Continued
from the previous page
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE WORLD: FABULOUS PLACES, ERAS,
PEOPLE, EVENTS:
FABULOUS
TIMES, PLACES AND PEOPLE: PARIS IN THE 20s and 30s.
ART
OF THE ERA
Photo:
La Conquète de l'Air (conquest of the air) by Roger de la Fresnaye,
1913.
And you thought
Cubism was a bit odd? It was the art form that shocked people in 1906 but
seemed positively tame compared with the Dada-tinged nihilism that was to
come. The work of Marcel Duchamp made fun of everyone, including himself,
(mocking Cubism in "Nude Descending A Stair", sticking a moustache on the Mona
Lisa). In 1924 the more po-faced Surrealists began to dominate the art scene,
that André Breton was soooo dogmatic.
The years surrounding the First World War saw the visual arts treating new
subjects in new ways. As in music and literature, there was a radical break
with tradition, and a completely altered attitude to the work of art itself.
Paris was full of young artists keen to turn away from the languid colours and
images of the Impressionists. The new vision was one which represented the
world in terms of geometrical shapes and altered perspectives. Things were
never to look the same again. New subjects included machine-like images and
the city in both its glory and its ugliness, while the traditional subjects -
the still-life and the portrait - became less and less popular. Cubism was the
first to emphasise these flat two-dimensional shapes and geometrical figures.
Another real innovation was its use of collage techniques with everyday items
- newspaper, tickets, pieces of cloth - being pasted onto the painting. This
broke completely with the traditional idea that works of art must be produced
with pencils or paint alone to create an illusion of reality. As Cubism
steadily infiltrated other creative art forms such as film, the Italian
Futurism of Filippo Marinetti hit Paris with an exhibition of Futurist
Italian works in 1912. Although an early influence and not a French
development itself, the art world owed a debt to this movement which heralded
a violent departure from traditional artistic values. Its influence can be
heard resonating in the aesthetics of Cocteau, and its glorifying of
the beauty and sleekness of the machine in many ways pre-figured the future
fascination with "machine-art". This fusing of art and the everyday world was
mirrored in music and poetry too, and also extended into Dadaism.
Photo: Filippo
Tommasso Marinetti, Italian author and initiator of Futurism.
The Dadaists
believed in total freedom to experiment and their Parisian exhibitions were
sometimes so outrageous that the audience pelted them with eggs and
vegetables. Dada also poked fun at art itself, showing a special contempt for
the notion of "high art". The most memorable image of Dada's subversive, fun
side is probably Marcel Duchamp's La Gioconde - the Mona
Lisa... with a moustache. Duchamp was one of Dada's leading
artists. He claimed that an object was art if an artist says it is, and
produced a series of Ready-Mades which were based on everyday
objects. Francis Picabia, who had taken up with Dada's founder, the
Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, when he arrived in Paris in 1920, echoed
this in his statement that "Art is, and can only be, the expression of
contemporary life". Both Picabia and Duchamp's ideas can be seen
as leading to the pop art of the late 1950s and 1960s. Ezra Pound was
particularly taken with Dada and how it had "satirised the sanctimonious
attitude towards the arts". Dada's nihilism was to be short-lived though. By
1924, with the publication of the Manifeste du Surréalisme it gave
way to Surrealism. André Breton, one of Surrealism's leading figures,
described it as "pure psychic automatism" - a means of expression uncensored
by reason, which allowed putting down on paper whatever should come into the
artist's head. A final sign of the times was that artists no longer limited
themselves to exhibiting canvases and sculptures in galleries, with Picasso,
Picabia and Léger branching out into the world of music and
dance. The greatest collaborations of the time involved Diaghilev's
Ballets Russes and Rolf de Maré's Ballet Suedois
(Swedish Ballet) who both premiered important avant-garde ballets in Paris
during the early decades of the century, for which the artists provided Cubist
and Dadaist set and costume designs.
FABULOUS
TIMES, PLACES AND PEOPLE: PARIS IN THE 20s and 30s.
ART AND PAINTINGS OF THE ERA; LIFESTYLES
OF FRENCH WOMEN OF LA BELLE EPOQUE:
Parisian woman by Edgar Chahine
French hairdo of the era by Paul Cesar Helleu
Parisian woman by Maurice
Milliere The French
coquette of the era by William Ablette
FABULOUS
TIMES, PLACES AND PEOPLE: PARIS IN THE 20s and 30s.
PLEASURES OF THE ERA
Photo:
A flapper flirts with a gentleman friend: illustration
by Jacques Leclerc in La Vie Parisienne,
20th February, 1926.
Ecstasy had been invented in 1913,
but had to wait another 75 years to become popular. Absinthe, a wormwood-based
drink with hallucinogenic properties, was banned in 1915. Pernod replaced it
as the arty drink of choice. Opium had its fans, including the writer Jean
Cocteau. Modigliani liked a spliff, apparently. Women were beginning to gain
more freedom and were more openly going out on the razz.
Paris in this era was probably the most
liberal place in Europe. It certainly was a lot more easy-going than the
United States, where prohibition was being enforced. There was also a more
liberal attitude to sex. Homosexuality and promiscuity did not mean the
instant rejection from society that it would mean in many parts of the World.
Gertrude Stein's partner was the writer Alice B. Toklas and they
had a fairly open relationship considering it was the 20s. In fact, if they
dared, the 'modern' woman could smoke, drink and have all sorts of new fun.
The beautiful American nicknamed 'Kiki de Montparnasse' was a model posing
nude as well as clothed, for many famous artists of the day including Man Ray.
