Foreign Modernism: Cosmopolitanism, Identity, and Style in Paris 9781442662018

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FOREIGN MODERNISM Cosmopolitanism, Identity, and Style in Paris

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Foreign Modernism Cosmopolitanism, Identity, and Style in Paris

IHOR JUNYK

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 013 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4519-6

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Junyk, Ihor, 1969– Foreign modernism : cosmopolitanism, identity, and style in Paris / Ihor Junyk. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4519-6 1. Arts, French – France – Paris – Foreign influences. 2. Arts, French – France – Paris – 20th century. 3. Paris (France – Civilization – Foreign influences). 4. Paris (France – Civilization – 20th century). 5. Immigrants – France – Paris – Intellectual life – 20th century. 6. Aliens – France – Paris – Intellectual life – 20th century. 7. Cultural pluralism – France – Paris – History – 20th century. I. Title. NX549.P3J85 2013  700.944’3610904  C2012-908147-7

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

   University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

For my parents

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 3 1 Travelling Culture: Rilke, Rodin, and the Poetics of Displacement 12 2 Becoming Minor: Archipenko, Bergson, and Deterritorialization 33 3 The Aeneid of Modern Times: Hybridity and Cosmopolitanism in Parade 58 4 A Call to Order: Nostalgia and the Vicissitudes of Cosmopolitan Identity in Igor Stravinsky 80 5 The Face of the Nation: State Fetishism and Métissage at the Exposition Internationale, Paris 1937 102 Epilogue: The Ba le of the Tuileries: Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Memory in France 126 Notes 135 Bibliography 155 Index 169

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List of Illustrations

 1 Auguste Rodin, Eve, detail of hand 28  2 Aristide Maillol, The Three Nymphs 45  3 Alexander Archipenko, Woman Combing Her Hair 51  4 Cartoon with Venus, Paris, 1912 55  5 Pablo Picasso, Parade, Drop Curtain 65  6 Pablo Picasso, sketch for “Chinese Magician” costume 70  7 Movie poster for Fantômas 75  8 Pablo Picasso, sketch for Pulcinella costume 85  9 Pablo Picasso, original design for Pulcinella set 88 10 Jacques Lipchitz, Prometheus Strangling the Vulture 103 11 The Old (“Moorish”) Trocadéro 115 12 Cartoon from L’Humanité, 22 March 1936 116 13 The Trocadéro (Palais de Chaillot) 119 14 Photo taken at the exhibition Artists in Exile 124 15 Alain Kirili, Grand commandement blanc 131 16 Louise Bourgeois, Welcoming Hands 132

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Acknowledgments

This project has been a long time in the making and I would like to thank at least some of the many people and institutions that helped it along the way. I would like to thank the colleagues at various universities, journals, and conferences who engaged with this material, who questioned me, challenged me, and pushed me to make it be er. I would like to thank, in particular, Jan Goldstein, Michael Geyer, Katie Trumpener, Robert von Hallberg and the participants of the Workshop on the European and American Avant-Gardes at the University of Chicago, Michael Steinberg, Brandon Joseph, Jonathan Bordo and Davide Panagia. A special thanks goes to Harold Mah, whose friendship, critical insight, and advice supported this project throughout the entire length of its development. Several institutions provided generous funding that made the research and writing of this book possible: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Josephine De Karman Fellowship Trust, and Trent University. I would like to thank my editor at the University of Toronto Press, Richard Ratzlaff, for his enthusiastic support for the project and his eagle eye for the multitude of details and complexities that were necessary to resolve in order to get this book into print. Thanks go, as well, to Miriam Skey for the meticulous copy edit. And finally I would like to thank my family for their unwavering support, encouragement, and enthusiasm, in particular my wife Kristin and daughter Nadia.

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FOREIGN MODERNISM Cosmopolitanism, Identity, and Style in Paris

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Introduction

“Nowhere is one more a foreigner than in France,” writes Julia Kristeva, an assessment painfully borne out by recent history. Whether it is the liquidation of the Roma camps outside Lyon, the headscarf controversy, the immigrant riots in the banlieues of Paris in 005, or the spectacle of Nicolas Sarkozy (child of Greek and Hungarian immigrants) winning the presidential elections on a get-tough-with-immigrants policy, the world has witnessed the manifold difficulties of being foreign in France. However, despite the centrality of this issue in the contemporary moment, it is also a concern with a long and complex history. Over the last two decades one crucial episode in this history – the role of foreigners in Parisian culture in the first third of the twentieth century – has generated considerable critical a ention. Traditionally this period has been seen as the heroic era of Parisian modernism. Literary, scholarly, and popular accounts have portrayed the city as the cosmopolitan Mecca of Europe and perhaps the world where foreign writers, painters, sculptors, and musicians created the works that are now virtually synonymous with modernism itself: Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, The Rite of Spring, and Ulysses were all created by foreigners in this heady cosmopolitan atmosphere. Contemporary criticism, however, has rejected this vision and presented a profoundly estranging picture of modernist Paris. In his pioneering book Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian AvantGarde and the First World War, 914–1925, Kenneth Silver questioned the default association of Parisian modernism with experimentation, cosmopolitanism, and progressive politics, and explored the connections between the avant-garde and the burgeoning French Right, a position that has subsequently been taken up by critics such as Christopher

 Foreign Modernism

Green, Mark Antliff, Romy Golan, and Benjamin Buchloh and that has now become virtually de rigueur in any assessment of the period. In Esprit de Corps Silver argues that the heady, cosmopolitan atmosphere of modernist Paris was sha ered by the First World War. While the Far Right had been a growing presence in French intellectual and political life since the end of the nineteenth century, the outbreak of war resulted in broad, popular support for the reactionary program of nationalism and jingoism. “The free-wheeling, bohemian world of Montmartre and Montparnasse was,” he wrote, “at least for the moment, a vanished way of life … a certain kind of delight, whereby Cubism and poetic experimentation were the most important things in the world, vanished in August 914, to be replaced by a far more austere, moralistic, and circumspect cultural climate.”1 Not only were foreigners persecuted, but the more subversive trends in art were wri en off as the corruption of rational French culture by a medieval, Germanic barbarism. Modernism was rejected and artists were expected to glorify France by celebrating her “classical heritage” and “Latin” identity. According to Silver, this would prove to be “an important cultural transformation whereby the avant-garde’s function as critic, disrupter, and adversary of the establishment would be gradually but effectively discredited.” The members of the avant-garde, either swept up in the euphoria of war or bullied by the hostile public, capitulated to the demands of the union sacrée and produced neoclassical art that was o en “the blandest kind of representation,” “a forge able effort at accommodation” without “metaphorical power” or “technical proficiency.” Only in the late 1920s, when the hostile environment had dissipated somewhat, did the restrictions on avant-gardism loosen, allowing the surrealists to reestablish modernism in its rightful place as an antitraditional oppositional force. By this point, however, the ba le was already lost: by valorizing order, tradition, and national chauvinism the classicists aesthetically paved the way for the rise of fascism: “Construction, Action Française, order, Mussolini, discipline, classicism, Maurras – these were all elements of a post-war a itude shared by the Latinate victors of the Great War.” For the Italians, this potent brew would “determine the next quarter-century of their political life,” while for the French, it “would find its most devastating expression in Pétain’s Vichy.”4 Interpretations such as Silver’s have been extremely important in de-idealizing this period of cultural history and bringing the Rightwing roots and resonances of interwar modernism back into critical

Introduction 5

debate. However, despite the important correctives that this direction in the scholarship has accomplished it has also introduced a number of distortions of its own. Most notably, it has turned the artists of the avant-garde into nothing but the agents or victims of the xenophobic and reactionary program of the Right. While these critics have rightly turned scholarly a ention back to the social, political, and cultural contexts of interwar modernism, they have also made the artists of the time into li le more than the symptoms of those contexts. To a great extent agency has been lost. In part this is a function of the type of criticism these scholars have practised. All of them, in their distinct ways, are representatives of the new historical approaches to the study of art that emerged in the wake of the theory revolution in the humanities and social sciences. While much of this work has been extremely fruitful and represents an important step beyond the sterile connoisseurship that previously dominated certain aspects of the discourse on visual culture, it has sometimes had the paradoxical effect of de-emphasizing or eliding entirely the artwork that is putatively the object of investigation. In works of this sort, the art itself becomes nothing more than an epiphenomenon of more fundamental economic, social, and political realities and practices. Works of art and even entire styles become mere tokens that inscribe and reflect these ideological contexts, dominant discourses, and hegemonic ideas.5 And so, discussing Picasso’s use of both a mimetic, illusionistic classicism and a less legible cubism during and a er the war, Silver notes: “Such was the power of the political and social regimes of the war and Reconstruction, and so in conflict were their ideologies with those of pre-war Parisian society, that for an artist like Picasso who was commi ed to both his earlier aesthetic discoveries and to his own well-being, the only solution was to hedge his bets and play all ends against the middle.” In this account, Picasso’s two styles unproblematically reflect the different values and dominant ideologies of pre-war and post-war Paris. And there is no doubt as to which style embodies which set of values: cubist fragmentation is clearly associated with the cosmopolitan and liberal atmosphere of the pre-war years, while the return to traditional elements and a more representational style signify a more repressive and conservative political regime. This association is made quite explicit elsewhere in the book when Silver argues that “the conventional illusionistic mode of these works, along with their lack of implied social protest, brought them extremely close to an acceptable affirmation of French wartime values,” a sentiment put even

 Foreign Modernism

more plainly when he notes the “evidently reactionary quality of the new illusionism.”7 As intellectual historians like Dominick LaCapra have been at pains to point out, however, texts (used in the broadest sense possible) do not merely inscribe contexts in a symptomatic manner, but may also challenge them in a fashion that is critical of contemporary historical reality or even transformative of that reality. This point is also stressed by Kobena Mercer. Mercer is supportive of contextualist approaches which have revealed “Eurocentric assumptions that were o en masked by the value-free search for ‘pure form’” and have foregrounded artistic production and reception as “material practices that are immanent to the power relations of the societies in which they arise.” “But, on the other hand,” he writes, “without a ention to specific ma ers of form, would art not be reduced to images that can only illustrate their contingent contexts?” Style, then, for both these critics, is not a straightforward marker of political ideology but a complex site where ideologies can be examined, critiqued, undermined, and transcended. Any cultural history that wants to develop an understanding of a particular period needs to contend seriously with the formal and stylistic registers of the works produced during that period, because it is at this formal level, rather than at the level of content or explicit statement about the text, that much of the signifying work is done. Significantly, there are several moments in Esprit de Corps when Silver deviates from his symptomatic analysis and recognizes the crucial role of form and style in the works he contemplates. Discussing Picasso’s reinterpretation of Le Nain’s The Peasant’s Repast, he notes that the painting is “clearly part of Picasso’s post-1914 study of the French past” and that it is “exemplary of the new apprenticeship to old masters being served by so many members of the Parisian avant-garde.” But he is forced to conclude that “the painting would hardly qualify as an example of the ‘clear and lucid French spirit’ or even, for that matter, as respectful.” Then, pursuing a close analysis of the work Silver notes that “having changed the format from Le Nain’s horizontal to vertical; neglecting to include a child in the doorway at the far right and also a baby (perhaps a just-baptized infant) on the woman’s knee at the right, as well as a cat in the lower le ; altering the relative scale of the figures to the point of nonsense; and most obviously, exploding Le Nain’s image of family piety with the brightly colored confe i of a mock-Seurat pointillism, Picasso has totally subverted the form and content of the French master.”9 At several other points in the text Silver

Introduction 7

acknowledges that Picasso’s combination of classicism and modernism may subvert rather than reflect the Right-wing values of the time. He notes that the neoclassical “works seem ironic in their invocation of the new traditionalism,” and that “there may be some intended irony in the adaptation of Cubist techniques to a subject that could not be less Cubist.”10 However, despite the realization that Picasso’s interwar work is not inherently reactionary, Silver is unwilling to pursue this line of inquiry further. In the chapters that follow, I pick up and develop this unexplored interpretation of the interwar Parisian avant-garde. I follow writers like Silver, Golan, and Green by rejecting an idealized and depoliticized vision of modernist Paris. But I deviate from them by arguing that the cosmopolitan avant-garde frequently critiqued and challenged the culture of increasingly oppressive nationalism then emerging, and it did so on the level of aesthetic form. I focus on the French and foreign artists who worked and interacted in the profoundly international enclaves of Montparnasse, Monmartre, and La Ruche, and were interested in producing new forms of art and society that rejected purity, homogeneity, and stability, in favour of hybridity, mix up, and metamorphosis. My argument proceeds along two axes: a vertical, formal axis, and a horizontal, historical axis. Accounts of this period that proceed exclusively or even primarily along the horizontal axis risk badly misinterpreting the art of the interwar period. This is because works of art are not mere symptoms of more fundamental social, political, and cultural contexts, but complex sites where these contexts are o en challenged, critiqued, and undermined in subtle or even covert ways. Close formal analysis of the works in question reveals, I argue, that the interwar avant-garde o en invoked the styles, themes, and tropes of the reactionary Right, but then subjected them to strategies such as parody, creolization, and métissage that fundamentally altered their valences and le them signifying otherwise. More precisely, I argue that the avant-garde o en assumed the neoclassical forms that the Right used to articulate national chauvinism, xenophobia, and a closed, “pure” construction of Frenchness, and subversively reinterpreted them so that they valorized cosmopolitanism, hybridity, transience, and open forms of identity. In order to elaborate the horizontal and vertical axes mentioned above, the book a empts to bring the theoretical and methodological innovations of critical cosmopolitanism to the study of cultural history. Critical cosmopolitanism is a term used by a number of contemporary theorists to describe a field (or perhaps a series of overlapping fields that

 Foreign Modernism

may include diaspora studies, transnationalism, studies of migration, travel, and tourism) that emerged in the wake of postcolonialism in the late 1970s, identity politics in the 1980s, and globalization in the 1990s.11 An amorphous and contested discipline, critical cosmopolitanism has grappled with the new configurations of culture, politics, and identity emerging in a world defined by increasingly mobile flows of people, capital, and information.12 Considering the increased prevalence and importance of such terms as “the global,” “the international,” “the crosscultural,” and “the culturally diverse” Mercer has speculated whether “the cosmopolitan” could “serve as a conceptual tool capable of cutting through the congested, and o en confusing, condition created by these competing vocabularies.”1 The term is certainly imperfect. On the one hand, it continues to carry its earlier, pejorative meaning of a rootless world citizenry beyond all forms of local a achment, a sense which contemporary anthropological and cultural studies uses of the word are a empting to transcend.14 On the other hand, though, scholars in anthropology, cultural studies, and other disciplines have deployed the term in such a wide variety of contexts that one might argue that simple contestation has given way to a bewildering polysemy.15 That said, a certain centre of gravity has emerged among critical uses of the word. Writers such as James Clifford, Homi Bhabha, Bruce Robbins, and Rebecca Walkowitz have all deployed the term in order to succinctly capture the crucially dialogical nature of culture, identity, and belonging.1 While admi ing that “cosmopolitanism evokes mixed feelings,” Clifford argues that it ultimately “gives us a way of perceiving, and valuing, different forms of encounter, negotiation, and multiple affiliation rather than simply different ‘cultures’ or ‘identities.’”17 As one of many illustrations of this “discrepant cosmopolitanism” Clifford discusses “The Airbus,” a short story by Luis Rafael Sánchez: Something like Puerto Rican “culture” erupts in a riot of laughter and overflowing conversation during a routine night flight from San Juan to New York. Everyone more or less permanently in transit … Not so much “Where are you from?” as “Where are you between?” Puerto Ricans who can’t bear to think of staying in New York. Who treasure their return ticket. Puerto Ricans stifled “down there,” newly alive “up here.” “Puerto Ricans who are newly installed in the wanderground between here and there and who must therefore informalize the trip, making it li le more than a hop on a bus, though airborne, that floats over the creek to which the Atlantic Ocean has been reduced by the Puerto Ricans.”18

Introduction 9

The Puerto Rican travellers can no longer be considered under the rubric of a single national culture or discrete identity. They are no longer rooted to a single place which is the locus of their belonging; instead they are permanently in transit between places, experiencing multiple affiliations and creating identities as complex hybrids, negotiations of Puerto Ricanness and Americanness which are neither less nor more than the original terms but rather something new and different. However, despite the importance of this issue in the globalized present, Mercer cautions us that we should not let a relentless focus on the contemporary “take precedence over ‘the historical’ as the privileged focus for examining ma ers of difference and identity.”19 Discussing the “privileged focus that ‘the contemporary’ enjoys as that which talks back to the colonial discourse of the past,” Mercer notes the “unwi ing outcome” that this strategy has “of obscuring earlier periods in the first half of the twentieth century.”20 Consciously or unconsciously, patient and concerted study of the modernist past has o en been abandoned in favour of the construction of modernism as a straw man which the various “posts” (-modernism, -colonialism) respond to and correct. In contrast to this relentless presentism, Mercer argues that “the interactive relationships” valorized by certain aspects of contemporary theory, “have always been present between the western centre and societies hitherto placed on the periphery.”21 “Cultural difference,” he writes, “as a distinctive feature of modern art and modernity … was always there and is not going to go away.”22 Clifford has evinced the same historicizing sensibility. His account of interwar Paris foregrounds the same qualities of mobility, multiple affiliation, and hybridity that he emphasizes in his characterization of the contemporary moment: Paris as a site of cultural creation included the detour and return of people like [writer Alejo] Carpentier. He moved from Cuba to Paris and then back to the Caribbean and South America, to name Lo real maravilloso, magical realism, Surrealism with a difference. Surrealism traveled, and was translated in travel. Paris included also the detour and return of Leopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Ousmane Socé, meeting at the Lycée Louis le Grand, returning to different places with the cultural politics of “Negritude.” Paris was the Chilean Vincente Huidobro challenging modernist genealogies, proclaiming “Contemporary poetry begins with me.” In the thirties it was Luis Buñuel moving, somehow, between Montparnasse Surrealist meetings, civil war Spain, Mexico, and … Hollywood. Paris

