week after the triumphant Balanchine performances, The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music sponsored the premiere of part of the new opera Hester Prynne, written by Avery Claflin and directed by John Houseman. Virgil Thomson’s Quartet Number Two was premiered the same evening, in a setting designed for the occasion by Pavel Tchelitchew. Tchelitchew had the quartet sit on a low black platform. The main element of their backdrop was a large arch made of rubber hose and draped in white tulle. Hanging from the ceiling by invisible wires, it was, according to Virgil Thomson, “like a stroke of penmanship.”9 The arch enclosed three panels on which Morris Grosser had painted the first three pages of Thomson’s Quartet Number Two. Grosser did them in white on black, so that they looked like proof sheets or photo negatives; and he also painted some of Thomson’s musical notations in black on twenty yards of the bright white tulle. Thomson was delighted with the effect: “As insubstantial as the sound of music, the set gave visual presence to the musicians and picked up the red brown of their instruments.”10
Three days after that event, Salvador Dali showed the film Un Chien Andalou and gave a lecture. If Jim Soby’s friends who had huddled in his West Hartford living room gazing at L’Age d’Or ever wanted to hear Dali’s rationale for these films he had made with Luis Buñuel, now was their chance. Dali spoke of his wish to illustrate the world of dreams, and gave vast credence to all unconscious thought, however disarming it might seem. He showed the audience a postcard of Africans in front of a hut and then turned it ninety degrees to indicate that on its side it had many elements of a man’s head as drawn by Picasso, and he demonstrated how a Leonardo da Vinci Madonna and Child contained a strong subconscious image of a vulture. He said that in his own work he wanted to cultivate these double meanings, whether they were the result of sheer accident or reflections of significant thought. This recognition of subconscious ideas was, Dali explained, a vehicle toward “liberty.”11
The Hartford audience had all sorts of opportunities to be liberated. On January 18, 1935, Gertrude Stein spoke in the auditorium where her opera had opened less than a year earlier. The event was front-page news in the local paper. The headline in the Hartford Courant was “Miss Stein Speaks With Meaning Here,” while the picture caption read, “Avery Audience Understands Most Of Her Address.” She spoke in a slow, informal, conversational voice about her impressions of modern painting. Stein dealt out her usual surprises, but at least the gist could be followed. With statements like “The relationship between oil painting and the thing painted is nobody’s business” and “Familiarity does not breed contempt, it breeds familiarity,” she kept the crowd with her.
Public response mattered deeply to Austin. From January 30 to February 19 he put on a show of American painting and sculpture from eighteenth-century portraits and allegories to Calder, Noguchi, and Lachaise, and he issued a questionnaire encouraging everyone to voice his or her view. There were questions like “Which picture in the exhibition would you prefer to have in your home?” and “Which picture or sculpture do you dislike most?” along with instructions to put the completed form in a ballot box and the upper-case statement “THE MUSEUM WOULD GREATLY APPRECIATE SERIOUS ANSWERS TO THE ABOVE QUESTIONS.” The results proved to be mostly negative, however. One local citizen’s answer was a warning against forcing “this modern art jazz” on the public and the claim that 90 percent of the local population detested it.12 At the trustees’ annual meeting, Austin complained about low attendance at both lectures and exhibitions.13 The talk of New York was not taking on the home front.
There was no stopping, however. From March 12 to April 14, Austin mounted a solo exhibition of Tchelitchew’s paintings. These strange and startling works were diplomatically accompanied by an exhibition of the nineteenth-century American realist George Caleb Bingham—the artist whom the Museum of Modern Art had used as counterpoint to the Gaston Lachaise show a month earlier—but this concession to public taste was little more than a nod. From October 22 to November 17 he unveiled another truly pioneering exhibition: “Abstract Art.” In 1935 it didn’t take three years’ advance planning to assemble such a show; Austin had gathered the work for it in Europe that summer. Out of deference to the notion “that Abstractions cannot be taken in large doses,”14 Austin confined the selection to nineteen works by four artists all living in Paris at the time: the Russian-born brothers Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo, and the Dutch artists Piet Mondrian and César Domela. The sculptures, reliefs, and paintings were given an unusually simple and airy presentation in Avery Court, with lots of space around each work. The exhibition demonstrated above all the notion that beauty lay in pure shapes and forms without reference to subject matter. This was especially evident in the abstract Mondrian Composition in Blue and White that Austin bought out of that exhibition for the Atheneum—the first of the artist’s work to enter the collection of a major American museum.
The simplicity and reductionism of the “Abstract Art” show may not seem startling today, but in 1935 it was all pretty radical for the public at large. The reaction of the cognoscenti, however, was encouraging. Although Austin might have been miffed that the immediate public didn’t approve of what was going on in the museum, he must have been pleased with the words of the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier, who on a visit from Paris lectured at the Atheneum on October 25. The result of Corbu’s visit was his report back in France that Austin and his friends Soby and Hitchcock had made Hartford—“Petite ville au haut de Connecticut”—“un centre spirituel de l’Amérique, un lieu où la lampe d’esprit brûle.”15 Shortly after his visit Corbu proposed that his Paris friends Picasso, Léger, Braque, Laurens, Lipchitz, and Brancusi join him in building and decorating a villa in association with the Wadsworth Atheneum—an idea unfortunately never realized.
In Hartford, 1936 began with a Paul Klee exhibition. What everyone was awaiting, however, was the First Hartford Festival, devoted to all the arts. Dreamed up by Chick Austin, with James Thrall Soby as his unofficial assistant in organizing the various events, the festival was jointly sponsored by The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music and the Atheneum.
The festival opened on the afternoon of Sunday, February 9, with a concert called “Music of Today in Connecticut.” A local entrepreneur—one of the developers of the self-service supermarket—and his wife gave a prize of two hundred dollars for the best work by a Connecticut Valley composer. The winning composition, by Ross Lee Finney, was entitled “Three Songs on Poems by Archibald MacLeish.” It was performed by the Hartford Festival Orchestra, along with work by John Spencer Camp, Roger Sessions, Frederick Jacobi, Ruth White Smallens, and Werner Josten, in a concert conducted by Alexander Smallens and some of the composers themselves. Having by now conducted Porgy and Bess for the Theatre Guild in New York, Smallens’s reputation had grown since he waved his baton for Four Saints.
The evening following the concert, four “Early Masterpieces of Cinematic Art” were shown. Iris Barry of the Museum of Modern Art had selected them and written program notes that dignified them with a level of scholarship then new to the study of films. The movies were A Trip to the Moon, made in 1902 by Georges Méliès; The Whirl of Life, made in 1914 and starring Irene and Vernon Castle; A Fool There Was, made in 1914 with Theda Bara—of whom Jim Soby claimed “Everybody was Theda Bara’s fool”;16 and Entr’Acte, a film on which René Clair and Francis Picabia collaborated in 1924. Entr’Acte had been set to music by Erik Satie and Darius Milhaud, and starred Picabia and Satie as well as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.
Satie’s music was heard again on Friday the fourteenth, as part of the “Grand Concert Spectacle.” As at the Four Saints premiere two years earlier, the winter weather was brutal—twelve hours of pelting snow, sleet, and high winds made it a major effort just to get to the Atheneum that night—but the Grand Concert went on regardless. People like Kirk Askew, Lincoln Kirstein, Mrs. Pierre Matisse, Henry McBride, Jere Abbott, Marga Barr, and Eddie Warburg wouldn’t be put off by a little inclemency when another great modern entertainment was about to unfold.