She is an appropriate symbol of the free sexual attitudes and bohemian
behaviour, but her activities would have been beyond shocking in the USA.
Condoms had been issued to soldiers during the war to guard against venereal
disease and brands such as Trojan were made publicly available by 1920. This
meant that not only could married couples control the size of their families
but young people could engage in more sex before marriage. Ernest Hemingway
famously called Paris, "a moveable feast". Cafés, clubs, parties (big
parties), think tanks, salons - no doubt about it, if you were an outsider
looking for a good time, it was definitely the place to be.
CHARACTERISTIC STYLE OF THE ERA...AND ITS FASHION
Photo:
A flapper smokes a cigarette: illustration from La Vie Parisienne, 3rd April
1926.
"The straight line is the medium of
expression,'' said Coco Chanel. It was out with curves and in with the
flat-breasted super-waif. Fashions began to be more practical and less
restrictive with, joy of joys, short hair becoming quite the thing. Saved
hours of shampooing time and looked good with a long cigarette holder.
At the start of World War I it seemed that French couture
houses would stay closed for business until the cessation of fighting.
However this was not the case and by 1917 there was talk of new lines,
simple dresses such as the barrel dress and the dropping of 'false chic'.
Women's fashions had responded to the fact that they had been working during
WWI with a freedom of movement previously unheard of. There was even amusing
advice on how women could reconcile their husbands returning from war to the
new shorter hemlines. Coco Chanel was being picked out as early as
1914 for her elegant practicality and casual comfortableness. She made the
over-decorated peacock fashions of the pre-war era seem hideously old
fashioned and gaudy. It also must have been a natural response to the
horrific war to be dressed more soberly. Chanel once said, "The first
war made me. In 1919 I woke up famous". In the twenties, experimentation
invaded all art forms including style. Silhouettes idealised the graphic
lines found in art - many fashion designers had close connections with the
avant-garde. However these straight lines and sleek bobbed hairstyles
required slender figures and women responded with the 'slimming craze' of
the time.
FABULOUS
TIMES, PLACES AND PEOPLE: PARIS IN THE 20s and 30s.
PHOTOS OF THE LIFESTYLE OF THE ERA
Mistinguet
Coco Chanel
Aristide Bruant by Toulouse-Lautrec
La Goulue by
Toulouse-Lautrec
Toulouse-Lautrec
Jane Avril
PARIS BETWEEN 1920 AND 1930
Dress from La Belle Epoque of Paris, circa 1930
FABULOUS
TIMES, PLACES AND PEOPLE: PARIS IN THE 20s and 30s.
POETRY OF THE ERA
Photo:
Ideogramme, in the shape of a horse by surrealist poet Apollinaire.
Everyone
loves a good poet, though they're not always so keen on themselves. Cubism and
collage had made the wordsmiths look at their medium with fresh eyes - new
ideas were championed by the arch-Modernist Apollinaire. These included
arranging words into images on the page, experimental punctuation and all
sorts of other confusing things. He also invented the word 'Surrealism' in an
attempt to describe the musical happening "Parade" in 1922.
In the modernist world of Parisian poetry Cubism and Dada had a resounding
effect. Not only did the subject-matter go through a radical change, but even
the shape of the poetry altered. These changes are most noticeable in the work
of Guillaume Apollinaire, a close friend of the Dada artists, who
championed their work as an art critic and helped build many a reputation. In
his Calligrammes Apollinaire experimented with arranging
fragments of speech spatially, in the shape of the subject of the poem. Hence
a poem about a horse would be ... horse-shaped. Apollinaire also
experimented with poetry based on the layout and subject matter of the press,
proudly claiming: "I believe that I have found a source of inspiration in
prospectuses … catalogues, posters, advertisements of all sorts. Believe me,
they contain the poetry of our epoch". The complete removal of punctuation was
another of Apollinaire's
innovations, leading the Cubist painter Georges Braque to describe his
work as closer to "Cubist typography" than "Cubist poetry".
Apollinaire
claimed to have no need of punctuation, saying "the rhythm itself and the
division into lines provide the real punctuation, and no other is needed".
Dada's call for the freedom to experiment lead to much nonsense poetry. This
freedom allowed taking a newspaper article, cutting it up, putting the pieces
in a bag and shaking it. The order in which the words or groups of words came
out determined the order of the words in the poem. While in Paris Ezra
Pound followed the Dada movement closely, drawn by its subversive
tendencies. He even attempted his own Dada poems, one of which was published
in The Little Review under a pseudonym and is as far from traditional
poetry as it is possible to get. Its opening lines are: "Godsway bugwash...
Bill's way backwash ..." ... and it includes such nonsense as: "... Brot wit
thranen, con plaisir ou con patate pomodoro …." Hemingway, on the other
hand, thought Dada was ridiculous, and was in Paris writing economical prose
stripped of superfluous words and florid language. He worked on this new,
sparse style with the help of Pound, who he claimed taught him "to distrust
adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain
situations".
Hemingway
was in Paris as a reporter, while Pound was contributing regularly to The
Little Review and writing "Parisian Letters" to The Dial.
Several issues of The Little Review were devoted to the work of the
modernist artists Pound was rubbing shoulders with. He also published a piece
for the New York Evening Post which focused on Picabia and the
Parisian scene. With the demise of Dada the poets and writers Louis
Aragon, Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault became principal members
of the Surrealist group, going on to write novels which had Paris as a focus.
Later, in 1929, Walter Benjamin wrote of the Surrealists "At the centre
of this world of things stands the most dreamed-of of their objects, the city
of Paris itself".
END OF THE ARTICLE.