10 Foreign Modernism included the salon of the Martiniquan Paule e Nardal and her sisters. Nardal founded the Revue de Monde Noir, a place of contact between the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude writers.2

Clifford succinctly demonstrates the error of valorizing the contemporary moment as the privileged site of cosmopolitanism and cultural negotiation. Although insisting on the spatio-temporal specificity of every site of inquiry, he shows that the early twentieth century was not a time of monocultural consensus, but already profoundly multicultural and diverse. The chapters that follow pick up and extend this account of a profoundly cosmopolitan modernist Paris. They a empt to steer between the Scylla of a naively depoliticized vision of this site and the Charybdis of a pessimistic politicized view that argues that aesthetic resistance and alternative conceptions of identity were all but squeezed out by the pressure of the Rightward turn during the interwar years. Instead, using key concepts such as travelling culture, deterritorialization, hybridization, reflective nostalgia, and métissage, they argue that the international avant-garde used their work to resist reactionary pressures and fight tenaciously for creative new forms of culture, identity, and association. Resisting the impossible a empt at comprehensiveness, the book offers instead a series of case studies focusing largely, but not exclusively, on Eastern European émigrés and their role in Parisian modernism. This is an a empt to address an oversight in the literature. For while Black, Latin American, and Jewish artists have been the subjects of recent studies, the Eastern European experience has been underexplored despite the crucial role of Eastern Europeans in the evolution of Parisian modernism.24 Finally, the book rejects a single disciplinary focus in favour of interdisciplinarity. Cosmopolitan experimentation was not the province of any single discipline, but rather went on simultaneously in all conceivable disciplines. Further, the culture-makers in these separate disciplines knew one another, shared thoughts and ideas, and o en collaborated. Many of the key works of this period – operas, Ballets Russes performances – were collaborative, multimedia spectacles. And even artists working alone in single media were o en crucially influenced by artists in other disciplinary camps. To give just one example: one of the most important influences on Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry was the sculpture of Auguste Rodin. To insist on a rigid separation of disciplines, then, is to risk distorting the field in a way

Introduction 11

analogous to the distortions inherent in the insistence on maintaining rigid distinctions between different national cultures. As a final note let me state that the resonance between this study and contemporary events is entirely intentional. While commi ed to a rigorous study of the past on its own terms, this study also takes seriously Dominick LaCapra’s contention that every historical account is engaged in a “dialogical exchange with the past,” focused on the “performative and creative way in which we rewrite the past in terms of present interests, needs, and values.” For LaCapra, “we awaken the dead in order to interrogate them about problems of interest to us, and the answers we derive justifiably tell us more about ourselves than about a context we could not recreate in the best of circumstances even if we wanted to.”25 While one wants to be wary of romanticizing and exaggerating the potential impact of historical inquiry, my hope is that a clear sighted understanding of cosmopolitanism in the past will help us to make rational and progressive choices in the present and the future.

1 Travelling Culture: Rilke, Rodin, and the Poetics of Displacement

In his book Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, James Clifford proposes a new concept for the analysis of modernism – travelling culture. Displacement, argues Clifford, has o en had a negative valence in twentieth-century thought and experience. Modernism, for example, has frequently been obsessed with exile and its association with “uprootedness, pain, authority.”1 But Clifford reminds us that there is another characterization of travelling that “reverses … the usual relation of stasis to movement.” For Clifford “traveling culture” is a certain subset of modernism and postmodernism that valorizes “traveling, movement, and circulation,” and takes the figure of the traveller, not as rootless deviant, but as representative of a valuable and increasingly widespread modern experience.2 In this chapter I would like to build on Clifford’s notion of travelling culture, focusing, in particular on its crucial, but easily overlooked expression in the realm of aesthetic form. While many of Clifford’s examples explicitly thematize the experiences of movement and transience, this thematic focus is not the only way in which these issues have been broached and explored. I will argue that while avoiding an explicit thematization of displacement, many artists used modernist form to embody and celebrate mobility, border crossing, and transformation. While this formalism may appear as a kind of quietism or aesthetic flight from the crucial socio-political issues of the moment, I will argue that it is precisely the opposite, for at a time when purity, stability, and rootedness were key values of the nationalistic and xenophobic Right, an art of flux and movement was nothing less than an engaged and subversive celebration of the values of cosmopolitanism. In this chapter I will explore these issues by focusing on the life and work of Rainer Maria Rilke. In his groundbreaking essay, “Paris/

Travelling Culture 1

Childhood: The Fragmented Body in Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” Andreas Huyssen asks a surprising question about Rilke’s classic novel. Is it possible, wonders Huyssen, to consider Malte Laurids Brigge, with his hallucinations, delusions, and fractured subjectivity, as “a paradigmatic case of male subjectivity within modernity?” (135). For Huyssen, Malte’s paradigmatic status comes, not only from his fragmented sel ood, but from its genesis in both the traumas of childhood and the modern city. In what follows I want to return to Malte’s paradigmatic status and give a different, and probably rather surprising, account of his constitution as a modern subject. While Huyssen is interested in a post-Freudian notion of subjective fragmentation and its relation to Walter Benjamin’s conception of urban shock, my focus is on Malte’s experience of displacement and foreignness. The migrant, writes Salman Rushdie, “is, perhaps, the central or defining figure of the twentieth century,” and Rilke’s novel, with its merciless anatomization of exile, is one of the key documents in the modernist literature on migration, although it is rarely perceived as such.3 In what follows I will look at the representation and characterization of displacement in Malte Laurids Brigge. In this novel the exilic condition is presented as essentially traumatic and uncanny, and I will be interested in Rilke’s use of modernist form as a means of negotiating the trauma. But I will argue that modernist form is not only a therapeutic means of dealing with the traumatic dislocations of migration, but becomes a vehicle for the complete transvaluation of Rilke’s view of the exilic condition. Rilke’s intense study of the works of Auguste Rodin led him to conclude that fragmentation, transience, and contingency were not merely conditions to be endured, but should be celebrated as the fundamental characteristics of both a truly modern art and a truly modern self. City of Exiles Throughout the modern period, Paris has been a centre of a raction for foreigners of all sorts. In 1881 the capital was home to one million foreigners (3 per cent of the population), a number that had risen to 2,700,000 (7 per cent of the population) by 1931.4 These foreigners came to Paris for diverse and complex reasons: many for the economic possibilities, some as students, others as political refugees or in flight from persecution. A small subset of these migrants came to Paris because of its reputation as the centre of European (and possibly world) culture.5 The Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz recalled that “Paris

14 Foreign Modernism

between 1900 and 1914 was filled with foreign artists, many of whom I met and to some of whom I became very close. These included such Spaniards as Picasso and Juan Gris, and the Italian Modigliani. Chagall came to Paris from Russia in 1910. Sculptors included Brancusi, Zadkine, and Archipenko.”6 These artists tended to gravitate to the bohemian, avant-garde communities forming in Monmartre, Montparnasse, and La Ruche. In 1929 the journal Bifur noted, “la Bu e Monmartre, c’est un congrès des cinq continents” (A real hodgepodge of cultures; that’s what Monmartre is).7 These were profoundly cosmopolitan enclaves existing (for the most part) in a space separate from and parallel to mainstream French society. “When I arrived at the Gare de Lyon in October 1906, I had 50 francs to my name, knew nobody and barely spoke French,” wrote Gino Severini. “I took a white tram … over to Montparnasse and there I drank my first café au lait.”8 Similarly, the painter Pincus Krémègne recalled: “When I arrived from Russia at the Gare de l’Est in Paris, I couldn’t speak a word of French and had three roubles to my name … The only phrase I knew was: ‘Passage Dantzig’ [the street on which the artist’s colony of La Ruche was situated].”9 The myth or fantasy of Parisian centrality gave many of these migrations the character of a religious pilgrimage: Constantin Brancusi, for example, le Romania on foot in May of 1904 and arrived in Paris on 14 July in order to present himself to Auguste Rodin as an “apostle of art.”10 Another one of these apostles was the Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. When he arrived in Paris in late August 1902, Rilke was full of hope and expectation. Commissioned to write a study of Rodin, Rilke was excited by the prospect of spending time with the great artist and establishing himself in the mythic place that would provide the atmosphere he required for his own artistic labours. However, even though he quickly established an ideal rhythm for himself – “Thinking, rest, solitude, everything I longed for” – he found that his hope and optimism had turned into feelings of dread and affliction.11 The city revealed itself to him as a vast sepulchre, filled with the dead and the dying. It was “infinitely strange and hostile,” a lost city “rushing like a star out of orbit towards some fearful collapse,” and a year later he was teetering on the verge of a complete psychic breakdown.12 Turning to the writer Lou Andreas Salomé, his friend and former lover, he described his state of mind in a stream of confessional le ers. He noted the “interminable nights of fever and great anxiety” and the days full of vague and mysterious physical symptoms that he was only able to beat back by a tremendous exertion of the will. “But then came something so

Travelling Culture 15

full of dread,” he continued, “came and came again, never really leaving me since … and took hold of my heart and held it over the void … Everything changes, falls away from my senses, and I feel myself cast out of this world … into another, uncertain environment full of nameless fear … I felt as though I would not recognize anyone coming in and as though I too was strange to everyone, like one dying in a foreign land, alone, superfluous, a fragment from another context.”13 In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Rilke gives us a fictionalized account of his Parisian breakdown and seems to a empt a working through of his psychic collapse. While it would be ludicrous to insist on a complete identification of narrator and author, the fact that Malte shares Rilke’s Paris address, his age, and quotes passages from his letters and diaries, verbatim, should be enough to establish the strongly autobiographical nature of the character and the novel.14 Recent scholarship has turned to psychoanalytic theory in order to explain Malte’s breakdown and its connection to Rilke’s experiences.15 Huyssen, for example, seeks to trace the disturbances described in the novel to the problematic relations between Malte/Rilke and Maman/Phia Rilke. Invoking Melanie Klein, Huyssen argues that Phia Rilke’s inconsistent mothering, her tendency to be both unaccepting of her son and over-protective and all-embracing prevented a proper “transition from symbiosis to object relations” and produced “psychic disturbances.”16 According to Huyssen, the disturbed and ecstatic states described by Malte – “murderous phantasies of the violent, fragmented body, anxieties of fragmentation, of objects that enter the body or grow inside it, fear of merger and dissolution …” – are typical of patients suffering from narcissistic and borderline illnesses (123). Similarly, David Kleinbard notes that “it would be absurd to classify Rilke as a schizophrenic, but the anxieties and fantasies that we find in his writings about his first year in Paris closely resemble some of those characteristic of the disease.” Ultimately, however, he turns to “closely related forms of narcissistic and borderline illness [studied] by Heinz Kohut, R.D. Laing, and D.W. Winnicot” to understand “what Rilke was going through when he first came to Paris.”17 While these approaches have been incredibly fruitful and productive, there are other aspects of the text that they have occluded completely. In what follows I would like to rectify one of those occlusions by examining the key roles of foreignness and displacement in Malte’s crisis. Recall Rilke’s description of his own breakdown, quoted earlier in this chapter. He refers to himself as “strange to everyone, like one

16 Foreign Modernism

dying in a foreign land, alone, superfluous, a fragment from another context.” While Rilke invokes his émigré status as a trope it should, on one level of interpretation, be taken quite literally. At precisely this time a tense gap was forming between the emerging culture of bellicose nationalism and increasingly large transient or immigrant populations, those others within the national body. As the nineteenth century came to a close, not with a whimper, but with the bang of the Dreyfus Affair, French intellectual life was in the midst of a historic realignment. Nationalism, the patrimony of the Le since the time of Jacobin patriotism was being co-opted by reactionary forces. Reeling from the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War and the establishment of the Third Republic, reactionaries used the Boulanger crisis and the Dreyfus Affair to initiate a discourse of revolt against republican democracy and liberal capitalism and a empted to reclaim the nation for the traditional institutions of church, army, and monarchy. Classicism was a key term in this reactionary rearticulation. For the theorists of the Right, Gallic identity was defined by the unbroken connection between contemporary French culture and the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean world and the timeless persistence of the Latin qualities of the French “race.” This in turn required the preservation and protection of an undiluted Frenchness: at a time of increasing immigration, the spokesmen of the Right rejected cosmopolitanism, or what we would today call multiculturalism, and affirmed the centrality, and purity, of France’s Latin character. One of the key figures in this movement was Charles Maurras. The leader of the proto-fascist Action Française, Maurras has been referred to as the “evil genius of the Third Republic” by one of its historians.18 Born and raised in Aix-en-Provence, he was originally a supporter of the regionalism of the poet Frédéric Mistral and the Félibrige movement that sought to protect the language and national honour of Provence.19 He split with the group, however, by calling on the movement to take an explicitly political role, and with the foundation of the Action Française in 1899 he found an outlet for his increasingly radical views. Valorizing the rationality, order, and rigour of the classical tradition and its modern avatar, the Cartesian rationalism of the French seventeenth century, Maurras opposed French Latinité to the chaos and disorder of nineteenth-century romanticism, with its origin in the anarchic individualism of the French Revolution and what he saw as its apotheosis in modernist anti-rationalism. This conception of identity was also opposed to the “four confederate states of Protestants, Jews,

Travelling Culture 17

Freemasons and foreigners” that he coined “anti-France,” a “gouvernement de l'Etranger, à l'intérieur de la France” that had brought the country to the brink of ruin.20 Maurras soon had legions of followers who a empted to actualize his views in both the political and cultural spheres. The same year that Action Française organized the Camelots du Roi, a group of young thugs who used physical intimidation to spread the gospel of Maurrasianism in the streets of the Latin Quarter, a group of young Maurrasian writers established the monthly Revue critique des idées et des livres to lead a nationalist, neoclassicist assault on the literary status quo.21 Following and expanding on Maurras’s pronouncements, acolytes such as Pierre Laserre, Jean-Marc Bernard, Gilbert Maire, and Henri Clouard further developed his vision of French classical identity. Another key figure in this regard was Maurice Barrès. Born and raised in the eastern provinces Barrès made his mark, not as a philosophical or political essayist, but as a poet and novelist. Starting as something of a symbolist dandy he evolved into a rabid nationalist, his early individualism turning to collectivism as he “realized” that the individual was constituted by society and history. To call the Barrèsian position nationalistic classicism is something of a misnomer, because for Barrès the two terms were interchangeable: “Nationalism is a form of classicism.”22 This conflation of the two terms necessarily made Barrès’s classicism considerably more elastic than its Maurrasian counterpart. As Barrès noted, “If one is a traditionalist, and submits to the law of continuity one must take things as one finds them.”23 Therefore, Barrèsian classicism included the Revolution, the Third Republic, symbolism, and impressionism – an inclusiveness that was rejected by the Action Française. If it was more inclusive of French culture and history, however, Barrèsian classicism was just as exclusionary and xenophobic as its Maurrasian counterpart when it came to foreign elements. Barrès’s most popular novel, Les Déracinés, was a polemic against the cosmopolitanism of “uprooted” intellectuals, and his essays presented the threat posed by foreignness in stark terms: “The foreigner, like a parasite, is poisoning us.”24 Clearly, many in France agreed, for Barrès’s distinctive form of classicism soon found abundant supporters. His combination of nationalism and Bergsonism appealed to the more radical elements of the student population. In the literary milieu, Adrien Mithouard in his review L’Occident and André Gide in his magazine La Nouvelle Revue Française, and in the art world Maurice Denis, all advocated a broad