The program for which they donned their wool mufflers and high boots opened with Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces, a Balanchine ballet called Serenata, and the American premiere of Satie’s Socrate, a symphonic drama for tenor, soprano, and orchestra. It wasn’t a bad program, but it represented a last-minute change of plans. What had originally been intended for that evening and a repeat later the following day were the American premieres of Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny, with Lotte Lenya, and of Weill’s operatic ballet spectacle The Seven Deadly Sins, choreographed by Balanchine and starring members of the School of American Ballet. According to one newspaper account, what went wrong was that “Someone forgot to consult the composers and when someone else thought of it, it was rather late and the authors proved troublesome.”17
Once again, Alexander Smallens conducted. The Stravinsky, unfamiliar to most of the audience, got things off to a lively start. It was performed by four vocalists, a chorus, four pianos used as percussive instruments, and a percussive orchestra. The soloists and pianists were from the Art of Musical Russia, Inc. Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, had arranged this, and it gave the work rare authenticity. So did the rather severe sets, based on Natalia Goncharova’s designs in the Lifar collection and executed by Chick Austin.
Balanchine’s short ballet Serenata, which followed, was deemed an exquisite diversion. Chick Austin had commissioned it. It was subtitled Magic, since Balanchine had Chick Austin’s performances as “The Great Ozram” in mind for the action. Danced to a Mozart composition for eight instruments, it was both the first American appearance and the last public performance of Diaghilev’s star ballerina Felia Dubrovska, and the debut of the great dancer Lew Christiansen. Tchelitchew designed the costumes and the set, a room enclosed by three walls of layers of white chiffon. Each wall had a black door hung on red and green ropes, and each door opened to reveal a rectangle of black velvet in front of which dancers stood while awaiting their entrance cues. The violet and mauve lighting came from behind.
But it was Socrate that made the biggest impression. Alexander Calder had designed his first mobile sets for it. As the soprano sang a text from the Dialogues of Plato, a bright scarlet disc suspended from invisible strings—it represented the sun—moved across the stage. When the tenor performed his aria, glittering chromium hoops revolved—in a couple of instances pushing him toward the side of the stage. Also suspended by invisible supports, they were like the outline of a glove. At the end of the piece, a tall white panel began to levitate. Then it descended to the floor, lay flat, turned over, and rose up—now a deep black. This was for the moment that Socrates drank the goblet of hemlock. The sun concurrently echoed the fatality by completing its diagonal descent across the sky and moving into shadow. Although Calder had provided motors to effect all of this motion, they had proved too weak for the task, so Abe Feder, the lighting engineer, and a stagehand had made it all happen by pulling ropes.
Calder’s moving parts provided a lot to talk about, but what really attracted people to the Atheneum was the costume ball planned for Saturday evening. Another of the special Hartford trains out of Grand Central ferried people northward for the event. A performance of the Grand Concert was scheduled for 4 p.m. to accommodate them, but it was really just an hors d’oeuvre. Some New York visitors were already in Hartford, but most took the private train. Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (this is how the society columnists referred to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller), was on board; she had reserved a box at the ball. The Viennese dancer Tilly Losch, Princess Natalie Paley (daughter of the Grand Duke Paul of Russia), Ziegfeld Follies composer Vernon Duke, Virgil Thomson, Roger Sessions, Fernand Léger, Margaret Lewisohn, and George Gershwin also made the Saturday trip. Journalists like Marya Mannes of Vogue, Gloria Braggioti of the New York Post, Wolfe Kaufman of Variety, “Mme. Flutterbye” of the New York Journal, and Henry McBride of the New York Sun were there to make sure that the rest of America was aware of the event. The party, known as the Paper Ball, began at 9:30 p.m. Those who attended would never forget it.
Tchelitchew created the setting. He covered the Avery courtyard with delicate decorations made of brightly painted newspapers. It had what Lincoln Kirstein called “the pathos and elegance of le style pauvre.”18 Students at the Hartford Art School and other young Hartfordites had collected piles of newspaper throughout the city, and Tchelitchew cut, pasted, folded, and stitched it to craft two false tiers of elaborate theater boxes on the balconies that formed Avery Court. The normally flat expanses of white plaster were transformed into ornate balustrades, pillars, and elaborately swagged paper draperies with fanciful emblems or armorial shields. The pillars were striped in black-and-white newsprint and topped with curly plumes made from the comic sections, printed in color. The Baroque statue of a nymph and two satyrs in the middle of the court wore a paper mask and a headdress of colored papers.
In the midst of the balconies imaginary spectators appeared. Tchelitchew indicated these figures in gray, black, and white gouaches accented in shocking pink on sheets of newspapers he had mounted on frames. The impression was of “a fantastic audience looking down on the Ball” below.19 Their faces were “expressions of nightmare grimace.” But beyond that, the illusory assemblage had little in common. They represented
every creed, color, race and station in life. Duchesses raised lorgnettes, Chinese stared over their long mustaches, hodcarriers sat with derby hats and feet on rail, be-monocled persons gaped, negroid features were arranged side by side with blonde Nordics, inebriates sat shoulder to shoulder with Puritans, on and on through these hundred or so boxes in the two tiers rising 60 feet high. They were the motley music hall audience at the fantastic circus.20
The materials reflected the realities of the Depression. The main ingredient was imagination. The choice of paper also said something about Tchelitchew’s views on precious materials and on the power of art to bring about transformation. Like so many modern thinkers, he was reconsidering traditional value judgments. The goal, according to the Russian artist, was “to show you how something elegant and beautiful can be made out of a scrap of paper, and bits of ribbon, and broken fragments of many kinds which you usually think are no good, and which you throw into the ashcan.”21 Newsprint could be brocade; tissue paper could be velvet.
Avery Court decorated for the Paper Ball. (Photo Credit 6.1)
In his ballet and theater designs Tchelitchew had worked with light and motion as much as anything else. To have wind blow through gauzy material was a consummate effect. Weightlessness, after all, is the substance of gaiety. And it was gaiety that was achieved above all else.
The Avery Court had become a stage setting, and the guests that evening performers more than observers. Their entrances did justice to the dreamlike environment. The theme of the grand pageant was “the Cirque des Chiffonniers”—or ragpickers’ circus. Seventeen groups comprising 350 people paraded through the Morgan Memorial—decorated like a circus tent with light blue walls and a white gauze “big top”—and into Avery Court. Outside on Main Street, a celebrity-hungry crowd—the type that frequents Broadway premieres or Academy Awards ceremonies—looked on as the “ragpickers” arrived at the canvas marquee that had been erected between the street and the Morgan entrance. Once inside the Avery Court, those in paper costumes were awaited by an additional 450 guests more in the category of spectator than performer, and attired in ordinary evening clothes.
Each entrance into the court, directed by Tchelitchew—who was clad in overalls for the occasion—was made to a silent fanfare on paper trumpets held by two fully uniformed heralds wearing admirals’ hats with paper feathers. One of the men was Paul Cooley, co-chairman of the ball; the other was Robert Drew-Baer, the museum’s executive secretary. Abe Feder dramatically illuminated the arrival of each group. To obtain his desired effects he had installed a special large switchboard for the evening and deployed forty powerful floodlights with a combined strength equal to one hundred thousand candlepower. These lights, periodically dimmed and brightened, were for the most part directed across the airy courtyard rather than down toward the arrivals. According to Henry McBride, “The cumulative effect of so much beauty was almost unbearable. Most of the dancers, though in paper, were copiously and imaginatively clad, though a few were beautifully unclad.”22
Chick Austin led the procession in a scarlet, white, and black ringmaster’s outfit designed by Tchelitchew. He drove a team of six ponies—women dressed in black paper lace ballet skirts and wearing black mitts that transformed their hands into hoofs. Mrs. Richard Bissell, a Hartford woman who had helped organize the ball, followed in her black riding habit, with another team of six horses. These were Hartford Art School students disguised as stallions, covered in white oilcloth spotted in black; they wore paper heads and long, flowing paper manes.