18 Foreign Modernism

Barrèsian classicism that gave it a currency beyond the narrow circle of the far Right, a reach that has led one historian to claim that “it was the ethical and aesthetic nationalism of Barrès that became hegemonic, rather than the doctrinaire monarchism of the Action Française.”25 Therefore, at a time when “race” was ever more central in determining membership in the nation, understood as an organic and integrated community, the foreigner could be seen (and could see himself) as a broken off bit from elsewhere, as an abject fragment that did not belong. For some, such as Rilke, the situation was even more unse led because they originated from transnational states and had a very weak sense of national belonging at a time when this was becoming a crucial marker of identity. Rilke was born in Prague and his family belonged to the German-speaking minority that formed the city’s professional class in the la er part of the nineteenth century. His sense of national identity, however, was always unclear. Discussing this issue, Robert Hass writes: “He was insulted once to be called a German, and, when the speaker corrected himself, ‘I meant, Austrian,’ Rilke said, ‘Not at all. In 1866, when the Austrians entered Prague, my parents shut their windows.’”26 Although he felt tightly connected to the German language, Rilke never thought of himself as an Austrian or a German, and his aversion to all things Germanic grew in direct proportion to the level of militarism and bellicosity that these two nations displayed during the interwar period. On the other hand, while he felt sympathy for the artistic and national aspirations of the Czechs he knew very well that he did not belong there either, and grew to resent Prague – “that, God forgive me, miserable city of subordinate existences” – for a good portion of his life. Ultimately, Rilke’s sense of belonging was purely a ma er of elective affinity, and he chose Russia and Paris as his spiritual homelands. But even here he o en felt displaced, uncomfortable, alien.27 Part of this discomfort came from an acute awareness of his loss of socio-economic status. Having abandoned a professional career in his home country and chosen the life of a transient artist, Rilke was under extreme financial pressure when he arrived in Paris. This stress was increased by feelings of guilt for having frustrated his father’s ambitions and abandoned his family to the indignities of a creeping déclassement. According to Kleinbard, “The poet was haunted by Josef’s [his father] emotional constriction, his expectation that his son would vicariously fulfill his own frustrated ambitions, his disappointment at René’s leaving military school and rejecting a military career, and his anxiety about the poet’s unwillingness to find a job which would protect him, his

Travelling Culture 19

wife, and daughter from shameful poverty and give them a respectable place in society.”28 Rilke’s anxieties over class and nationality are projected onto Brigge. Malte, a Dane, o en refers to himself as a foreigner, usually in conjunction with his anxieties over being poor. At the Bibliothèque Nationale he describes himself as “perhaps the shabbiest of all these readers and a foreigner.”29 At other moments he links his foreign status to his more general sense of subjective nullity. The scene that begins with Malte noting that he is a “nothing” that thinks, ends with him describing himself as “this young insignificant foreigner, Brigge” (MLB, 24). Formerly an aristocrat and now nothing but a shabby foreigner, Malte is intensely anxious about his appearance and status. In his notebook entries the streets of Paris seem to be brimming with the poor. He seems to be forever surrounded by “outcasts”: “For it’s obvious they are outcasts, not just beggars; no, they are really not beggars, there is a difference. They are human trash, husks of men that fate has spewed out. Wet with the spi le of fate, they stick to a wall, a lamp-post, a billboard, or they trickle slowly down the street, leaving a dark filthy trail behind them.” (MLB, 40) This is not just the poor, but the Lumpenproletariat, the human refuse chewed up and spit out by the industrial order. But not only does Malte fear them, he also fears that in the foreign context in which he finds himself the signifiers of class status that distinguish him from them have ceased to function properly. At the Bibliothèque Nationale he speculates at length about his appearance and his relation to the urban poor. At first he seeks to make a rigid distinction based on sartorial and bodily signs. He clings to his difference “even though I am poor. Even though the jacket I wear every day has begun to get threadbare in certain spots; even though my shoes are not entirely beyond criticism. True my collar is clean, my underwear too, and I could, just as I am, walk into any café I felt like, possibly on the grands boulevards, and confidently reach out my hand to a plate full of pastries. No one would find that surprising; no one would shout at me or throw me out, for it is a er all a genteel hand, a hand that is washed four or five times a day. There is no dirt under the nails, the index finger isn’t ink-stained, and the wrists especially are irreproachable. Poor people don’t wash so far up; that is a well-known fact. Certain conclusions can therefore be drawn from the cleanliness of these wrists” (MLB, 38–9). But even as he hysterically insists on the transparency of his somatic signs, he acknowledges that in the boulevards of Paris they have lost their unequivocal meaning. “There are still one or two individuals,” he confesses, “on the Boulevard Saint-Michel

20 Foreign Modernism

for example, or on the rue Racine, who are not fooled, who don’t give a damn about my wrists. They look at me and know. They know that in reality I am one of them, that I’m only acting” (MLB, 39). Later, forced to wait alongside the abject poor at the Salpêtrière hospital, Malte once again feels that the signifiers of his class status have misfired and that he has been relegated to the ranks of human refuse. “It occurred to me,” he comments, “that I had been directed here, among these people … It was, so to speak, the first official confirmation that I belonged to the category of outcast. Had the doctor known by my appearance? Yet I had gone to his office in a fairly decent suit; I had even sent in my card. In spite of that, he must have somehow discovered it; perhaps I had given myself away” (MLB, 55–6). In both of the aforementioned scenes (at the Bibliothèque Nationale and Salpêtrière), Malte begins in a relatively lucid and coherent frame of mind. Then, a er confusions and anxieties concerning class, he experiences paranoia and hallucinations. At the end of the Bibliothèque Nationale episode Malte begins to feel that he is being watched and that weird and sinister strangers are showing him signs, pregnant with significance. Similarly, in the hospital waiting room, a er being “found out,” Malte’s gaze turns the patients into a collection of disjointed body parts: “And there were many bandages. Bandages wrapped around a whole head, layer by layer, until just a single eye remained that no longer belonged to anyone … Bandages that had been opened and in which, as if in a filthy bed, a hand lay now, that was no longer a hand; and a bandaged leg stuck out of the line on the bench, as large as a whole man” (MLB, 56–7). In both these cases, Malte’s anxieties over his new status as a déclassé foreigner lead to eruptions of what Freud called the uncanny. While for Freud the uncanny is a function of the return of repressed infantile trauma, I will argue that it also has more immediate and environmental causes. The term “uncanny” is a rough translation of the German unheimlich – the unhomely – and I will argue that Malte’s uncanny hallucinations cluster around and are generated by his experiences of exile and homelessness.30 Curiously, this conception of the uncanny is present (albeit in an unacknowledged way) in Freud’s text itself. Discussing the different modalities of the uncanny, Freud relates a personal anecdote: As I was walking, one hot summer a ernoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself

Travelling Culture 21 in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But a er having wandered about for a time without inquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite a ention. I hurried away once more, but only to arrive by another detour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had le a short while before, without any further voyages of discovery.31

While Freud uses the anecdote as a metaphor for the demonic nature of the repetition compulsion, it seems that it should be taken seriously on a literal level as well. It seems clear that in this particular case Freud experiences the upsurge of the uncanny, not because he is compulsively repeating some repressed childhood trauma, but because he is a disoriented stranger in an unknown place. Lost in the labyrinthine streets of a foreign city, accidentally in violation of unknown and unstated codes of conduct, Freud experiences the unheimlich character of semiotic indeterminacy. Paradoxically, then, while Freud argues against Jentsch’s notion of the uncanny as “intellectual uncertainty,” and dismisses his idea of the unheimlich as “something one does not know one’s way about in,” his examples seem to repeat this very definition (341). The semiotic confusion of a foreigner negotiating unfamiliar codes is a major site of uncanny hallucinations in Rilke’s novel. While Malte claims that by coming to Paris he is “learning to see” (MLB, 5, 6), he actually finds his ability to “see” frustrated by the opacity of the city. On the boulevards he feels that he is being watched and that strangers are showing him signs, pregnant with significance, but a significance that he is u erly unable to divine: What in the world did the old woman want of me, who had crawled out of some hole carrying a night table drawer with a few bu ons and needles rolling around inside it? Why did she keep walking at my side, keep looking at me? As if she were trying to recognize me with her bleary eyes, which looked as though some diseased person had spat a greenish phlegm under the bloody lids. And how did that small grey woman come to be standing at my side for a whole quarter of an hour in front of a store window, showing me an old long pencil that pushed infinitely slowly up out of her wretched, clenched hands. I pretended that I was busy looking

22 Foreign Modernism at the display in the window and hadn’t noticed a thing. But she knew I had seen her; she knew I was standing there trying to figure out what she was doing. For I understood quite well that the pencil was in itself of no importance: I felt that it was a sign, a sign for the initiated, a sign only outcasts could recognize; I sensed that she was directing me to go somewhere or do something. And the strangest part was that I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that there actually existed some kind of secret language which this sign belonged to, and that this scene was a er all something I should have expected. (MLB, 40–1)

Not in possession of the cultural codes that would allow him to navigate the manifold signs of the city, Malte finds himself overwhelmed by interpretive delirium. This is evident as well in the famous Salpêtrière scene. When several doctors appear for a second consultation Malte tells the one he has already spoken to: “If you think it is necessary for these gentlemen to be initiated, you are certainly able, from our conversation, to do that in a few words, while I would find it very difficult” (MLB, 58). While this in part refers to Malte’s difficulty in relating the complexity of his medical case, there is also an intimation that his difficulties stem from a lack of linguistic facility. Malte prefaces his statement to the doctor by noting, “I heard myself say in French,” drawing a ention to the strangeness and singularity of hearing himself speak in this foreign tongue. Later, a er suffering hallucinations in the waiting room Malte rushes out of the hospital: I can’t remember how I got out through the many courtyards. It was evening, and I lost my way in the unknown neighborhood, and walked up boulevards with endless walls in one direction and, when there was no end to them, walked back in the opposite direction until I reached some square or other. Then I began to walk down one street, and other streets came that I had never seen before, and still others. Electric trolleys, too brightly lit, raced up and past, their harsh bells clanging into the distance. But on their signboards were names I couldn’t recognize. I didn’t know what city I was in, or whether I had a room somewhere, or what I had to do so that I could stop walking. (MLB, 62)

While this passage suggests the general confusion stemming from a psychotic episode, it can also be read as the much more specific confusion and terror of the displaced exile. Rilke presents Malte as not only

Travelling Culture 23

psychically or existentially lost, but also (like Freud) concretely, physically lost in the strange streets and neighbourhoods of a city that does not belong to him. This reading is further justified by the fact that when a trolley passes him, he is unable to recognize the French names on the signboards, a linguistic limitation that connects to his inability to express himself to the examining doctors. Malte is not only disoriented and fragmented because of early childhood trauma but because he is an exile, living in a city and a language that he does not fully understand. In the second half of the novel, in a defensive gesture, Malte a empts to recuperate his sha ered wholeness in an Edenic language. The novel shows an increasing abstraction as the social and psychological realities of displacement are abandoned in favour of bloodless speculations on historically distant “women in love” and the final anecdote of the prodigal son. Earlier in the book, as a preface to what is to come, Malte notes that “the time of that other interpretation will dawn, when there shall not be le one word upon another, and every meaning will dissolve like a cloud and fall down like rain … this time, I will be wri en. I am the impression that will transform itself” (MLB, 52–3). Huyssen interprets this as the longing for “modernist epiphany, the transcendence into a realm of writing that would leave all contingency behind and achieve some ultimate truth and coherence.”32 Malte tries to accomplish this in the second half of the book. In this part of the novel Malte, with his psychological and social issues, disappears as a character, as an object of investigation, and exists only as an effaced writer who presents us with his reflections on Gaspara Stampa, Mariana Alcoforado, Be ina Bretano, and others, wri en in the “glorious language” of modernist transcendence. However, as Huyssen astutely points out, this turn to language is not a solution to the problems of the self posed by the first part of the novel, but their evasion. In the end, Malte does not achieve reintegration or transcendence, but simply the voiding of his subjectivity in another register.33 Rumoured, Remotest, Incredible War-God If the end of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge represents an a empt by Rilke to transcend the fragmentation of the exilic condition in favour of a transcendental wholeness, his work at the beginning of the First World War is certainly the apotheosis of this tendency in his poetry. On the eve of the Great War Rilke was visiting Germany and the outbreak of hostilities trapped him there, cu ing him off from Paris with only the small

24 Foreign Modernism

suitcase of possessions he had brought on his trip. Amazingly, despite the fact that he was now truly homeless and that Germany and Austria (neither of which he had expressed any enthusiasm for) were at war with his adopted homeland (France) and his spiritual homeland (Russia), he did not fall into depression, but rather expressed a hysterical enthusiasm for the conflict so typical of the time. Influenced by Hölderlin’s apostrophes to the gods of Greece he produced “Five Hymns” to the god of ba le, the “rumoured, remotest, incredible war-god.” He is described as a “horror,” “a volcanic peak … Sometimes flaming. Sometimes a-smoke,” and causing “some district near to his borders to quake.”34 Further, in similarly typical fashion, Rilke uses this violent deity to rhapsodize about the mystical, transcendent nature of war: “He stands. Higher / than standing towers. Higher / than the inbreathed air of our days just past / he stands. He transcends.” Standing far above the banality of quotidian life, war offers a sublime spectacle and a heightened, authentic experience. Most surprising though is Rilke’s poetic description of his own subjective experience – for the bohemian poet, the alienated outsider, the intense individualist felt himself deliriously shedding his own discrete subjectivity and merging into the mass: And we? We merge into one together, into a new kind of being, mortally animate through him. So too am I no more. Out of the general heart my heart is beating in tune; and the general mouth is forcing my lips apart.

. . . . . . . . . . . For we have been altered, changed to resemble each other. Each one has received of a sudden into no longer a breast of his own, meteoric, a heart, hot, an iron-clad heart from an iron-clad cosmos … (Prater, A Ringing Glass, 252)

Here Rilke finds the ultimate antidote for his exilic alienation: the nationalist mob mentality of war hysteria. A broken-off fragment no longer, he has become completely reintegrated into the body of the nation. But ultimately, for Rilke, this enthusiasm for war and mystical bonding with the nation (more typically associated with the likes of Ernst Jünger) was only a very short passing phase. Within two months his

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fascination with Mars had dissipated, and he now viewed the war god as “a spectre of affliction, no longer a god but a spirit let loose to scourge the nations.”35 As the casualties mounted he became increasingly distressed and friends found him “sha ered by events” (258). This state of affairs was heightened at the end of November when he was called up for service with the Landsturm, the territorial Home Guard. His unpleasant experiences recalled for him his traumatic days at military school as a child, and even when influential friends secured his discharge he felt that life had become so chaotic and gloomy that any resumption of artistic work was impossible. While at the beginning of the war he received a perverse pleasure from being spoken through by the ideological discourse of the mass, he now understood the grave danger that this posed for his writing. Echoing the criticisms of his friend and contemporary Karl Kraus, and perhaps Heidegger’s notion of empty talk he noted: “I fear that the certainty of my own words, precise and brought to glowing heat, would suffer a bewildering set-back if I were to choose my subjects out of the crowd of those other words of dubious credibility.”36 Seeing language so debased by lies and the empty phrases of propaganda and ideology, Rilke, who insisted on his poetry’s precision and fidelity to reality, could only be struck dumb. Greek Work For the duration of the war, Rilke abandoned poetry (or perhaps it is be er to say that it abandoned him) and threw himself into politics. He a ended countless meetings, rallies, and demonstrations, agitating for peace and expressing his sympathy for revolution. With the armistice, while still on the sidelines, he took a more active role, holding discussions with members of the revolutionary government of Bavaria and expressing his opinions on ma ers such as educational reform and the reception and welfare of the returning troops.37 While Rilke was initially hopeful that politics might help humanity to “turn a completely new page of the future,” he became increasingly disillusioned as German politics became ever more polarized and radical. Ultimately he concluded that a new beginning would come only if everyone ignored “the call of the time, which seeks to divert everyone from his proper and particular capabilities,” and pursued what “he had really learned to do, and can do, and do it joyfully.” For Rilke this meant a return to writing: he would “vote for the Insel, and no one else!”38 Not long a er the armistice Rilke le Munich, and eventually se led in a li le château

26 Foreign Modernism

in the Valais region of Switzerland. Here a er a long drought voices began calling to him again. On the occasion of his daughter’s engagement he had received a le er of congratulations from an old acquaintance, Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, whose own daughter, Vera, had died at the age of nineteen, a year a er the end of the war. He felt immediately and mysteriously drawn to Vera and approached her mother for more information about her life and death. Gertrud Knoop responded with a biographical le er which quite unexpectedly propelled Rilke out of his lengthy writer’s block. He found himself writing, in a frenzied creative ecstasy, a sequence, “Sonnets to Orpheus,” dedicated to the memory of Vera Knoop. In three days he finished a cycle of twenty-five poems and then, a er completing the Duino Elegies, went back to the sonnets and produced another twenty-nine. But if the new poems returned to the classical tradition, they did not do so in the way of the reactionary nationalist poetry of the early war years. These were not nostalgic a empts to transcend fragmentation in favour of some phantasmatic wholeness. Instead they took their inspiration from the fragmented modernist sculpture of Auguste Rodin and radically reimagined the exilic condition and the nature of the poetry that would engage with it. This turn in Rilke’s poetry harkened back to a theoretical work that he had wri en decades earlier. In the autumn of 1902, while working on his study of Rodin, Rilke had spent considerable time with the French sculptor, both literally and figuratively: talking and viewing his works at the studio in the rue de l’Université, visiting the Rodin residence at Meudon, and contemplating Rodin’s place in the history of art during long sessions at the Bibliothèque Nationale. What emerged was Rilke’s study, Rodin, a text that reflects the poet’s a empts to understand and internalize the wisdom embodied in the sculptor’s artwork. In contrast to Rilke’s flight into the transcendent and abstract at the end of the Notebooks, what he saw in Rodin’s sculpture was an insistence on materiality, a dogged affirmation of the thing-ness of art. According to Rilke, Rodin knew that “that which gave distinction to a plastic work of art was its complete self-absorption. It must not demand nor expect aught from outside, it should refer to nothing that lay beyond it, see nothing that was not within itself.”39 For Rilke, Rodin’s sculptures do not refer to some transcendent beyond, far from the flux and contingency of the material world, but are, rather, resolutely part of it. As such, they take as their subject ma er the sheer physicality of being in the world – as Rilke phrases it: “The language of this art was