The denizens of Farmington and other local suburbs, for whom party attire was generally something that lasted a good ten seasons, donned getups a far cry from their usual pickings. Instead of the local emporia that put them in their usual, insurance-city-correct attire, tonight their couturiers included Tchelitchew, Calder, and Eugene Berman. In lieu of Liberty of London prints, the ladies now donned tissue paper cut to resemble fur, construction paper shredded into unruly fringes, crepe paper stretched to imitate silk or moiré, old-fashioned wallpaper pasted onto cheesecloth or tarlatan to simulate traditional evening gowns, and cellophane ruffles—all sprayed with fireproof liquid. Their puffed sleeves were made out of Chinese paper lanterns. Mrs. Sheffield Cowles, a snake charmer, had a paper boa constrictor wound round her. Mrs. Wilmarth Lewis—the former Annie Burr Auchincloss, and now wife of the Horace Walpole scholar who lived in Farmington—was draped in glistening silver metal paper fashioned after a gown in a Velázquez portrait. She was followed by half a dozen toreadors and a coal black bull.
Other large animals were meant to resemble unclassifiable creatures out of nightmares. Called “Nightmare Shadows” or “A Nightmare Side Show” (depending on which account of the event one reads), this group, appropriately, was led by Mrs. James Soby, who knew more about dream imagery than most of her friends did. It was Sandy Calder who made their costumes. Jim and Mimi Soby gave a dinner party before the ball at the house they had recently moved to in Farmington—one town west of West Hartford. Calder and his wife, Louisa, were to have been there at the same time as the other guests, in order to put everyone into costumes. However, the party itself became a bit of a nightmare when the Calders failed to show up as expected. Soby did his best to stay calm by reminding himself of the tale of the speed with which Calder had assembled the Harvard Society show in Eddie Warburg’s room. Others grew edgy, however, and began to drink rather hard. When Calder did at last show up, it was pretty much a repeat of the Harvard performance. Everyone expected to see him appear with finished costumes; instead he arrived with nothing but “a large roll of brown wrapping paper as well as a stapler, scissors, needles and strong thread.”23 After dinner, he cut the brown paper into appropriate lengths and had the guests all lie down on the floor. He traced their bodies. Then he stapled and sewed. Winslow Ames—another former Paul Sachs student and at that time director of the Lyman Allyn Museum in New London, Connecticut—assisted. In a flash the Sobys and their friends became tigers, elephants, and other jungle creatures. They all wore gigantic masks of the brown wrapping paper, and were made to proceed on all-fours in large flaps of brown paper covered with brightly colored fragments. When they made their entrance downtown at the Atheneum, however, some of them had considerable trouble navigating and nearly fell into the shallow pool with its Baroque statue in the center of the Avery Court. Soby “had the most trouble with one of the elephants. The man inside this costume had a temporary problem with alcohol, and he kept bursting out of his costume at unlikely places to get another drink.… He had trouble keeping his trunk aloft and defiant as the night wore on.”24
Fourteen members of the Hartford Art School formed the group of “Modern Artists.” They simulated paintings. There were two Marie Laurencins, Léonide’s Fisherwoman with Net, a Klee, a Pierre Roy, and Brancusi’s Blonde Negress. Among the four de Chiricos was a Greek column made of corrugated cardboard and cheesecloth. Six of the students modeled themselves on Picassos, including The Three Musicians and Soby’s Seated Woman—regularly on view at the Atheneum in those days.
Everything seemed possible with paper. Some local women were “A Calendar of Trees.” Their torsos were swathed in brown to indicate trunks, while their upraised arms were covered with paper leaves and blossoms to suggest a lilac, a magnolia, a dogwood, an oak tree in autumn, and a holly tree. Fernand Léger, Mrs. Gerald Murphy (who was then living in New York), and Archibald MacLeish all went as gypsies. Mrs. Pierre Matisse was a giraffe. Oliver Jennings wore a paper smoking jacket. Lincoln Kirstein was part of a group led and designed by Eugene Berman and called “the ruins of Hartford in 3095.” There was a paper Queen Nefertiti, and more than one paper Mae West, as well as South Sea islanders and peasant couples. Lauder Greenway was a paper stork, his sister a bird of paradise. George Balanchine led a group called “Beggards,” costumed by Tchelitchew.
A man named Toby Freeman wore a paper leopard skin slung over a pink undershirt, and covered his wide-cut trousers with New Yorker covers. Propriety was definitely not the order of the day. Eddie Warburg observed that a big part of the pleasure that evening was “in taking away any modesty. Suddenly you found yourself parading into a conservative New England town looking like a ragamuffin. The more outrageous everything was, the more it was valued.”25 Indeed, halfway in the grand parade a group of young men appeared “almost as nature made them, and nature made them well”—this according to Henry McBride. On their shoulders they supported the actress Ruth Ford. She was the Muse of Poetry. Her costume, made by Tchelitchew, consisted of a basic black sleeveless gown covered in cellophane that was spangled with large alphabet letters cut out of newspapers. More letters adorned her wire headdress. These elegant creatures danced until dawn. To music written specially for the occasion by Nicholas Nabokov, George Antheil, and Vernon Duke, their paper costumes rustled away.
Even after most of the guests had returned to their proper Tudor or Georgian suburban homes or repaired to local hotel rooms, the party continued. Accounts vary as to the sequence of events as dawn broke, but, if they are all to be believed, first Toby Freeman and a young woman in voluminous eighteenth-century petticoats splashed into the shallow pool, and then Austin was thrown in twice. His initial plunge was the result of a push from Sandy Calder, and caused the marble floor to run scarlet from the dye in his paper costume. Later on, Charles Ford and Parker Tyler—another of the muse’s porters—went skinny-dipping,26 but they had not had much they needed to remove to begin with.
Parties were fine and good, but this was more than a New England city could take. The Paper Ball nearly cost Austin his job.27 He was not one of the people with his clothes off, but these profligates were his invited guests. More and more, Hartford was growing uncomfortable with the color their local impresario was bringing to town. At a party back at the Sobys’ house after the ball ended, two factions formed. One consisted of the Hartfordites who were adamant that this was all nonsense. The other group were the out-of-towners like Jere Abbott, Agnes Rindge, and John McAndrew from Vassar, Kirk and Constance Askew, Julien and Joella Levy, Pierre and Teeny Matisse, and Winslow Ames, all of whom thought this had been one of the highlights of their life. There were of course some locals who supported Austin. These were mainly people associated with the Atheneum like Paul Cooley, Austin’s secretary Eleanor Howland, and Russell Hitchcock. But opposition was growing. When the March 15 Vogue described the Paper Ball as “the event that stood Hartford on its ear last month,”28 they weren’t kidding. And not everyone was comfortable standing on his ear. A lot of Atheneum trustees didn’t approve of reading Vogue, let alone being mentioned in it.
There was no end to what Austin offered them, however. The afternoon after the Paper Ball, for those who could pry open their eyelids, the Hartford Festival concluded with a “matinée musicale” directed by Virgil Thomson. Chamber music by Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Couperin, and Tartini was played on period instruments by the Renaissance Ensemble. Modern works were interspersed. These included three pieces for clarinet and bassoon by Jere Abbott, songs by Paul Bowles, and a septet paraphrase of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” by Henri Cliquet-Pleyel. They were played in front of a Eugene Berman setting, for which Jim Soby, who had in the previous few years acquired Berman’s paintings en masse, had been Austin’s liaison. It suggested a public square, full of colorful columns, behind which a painted backdrop made a vista of seventeenth-century Italian buildings against a night blue sky.