Travelling Culture 27

the body” (R, 6). But this was not to be the idealized body of art history, the fantastic body of some imagined antiquity, but the modern body, situated in history. Rilke writes that “strata a er strata of costumes were piled over it [the body] like an ever renewed varnish; but under this protecting crust the growing soul had changed it … The body had become a different one” (R, 7). Saturated by history, the body has also been shaped by it and sculpture must rise to the challenge of representing this new, modern embodiment. Interestingly, what Rodin discovers (and what Rilke discovers in Rodin) is that the modern body is no longer one suffused with calm stillness but is fluid and unstable: Rodin knew that, first of all, sculpture depended upon an infallible knowledge of the human body. Slowly, searchingly, he had approached the surface of this body … It consisted of infinitely many movements. The play of light upon these surfaces made manifest that each of these movements was different and each significant. At this point they seemed to flow into one another; at that, to greet each other hesitatingly; at a third, to pass by each other without recognition, like strangers. There were undulations without end. There was no point at which there was not life and movement. (R, 9–10)

Having inscribed the relentless motion of modernity, the human body itself becomes a pullulating, infinitely active surface, which Rodin recognizes and represents truthfully.40 To underscore this unceasing flow the text is saturated with tropes of liquidity: Rilke tells us that Rodin’s sculptures appear as though they were held in “the whirlpool of a washing, gnawing torrent”; that a face created by Rodin “was as full of motion, as full of unrest as the dashing of waves”; and that the sculptor’s work in general is like “a sea” which is “but distance, movement, depth” (R, 17, 18, 1). All sense of fixity is lost in the relentless language of aqueous mobility. Further, not only is the stability of the subject imperiled by its constant motion, but its wholeness is compromised as well by a profound fragmentation. This is no longer the body of nineteenth-century neoclassical fantasies, single, indivisible, and coherent, but one that is shattered into pieces, where “every part was a mouth that spoke a language of its own” (R, 21). Certain passages in the text recall parts of the Notebooks with their descriptions of dismembered bodily parts: “There are among the works of Rodin hands, single, small hands which, without

28 Foreign Modernism

1 Auguste Rodin, Eve (1811), detail of hand. Jardin des Tuileries. Photo © by author.

belonging to a body, are alive. Hands that rise irritated and in wrath; hands whose five bristling fingers seem to bark like the five jaws of a dog of Hell. Hands that walk, sleeping hands, and hands that are awakening; criminal hands, tainted with hereditary disease; and hands that are tired and will do no more, and have lain down in some corner like sick animals that know no one can help them” (R, 24–5). The connection between this passage and Malte’s fantasy of the detachable hand are unmistakable, as is Rilke’s comment that “a hand laid on another’s shoulder or thigh does not any more belong to the body from which it came – from this body and from the object which it touches or seizes something new originates, a new thing that has no name and belongs to no one” (R, 25). Clearly, we are on the same terrain as The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, facing an uncanny body with porous boundaries and no clearly defined limits. Significantly, though, whereas this fragmented and aqueous world caused Malte tremendous anxiety, Rodin remains absolutely calm in it. According to Rilke, Rodin does not see this disintegration as a fall or a blemish, but a type of perfection: “The same completeness is conveyed

Travelling Culture 29

in all the armless statues of Rodin: nothing necessary is lacking. One stands before them as before something whole. The feeling of incompleteness does not rise from the mere aspect of a thing, but from the assumption of a narrow-minded pedantry, which says that arms are a necessary part of the body and that a body without arms cannot be perfect” (R, 24). Fragmentation is not debased or imperfect, but only seems so when viewed through the lens of an ideology that insists on a pristine (and phantasmatic) wholeness. In this flux and disarticulation Rodin finds a “balance and equilibrium” of his very own (R, 17). Fragmentation, then, is not modernity’s affliction, something to be endured, but its arch form which should be celebrated in its own right. This transvaluation of modern fragmentation is a radical move, but Rilke trumps himself by taking it a stage further. According to the poet, Rodin’s celebration of the splintered modern body is not a subversive rejection of the ideals of antiquity, but their apotheosis. At the time many saw Rodin’s contorted figures as a rejection of the idealizing and holistic vision of ancient sculpture. Rilke, however, turns the tables on this received wisdom and presents his own dissident reading of classicism: “Nature is all motion and an art that wished to give a faithful and conscientious interpretation of life could not make rest, that did not exist, its ideal. In reality the Antique did not hold such an ideal. One has only to think of the Nike. This piece of sculpture has not only brought down to us the movement of a beautiful maiden who goes to meet her lover, but it is at the same time an eternal picture of Hellenic wind in all its sweep and splendour. There was no quiet even in the stones of still older civilizations” (R, 18). Therefore, far from being the art of order and repose propagandized by the Maurrasians, classical sculpture was always an art of motion, a vortex of energy. Rodin, then, is not the revolutionary who seeks to smash the classical inheritance, but its liberator, rescuing classicism from the hands of its desiccated captors who for centuries had falsified it. Throughout the text Rilke constantly presents Rodin as producing classical works: he tells us that his small figures are “like some animal figures of the Antique,” and describes other sculptures as “Greek work” (R, 33). Ultimately, in Rilke’s study Rodin assumes the role of the true, rightful heir of the classical tradition. He tells us that during a crucial phase of Rodin’s development “new relations connected him more closely with the past of the art of sculpture, and the greatness of this past, which has been a restriction to so many, to him had become the wing that carried him. For if he received during that time an encouragement and confirmation of that which he wished

30 Foreign Modernism

and sought, it came to him from the art of the antique world and from the dim mystery of the cathedrals” (R, 20). Far from being the point of rupture, Rodin in fact reestablishes the link to the glories of classicism. This strange, dissident reading of classicism has more than a passing resemblance to Charles Baudelaire’s seminal conceptualization of modern art in “The Painter of Modern Life.” In this text Baudelaire engages directly the split between classicism and contemporaneity. A empting to articulate the difference between these two eras or sensibilities, Baudelaire notes that “by ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”41 But immediately a er rearticulating a conventional view of classicism as transcendental wholeness and modernity as fragmentation and lack, Baudelaire begins to problematize the binary opposition of the two terms: “Every old master has had his own modernity,” he tells us.42 For Baudelaire, modernity is not the debased other of a glorious antiquity – both are flip sides of the same coin. Just as classicism was the modernity of its time, so Baudelaire sees the modernity of his era one day becoming a kind of classicism. “For any ‘modernity’ to be worthy of one day taking its place as ‘antiquity,’” he writes, “it is necessary for the mysterious beauty which human life accidentally puts into it to be distilled from it.”43 In order for modernity to become classicism, then, one cannot flee from the conditions of contemporaneity into a phantasmatic vision of a pristine antique wholeness. One must, instead, radically embrace “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent,” that characterize modern life. Central to this characterization of modernity is the figure of the flâneur. An urban connoisseur defined by his mobility, the flâneur’s peripatetic strolling through the streets of the metropolis challenges old values, opens new vistas, and presents novel opportunities for self invention. In Baudelaire’s take on modernity, and Rilke’s Baudelairean interpretation of Rodin, we can see many of the key a itudes of travelling culture. Mobility and displacement are no longer symptoms of a fall, to be lamented or corrected, but new ways of living open to pleasure and the delirious possibility of self-transformation. In the late poem cycle, The Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke finally manages to integrate the Baudelairean insights of Rodin into his own poetic practice. The fact that it took him so long to do so speaks to the tremendous hold that nationalism has had on the modern imagination, even among those by their natures hostile to its premises and claims. In this strange and liminal work, he blurs the boundaries between classicism and contemporaneity, coherence and fragmentation in order to articulate a

Travelling Culture 31

radical vision of modern subjectivity. One of the key elements of this subjectivity is its rootless or transient nature. Displacement is no longer seen as a debased fragmentation, but the very model for a distinctly modern sel ood. Images of travel and border crossing proliferate in the text, tied to celebrations of metamorphosis and hybridity. The key figure in this respect is Orpheus himself. Equally at home in both the kingdoms of the living and the dead, he mediates, “not only between life and death, but between past and present, experiencing the whole of human history and achievement as one single, timeless, and divine event.”44 This understanding of Orpheus as a migrant, deliriously crossing borders has recently been reiterated by Salman Rushdie in his hybridizing, postcolonial take on the Orpheus/Eurydice myth, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, where Orpheus is described as “the singer with the lyre or, let's say, guitarist – the trickster who uses his music and wiles to cross boundaries.”45 Celebrating this Orphic border-crossing, in sonnet XII of the second part Rilke instructs us to “Cherish all change,” and warns us that “what resolves to remain as it is renounces existence.”46 In the terminal sonnet of the suite, the poet urges us to “Move through transformation, out and in” (Part II, sonnet 29, SP, 254–5). “The ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent,” are no longer seen as uncanny symptoms of a disordered modernity, but the signifiers of a new form of sel ood, one that accepts transience and mobility as the conditions of possibility for a constant reinvention of the I. This new ethos is perhaps most evident in Rilke’s representation of Orpheus’s death. According to Greek myth, the archetypal poet was torn to pieces by the maenads. But while they shredded his body, they were unable to destroy his head and lyre, which continued to produce music of an unearthly beauty. This apotheosis is dramatized by Rilke in sonnet XXVI: But you, O divinest singer, unconquered accorder, when the swarm of the slighted maenads ruined along, were able to drown their cries with exquisite order, for out of destruction soared your constituent song … And if the earthly no longer knows your name, whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing. To the flashing water say: I am.47

Here we have a complete transvaluation of the fragment. Orpheus, the migrant, is no longer a “fragment from another context,” an insignificant

32 Foreign Modernism

foreigner who can only find meaning by being absorbed into the nation. Like a Rodin statue, his disintegration is not incompletion but a kind of perfection. He is a subject that both flows and is: in other words, one that mediates or negotiates Being and Becoming, stability and flux, identity and difference. This double affirmation results in new, unprecedented forms of identity that are also distinctly modern forms of beauty – as he tells us, the “earthly no longer knows your name.” This new perspective in Rilke’s work strongly suggests Clifford’s “traveling culture.” Displacement is no longer conceived as exile with its “uprootedness, pain, authority.” It has instead been reconceived as travelling with its valorization of “movement” and “circulation.” The search for roots and stability has given way to the celebration of mobility and the continuous reinvention of the self that it facilitates. As identity became ever more rigid and exclusionary during the interwar period (particularly in Germany) Rilke stuck tenaciously to an oppositional identity based on travel. “Really, there is nothing to which I stand more passionately opposed than this ‘Reich,’” he wrote. “May Switzerland protect me until the day when I can find some distant refuge, or disappear as a private individual in Paris, as a Czech citizen who can stroll the quais and in the Luxembourg without ever bumping into the alarm bells of politics.”48 No longer a fragment from another context, Rilke now styles himself as a cosmopolitan flâneur deliriously enjoying the limitless possibilities of the city of exiles.

2 Becoming Minor: Archipenko, Bergson, and Deterritorialization

In his classic account of nascent modernism, Consciousness and Society, H. Stuart Hughes argues for a sea-change in European culture in the 1890s. “In this decade,” writes Hughes, “and the one immediately succeeding it, the basic assumptions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social thought underwent a critical review from which there emerged the new assumptions characteristic of our own time.”1 Propelled by “social disorder, economic crisis, and institutional malfunctioning,” the intellectuals of the early twentieth century a acked the “materialism,” “mechanism,” and “naturalism” of nineteenth-century “positivist” thought, and offered instead the subjectivism, psychologism, and irrationalism that we now recognize as quintessentially “modernist.”2 In France, in the years following the Dreyfus Affair, the positivism of Renan and Taine, the philosophical inflection of the emba led Third Republic, was challenged by a number of radical new doctrines: the mystical Catholicism and conservatism of Paul Claudel, the spiritual philosophy of Emile Boutroux, and the ecstatic violence of Georges Sorel, to cite only a few proper names.3 But the most important and influential challenge to the hegemony of positivism was undoubtedly the philosophy of Henri Bergson. The publication of Bergson’s doctoral thesis, Time and Free Will, at the end of the nineteenth century functioned like an intellectual bomb dropped on the positivistic and materialistic culture of the Third Republic.4 In this work (and the ones that followed) Bergson a acked the main tendencies of French thought, and the Cartesian tradition in particular, and articulated in its stead a radical, intuitionist philosophy that would have a profound impact on early twentieth-century culture.

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Bergson’s philosophy would generate diametrically opposed reactions. For the theorists of the Right, his a ack on the clarity and distinctness of Cartesian rationalism was not a productive turn away from an oppressive and moribund system, but a symptom of cultural crisis. Further, for the Right, Bergson was not only an apostle of metaphysical disorder but a “foreigner” whose alien values were undermining the French tradition. A Jew elaborating a German philosophy, he articulated a vision of flux and metamorphosis that was strange and hostile to classical French order. But if the Right could use the charge of foreignness to a ack and dismiss Bergson, the avant-garde could turn the tables by using Bergsonist principles to develop what I will call a minor aesthetic that challenged the reactionary position. The notion of a minor aesthetic is inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gua ari’s idea of a minor literature. Derived from their study of Ka a, for Deleuze and Gua ari “a minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.”5 It is the uncanny, foreign inflection that defamiliarizes the language, renders it alien or strange. In the words of Deleuze and Gua ari, the first characteristic of a minor literature is that “in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization.”6 In this chapter I will argue that becoming minor and deterritorialization are processes that occur not only in language but in the field of visual forms as well. Dominant modes of visual rhetoric can also be radically estranged and reinflected to reflect minoritarian interests and realities. In order to demonstrate this contention I will focus on the work of the Ukrainian sculptor Alexander Archipenko. Having come to Paris to study art, Archipenko threw himself into the intense world of the cosmopolitan avant-garde where he discovered Bergson. With his emphasis on flux and transformation, Bergson gave Archipenko a model of aesthetic form that not only satisfied his experimental proclivities, but also allowed him to make an intervention in the culture wars that were then raging. Producing neoclassical sculptures inspired by Bergsonian mobility, Archipenko affected a radical deterritorialization, subversively turning classicism from the major aesthetic of French nationalism to the minor aesthetic of a border-crossing travelling culture. Henri Bergson and the Dissolving Modern Subject In Time and Free Will Bergson launched a direct assault on the dominant tradition of French thought. He sought to challenge the hegemony

Becoming Minor 35

of this philosophy by arguing that it was built upon faulty premises – namely, the valorization of space over time and an unwarranted reliance on visual metaphors. According to Martin Jay, the philosophical tradition challenged by Bergson can be traced back to the “perspectivalism” of René Descartes. Jay argues that “Descartes was a quintessentially visual philosopher, who tacitly adopted the position of a perspectivalist painter using a camera obscura to reproduce the observed world.”7 In Cartesian philosophy the contemplating subject becomes a decorporealized, transcendental eye and the process of thought is reinterpreted as “seeing” ideas in the mind, looking at clear and distinct ideas with a “steadfast mental gaze.” One of the effects of this philosophy was to efface the existence of a concrete body underlying the disincarnated subject of knowledge. For Descartes and his followers the body is no longer the ground of all perceptions, an instrument of action, and a fundamentally lived experience, but an object to be analysed from the outside, just another “thing” existing spatially in the external world. In Time and Free Will, Bergson a acks the fundamental principles of Cartesian perspectivalism head on. He admits the existence of a spatialized self as an object in the world, but contends that far from being the fundamental, essential subject it is, in fact, merely superficial, an epiphenomenon of language and social relations. Bergson contends that there are two selves. The first is the subject recognized by traditional Cartesian philosophy: a “spatial” self with clear and distinct boundaries and well-defined conscious states. But, for Bergson, this is only a surface form, a “symbol” of the true underlying self. Unfortunately consciousness, goaded by the insatiable desire to separate, substitutes the symbol for the reality, or perceives the reality only through the symbol. As the self thus refracted, and thereby broken to pieces, is much be er adapted to the requirements of social life in general and language in particular, consciousness prefers it, and gradually loses sight of the fundamental self.8

Due to the clarity and precision required by social relations and the visual and spatial bias of language, the medium of those relations, the flux of the fundamental self is covered over with a clear, linguistically constructed subjectivity which is subsequently misrecognized as subjectivity tout court. Or, to put it in slightly different terms, because language cannot deal with subjective experience “without arresting its mobility” or present a “word with well-defined outlines” without doing violence