The Avery’s auditorium was only half full for the Sunday concert, however. Nothing could have the draw of the Paper Ball, and many people who might have been at the concert were at home recuperating. But if it was a party that had garnered more attention than any other event in the Hartford Festival, this celebration had significance beyond mere frivolity. The Paper Ball challenged notions of reality and identity as surely as any Cubist picture or Surrealist tract might, and it provided a sense of theater that people craved.
James Thrall Soby had what Alfred Barr called “a taste bold enough to confront the formidable.”29 His collecting took its decisive direction in the course of the 1930s. It veered increasingly from what was pretty or traditionally tasteful to art that embraced emotional complexity. His Matisses may have seemed wild when Soby put them up in the place of the Connecticut Impressionists, but in little time the Frenchman’s work had come to strike him as being “like lollypops.”30 Picasso’s Seated Woman was a portent of Soby’s growing passion for more unsettling art.
He acquired a number of smoothly painted, enigmatic works by the neo-Romantics Eugene Berman and Christian Bérard. Then, when Soby and Chick Austin mounted the Picasso retrospective, they both coveted two diminutive neoclassical paintings, one from 1921, the other from 1922. The artist had earmarked them for his family, but changed his mind because he was so pleased with the American show. The Atheneum bought the statuesque 1922 Nude Woman, a weighty presence in spite of its size of 7½ × 5½ inches, while Soby acquired a tempera on wood that measured a mere 5⅞ × 3⅞ inches. The size of a postcard, Soby’s Nude Seated on a Rock looms monumental and confident. Its ability to do so in spite of its small dimensions resulted in an unusual incident when Soby lent the painting to a midwestern museum several years after he bought it. The museum neglected to find out its actual measurements and sent a moving van to pick it up. Standing at the entrance of his West Hartford house, Soby couldn’t get over the sight of three burly drivers lumbering toward the door to pick up a painting that he handed to them from one hand; carrying it off, they glared back at him over their shoulders as if he had played a wicked trick on them. But the confusion of the curators who had sent them was completely understandable, both because the work seemed so large in reproduction and because some of Picasso’s neoclassical canvases were actually very big.
Then, in 1935, Soby purchased four major de Chiricos of the “metaphysical period”—1911 to 1917. To do so he sold Degas’s Woman Putting on Her Gloves back to Wildenstein. At de Chirico’s show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, Soby had become “like a man gone crazy with lust.”31 Wanting more than he could afford, he had decided that selling the Degas was the solution. To exchange a Degas for de Chiricos is like giving up a Social Register wife who has gone to the right schools for a younger, wilder woman. Soby in fact kept to well-bred wives—although in that arena too he periodically made exchanges—but with paintings he was more and more interested in territory that other people scarcely understood at all.
The de Chiricos fit in perfectly with After Picasso, the book Soby published in 1935. He wrote it in the attic of his West Hartford house, where Russell Hitchcock would often visit to give editorial advice and Austin frequently proffered comments. Soby borrowed the idea for his title from Clive Bell’s Since Cézanne; it didn’t suggest that the painters under discussion replaced Picasso—rather that they were the natural followers for whom Picasso had paved the way. The first section focused on the neo-Romantics—primarily Bérard, Tchelitchew, and the Berman brothers; the second on Surrealism.
Giorgio de Chirico was the artist whom Soby credited above all. De Chirico “had provided the central starting point both for the reveries of the neo-romantics and for the affronts to logic of the surrealist painters.”32 The Italian’s early credo—that he wanted to paint what he saw with his eyes closed—was central. The world that had nurtured Jim Soby stressed order and logic: the facts one could take in through wide-open eyes. Insurance executives and trust officers opt above all for rational explanations and systematic procedures—whether at their desks or on the fairways. This young gentleman, however, longed to legitimize the mysterious and inexplicable. No painting better glorified the puzzling, disconcerting side of existence than de Chirico’s 1914 The Enigma of a Day, which was one of the pictures Soby bought from Pierre Matisse in that grand sweep of 1935. Enigma shows a late nineteenth-century statue of a properly dressed citizen, situated in a simplified piazza. The piazza, which is occupied by various ambiguous objects, recedes sharply toward two towers. In its surface appearance the composition is rather tame and literal, certainly not the same sort of affront as Picasso’s Seated Woman. But, like most dream sequences, it resembled reality only to contradict it.
The large canvas (72⅜ × 55½ inches) had been a central monument of the Surrealist movement when it hung in André Breton’s apartment. A number of the key Surrealists had been photographed together around it. They considered it pivotal to their immersion in dream life. They drew up a questionnaire concerning its contents, and filled it out to indicate what aspects of the subconscious the scene portrayed, and what each object meant. The statue, heroic and vulgar at the same time, evoked an inexplicable sort of nostalgia—and, to some viewers, contempt—for the values of a dramatically different era. For better or worse, it embodied the pose and propriety of their fathers’ and grandfathers’ generation. This painting enabled perceptive onlookers to assess such standards, and their own reactions to them, with the most modern and alert vision. James Thrall Soby shared the passionate wish of the Harvard Society founders not just to coast along following the patterns and tastes of an earlier generation. Their common goal was to understand previous values and to establish different truths for the present.
The new vision allowed unprecedented sensuousness in paintings like Crowninshield’s Braque Still Life that the Harvard Society had shown in its second exhibition, and radical fantasy in work like de Chirico’s. Enigma and three other paintings Soby bought—The Great Metaphysical Still Life, The Duo, and The Faithful Survivor—were an affront to the usual way of ordering things and to decorum. The Great Metaphysical Still Life was an odd juxtaposition of thick boxy picture frames and skeletal easels, one frame containing a painting of a lovely Renaissance villa with fountain and gardens, another supporting a panel on which two crusty breads—akin to both bones and to human excrement—are mounted. The Faithful Survivor is a complex assemblage of dismembered scaffolding and other strange forms in which some tempting small biscuits—wrapped in glittering papers that are the essence of small luxury—dominate the foreground. It was a startling juxtaposition of deep anxiety with rich, if slight, everyday pleasures.
Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of the Day, 1914. Oil on canvas, 6′1 ¼″ × 55″. (Photo Credit 6.2)
At about the same time that he was acquiring his de Chiricos, Soby bought his new house in Farmington. The events surrounding its purchase had many of the elements of a de Chirico canvas: Greek columns, unknown spaces, bizarre characters, and occurrences one could not have possibly anticipated. What for other people would have been a dream sequence they would willingly have forgotten was for Soby the occasion of a momentous decision. He was on his way back to West Hartford from a farm he owned in Canton, Connecticut, when, after going through the center of Farmington, he headed up a country road. In retrospect he wasn’t sure why, unless it was to see the house of a prep school friend with whom he had stayed fifteen years earlier. Suddenly he saw a Greek Revival house he had never before noticed. Its grounds were overgrown, its paint peeling, and parts of the structure dilapidated. But it had a “for sale” sign, and Soby instantly fell “in love” with it.33
He knocked on the door. One of the owners appeared. She explained that she and her brother—the coproprietor—could no longer take care of the place. Soby walked in. Then, as he was looking up at the high ceilings and thinking that these were good rooms in which to hang paintings, he “fell over a soft, heavy object.”34 Soby had in fact tripped on a seated woman who was the niece of the owner of the house as well as the daughter of a man named Brian Hooker. Soby knew that Hooker was the translator of his favorite version of Cyrano de Bergerac. Everything about the place and these events intrigued him. He immediately proceeded to the local drugstore, telephoned the real-estate agent from one of the pay phones that had helped make his family their fortune, and offered the asking price for the place—even though he did not know the condition of the building or how much land was included. Within two hours of having first laid eyes on it, he had bought a new house—much as this annoyed his wife when he broke the news back at Westwood Road.
Soby realized that evening, however, that the four small square parlors would not accommodate his paintings and sculpture. So the next day he phoned Henry Russell Hitchcock to ask him to design a wing. When Hitchcock asked if the house was sided in clapboard or sheathing, the proud owner had no idea at all. But he quickly drove by again and discovered it was flat sheathing, which is what Hitchcock had hoped for. Hitchcock came up with a plan, and Soby hired a builder on a cost-plus basis so that he would not have to waste time on estimates and contracts.
By January of 1936 he and Mimi had moved in. In no time at all the place was in shape for them to give a housewarming that included a performance of The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music. In the following month they hosted their parties both before and after the Paper Ball.
All sorts of people converged at the Greek Revival structure. Le Corbusier visited, and, standing on the flat roof of Hitchcock’s wing, proposed a roof garden. The Swiss architect also offered to design a tree house in a large tulip tree nearby, and to link it with the roof by a concrete ramp—although unfortunately this was another Hartford-area project that failed to materialize. A few months after moving in, Soby discovered a well behind Hitchcock’s addition, and commissioned Sandy Calder to do a standing mobile as a wellhead. It was about twenty-five feet high. The main element was a long horizontal metal pole on which a heavy circular form on one end balanced a bucket on the other; here Calder had been influenced by the elbow pieces of medieval suits of armor. Whenever the bucket was lowered into the well, a series of smaller circular forms along the pole gyrated up and down. The contractor for the piece—at the Fuller Welding Company in downtown Hartford—thought both Soby and Calder totally mad, but the artist and patron were delighted to see Calder’s largest piece to date get erected, and to watch its carefree motion in the breeze.
While Calder was assembling the wellhead and adjusting its balance outside the house, Eugene Berman was inside painting five panels in the dining room. Their work had little relationship, however. The sculptor injected deliberate disarray into abstract forms; his thinking could hardly have been more modern. Berman, on the other hand, carefully organized representational imagery, in a style in the mainstream tradition of European painting. Calder’s only comment on what was going on in the dining room was that it needed fresh air. But Soby had space for both approaches.
Soby’s relationship with Berman was similar to Eddie Warburg’s with Gaston Lachaise. For a time the collector supported the painter in his Paris studio in exchange for artworks. He had discovered Berman at Julien Levy’s, which, more than any other gallery, was his source for Surrealism and neo-Romanticism—although he regularly frequented Pierre Matisse’s and Kirk Askew’s. At one point Soby and Levy had been part of a group who had a contract with Berman in which each member agreed to buy one painting annually, sight unseen. Then, when the other members of the group dropped out, Soby and Levy kept it going as a twosome, simply buying a larger number of paintings. At that point he commissioned the dining room murals.
Above: From the left, Henry Russell Hitchcock, an unidentified person, James Thrall Soby, and Le Corbusier on the roof of the Sobys’ house in Farmington, Connecticut, 1936. Below: Henry Russell Hitchcock and Chick Austin in front of Balthus’s The Street, c. 1938, Soby House, Farmington. (Photo Credit 6.3)
In 1934 Soby had gone to the first solo exhibition of Balthasar Klossowski de Rola—known as Balthus—at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. Balthus, twenty-six years old, was two years Soby’s junior. Soby could hardly have latched onto the work of anyone more passionate or contemptuous of convention. The artist was both tremendously knowledgeable about the processes of painting and uniquely imaginative. In a style nourished by traditional techniques, Balthus captured a singular and extraordinary vision. Soby had admired one painting in particular. It was the large—76¾ × 94½ inches—canvas called La Rue (The Street) that Balthus had painted the preceding year. Having brooded since then about not having purchased it, he was greatly relieved when he returned to the gallery in 1937—almost three years later—and to his astonishment found that the work was still available. Now that he had space for this huge work in his new house, Soby bought it. He was the first American to buy one of Balthus’s works and bring it back to American shores.
The Street depicts an assemblage of figures going about their everyday life on the short Rue Bourbon-Le-Château in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. What makes them arresting isn’t just their faces and costumes and poses, but above all Balthus’s extraordinary handling of paint and the bravura of the broad planes of the picture composition. Balthus has depicted the stance and the angles of the arms of each of the enigmatic nine figures with rare authority. At the same time, he has given rich rhythm to the composition as a whole. In his subtle paint surfaces and the richness of his color juxtapositions, Balthus puts painters like Léonide and the other neo-Romantics to shame. Here was someone as mysterious and literarily intriguing as the other painters who had captivated Soby, but with aesthetic taste and skills that made him practically the equal of Watteau and Piero della Francesca. Balthus could animate a surface, work paint, and establish forms as deftly as almost anyone.
Almost two decades after he bought it, Soby wrote about The Street,
The figures have an hypnotic intensity, as though seen in a dream or viewed on a moving-picture film which abruptly and inexplicably has stopped on its sprockets. It seems likely that at this moment Balthus was especially intrigued by Seurat’s ability to freeze contemporary life at a moment of poetic and ageless dignity; the figure of the chef in The Street is closely related to Seurat. The other figures are puppet-like in their sleepwalking irrationality, yet at the same time alive and majestically composed.35
It had many of the elements that most captivated him: a dreamlike trance, a defiance of easy explanations, and visual grandeur.
There were reasons why The Street had not been sold since the American collector had first seen it. For one thing, many collectors were put off by its size. But the main difficulty was a pair of figures on the left-hand side of the canvas. A young girl in a red cardigan is trying to escape a demonic young boy who has come upon her from behind. The boy not only grips her firmly by her left wrist with his left hand, and wedges his right calf between her legs to hold her in place, but—with the fingers of his right hand extended in an aggressively sexual way—reaches over the hem of her hiked-up skirt toward her genitals. The boy is, in Soby’s words—“strangely Mongolian-looking …, his face taut with easily decipherable excitement.”36
When he bought the painting, Soby had considered the position of the boy’s hand a challenge. He knew that U.S. Customs might take it askance. But he also knew that the customs officials in Hartford, which was then a port of entry and where he had previously had numerous artworks inspected, already considered him an unusual character. When they opened the crate containing The Street, they simply confirmed that it was an original work of art and hence duty-free. One of them even commented that this was the first of Soby’s imported paintings that he liked. Like Eddie Warburg, Soby often provided customs officials with plenty to talk about.
Soby hung the painting in his living room in Farmington. He enjoyed visitors’ reactions to its licentiousness. One imagines him eager to point out the more provocative elements to his friends on whom other aspects of the painting would be lost. At first no one minded. But in time it grew awkward to have The Street on view. The year he acquired the canvas he divorced Mimi, with whom he had an adopted son, Peter. The next year Soby married Eleanor Howland, known as Nellie. He had first met her when she was Chick Austin’s secretary, and had stayed in touch with her when she became Alfred Barr’s and then Julien Levy’s secretary after she had moved to New York to be near her aging mother. At first Peter was living with Mimi, but in the late 1930s, when Peter was about five years old, he moved to Farmington to live with Jim and Nellie. They wanted to do everything they could to put his life on an even keel, and it didn’t help when Peter’s friends began to titter wildly over the Balthus. They carried home tales of the naughty painting at Peter’s house. Some of the parents challenged Soby. His defense that Giovanni Bellini’s The Feast of the Gods at the National Gallery was equally explicit carried little weight in a New England town. At first Soby thought the solution might be to put a screen in front of the work. He discussed that possibility with Russell Hitchcock—but every time they considered its design they simply ended up having a drink and laughing about it.37 Finally Soby stored the picture in the fireproof vault he had built adjacent to the garage.