36 Foreign Modernism

to the “delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness,” it will render any public representation of subjectivity ossified and inauthentic.9 Underneath this veil of illusion, however, is a radically different self accessible to personal introspection. This is the “deep-seated self which ponders and decides, which heats and blazes up, [a] self whose states and changes permeate one another and undergo a deep alteration as soon as we separate them from one another in order to set them out in space.”10 Far from being the clear and distinct self of Cartesian philosophy, the authentic Bergsonian self is one without clear borders or welldefined limits, one whose conscious states dissolve into one another. Tropes of liquidity proliferate in Bergson’s text. He writes of “melting,” “flowing,” “dissolving,” “permeating,” and the “fluid mass of our conscious states.” This is a self of constant flux, constant becoming; a self whose proper element is not the stability or stasis of geometric space, but rather the incessant change of time, of dureé. And therefore the appropriate metaphoric of this self is not vision, not the eye with its Medusan gaze, but rather the aural register and the flowing time art par excellence, music. And so, Bergson constantly describes the subjective experience of dureé as a melody, as the “notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another.”11 Not only are the internal boundaries of the self porous, with the subject’s inner states bleeding into one another, but the divide between the self and others, or the self and the world is equally permeable. In the Cartesian system knowledge is acquired along the model of the viewer, with the coherent, bounded subject looking, at a distance, at discrete objects in space. In Bergson, however, this system gives way to the workings of intuition and musical empathy. For him, the subject does not stand at a distance from the object like a viewer, but rather merges with it in the same way that an auditor becomes one with a living current of acoustic sensation. “Only intuition,” writes Jay of this Bergsonian epistemology, “can provide the sympathetic entry into the interiority of the object, which is blocked by intellectual analysis, linguistic symbolization, and visual representation.”12 As the trope of the auditor suggests it is music that facilitates this empathetic melding, both actually and metaphorically. Actually, the experience of music or the musicality of language can induce in the auditor a state of empathy and identification with the author. Bergson tells us that the poet is “he with whom feelings develop into images, and the images themselves into words which translate them while obeying the

Becoming Minor 37

laws of rhythm.”13 And while we may see these images pass before our eyes, “we should never realize these images so strongly without the regular movements of the rhythm by which our soul is lulled into selfforgetfulness, and, as in a dream, thinks and sees with the poet.”14 The visual power of art is only able to have a limited effect on a spectator and it is ultimately its musicality that serves as a springboard to empathetic absorption. Metaphorically, this same musical process can serve as a model for empathetic identification with nature. In a later parable Bergson directs the philosopher to follow the simple wisdom of the child who chants the words to a lesson in order to enter into empathetic identification with the author and rediscover that author’s unique moment of creative inspiration. To reach that point the child “must fall into step with him [the author] by adopting his gestures, his a itudes, his gait, by which I mean learning to read the text aloud with the proper intonation and inflection.”15 Similarly, the philosopher can enter into empathetic identification with nature by “sounding it out in a correspondent music.”16 Bergson maintains that there is “a certain analogy between the act of reading as I have just described it and the intuition I recommend to the philosopher. On the page it has chosen from the great book of the world, intuition seeks to recapture, to get back the movement and rhythm of the compositor, to live again creative evolution by being one with it in physical sympathy.”17 Using the strategy of musical empathy the Bergsonian self can flow beyond its own borders and enter into a kind of pantheistic union with nature itself. The Eye and the Ear Bergson’s radical philosophy had a tremendous impact on avant-garde artists on both sides of the English Channel: it inspired the theorizations of cubism developed by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, the Symbolism of Tancrède de Visan, the performance poetry of the Italian Futurists, and, through the translations of T.E. Hulme, the early imagist poetry of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.18 But not only was the philosopher a profound influence on emerging modernism in elite culture, with the publication of Creative Evolution in 1907 he also gained acclaim among the fashionable public of le tout-Paris. Huge crowds of “five o’clock Bergsonians” began to pack the philosopher’s weekly public lectures and tourists flocked to them as one of the sights of the capital.19 Bergson’s popularity, however, was not universal. While

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many progressives saw his intuitionist philosophy as an important instrument of cultural revolution, for the theorists of the Right it was a symptom of cultural decline. While, for the Action Française, neoclassicism followed laws of nature and literary form that were enshrined in French cultural tradition and were “superior to the individual,” Bergson and his “romantico-symbolist” followers inherited their Romantic predecessors’ “contempt for all established rules,” succumbed to the “terrible individualist current” that was established with the Revolution, and plunged into chaos. For the Maurrasians the choice between classicism and Bergsonian modernist currents was the stark one between “discipline and absence of discipline, order and anarchy.”20 A similar critique is presented in the conservative critic Julien Benda’s Belphégor. According to Benda, the hegemony of Bergsonism has unleashed an orgy of “mysticism” and has cultivated an “abhorrence of all rational thought,” once the mainstay of French culture.21 This is evident in the contemporary denigration of the classical French “plastic” sensibility and its replacement by the Bergsonian “musical” sensibility. Benda neatly defines the two tendencies as follows: Divide sensibility broadly into two kinds; on the one hand, the kind which is acquired through sight and touch and which, using as its armature the idea of form, derives from that origin a peculiar clarity and firmness of outline; let us call this the plastic sensibility; on the other hand, hearing, smell, and taste, which, not having this armature, consist of a sensation without outline, more emotionally effective by far; let us call this the musical sensibility. (B, 30)

The plastic sensibility (which he here identifies with sight and touch but which throughout the text is almost exclusively identified with vision), then, is concerned with form, clarity, and distinctness. The eye is the organ that separates, compares, and judges, and as such it is the seat of reason and intelligence. But this is true not only because of the eye’s adjudicating role, but because of the very modality of vision itself. In a lengthy appendix on the physiology of the senses Benda notes that “the sensations of sight are naturally inseparable from the idea of the object which arouses them; they are sensation mixed with an intellectual condition, (the la er sometimes usurping almost all the field); they come under the heading of clear sensibility” (B, 142–3, emphasis in original). The clarity of vision is guaranteed because it is not merely sensory experience registering mechanically on the brain in the manner

Becoming Minor 39

of eighteenth-century sensationalism, but already passes through the mediation of the mind. What the viewing subject perceives, then, is not the superficial skin of things, but rather their deep underlying form, their “idea,” a term which suggests a transcendental Platonic essence. Finally, Benda notes that the plastic sensibility is a “compact sensibility” with a highly salutary effect on the self – it “inculcates poise” (B, 30). The plastic sensibility consolidates subjectivity, reinforcing the coherence and the integration of the ego. The musical sensibility, on the other hand, is the precise opposite of the plastic sensibility – its demonized other. Instead of clarity and form, it brings ambiguity, confusion, and a hazy lack of distinctions. Instead of plumbing the deep essence of things, the musical sensibility stays resolutely at the surface of “pure sensation … exempt … from any intellectual content” (B, 143). As such, it fails to engage reason and instead encourages purely emotional reactions. Further, whereas vision imposes on the subject “the idea of something outside of himself,” making him aware of “the limitation, the finite state of his being,” hearing seems “to come to him from the inside; to him it seems as though by his own effort he were increasing the scope of his being; they make him aware of the infinitude of his ego” (B, 143). Instead of inculcating poise, it leads to a “disintegration of consciousness resulting in a sensation that is diffuse and sca ered, and producing a dizzy intoxication” (B, 30). Far from reintegrating the subject, musicality and aurality lead to the annihilation of the self in an oceanic diffusion. In a complete transvaluation of Bergson’s musical empathy, Benda conceives of the musical experience as a masochistic bacchanal, a subjective suicide. While Maurras and Benda present their opposition to Bergson as a series of philosophical or aesthetic disagreements, there is also a strongly nationalist and racist aspect to this critique. For Maurras, Bergson’s philosophy was suspect because of its supposed “Germanic” roots, while Bergson himself was to be vilified for his Jewish background. The characterization of the philosopher and his thought as foreign is evident in Belphégor as well where Benda presents the Bergsonian musical sensibility as an inherently Jewish characteristic. True to his penchant for the relentless construction of binary oppositions Benda gives a dualistic conception of Jewish identity. He claims that there are “two kinds of Jews: the severe moralistic Jew, and the Jew who is always greedy for sensation – speaking symbolically, the Hebrew and the Carthaginian, Jehovah and Belphégor, Spinoza and Bergson” (B, 113). It is the Carthaginian side of the opposition that is predisposed to musicality. “We

40 Foreign Modernism

cannot deny,” he writes, “the Carthaginians’s passion for literature creative of emotion, their cult of the theatre and the comedian, their thirst (Alexandrian) for the indistinct, for the non-defined, for the mysterious, for the confusion of subject and object; nor can we help noticing the coincidence of the present French aesthetic, as we have just portrayed it, with the enormous part the Jews have had in its development during the past few years” (B, 113). With their “inherent rage” for the hazy and ill-defined and their tremendous power in French cultural life, the Jews have infected the French body with the “virus” of musicality. A True French Sculptor These philosophical and political controversies also found their way into debates about French sculpture which, at this time, was in the midst of a seismic shi . The Académie, for centuries the arbiter of French taste, was under a ack. The French Académie was founded in 1648 and modelled a er the Renaissance academies of Florence and Rome. It was replaced in 1796 by the École des Beaux-Arts which continued the previous institution’s mandate to provide a firm basis in the study of classical art.22 Up through the 1930s an École education was considered the only valid “proof” of professional competency in sculpture and a sine qua non for sculptors seeking state and municipal commissions. But by the early twentieth century this hegemony was challenged on two separate fronts. On the one hand, so called “Independent sculpture” rejected the formal and narrative conventions of the academy, and attempted to produce a new classicism of austerity and visual purity. On the other, the avant-garde initially abandoned classicism altogether in favour of revolutionary experimentation; and when they did return to it, it was in a form so radicalized as to be almost unrecognizable by École standards. While current cultural history tends to privilege the achievements of the avant-garde, critics of the 1920s and 1930s saw the emergence of the Independents as the most important development in contemporary sculpture.23 And it is perhaps this development that Benda had in mind when he notes at the end of his book certain signs of a “violent return to classicism” which might check the creeping takeover of musicality and foreignness. The label “Independents” referred to a loose group of sculptors (Aristide Maillol, Emile Antoine Bourdelle, Lucien Schnegg, Charles Despiau, Joseph Bernard, and others) who had rejected (hence were “independent of”) École conventions; in the words of the contemporary

Becoming Minor 41

art historian A.-H. Martinie, they “are drawn together by their justified defiance of official teaching.”24 In particular, they abandoned the anecdotal and literary allusions of the École and concentrated on simplified forms in order to provide a purely optical sculptural experience, a reduction o en justified in the Neoplatonic terms discussed above. While these shi s were typically presented as purely artistic changes, this aestheticizing rhetoric covered over the profoundly political character of Independent sculpture. While the Independents claimed radical authority by rejecting the staid conventions of the academy and returning to a pure visuality, they also played on other, less aesthetic emotions. During the increasingly xenophobic and racist interwar period these sculptors were o en presented as the purveyors of a pure French art, a situation that they sometimes abe ed by pandering to chauvinistic and reactionary sentiments in their statements and sculptures. Consider, for example, the work of Aristide Maillol. Maillol was considered to be the most important of the Independent sculptors and one of the most important living French artists bar none. This critical valuation is evident in the number of monographs devoted to the artist in his time. Between 1920 and 1939, Maillol was the subject of eleven books, whereas Brancusi, Laurens, or Giacome i (artists who since 1945 have dominated the scholarship on interwar sculpture) had no monographs published about them at all. It is further evident in the central position given to Maillol at the massive art exhibition, Les Maîtres de l’Art Indépendent, which was staged in conjunction with the World’s Fair of 1937. While Picabia, de Chirico, Severini, Soutine, Ozenfant, Modigliani, Ernst, Kisling, and Chagall shared one room with about a dozen others, Maillol received three rooms to himself at the very centre of the exhibit. The lionization of Maillol evident in the exhibition’s display strategy extended to the critical and journalistic discourses surrounding the show. The journal Insurgé, for example, identified Maillol as one of the unrivaled “masters” of contemporary sculpture.25 Maillol’s preeminence putatively derived from his mastery of aesthetic form, a mastery that was typically described in Neoplatonic terms. Maillol’s genius, his supporters argued, allowed him to reduce the visible world to its essences. His sculptures, they claimed, were beyond earthly contingencies and had a ained the tranquility of transcendent Forms. For Waldemar George, in a Maillol sculpture “that which is accidental, fortuitous, or ephemeral is cut out. Only that which is imperishable and unchangeable subsists. Most of Maillol’s figures appear to us as though placed outside of time, enjoying an absolute, sublime,

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and immobile repose. This eternal aspect is translated with a scintillating clarity.”26 Removed from the flux of Becoming, Maillol’s figures achieve the fulness of time in a static transcendental realm. Maillol himself routinely spoke about his own work in these same terms. The ideal of synthesis dominates his discussions of sculpture. For Maillol, it is the essential quality of Greek art: “The Greeks proceeded by synthesis,” he notes to Judith Cladel. But it is also the fundamental necessity in the renewed classicism of contemporary French art: “It is necessary to be synthetic … We are in an era when it is necessary to put many things into a synthesis.”27 For Maillol, this synthesis, this condensation of forms means a move away from particularity towards generalization. “The particular is not interesting,” he argues. “What interests me, what I seek is the general.”28 In opposition to the multiplied and fragmented perspective of Picasso’s cubism, this generalization calls for a consolidation of point of view. “I have only a few principal profiles and still I find there are too many of them,” states the sculptor. “I would prefer to have only two profiles like the antique primitives. Their art is for me the most beautiful.”29 For Maillol, the ideal work of art strains towards the purity of a monocular focus. This compression, however, is not merely an arbitrary reduction, but a search for the basic, underlying structure of things, an “architecture.” “I seek architecture and volume,” states Maillol. “Sculpture is architecture.”30 This quest for fundamental forms, for the underlying skeleton of reality is, of course, an eminently Platonic enterprise, a fact acknowledged by Maillol himself. “For Plato idea and form were one, and that is also how I see it,” he tells John Rewald.31 And elsewhere, expanding on this idea he notes, “Form pleases me and I create it; but, for me, it is only the means of expressing the idea. It is ideas I seek. I pursue form in order to a ain that which is without form. I try to say what is impalpable, intangible.”32 In order to a ain this transcendental world of Ideas, art must strenuously reject anecdote and narrative and strive towards a pure visuality. This is clear in Maillol’s comments about Greek sculpture. According to the sculptor, “In Greek art, there is nothing more beautiful than the Venus de Milo.”33 In a corpus of works defined by their synthesis, balance, and beauty, the Venus de Milo stands out as the apotheosis of the Greek ideal. What is it that makes this such a privileged work? Maillol explains his aesthetic assessment thus: “For forty years I have been trying to explain the Venus de Milo. Every time I see her, I try to analyze her. I never succeed. One is so taken with that harmony, that poetry, that one can say nothing. The statue has an air of not giving a damn

Becoming Minor 43

about you. If she had arms, which perhaps held a shield, she would be less beautiful. There is the mystery: the arms must have made an explanatory (story-telling) gesture, whereas in her present state she is pure beauty.”34 The Venus de Milo is so beautiful, so aesthetically successful, because it is absolutely a work of the eye. It not only completely lacks a narrative dimension, it is also u erly irreducible to discourse. Impregnable to verbal analysis or description, the artwork establishes a visual circuit – relaying the eye directly from the elementary forms of the sculpture to a higher world of transcendental Forms. Further, this pure classicist optics also establishes a particular form of subjectivity. The Venus is characterized by her “harmony,” by her “air of not giving a damn about you.” In other words, she is coherent, balanced, and completely self-contained. However, not only did Maillol’s optical classicism offer an alternative to the decadent musicality of contemporary French culture, it also challenged its creeping foreignness. Born in 1861 on the Mediterranean basin at Banyuls-sur-mer, in an area colonized by both the Greeks and the Romans, Maillol was o en styled the ultimate embodiment of latinité. In the words of Maurice Denis, “by birth, by race, he belongs to the French Midi; he comes to us from the shores of the Mediterranean whose blue depths gave birth to Aphrodite.”35 This characterization can be found in the work of George as well. “Maillol is the heir of the artists of Versailles and the Ancient Greeks,” he wrote. “He is a true French sculptor.”36 Maillol’s quintessential latinité put some critics in mind of another great French classicist. The journal Combat noted that if one were to compare the sculptor to a “great contemporary” it would have to be Charles Maurras for both were “Greeks of our Midi.”37 This connection to Maurras was underscored by the sculptor himself. In her book of interviews with the artist, Cladel relates the genealogy of Maillol’s most famous work, The Mediterranean. She notes that at one point the sculpture was called Thought, and later, Latin Thought, a title, Maillol tells her, that “should be taken in the sense in which Charles Maurras means it.”38 While this one reference should not be overburdened, it does suggest Maillol’s support of certain reactionary values and challenges the conventional view of his sculpture as an anodyne and apolitical Hellenism. We can see this in both statements made by the sculptor and in the sculptures themselves. For example, John Rewald records this: We came back from lunch, during which the conversation touched on many subjects. A favorite phrase of Maillol’s turned up again and again:

44 Foreign Modernism “People are stupid and imbeciles.” He repeated it on every possible occasion: regarding bad photographs of sculptures, books that were poorly bound, ugly houses or monuments put in the wrong spot … His favorite century was that of Louis XIV when artists were respected instead of being treated with contempt; in that happy period, he said, even artisans knew how to create artistically, with a feeling for their materials and with infallible good taste … On the way [to his studio] we discussed the difficult question of the extent to which the public at large understands art. Maillol was convinced that it didn’t and once more expressed his disdain for most people. “I hate them,” he repeated, “they are wretched beings. I prefer my cat or a frog. My cat at least understands when I talk to him.”39

Here, Maillol expresses an anti-demotic position and a nostalgia for an anti-democratic age, for an absolutist politics that powerfully recalls Maurras’s royalism. Some of Maillol’s comments on race and national identity also overlap with the more odious ideas of Maurras’s reactionary classicism. In Cladel’s book Maillol dismisses the avant-garde’s interest in African and Oceanian art: “Those in this country who try to produce Negro sculpture are wrong. We are in France! We are in the land of Ronsard, of La Fontaine and of Racine! What connection is there between this country and its men, and Negro sculpture? Every artist creates solely according to the character of his race and of his time.”40 Not only does Maillol recapitulate a hackneyed opposition between a classical France (“the land of Ronsard, of La Fontaine and of Racine”) and various “primitive” Others, but he also elaborates something like a racial determinism, a conviction that race is the defining and limiting factor of cultural production. With these comments in mind, Maillol’s technique of “generalization” takes on a different aspect. This method of Maillol’s has o en been commented on: “despite the keenness of his observation,” writes one critic, “Maillol generalises his figures so that they lose any personality and approximate to types.”41 This feature of the sculptor’s work has been most o en accounted for in Neoplatonic terms: “This standardisation accords completely with Maillol’s overriding concern with timelessness and universality, and his desire to achieve a final, perfect summation of his artistic ideal.”42 Not surprisingly, this type of assessment recapitulates, almost exactly, the interpretation of Maurice Denis. Writing about Maillol’s work between 1905 and 1925, Denis notes that “the thing that is striking about the new monuments is not the novelty

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2. Aristide Maillol, The Three Nymphs. Jardin des Tuilieries. Photo © by author.

of the motif, or the unexpectedness of the subject. Maillol takes up the same themes and almost the same models incessantly: he perfects them; he polishes them; he brings them ever closer to his ideal.”43 According to this perspective, then, the overwhelming uniformity and standardization of Maillol’s figures can be a ributed to his efforts to asymptotically approach a Platonic ideal. But there is another possible interpretation of this generalization, one that tallies be er with the Maurrasian thrust of Maillol’s work. Maillol’s refinement, one can argue, is not a striving towards Platonic Forms, but an a empt at homogenization, an effort to cast out difference. This is evident in a work such as The Three Nymphs (figure 2). One is immediately struck by the uncanny similarity of the three figures, who appear to be copies or clones of the same woman. With their stiff, unnatural bodies, and vacant staring eyes that lifelessly look past one another, they seem to be, not archetypes of Mediterranean serenity and coherence, but mass-produced mannequins. Far from being ever-be er approximations of an ideal subjectivity, these figures are hollow shells, empty ciphers, not the apotheoses of personhood but its annihilation. The personal and individual is dissolved in favour of the elaboration of a pure national and racial type.

46 Foreign Modernism

But if Maillol and the Independents used a Neoplatonic inflection of classicism as a bulwark to keep out foreign contaminants, at this very moment other artists were staging very different encounters between the classical and the foreign. Avant-gardists like Alexander Archipenko used Bergsonian philosophy to deterritorialize classicism and to challenge the more restrictive notions of culture and identity being debated in France. Towards a Minor Aesthetic Archipenko was born in 1887 in Kyiv, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. Having demonstrated a precocious artistic talent he decided to pursue formal education as a student at art school in his native city, but this proved to be short-lived: in 1905 he was expelled for criticizing his teachers as “too old-fashioned and academic.”44 A er an exhibition whose connection to the Revolution of 1905 was investigated by the police and a stint with a group of “progressive” artists in Moscow, Archipenko decided that the constraints on his creative freedom were too great in the Russian Empire and he emigrated to Paris.45 Archipenko enrolled in the École des Beaux Arts but le in disgust a er two weeks because he found the academic system too confining and tedious. He spent his time studying art independently in museums: “My real school was the Louvre and I a ended it daily,” he noted.46 But here he avoided the work celebrated by the Independents – the Venus de Milo, the classicism of Praxiteles – and concentrated instead on archaic Greek, Byzantine, and Gothic art, studies he supplemented by visits to the ethnographic museum in the Trocadéro.47 In addition, Archipenko pursued his Bildung by immersing himself in the artistic and critical culture of the avant-garde. He was a regular at La Ruche, the artist’s colony in the Vaugirard district where he met Guillaume Apollinaire (who was to be one of the staunchest early admirers of his work), Léger, and Blaise Cendrars.48 Through Léger he met cubist pioneers LeFauconnier, Gleizes, and Metzinger, and by 1911 was a participant in the group that gathered around the Duchamp brothers and included (in addition to the artists mentioned above) Gris, Lhote, and Picabia. In these heady days of art-historical study and cubist theorizing Archipenko developed the main tenets of his philosophy and aesthetics. In contrast to the Neoplatonism of Maillol, it is Bergson who informs Archipenko’s metaphysics more than any other philosopher.

Becoming Minor 47

Archipenko came into contact with these ideas through his association with Gleizes and Metzinger, who at this very time were developing a Bergsonian understanding of cubism that would be published as Du Cubisme in 1912. In 1960 the sculptor himself published a book, Archipenko: Fi y Creative Years, 19 8–1958, explaining the philosophical premises underlying his sculpture, in which Bergsonian ideas play a prominent role. In the very first sentences of this text, he identifies creativity as the main force driving the universe: “In the infinity of time and space between planets,” he writes, “there was brought into being by cosmic dynamism a specific order of suitable elements to constitute creation. This perpetual creation in a state of energy which has been embodied deep in all cells from primordiality, constitutes the eternal life of art.”49 This creativity manifests itself on three separate but interconnected levels: cosmology, human subjectivity, and aesthetics. In terms of cosmology, Archipenko’s vision rejects Maillol’s notion of a stable world of forms for something resembling Bergson’s creative evolution. In order to underscore this affinity Archipenko even quotes from the philosopher’s text of the same name: “A perfect definition applies only to a completed reality; now vital properties are never entirely realized, though always on the way to become so; they are not so much states as tendencies.”50 Mirroring this perspective, the sculptor writes, “The phenomenon of change constitutes life. Animals, plants, minerals, as the result of changes are all subordinated to the formative laws of growth and evolution.”51 For Archipenko, the universe is in a process of constant change, flux, development: “Eternal progression in quality and quantity is a creative phenomenon of nature with its perpetual motion which makes organic and non-organic life to be and to evolve biologically.”52 Immutable Platonic Ideas are sheer fantasy because “the static in nature does not exist.”53 Creative evolution and flux, however, are not merely cosmological verities; they are also constitutive qualities of human subjectivity. This is because they have been literally inscribed into the human body. Archipenko notes that “universal dynamism mingles planetary forces with those of our cells in a continual creative evolution. If consciousness will embrace this inevitableness, the individual will grasp the creative reality within nature as well as within himself and may express it in many forms.”54 The same creative energy that exists in the macrocosm also exists in the microcosm, on the fundamental level of human cells. This has a twofold effect. First, it makes change and evolution fundamental human a ributes and does away with the static conception

48 Foreign Modernism

of humanity as the embodiment of a transcendental ideal. Second, it sha ers the notion of a coherent, well-bounded subject, because for Archipenko the self and the universe are fully interpenetrated. He writes: “Different feelings and states of mind do not always spring from the mind of the individual. Some come from unknown and unsensed abstract sources of nature and remain beyond the boundary of logic.”55 Since creative thought and emotion come from the energy of cosmic dynamism in our cells, the human subject is not a closed, discrete unit, but an open conduit for natural forces. “The greatest imagination or rationality, challenging universal unity, will not find the way to separate anything from the rest of the universe and to make a thing exist independently. All our thoughts and emotions come from and return to the rest of the world.”56 In this vision of a self merged with others in a kind of pantheistic union we can see the influence of Bergson’s deconstruction of Cartesian subjectivity and theorization of a subject empathetically melded with the rest of the world. This affinity is further evident in Archipenko’s use of the idea of intuition. On this issue he again approvingly cites the French philosopher: “What can this mean but that there are two symbolisms, equally acceptable in certain respects, and, in other respects equally inadequate to their object? The concrete explanation, no longer scientific, but metaphysical, must be sought along quite another path, not in the direction of intelligence, but in that of sympathy.”57 Like Bergson, Archipenko minimizes the importance of the rational intellect: “The intellect alone is not responsible for creative selection or changes,” he writes, “since the rudimentary abstract creative forces of nature are genetically imbedded in the body long before the formation of intellectual awareness of the individual.”58 Since the intellect is not the seat of creativity, overreliance on this faculty “inevitably results in a formalistic, dry aspect without spiritual stimulation and associative quality.”59 In order to access true creativity it is vital to turn to “spontaneous, intuitive action which usually is more vital than cerebral intervention with formulas.”60 Instead of turning to the desiccating, Medusan gaze of rational thought, the creative individual will use intuition to empathetically merge with nature and access the fundamental energy of cosmic dynamism. Having grasped the creative flux of the universe through intuition, the artist seeks to represent it in the work of art. For Archipenko, art should not become mired in the positivistic rendering of external surfaces, but should “become a mirror of self-emanation,”61 an expression

Becoming Minor 49

of the metamorphosis and change at the heart of Being. For the sculptor, this is precisely the mandate of modernism, a fact that both separates it from the sterile repetition of the Academic tradition and connects it to the great canon of world art. He writes: Modern art in many respects does not differ from the creative art of many peoples since prehistoric times. Then and now the stylistic transformations of the environment of represented bodies are the inevitable creative act. This is the process of interpretation and not of direct presentation of the externality of the object. This interpretation is an inevitable demonstration of both spiritual and intellectual a ainment. A cave man, an ancient Egyptian, a medieval Goth, a Hindu, a Byzantine, and an old Northwest American Indian, and many others, centuries ago transformed nature into symbolic shapes, o en totally concealing the naturalistic aspect of the object. From the point of view of art they are the free followers of the divine creative law of different transformations by nature itself, of which many people never dreamed.62

This passage is fascinating for several reasons. It presents a fundamentally Bergsonist understanding of the mission of art and casts modernism as the true, contemporary fulfilment of this mandate. This effectively reverses the prevailing assessment of the time: valorizing modernism and marginalizing more naturalistic, transparently representative styles such as Academic sculpture and perhaps Independent sculpture as well. It also breaks down the binary opposition (invoked by Maillol and so many others) between a privileged Western art and its debased foreign others, presenting European modernism as merely the last link in a long chain of global artistic innovations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the Bergsonist current to his philosophizing, Archipenko turns to the trope of musicality to further elaborate his sculptural method. Concerning the general relation of aural and visual art he notes that “it would seem that music is a more direct emotional factor than optical line. However, both spring from the same creative and orientational causes and are easily comparable and associable. The analogy is so strong that both may interpret one another. A quietly flowing melody in music is associable with moderately bent linear curves. Pathos and heroic bravery in music are analogous to large dramatized, angular, geometrically arranged lines.” Interestingly, when he then chooses a musical analogy for his own work it is from a non-Western source: “There is a lyrical line in my style which may be

50 Foreign Modernism

compared to the long sound of one string on a certain Japanese instrument called a suma-koto.”63 Bergson, music, foreign cultures. What I think that Archipenko is doing here is creating what we might call a minor aesthetic. He is selfconsciously connecting various elements repressed, marginalized, and demonized by the major French culture. He is, in other words, taking seriously the Right’s characterization of Bergson’s work as foreign, indeed even amplifying that assessment by showing its resonance with other foreign elements, but in the process completely transvaluing it, turning this foreignness into a counter-aesthetic, or counter-metaphysic. This is not to say, however, that this effort is in any way abstract or aestheticizing. Indeed it must be looked at as a subversive political intervention. According to Deleuze and Gua ari, one of the key characteristics of a minor literature is that “everything in [it] is political,” and this is because “a whole other story is vibrating within it.”64 The Bergsonian terms used by Archipenko to describe cosmic processes can be translated directly to the experiences of travelling culture – the nomadic other of the stable national culture articulated by the Right. The focus on flux, mobility, blurred boundaries, and transformation highlights precisely the mixed up border-crossing realities of the transnational avant-garde. The sculptor’s a ack on stability and reified identity, then, is not only a critique of a rigid metaphysical vision, but also the visions of Frenchness produced by the Right. Archipenko’s Bergsonism allows him to move away from the closure of the Right and its ideas of latinité to more open, fluid, and comprehensive conceptions of identity. In the words of Deleuze and Gua ari, the minor position “allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility.”65 Deterritorialization For Archipenko, these Bergsonist ideas were not only present in his explicit theorizing, but were also inscribed in his artwork. As he notes in Fi y Creative Years, “a great work of art is also a visual philosophy.”66 Bergson, then, provided Archipenko with the philosophical and formal means to oppose the hegemonic traditions of French sculpture with their Neoplatonic justifications of national unity, coherence, and purity. A philosophy of flux and fragmentation would provide not only the perspective from which to critique the rigid and reifying vision of identity produced by the Right, but the aesthetic means to embody the

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3 Alexander Archipenko (1887–1964), Woman Combing Her Hair. 1915. Bronze. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. © Aleksandr Archipenko Estate / SODRAC (2012).

social, political, and cultural values of the cosmopolitan travelling culture in which he was situated. In a radical and subversive move he takes the neoclassical subject ma er of the Right and rearticulates it via Bergson and Rodin. In other words, like Rilke, he uses formal means to eviscerate the art and philosophy of the Right from within. This recalls Deleuze and Gua ari’s notion of deterritorialization – the process of estrangement, of defamiliarization, of making foreign that they see as one of the principal effects of a minor literature. “How to tear a minor literature away from its own language,” they ask, “allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to

52 Foreign Modernism

one’s own language?”67 Bergson and his connection to musicality and foreignness shows Archipenko one such path. This is particularly evident in the breakthrough work of 1915, Woman Combing Her Hair (figure 3), a work that the art historian Frederick S. Wight has described as a “monumental and quite goddesslike” figure, representative of the early “neoclassical Archipenko.”68 In this piece, Archipenko brilliantly combines venerable neoclassical motifs with the most radical avant-garde formal invention and philosophical content. The sculpture represents a bather, that most classic of neoclassical characters. Having just stepped from the bath, this nude woman of Maillolean proportions stands contrapposto, while her right arm reaches up to her head to comb her flowing locks. But while the sculptor’s subject ma er is reminiscent of (and may even allude to) Ingres or Puvis de Chavannes, the figure itself could never be mistaken for the work of those artists, for in typical modernist fashion, the body is simplified, geometricized, and executed in a highly reflective metallic finish. But it is Archipenko’s introduction of the radical sculptural techniques of fragmentation, concaves, and positive negative space that definitively propels the neoclassical bather into the orbit of modernism. As I noted in the last chapter, the work of Auguste Rodin forced a fundamental reconsideration of the fragment in the sculpture of the early twentieth century. When asked in 1923 about the Frenchman’s influence on him, Archipenko answered bluntly, “I hated Rodin, who was then fashionable. His sculptures reminded me of chewed bread that one spits on a base, or of the crooked corpses from Pompeii.”69 However, if the young sculptor rejected the elaborate surface modelling and twisted psychologie nouvelle postures of Rodin’s art he, like Rilke, clearly imbibed the French artist’s use of fragmentation. From approximately 1910 Archipenko began to follow Rodin and to produce partial figures as finished sculptures himself. We can see Rodin’s influence in pieces such as Bather and Porteuse of 1912 as well as Woman Combing Her Hair where the figure’s le arm is chopped off just below the shoulder. While his use of fragmentation is indebted to Rodin, his utilization of concaves is the legacy of his cubist days. In cubist dogma void and solid, concave and convex, are of equal value and can interpenetrate and substitute for one another.70 Starting in about 1908 Picasso and Braque began to introduce concave and convex forms into their paintings, and Archipenko followed suit in his sculpture in about 1914. The Woman Combing Her Hair is practically built around these hollowed-out