Years later, Soby decided that he would bequeath The Street to the Museum of Modern Art. But he feared that the museum would never hang it. In 1956 he wrote to Balthus and explained the problem.38 He dropped the hint that several restorers had offered to alter the lurid passage, but that of course he would not let anyone but the artist himself change it. In spite of the tact, he feared that this remark would be the end of the valued friendship he and the notoriously uncompromising Balthus had developed over the years. But, to Soby’s astonishment, Balthus wrote back that if Soby would send him the canvas, he would try to change the offensive passage. “When I was young, I wanted to shock. Now it bores me,”39 Balthus wrote. After holding the painting for several months, the artist returned it with the boy’s hand moved upward and the extended fingers bent inward, folded into a fist locked safely over the girl’s dress.
When Soby had first brought The Street home to Farmington, it did more than startle viewers with its naughtiness. The subtle mystery of its frieze of characters riveted a handful of cognoscenti. There was a lot to marvel at. The well-worked, frescolike impasto absorbs light to an unusual degree. The posed cast of characters makes the picture a commentary on daily rituals, enriched by the demonic trance of many of the faces. Those heads forever turned away from us have the allure of the unknown. The Atheneum set was suitably moved. Paul Cooley visited Balthus that year in Paris where, to his surprise, the artist asked if he could do a painting of Cooley’s wife, Jane. An extraordinary portrait of this tweedy West Hartford woman was the result. Several of Soby’s friends and neighbors bought paintings at the otherwise rather unsuccessful exhibition that Balthus had at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in New York in 1938. Soby himself bought Balthus’s Joan Miró and His Daughter Dolores at that exhibition, but released it before even taking possession of it—because Alfred Barr wanted it for the Museum of Modern Art. Barr had managed the difficult feat of obtaining funds for it, and Soby felt that a public institution should always have priority over a private collector, even if the collector had gotten there first.
Chick Austin acquired for the Atheneum Balthus’s richly loaded 1937 Still Life. Its earthy tones and textures liken it to Chardin’s work, as do its lively rhythms and depiction of reflected and refracted light. This is a kitchen still life as they have existed for centuries—a firm wooden table, a basket heaped with bread, a lovely flask and handsome goblet filled with refreshing sustenance (presumably white wine). But in the center of the composition, lying head down on the table, there is a hammer. It has just struck. A second, thin-necked decanter lies shattered on its side, with broken glass fragments—they are an extraordinary feat of painting—surrounding it. The sharp knife that pierces the handsome half-loaf of crusty country bread looks equally destructive, like a weapon more than a kitchen implement. Even the fork that spears a potato at the other end of the table appears to attack and violate it.
Balthus had managed to lead the existence of a privileged European nobleman. To many he was the Count de Rola, able to paint in a fine Paris studio and in pleasant country châteaus. But he was not impervious to what was happening in the Europe around him. The treachery and tumult of his Still Life was akin to that of Miró’s 1937 Still Life with Old Shoe, a painting that Jim Soby would buy in 1944. Balthus knew and admired Miró. Miró’s studio was on the second floor of the Galerie Pierre; it was there that the Spaniard worked on Still Life with Old Shoe for about a month at nearly the same time that Balthus was having his exhibition below. The colors of the Miró are lurid and chemical-looking while Balthus’s are restrained and earth-toned, but there too a chunk of a loaf of bread resembles a skull, and a fork stuck into an apple seems to impale it. These paintings depict destruction.
Balthus, Still Life, 1937. Oil on canvas, 31⅞ × 39⅜″. (Photo Credit 6.4)
In Miró’s case the specific violence that he had in mind was the Spanish Civil War. What Balthus’s Still Life reflects isn’t one historical event so much as an attitude. And that attitude was, at the time that Chick Austin acquired the canvas for Hartford, beginning to take over the world. Broken glass wasn’t just falling on people’s kitchen tables. November 9, 1938, was Kristallnacht. One could still turn to the back of the newspaper to read the dance and art criticism or to check out Lucius Beebe’s society accounts. But when the front-page headlines reported deliberate smashing, looting, and burning—and the information that in twenty-four hours a thousand German Jews had been killed, and thirty thousand arrested—it was impossible to pay attention to anything else.
For Eddie Warburg, the excitement of the ballet began to wear thin even before the rumblings of war overtook him. Toward the end of the 1930s, he was losing the drive to fight for new art forms. Like Chick Austin in Hartford, Warburg gradually wearied of opposition. For years they had both enjoyed defending unpopular points of view. But as time went on, Warburg and Austin were losing the patience to combat yet again the voices that said they were backing worthless causes. And they tired of struggling for the funds to do so.
Warburg had long been concerned about the audience he was serving. At Bryn Mawr he had come to feel that all that his students really cared about was the patina of sophistication. Nowhere in America had he seen real public enthusiasm of the type he had admired in the Soviet Union. With the ballet crowd, he began to lose faith completely. He questioned why he was working himself to the bone, and depleting his fortune, for people who seemed only interested in dressing up, seeing one another, and being written about by Lucius Beebe. He was providing entertainment for a few insiders who didn’t really need it, not for the public at large. And given the realities that most of the population was confronting on a daily basis in that time period, this shortcoming seemed particularly heinous.
Warburg questioned his motives for everything. He could always manage an upbeat posture before the public, but in fact was full of self-doubt. He had written Agnes Mongan of his misgivings about museum work. He felt he had done 37 Beekman Place more to be part of the in crowd and gain the esteem of people like Johnson and Kirstein than out of real aesthetic commitment. Now the ballet was beginning to feel more like personal antics than that idealistic enterprise he and Kirstein had discussed at Harvard as the best possible combination of various art forms, bestowing benefits to the broadest group of creators.
But although he was losing his conviction, Warburg made a couple of all-out efforts before he entirely put on the brakes. For one thing, as everyone who had been at the Paper Ball knew, Tchelitchew was in America. In Europe Tchelitchew was well known for his set and costume designs. Shortly after arriving in America at the end of 1935, he had told Lincoln Kirstein that he would like to design a production for the American Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House. Eddie Warburg agreed to foot the bill for the sets and costumes. They settled on the opera-ballet Orpheus and Eurydice, with music by Christoph Willibald Gluck, to be presented at the Metropolitan on May 22, 1936. Balanchine had complained that the Met used the ballet company as “a diner uses a napkin—to wipe his mouth before resuming his meal”;40 this would be an opportunity for ballet to be the main course.
Warburg had complained about the brocades and silks of the Met’s productions. The scenery he funded was their antithesis. It was made of chicken wire, cheesecloth, and dead birch branches. The costumes revealed as much nudity as the times would allow: transparent T-shirts, translucent veils, and gauze netting, worn by characters who had wings mounted on their shoulders or lyres strapped across their backs. Tchelitchew had proved, after all, that torn paper was the stuff of fancy-dress balls. He liked to inspire a rethinking of standards. At the same time, he achieved stunning sights. For Lincoln Kirstein—whose faith in the ballet seemed to be ever ascending, even as Warburg’s faded—the production of Orpheus and Eurydice became “the most beautiful visual spectacle I have seen on any stage.”41
Tchelitchew’s costume sketches suggested the atmosphere intended for the performance. The basic material was “artificial silk,” a standard color “ox blood.” The rough crosshatching indicated people with their arms stretched as far as possible. The idea was a look of longing, of reaching with all the intensity one could muster. There was nothing restrained or proper here; what Tchelitchew wanted in his characters, and Balanchine in his dancing, was raw emotion.
Lincoln Kirstein described the scenario:
The entire production was conceived without an element of paint. Rather, pigment was actually light.… Backgrounds were impalpable, chosen for their capacity to transmit, reflect, or change light.…
When the curtain rose, Orpheus, a big boy [danced by Lew Christiansen] in a transparent T-shirt and black trunks, impassive, frozen in grief, watches the construction of Eurydice’s memorial monument. Friends and neighbors try to comfort him, bringing reminders of his lost happiness. On cross beams they drape rags, stack brooms, ladders, pots, ordinary objects of domestic ritual. This homely structure is capped by a cloth with Eurydice’s wan portrait on a translucent veil. All except Orpheus himself were covered in gray body makeup, shades of sorrow.…
Hell, the second scene, was a Piranesian prison, crossbars of which were made of braided barbed wire.… Orpheus’ crystal lyre seemed to draw blood from red-orange silk flames. Demon guards, masked in horse skulls with manes of serpents, brandishing snaky whips, lashed gangs of chained prisoners suggesting a Last Judgment or Doré’s engravings for Paradise Lost or Dante’s Inferno. This underworld was composed of stone and fire, chain and bone.
In the third scene, Orpheus’ lyre led him through an airless Umbrian landscape in some tireless limbo. Birch trunks, stripped of leaves, hung in midair over a massive mound or burial barrow. A solemn procession of graybeards, vestals, and adolescent youths offered their meager homage of bone-dry laurel. In this anomalous ambience, dancers were swathed in doubled nettings of blue and violet which read as changeable taffeta, revealing naked bodies inside.…
In the final scene, spread across the wide sky, was a self-illuminated Milky Way, thousands of stars superimposed across the traditional diagrams of Lyre, Dipper, Cassiopeia’s Chair, standing against a vibrating mosaic of tiny stars powdering the black velvet night.
The Warburgs had previously commissioned expensive jewelry constellations at Cartier’s. There the medium was diamonds connected by thin platinum wires. Now the materials they funded were—by a combination of choice and necessity—as “valueless” as possible. Eurydice wore “mother-of-pearl chiffon which barely veiled her.”42 Amor had goose-feather pinions. The goal was that materials should be as light as possible, or disappear entirely. The vocalists and choristers sang, unseen, from the pit.
It was hardly the taste of the times. If Tchelitchew wanted to do a costume party for rich folk, that was one thing, but his ideas would win little approval in the opera circuit. Samuel Chotzinoff, in the New York Evening Post, wrote that the sets
expressed, no doubt, something deep and cosmic, since they eluded identification. I thought that the Garden of the Temple of Love rather resembled a huge portion of sweetbreads. At the final curtain a backdrop with curious designs of lines and dots began to shimmer and glow, looking for all the world like an illuminated road map of Connecticut.43
Time, in an article entitled “Travesty on Gluck,” called this “the most inept production that present-day opera-goers have witnessed on the Metropolitan stage.” Hades was “a giant cage contraption which housed furies no more terrifying than Punch & Judy puppets.” As for Balanchine’s choreography, it suffered from “bogus conceptions.”44 The New York Sun’s take on the event was that “a more melancholy, ineffective and incongruous performance of Gluck’s opera could hardly be accomplished.”45 The New York Times said,
So far as last night’s production is concerned, it is regrettable to be obliged to say that it ranks as the most inept and unhappy spectacle this writer has ever seen in the celebrated lyric theatre.… It is ugly and futile, impudent and meddlesome, wholly ineffective in performance.
It was the choreography and position of the singers that took the worst lambasting, but Tchelitchew’s sets were deemed
equally absurd. There is no good reason to discuss it in detail; but it is to be added that there is hardly any excuse, even in the name of original experiment, for this mannered, uninventive and incongruous fabrication being presented on the Metropolitan stage.
The people who would disagree with that viewpoint, and moreover were to blame for this travesty, were “certain sophisticates and dilettantes of the operatic stage.” It was as if the writer—whose name was not given—was pointing his finger directly at Kirstein and Warburg.46
The “sophisticates and dilettantes” had their champions, however. Glenway Wescott followed up Time’s review of Orpheus with a letter of rebuttal. He claimed that Orpheus, “the only original undertaking of the opera association this season, gave as much pleasure to a certain public as offence to the critics.” Wescott considered himself part of that public, “more deeply moved by the old myth than ever before.”47 He wrote that he and other people he knew longed for more such free and unconventional art.
Eddie Warburg was becoming discouraged, but voices like these, and his ongoing faith in Balanchine and Kirstein, were hard to resist. Balanchine deserved an even greater opportunity. It wasn’t enough for him to choreograph opera ballets and curtain raisers for the Met. What was needed was an evening entirely of ballet.
In the winter of 1935–36, Igor Stravinsky was in America on a concert tour. That spring, Balanchine met with the Russian composer, whose work he adored. Balanchine, Kirstein, and Warburg decided that the all-ballet evening at the Metropolitan Opera House should be a Stravinsky festival. Balanchine would choreograph two extant Stravinsky works: Apollon Musagète and Le Baiser de la Fée—a tribute to Tchaikovsky based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen. In addition, Eddie Warburg commissioned the composer to create one entirely new work to be written for the American Ballet Company. He agreed to pick up the tab for the music, sets, costumes, and other expenses with the idea that the proceeds of the production would benefit the American Ballet School’s scholarship fund.
For more than ten years Stravinsky had had the idea of a ballet in which dancers represented playing cards against a backdrop of a green baize card table in a gaming house. He had been intrigued by cards ever since he played durachki as a child. When he was young his family traveled to German spas, where he developed a fascination with casinos. Gambling suggested an interplay of numerical combinations that seemed a natural basis for a ballet score. He felt that “Playing cards are ideal material for a ballet if only because of the rich possibilities in combining and grouping the four suits.”48 M. Malaieff,49 a friend of the composer’s son Theodore, had suggested the specific theme of a poker game. Having already done some work on the idea, once he received the invitation of the American Ballet Company, Stravinsky completed the piece in the last few months of 1936. He called it Jeu de Cartes: Ballet en Trois Donnes (The Card Game: Ballet in Three Deals).
For each of the three deals, the shufflings and handing out of the cards—or dancers—made a ceremonial introduction. Then, after the cards were played, they were cleared by the gigantic fingers of invisible croupiers. Throughout this action, the powerful joker reigned supreme. Omniscient because he could become any card in the pack, the joker was defeated only at the end, under the mightier force of a royal flush of hearts.
To put a poker game on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House must have fulfilled some of Eddie Warburg’s dearest dreams. Like Calder’s wire figures, this redefined the nature of art. The rough-and-tumble was fine. As with Alma Mater, here was American subject matter—and of a type that touched a wider audience than did Ivy League high jinks. But at the same time that Stravinsky’s ballet evoked a playful backroom diversion, it was a game of moral implications. The characters who at first appear to be omnipotent end up not so powerful after all. The demonic, self-possessed joker is defeated. Not only that, but the kings, queens, and jacks—seemingly the rulers—are eventually deposed by small cards that band together in an effective group. What the American Ballet Company was putting forward wasn’t just new in sound and style. It was revolutionary in content.