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forms. From the scooped-out arm that frames her head, to her indented neck and curved thighs, these ambiguous cubist hollows make up the very guts of Archipenko’s bather. But the Woman not only shows the influence of Rodin and cubism, it also features Archipenko’s greatest innovation in sculptural technique: positive negative space, or the hole. Archipenko has noted that “traditionally, there was a belief that sculpture begins where material touches space. Thus space was understood as a kind of frame around the mass. We may change the form of solid volumes many times, but the actual existence of the outline of the forms, beyond which is the beginning of space, seems unavoidable.” But, “ignoring this tradition,” the sculptor continues, “I experimented, using the reverse idea and concluded that sculpture may begin where space is encircled by material.”71 This technical advance evolved out of the use of concaves, and pushed the hollowing out process to its logical limit – boring into the material until the mass of the sculpture was pierced completely. Interestingly and paradoxically, this void then becomes a substitute for the mass that it has displaced. By the 1920s Archipenko’s use of positive negative space was hailed as a major development in modern art and in Germany even received its own neologism – Lochplastik, a “sculpture of holes.”72 The Woman features a striking use of this technique: her right concave arm and flowing hair frame an empty space that is her head; instead of a face, traditionally the centrepiece for any figurative art, the viewer is greeted by a hole. We can see then, that Archipenko’s Woman showcases some of the most radical experiments in modern sculpture. However, as noted above, for the sculptor, these technical innovations were not merely formal games, but bold philosophical statements with “spiritual value,” and “psychological significance.”73 Archipenko discusses the meaning of this formal experimentation by referring to the three terms of the “minor aesthetic” I discussed earlier: the Bergsonian, the non-Western, and the musical. He begins with the poetry of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tse (604–531 BC). According to the sage: The use of clay in making pitchers comes From the hollow of its absence; Doors, windows, in a house, Are used for their emptiness; Thus we are helped by what is not To use what is.74

54 Foreign Modernism

For the philosopher, the absent, the negative, is not a destructive quality, but a positive, constructive one, a potentiality that allows for creation. This aspect of the negative is then further elaborated in a reference to Bergson. Archipenko considers the positive value of the negative in the French philosopher’s theory of memory. The sculptor cites Bergson’s idea that an “object, once annihilated leaves its place unoccupied; for by hypothesis it is a PLACE, that is, a void limited by precise outline, or in other words, a kind of thing.”75 For Archipenko, this short passage from Bergson reinforces his idea that “ by its absence the object leaves its own form in our memory. It is the shape of the space that becomes the imprint of that which is not there and creatively reconstructs that which is in our memory.”76 Once again, for Archipenko, the void is not a deficient or dangerous condition, but that which determines the possibility for positive construction. Finally, in a last recapitulation of this principle, the sculptor makes the easy transition from Bergsonian philosophy to musicality. For Archipenko, the positive, creative aspect of the negative can be easily seen in the differential nature of musical signs. He writes: There is another psychological state in relation to the absent. It can be compared with the musical pause and can be explained as follows: Rhythm in music is possible only if the sound is significantly sequent to the silence, and silence is sequent to sound. Each musical phrase is formed from certain lengths of sound and the length of silences between the sound. Each has its own meaning, as has each word in a phrase. Silence thus speaks.77

Just like a language, a musical composition is a differential structure of signs, where the identity of each element depends on its differentiation from all other elements. In order to create this distinction, and in the process meaning, it is precisely absence that is required: the blank space between le ers or the silence between sounds is that which makes words and rhythm possible; without these tiny voids there would be no meaningful creative work, just a senseless and undifferentiated stream of noise. The recoding of the classical figure in these “foreign” terms has radical effects. In the first place, the use of concavities challenges the stable, static figure of neoclassicism and introduces fluidity and flux. This is due to the optical illusion created by the use of this form. Under certain lighting conditions, protruding shapes seem to recede and receding ones to protrude. This is because the same shadows that form around a

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4 Cartoon with Venus, Paris, 1912.

rounded shape also form on the inside of a hollow.78 The result of this substitution or flip-flopping gestalt is a profound spatial ambiguity, a condition nicely illustrated by the following anecdote of Archipenko’s: “In 1927 I exhibited in the Denver Museum. A conservative Trustee, guided around the exhibition by Mr. Ronebek, who was then Director, objected to the idea of concave sculpture. He pointed to my statue which was concave and said: ‘I prefer this statue with normal form, no concave riddles!’ Mr. Ronebek replied: ‘But this statue is concave!”79 The optical illusion created by concave form renders the statue illegible and indeterminate. This is heightened by the fact that these effects depend on conditions of lighting – while in certain intensities of light areas may appear to protrude, those very same areas may appear to recede if the conditions change. The sum total of all this is that it makes

56 Foreign Modernism

the surface of the statue unstable. Instead of the immutable, relentlessly legible Maillolean figure, Archipenko gives us a subject of flux and pure movement. In Deleuze and Gua ari’s terms, the effect of this minor aesthetic is “metamorphosis,” a “becoming that includes the maximum of difference as a difference of intensity, the crossing of a barrier.”80 This Bergsonian mobility, paired with Rodin-esque fragmentation suggests, not a closed, complete figure, but a subjectivity of endless openness, movement, and change. This openness, however, is not merely a function of the instability and unfinished character of the subject, but also of the fact that, composed of holes and solids, it contains within itself putative binary opposites. This sentiment is captured by a contemporary of Archipenko’s, the critic Ivan Goll, who says: “Archipenko is the first to dare what appears to be sculptural suicide. A deep philosophy emanates from his creations. Every object is also present in its reverse. Being and non-being. Fullness is expressed through emptiness. A concave is inevitably also a convex form.”81 By deconstructing the opposition between different modalities of Being, Archipenko creates a figure that is open to all possibilities – not one based on exclusion and demonization, but one that balances contraries and integrates alterity. The sculptor comments on this profoundly synthetic metaphysics directly: “All positive and negative by the nature of polarity eventually become one. There is no concave form without a convex; there is no convex without a concave. Both elements are fused into one significant ensemble. In the creative process, as in life itself, the reality of the negative is the conceptual imprint of the absent positive. This is a polarity, a sort of equivalence of opposites, similar to the photographic negative on which light becomes shadow and shadow becomes light.”82 In opposition to the Manichean tendencies of Maillol’s reactionary classicism, Archipenko elaborates a philosophy and subjectivity of affirmation, inclusion, and pluralism. The profound strangeness of this deterritorialized classicism for Archipenko’s contemporaries is apparent in a cartoon that appeared in 1912. Titled “At the Salon Des Independents,” it features two stylishly dressed women of le tout-Paris staring with incomprehension at a statue labelled “Venus” (see figure 4). A caricature of a modernist Venus de Milo, the figure is altered in all the conventionally “avant-garde” ways: while its body stands in a contorted Rodin-esque position, its head, twisted over at an impossible angle, carries a face rearranged like a Picasso portrait that looks down with amusement at the bewildered spectators. Behind the two women, functioning as an objective correlative

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of their bewilderment, hangs a painting, its mock-pointillist surface coalescing into a question mark. Under the illustration a caption reads “In front of the Archipenko Venus.” “Really?” asks one of the women, “You think that it’s the sister of the one in the Louvre?” “Yes,” replies the other, “but they don’t have the same father.” But if the lay public was astounded by Archipenko’s modernism, soon this astonishment would take on a new and more dangerous valence. With the outbreak of the First World War many in Paris began to look at aesthetic innovation as a pro-German a empt to undermine French values. In the next chapter I will look at this wartime hostility to modernism and the methods devised by the avant-garde to safeguard formal experimentation and cosmopolitan values.

3 The Aeneid of Modern Times: Hybridity and Cosmopolitanism in Parade

On his return to Paris a er the First World War the German collector William Uhde decided to a end a show at the gallery of Paul Rosenberg, the important new dealer of modernist art. Separated from the Parisian art world by war and jingoism Uhde was excited by the prospect of reacquainting himself with the painting of the avant-garde and in particular with the work of its undisputed master Picasso. As he arrived at the gallery he speculated about the paintings he would see: what did Picasso have up his sleeve this time? What new ways had he developed to shock the bourgeois public? When he finally stood in front of the new Picassos Uhde was shocked, but not by the radicality of the pictures. Cubist spatial deconstruction and primitivist figural distortion were nowhere to be seen, and instead smoothly molded realistic figures, harlequins, and Hellenes filled Picasso’s canvasses. Uhde did not know what to think: I was looking at a big portrait in what is called the “Ingres style.” What did these pictures mean? Were they an interlude, a game, fine but not binding, to keep hands busy while the soul, weary of the road traversed, was taking a rest? Or was it that in a time of hate, when Romance circumspection self-consciously took a stand against nebulous German metaphysics, [Picasso] had felt innumerable people pointing at him and accusing him of deep German affinities, connivance with the “enemy”? Was he morally isolated in an alien land? Was he trying to find a spot on the specifically French side?1

For Uhde, the change in Picasso’s style was intimately related to the pressures felt by modernist non-combatants in wartime Paris, many

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of whom were foreign nationals. With the outbreak of the First World War, there was an a empt by conservative forces to discredit the avantgarde project, cast suspicion on its foreign ringleaders, and present classicism as the true aesthetic of a “pure” France. Modernist movements, even those invented in France such as cubism, were repeatedly decried as Germanic a acks on French culture. At the same time, the iconography of classicism began to appear in war propaganda and a variety of specious genealogies were proffered, “proving” that the French were the heirs of antique reason while the Germans were the modern avatars of a superstitious and autocratic medieval mysticism.2 Apparently, Uhde believed that these nationalistic and xenophobic pressures were too great for Picasso and saw his classicism as a strategic capitulation to the Right. Some seventy years later, many historians looking at the works of this period have arrived at essentially the same interpretation, particularly Kenneth Silver in his enormously influential Esprit de Corps. “Although most Parisian artists and critics chose to ignore the fact,” writes Silver, “the source of the new classicism during the war was indisputably the French Right.”3 While this interpretation has become something of a sine qua non in contemporary studies of interwar art, in this chapter I want to offer an alternative reading of the stylistic change in the work of the Parisian avant-garde. While some modernists shi ed their allegiances to the nationalist cause, others held on to their cosmopolitan ideals and a empted to develop an aesthetic that would allow for their expression in an atmosphere decidedly hostile to internationalism and experimentation. O en this was done by carnivalizing the forms of the nationalist Right, or to use the language of postcolonial critics questioning and destabilizing national identity, hybridizing them. According to Kobena Mercer this strategy “critically appropriates elements from the master-codes of the dominant culture and creolizes them, disarticulating given signs and rearticulating their symbolic meaning otherwise.”4 Assuming the forms and themes of the reactionary Right, the cosmopolitan avant-garde undermined them from within. In order to demonstrate this contention I am going to focus on one key artefact: the Ballets Russes’s performance of Parade in 1917. While some critics have seen this as a reactionary work that pandered to wartime nationalist values, I will argue that it is a subversive work that not only celebrates cosmopolitanism and heterogeneity, but profoundly challenges the nationalist fantasy of a pure, classical French identity.

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Latinité and Kubism When war was declared on 2 August, Picasso was vacationing near Avignon with Braque and Derain. In a somber mood, which contrasted to the patriotic gaiety of the crowds during these early days of the conflict, he accompanied his friends to the train station for their return trip to Paris where they would take up military service. “We never saw each other again,” he told his dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.5 While literally untrue, Picasso’s words speak metaphorically to the profound change ushered in by the war. The cosmopolitan community in Paris would never be the same and the carefree experimentation and enthusiasm of the prewar era were (at least temporarily) at an end. When Picasso returned to Paris in November, Montparnasse was like a ghost town: apart from Foujita, Modigliani, and Ortiz de Zarate, the cafes were deserted. A large number of avant-gardists were at the front, including Braque, Derain, Charles Camoin, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Roger de la Fresnaye, Albert Gleizes, Moise Kisling, František Kupka, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger, Henri Dunoyer de Segonzac, Jacques Villon, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Ossip Zadkine. Others, such as Marcel Duchamp and Robert Delaunay, decided that Paris in wartime was no place for able-bodied non-combatants and waited out the war abroad. Still others remained in Paris but decided to maintain a decidedly low profile. The reason for this was a palpable change of atmosphere in Paris, especially where foreigners were concerned. Prior to the war foreigners could se le in France with no greater formality than a declaration to the local administration. With the war, however, legal restrictions and a general air of suspicion emerged.6 The tenuous status of the foreigner in this new France was brought home to the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz when, as a Russian alien, he was required to furnish references to the Sûreté – references few were willing to give for fear of being compromised by associating with him.7 The increasing xenophobia and paranoia are evident in a series of le ers wri en by Juan Gris to Kahnweiler, who was in Italy when war was declared. “I have no idea where you are,” wrote Gris on 1 August, or whether amidst all these troubles of war you will receive this le er. At all events, the fact is that panic is increasing from hour to hour … The reservists have been called up; the foreigners, summoned to the town hall to reveal their most intimate secrets, have been involved in a mass of fines

The Aeneid of Modern Times 61 and proceedings for not having their papers in order, and some have been threatened with expulsion.8

By April 1915 the situation had become even worse. Could they not, Gris asked Kahnweiler, correspond by way of his sister in Madrid in order to prevent the possibility it would be discovered that he was in contact with the enemy? You who are absent cannot imagine how every foreigner here is suspect, no ma er what his nationality … What I am telling you is an absolute fact, so I think it is much be er for us to carry on our correspondence via Madrid, in order not to arouse my concierge’s suspicions. I can see you laughing at my suggestion … but don’t forget that at the present nothing is more important than the opinion of a concierge. Every day one is aware of the pe y malice of one’s neighbors … An anonymous le er is the most favored method. … Take it from me, mon cher ami, that it is not enough to have a clear conscience: one also has to give the appearance … They say appalling things in the canteens of Montmartre and Montparnasse and make terrible accusations against myself and against anyone who had dealings with you.9

Not only were foreigners themselves looked at with suspicion as potential enemies of the state, their cultural production was also deemed potentially harmful to the health of France. One Tony Tollet, for example, gave a lecture in Lyon in 1915 entitled “On the Influence of the Judeo-German Cartel of Painting Dealers on French Art,” where he noted that the dealers “had imposed works stamped with German culture – Pointillist, Cubist, and Futurist, etc. – on the taste of our snobs … Everything – music, literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative arts, fashion, everything – suffered the noxious effects of the asphyxiating gases of our enemies.”10 The aesthetic innovations of modernism – even those movements like cubism (o en presented in the press as “Kubism” to emphasize its “foreign” character), which were explicitly developed on French soil by the so-called École de Paris, the cosmopolitan Parisian avant-garde – were decried as German inventions, cunningly passed off on weak-minded elites in order to undermine and eviscerate French culture. For those on the Right, true French culture was classical culture. As noted in chapter 1, the conception of classicism that was dominant at the

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time was heavily indebted to the thought of Charles Maurras. Maurras’s ideology was founded on three pillars – royalism, Catholicism, and classicism – all of which were united in a totalizing Weltanschauung. Classicism, far from constituting some ethereal, aesthetic realm, was for him deeply implicated in politics. In 1910 he wrote that he “had seen the ruins in the realm of thought and taste before noticing the social, military, and economic damage that generally results from democracy … by analysing the literary errors of romanticism we were led, indeed dragged, to study the moral and political errors of a state involved in revolution.”11 At the heart of this ideology was the problematical idea of latinité. In the parlance of the time this referred to the timeless persistence of the Latin qualities of the French “race” and the unbroken connection between contemporary French culture and the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean world. While this was not the biological essentialism that would emerge in Germany in the interwar period, the difference lay in the manner of emphasis. While French Latinists o en talked about latinité as a function of the preservation of certain traditions on their soil, they also referred to concepts such as race and blood. Latinité, then, was an idea problematically suspended between culture and biology whereas for the National Socialists classicism was rooted firmly in the blood. However, while not as reductive as German racial theory, for the métèques of the École de Paris with neither the appropriate race nor tradition, the concept of latinité was restrictive enough to definitively exclude them from French culture. With the pressures and hysterias of wartime these ideas became more and more widespread. According to David Co ington, the radical positions articulated by Maurras “constituted a set of ideas at the very heart of ideological debates, a rallying-point for some and an object of refutation for others; as such, a constant theoretical point of reference. Moreover, in certain literary or student milieux Maurrasism effectively exercised, in the moment of its apogee in the years before and a er 1914–18, a dominant influence.”12 No longer limited to the extremist fringe, xenophobia and intolerance moved squarely into the heart of the popular sensibility. Parade, Hybridity, Cosmopolitanism It was under these dismal circumstances that Picasso lived in Paris. His situation was made even worse by personal tragedy: his lover Eva Gouel was sick from cancer and was slowly dying in hospital. “My life