This radical tale was told in a lighthearted voice. Stravinsky’s music for the ballet is highly melodic, rhythmically complex yet carefree. In its twenty-three-minute-long nonstop course, it makes allusions to work by Beethoven, Rossini, Ravel, and Johann Strauss, as well as to Stravinsky’s own earlier work and to jazz. Balanchine’s choreography is similarly grounded in tradition, parody, and pure invention.
Jen de Cartes was a close collaboration between composer and choreographer. Stravinsky went to New York to attend rehearsals. When Balanchine needed extra phrases of music to complete a sequence, the composer would provide them the next day. But generally Stravinsky had the upper hand. He knew the vocabulary of dancing almost as well as he understood music, and he often eliminated a pirouette or proposed other changes. When Balanchine’s directives had the dancers in a fan shape like a hand of cards, the composer suggested the repetition of an earlier sequence. Lincoln Kirstein, in a newspaper interview of the time, described the manner in which Stravinsky made these points:
He has about him the slightly disconcerting concentration of a research professor or a newspaper editor, the serious preoccupation of a man who has so many interrelated activities to keep straight and in smooth running order that he finds it necessary to employ a laconic, if fatherly and final, politeness. The effect is all the more odd coming from a man who is at once so small in stature and who, at least from his photographs, appears not to have changed a bit in twenty-five years. When he speaks, it seems to be the paternal mouthpiece of a permanent organization or institution, rather than a creative individual.50
Kirstein and Warburg asked the designer Irene Sharaff to do the scenery and costumes for Jeu de Cartes. They urged her to study medieval playing cards and the tarot, so that by the time Stravinsky got to America, Sharaff had already done forty sketches giving the cards and backdrops a style that conjured a period five centuries earlier. Stravinsky thought this was all wrong. He called for Sharaff to drop the flourishes and make the dancers into ordinary, everyday playing cards that any viewer might recognize in an instant as old friends. Everything should be legible to the poker players in the audience.
The company rehearsed tirelessly for the Stravinsky Festival. These performances had to be the company’s best. Kirstein asked Tchelitchew to design the set for either Apollon or Le Baiser de la Fée, but after the burning he had received for Orpheus he refused. So for Baiser Kirstein hired Alice Halicka, a decorator who was the wife of the painter Marcoussis. She came up with a set of tufted satin covered with glitter. For Apollon Stewart Chaney devised backdrops based on Poussin. It all had great promise.
Shortly before the actual event, Warburg decided that the musical accompaniment was inadequate. The Metropolitan Opera orchestra wasn’t good enough. He arranged for the New York Philharmonic—of which his father was one of the major backers—to perform; Stravinsky agreed to conduct. April 27 and 28 of 1937 were to be the American Ballet Company’s greatest moments so far.
Above all, everybody was eagerly anticipating the premiere of Jeu de Cartes. Publicity photographs whetted the public appetite. These shots showed the dancer William Dollar, George Balanchine, Stravinsky, and Eddie Warburg seated on cheap metal folding chairs at a folding card table. Dollar and Balanchine are in working clothes. The immaculately groomed Stravinsky wears a dark suit and white pocket handkerchief, and has a cigarette in a long holder hanging from his mouth. Warburg looks like the model of a well-brought-up young gentleman in his three-piece suit, with his father’s signature boutonniere of a carnation. Four lovely young women, presumably ballerinas, look on. A crucial moment in the game has just occurred. A truly poker-faced Warburg, utterly cool, lays his cards on the table, faceup. Balanchine, Dollar, and Stravinsky, their cards still in their hands, look on. Stravinsky has a fantastic expression on his face, like a gambler who cannot believe his eyes, or at least doesn’t want to believe what he sees. It seems that with this hand, anyway, the rich have just gotten richer.
Publicity photograph for Jeu de Cartes: poker game with Edward Warburg, Igor Stravinsky, William Dollar, and Georges Balanchine. (Photo Credit 6.6)
The actual production opened with Irene Sharaff’s rendition of the vast green baize gaming table, which she set against a crimson background. The table was flanked by two greatly oversized candelabra, near to which there were entrance doors that imitated decks of cards. The dancing cards entered and shuffled themselves. Then they took their positions according to the rules of Hoyle. Leda Anchutina danced around as the queen of spades, Lew Christiansen as the king of hearts. William Dollar—the joker—would periodically dance in to make winning hands, until he suffered his ultimate defeat. The total effect was lively and original, and although Apollon and Le Baiser de la Fée were not as startling, both were romantic and enticing.
Above: Apollon—Apollo and the three Muses. Below: Orpheus and Eurydice. Performance photograph by Richard Tucker. (Photo Credit 6.7)
The relative success of the Stravinsky Festival was not enough, however. By the end of the next season, the American Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera went their separate ways. It was hard to tell who tired of whom first. According to Kirstein, the Met’s director Edward Johnson “had hired the American Ballet on the promise of its youth and Warburg’s backing, but he was not prepared to support us in ambitious aims for the renovation of dancing in opera, or to permit us a free hand in the development of a ballet repertory within his house.”51 The dancers were having a rough time on the opera stage. When Lew Christiansen was paired with Rosa Ponselle in Carmen, she refused to rehearse. In the actual performance the great soprano, after gulping a bit from a goblet of wine—in truth grapefruit juice—threw the remainder of the juice into Christiansen’s eye before pulling down his head and kissing him passionately.
Meanwhile, Kirstein had formed a new organization called “The American Ballet Caravan,” and Eddie Warburg was feeling more and more drained. The Stravinsky opening may have looked glamorous to some of his pals in the audience, but in truth it was no more relaxing for Warburg than his twenty-sixth birthday party at the moment that the clouds burst. Just before performance time on opening night, Warburg had asked Stravinsky to take his position in the orchestra pit. Suddenly Stravinsky “announced without warning, ‘I am sorry—I am not conducting.’ ”52 He was irked because the program said “Apollon, music by Igor Stravinsky” rather than “Apollon, ballet by Igor Stravinsky.” Warburg worked things out, and Stravinsky conducted, but controversies like this were taking their toll. Above all, there was the recurring problem of who the audience was. Tickets were expensive that night at the Met, and Depression dollars were scarce. From Warburg’s viewpoint, “this almost guaranteed a mindless audience, to whom the high spots of these evenings were the intermissions.… I asked myself: Why do I continue wanting to be involved in this strange form of torture? I decided that first night that I had had it.”53 He had lost the will to knock himself out for an overprivileged elite that didn’t even appreciate what it was looking at. Warburg resigned from the American Ballet immediately following the Stravinsky Festival.
He had spent a fortune; his family’s gibes about all the money he was giving away had turned into real concern. He had also grown fatigued by endless critical rebuke. What once seemed new and exciting had come to be a rugged routine. But more than any other factor, the key reason for his change in priorities lay elsewhere. Warburg had come to realize that the essentials of existence had little to do with what went on once the curtain went up or the museum doors opened. In April of 1937 Igor Stravinsky’s greatest problem may have been a misattribution in program notes; little more than a year later, there were graver issues to deal with. In May of 1938 Stravinsky’s work—along with that of Schoenberg, Berg, Hindemith, and Weill—was the subject of an exhibition in Germany called “Entartete Musik,” or “Degenerate Music.” The show in Dusseldorf displayed “decadent,” “Jewish,” and “cultural Bolshevist” music, and blasted recordings of samples of this unacceptable material. A reproduction of a portrait of Stravinsky hung on the largest wall. Underneath it a placard gave the instruction, “Judge from this whether or not Stravinsky is a Jew.”54 Without the freedom to live and work, there could be no room for art.