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is sheer hell,” he wrote to Gertrude Stein. But just when the situation seemed bleakest, Picasso was “saved” by the arrival of Jean Cocteau.13 In the years before the First World War Cocteau had gained a certain amount of fame as the precocious author of wi y and precious verses whose spirit is captured perfectly in the title of his early collection, Le Prince Frivole. Even more than for his art, though, he was known for his glamorous and spectacular social life. A sycophant and superb conversationalist, he was an inevitable fixture at the salons, rubbing elbows with duchesses and the Right Bank artistic establishment. Or, affecting a neo-decadence, he could be found sprawled out on a goatskin rug while entertaining in his “garçonnière.”14 A er about 1909 he a ained a certain amount of avant-garde respectability by a aching himself to the Ballets Russes, but on the whole in the prewar period his persona was characterized by playfulness, frivolity, and a decidedly conventional unconventionality. Picasso’s salvation came in the form of an invitation to collaborate with Cocteau and Erik Satie on a Ballets Russes production of the young poet’s ballet Parade. The Ballets Russes was the brainchild of Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev. A failed singer and composer, Diaghilev realized in the early 1900s that his particular genius lay in the presentation of the genius of others. A er several years of successfully importing Russian art and music to Paris, Diaghilev decided to try his luck with dance, arranging to bring the Imperial Theatres dancers (including the then-unknowns Fokine, Nijinsky, and Pavlova) to France during their summer vacation. With their lavish productions and virtuoso technique, the company dazzled audiences used to the decadence of French ballet (which had fallen into decline since the Franco-Prussian War) and won the hearts of le tout-Paris. Lush, sexually charged, and given to orientalism and primitivism, the spectacles of the Ballets Russes both satisfied and fuelled the culture’s taste for the exotic and instinctual. Cocteau was one of the Ballet’s most enthusiastic supporters. A spectator at the company’s first production in 1909, Cocteau was so impressed that he used his connections to secure an introduction to the impresario and “from then on I never saw Nijinsky except from the wings or from the box where Madame Sert sat wearing her Persian aigre e and Diaghilev stood behind her, watching his dancers through a tiny mother-of-pearl opera glass.”15 But if Cocteau was smi en with the Ballets Russes, at this stage the relationship was decidedly one-sided. While perfectly willing to exploit Cocteau’s notoriety for the promotion

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of his productions, Diaghilev thought li le of his artistic talent. Cocteau’s libre o for the company’s Le Diable Bleu was mediocre and poorly received, and Diaghilev’s ultimate exasperation with the poet resulted in his famous exhortation to “Astound me!”16 According to Cocteau, it was not until he saw the company’s epochal premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1913 that he fully understood what this exhortation meant. But he would not accomplish this task for another four years. “In 1917,” he wrote, “the a ernoon of the premiere of Parade, I astounded him.”17 Cocteau’s idea for Parade emerged out of a proposed collaboration with Stravinsky in 1914. Cocteau had met the composer in 1910, and a er the epiphany of the Rite had approached him with the suggestion that they develop a ballet based on carnival and circus themes. Stravinsky was not very enthusiastic about the plan and ultimately David (as it was to be called) fell through. Cocteau, however, continued to work on this scenario, and when he met Satie and Picasso he knew that he had found the collaborators to help him turn his ideas into reality. With these two important modernists involved, Cocteau was able to interest Diaghilev in the project, and the entire company (minus Satie who was loath to abandon his familiar Parisian haunts) convened in Rome during the winter of 1916–17 to prepare the spectacle for opening night. The nature of this collaboration and the work that it produced has been the subject of intense discussion, much of it unfla ering. Michel Faure for one has claimed that none of the collaborators had “subversive” intentions. He argues that in this work Picasso defends conservative values and that the ballet as a whole is a “nostalgic patchwork” that embodies perfectly the spirit of conciliation and union sacrée dominant during the war years.18 Jane Fulcher has nuanced this position by arguing that while Cocteau had conservative intentions, his ideas were undermined and carnivalized by Satie and Picasso in pursuit of their subversive agenda.19 While this is a substantial improvement over Faure’s thesis it still does not go far enough. I will argue that the work is indeed subversive and that all three collaborators had radical intentions – there is simply no other way to account for the numerous deliberately provocative choices that they made. Far from a empting to make modernism palatable by bringing it into the orbit of Maurrasian classicism, Parade eviscerated nationalist fantasies of classicism by bringing them into contact with the hybridizing strategies of the cosmopolitan avant-garde.20

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5 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), curtain design for the ballet Parade, 1917. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. Photo: Christian Bahier. © Picasso Estate / SODRAC (2012).

The ballet premiered at the Théâtre du Chatelet on 18 May 1917. Billed as a benefit for the war wounded, the event a racted a rather odd and explosive mix of people: a number of Russian soldiers on leave from the Western Front; Diaghilev’s usual contingent of society patrons; numerous avant-garde artists from Montmartre and Montparnasse; and a large proportion of bourgeois. When the curtain went up, the audience saw what Silver has called “the first great public and monumental example of the new avant-garde neo-classicism”: Picasso’s large overture curtain featuring harlequins and circus people (see figure 5).21 While this was greeted with “unanimous applause,” when the performance proper began, the crowd polarized. When they heard Satie’s tinkling dance-hall melodies and saw the dancers dressed in cubist costumes, the more conservative audience members revolted. There were boos and cries of “métèques,” “boches,” “trahison,” and “art munichois.” Provoked by this hostile reaction, the members of the avantgarde came to the defence of their heroes, shouting “Vive Picasso!” and “Vive Satie!” Reportedly, at the end of the performance a riot

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ensued, which was only quelled when Guillaume Apollinaire, recently wounded and decorated, mounted the stage and begged for order. Silver has interpreted the split reaction of the conservative audience members as a reflection of a split in Parade itself: between the reactionary style and values of the neoclassical drop curtain and the radical, avant-garde ballet.22 According to Silver, the overture curtain so appealed to the conservative crowd because it pandered to wartime nationalism and ideas of Latin identity. He writes that, “in the manner of the most convincing patriotic art, Picasso’s curtain was Latin – and French – not by any direct reference to the war at hand, but by allusion.”23 The curtain signalled its deep latinité by representing a “happy Latin party,” a ended by certain stock Latin characters popular in the iconography of neoclassical painting: “two Harlequins from the commedia dell’arte; two lovely young women in rustic, quasi-rococo bergère costume; an Italian sailor at the right; a Spanish guitarist at the le ,” all located in a “generally Italianate” se ing featuring a “ruined Roman arch in the background.” The curtain also aimed to please by focusing on popular conservative values. The “tender, familial scene” of Pegasus and its suckling foal gazed on by the Latin party provided them with a “charming object lesson in familial piety.” Finally, Picasso’s “new illusionistic style” guaranteed perfect legibility and prevented the shocks of an off-pu ing modernist art. All in all then, the conservative audience members were pleased because the drop curtain gave them “a composite of all that was best, most carefree, and most comforting under the clear skies of the Mediterranean world.”24 The ballet that followed, on the other hand, was appalling because it represented and embodied precisely the opposite values. Consider the following synopsis of the action in Cocteau’s own words: Parade. Realist ballet. The scene represents the houses of Paris on a Sunday. Théâtre forain. Three music hall numbers serve as the Parade. Chinese prestidigitator. Acrobats. Li le American girl. Three managers organize the publicity. They communicate in their extraordinary language that the crowd should join the parade to see the show inside and coarsely try to make the crowd understand this. No one enters.

The Aeneid of Modern Times 67 A er the last act of the parade, the exhausted managers collapse on each other. The Chinese, the acrobats, and the li le girl leave the empty theatre. Seeing the supreme effort and the failure of the managers, they in turn try to explain that the show takes place inside.25

To decode this somewhat: a “parade” is a sideshow or a come-on that was part of street-theatre tradition, staged to entice viewers into paying to see the full show. This particular parade features a Chinese musician, an American girl, acrobats, and three managers (one “from New York”). Cocteau refers to it as “Realist” because, not only does it avoid fanciful allegories and narratives in favour of a street scene, but the dances incorporate elements of “real life,” that is they show modern characters miming their occupations. The ballet then, appears to contradict the promise of the drop curtain on every level. Instead of a timeless latinité, it focuses on resolutely contemporary popular culture. It concentrates on foreign street performers instead of Latin archetypes. And instead of transparent classical representation it favours the music and movement of the dance hall and cubist costumes and sets. This analysis, however, is not sustained by a close reading of either the curtain or the performance. First of all, to interpret the curtain as a statement of reactionary latinité is to profoundly misread both its iconography and its allusions. To suggest that a group of commedia dell’arte figures represent a stable and pure Latin identity very problematically ignores the history and meaning of these figures. A form of Italian “low comedy” that evolved out of popular early modern carnival traditions, commedia dell’arte is anything but stable or pure. Focusing on characters such as the rogue Pulcinella and the buffoonish Harlequin, the commedia dell’arte is characterized by convoluted plots featuring burlesque, satire, disguise, and reversals of all kinds. In short, this genre embodies the ambiguity, anti-authoritarianism, and topsy-turvy vision of the world that Bakhtin has termed the carnivalesque.26 To take these figures out of context and read them as myrmidons of order and conservatism simply because they are a part of the Latin tradition is to badly misrepresent the uniquely playful and subversive role they play within that tradition. Silver’s misreading is compounded when we look specifically at how these figures are represented on the drop curtain. Picasso does not present them as archetypes, celebrating in some mythic Latin countryside,

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but as actors and actresses sharing a meal onstage. The “ruined Roman arch in the background” is clearly only a painted set, and the red curtains that billow on either side of the company signal the artifice of the scene, problematizing everything that happens between them like a set of quotation marks. This is equally true of Pegasus, the purveyor of Silver’s mythological family values. Picasso makes no a empt to hide the strap around her waist which holds on her fake wings and reveals her to be a circus performer in disguise, just like the others. But Picasso’s play with illusion and reality goes even further than this. The representation is cut off at the foot of the stage, and without the presence or absence of an audience to guide us, we cannot be sure whether the meal is part of the play and the actors are in character, or whether they have merely neglected to remove their costumes and are dining backstage, before or a er a performance. Far from an unambiguous statement of Latin values and identity, then, Picasso’s drop curtain thematizes ambiguity, illusion, the playful construction of self, and unleashes an interpretive vertigo in the a entive viewer. And instead of clarifying these opacities, the artist’s “new illusionistic style” obfuscates ma ers even further, for the scene is clearly a generalized reference to Wa eau, the most enigmatic and ambiguous painter of the classical Grand Siècle. Hardly a model of the clarity of the French tradition, this painter’s elusive theatrical scenes have mystified critics for hundreds of years.27 We can see then, that both the conservative audience members at the premiere of Parade and cultural historians who have looked at the event subsequently, have been guilty of misreading Picasso’s drop curtain. With its careful elaboration of ambiguities and invocation of the carnivalesque commedia dell’arte tradition, this piece frustrates any attempts to co-opt it as a transparent signifier for a stable Latin identity. Classical latinité, it seems to say, is not a natural, timeless essence, but an illusion, a performance, a masquerade. Once these qualities have been uncovered, the connection between the overture curtain and the ballet that followed becomes much clearer. The ballet no longer appears as a disjunctive rejection of the values of the introduction, but their fulfilment, a transposition of the carnivalesque themes of the curtain into the register of the contemporary and quotidian. Although at first glance they appear absolutely different, Picasso’s cubist sets and costumes in the second part of the performance are also inextricably related to the neoclassical drop curtain. The artist himself steadfastly refused to see a fundamental difference between his classicism and the synthetic cubism28 he was practising at

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the same time, a point made very clearly in an anecdote related to the art historian Douglas Cooper by Ernest Ansermet, conductor of Parade. According to Cooper, “Ansermet remembers being amazed by the rapidity with which, even during a bull-fight, Picasso could switch from a naturalistic to a Cubist style of drawing, and when he asked him how he managed it Picasso replied quite simply: ‘But can’t you see that the result is the same? It’s the same bull only seen in a different way.’”29 For Picasso, then, his synthetic cubism and classicism were interchangeable idioms, not radically distinct styles with correspondingly disjunctive political associations. And indeed, one can see that the tropes of the neoclassical drop curtain are repeated in the cubist ballet scenes. Picasso’s managers and Chinese conjuror are as elaborately costumed and disguised as his harlequins; and his set, with a distorted proscenium arch in the middle of a street scene, plays the same ontological games with illusionistic performance as the Wa eauesque curtain. Further, as Fulcher has recently argued, Erik Satie’s music repeats this gesture of creolization, deploying the tropes of nationalist classicism only to undermine them from within. “In the strict formal plan,” she writes, “the score would appear to suggest the orthodox wartime ideal of the classic as consisting primarily of the qualities of symmetrical balance and logic.”30 But these are presented so mechanically, or in such an exaggerated fashion that they can only be taken as a parody of nationalist values. Further, the purity of French classical style is hybridized by pu ing it into contact with various forms of “impure” music. One of the key references in the piece is to the music of the cabarets and music halls, a form of popular entertainment with a long history of cunningly challenging and undermining authority.31 The ballet is also replete with references to various forms of “foreign” music. Numerous sections of the piece allude to the rhythms of Stravinsky’s Slavic, primitivist fantasia The Rite of Spring, while other parts, particularly the “li le American girl” section, are modelled on American jazz, greatly in vogue with the cosmopolitan avant-garde, but still very much seen by mainstream France as the primitive expression of “negroes.”32 Most interestingly though, Cocteau’s libre o is not at odds with these hybridizing gestures but perfectly in line with them. Unless Cocteau was a party to this subversive effort how can one explain the numerous, provocative elements of his text? Why, for example, at a time of great anxiety about migrants, transience, and lack of roots, would Cocteau deliberately make this ballet about an itinerant troupe? Further,

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6 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), costume of the Chinese, for the ballet Parade. Théâtre Archive Champs-Élysées, Paris, France. © Picasso Estate / SODRAC (2012).

why make the members of this troupe, not French, but a hodgepodge of foreign nationalities? The inclusion of the “Chinaman” seems particularly strange. Silver has argued that this is a figure derived from the children’s book Les cris de Paris which illustrated different Parisian street vendors in the style of the folkloric images d’Epinal. But if this was a gesture meant to evoke tradition and summon nostalgia, why choose a figure that would have been deliberately contentious? As Fulcher has argued, this was particularly provocative since “all things ‘Oriental’ were considered ‘un-French,’ especially with Turkey’s entry into the war on the German side.”33 Further, although the li le girl may have been a reference to the entry of the United States into the war, for many

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Europeans at this time America was hardly less exotic than China. This seems particularly true of New York, a city already synonymous in the popular imagination with immigrants and foreigners.34 While the story is certainly at one level an allegory of the problematic reception of avant-garde art and a critique of modernity, it also needs to be taken seriously as a meditation on displacement and the pathos of the misunderstood foreigner – unpopular topoi at the time, and surprising ones from an author of supposedly reactionary sensibilities. Further, if both parts of the performance – curtain and ballet – a ack wartime nationalism and support cosmopolitanism in their various ways, the combination of these two parts into a single Gesamtkunstwerk sent a truly provocative and destabilizing message. If we see the itinerant theatre troop as the modern avatar of the commedia dell’arte group in Picasso’s creation, then the implication seems to be that Latin identity has always been implicated with foreignness. There is no such thing as pure Frenchness, the work seems to say; from the very beginning French identity has been métissage. Surrealism and the New Spirit If the more conservative audience members on opening night failed to see the continuity in Parade, there were others who understood very well that the piece was an a empt to present a coherent avant-garde challenge to the nationalist classicism of wartime. Marcel Proust, for example, compared the two acrobats to the Dioscuri, a comment that meshes well with Cocteau’s claim that Parade “revived the tradition of Greek dance.”35 But it was undoubtedly Guillaume Apollinaire who produced the most engaging account of the ballet’s modernist classicism. The premiere poet and critic of the avant-garde and a good friend of Picasso, Apollinaire was asked to write the program note for Parade. In this article, Apollinaire claimed that the contributors, for the first time, completely integrated several different art forms, an accomplishment that “heralds the advent of a more complete art.”36 This new union of the arts, he continued, “has given rise in Parade to a kind of surréalisme.” This is seen as the starting point of a succession of manifestations of the “esprit nouveau.”37 In order to understand the meaning of these terms (including “surrealism,” a word of Apollinaire’s own invention, seen in print for the first time in the Parade program), and their relation to the wartime discourses of classicism and national identity, it is necessary to turn briefly to the poet’s aesthetics.

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Apollinaire emerged from the First World War with a revised understanding of the artistic demands of the twentieth century. The radical modernist poet and early defender of cubism, returned from ba le and trepanning with a vision of the necessity of a modern classicism, and saw his own work, like that of his friend Picasso, moving in a distinctly “classic” direction.38 However, to seize on this word, as some critics have done, and conclude that Apollinaire had moved into the orbit of the reactionary nationalists fails to take account of the emba led complexity of “classicism” at this time. Apollinaire might advocate classicism, but it is a strange avant-garde classicism, closer to the hybridity of Parade than the reactionary nationalism of Charles Maurras. This is evident in the manifesto-like piece “The New Spirit and the Poets,” delivered as a lecture a few short months a er the Parade review, where he elaborates his idea of the “new spirit” and relates it to classical art. At first glance this essay does seem like a shi to the Right and a capitulation to the nationalist pressures of wartime. The work repeatedly praises the glory of France and insists that “the new spirit whose coming we are witnessing seeks above all to preserve the classical heritage of good sense, sure critical principles, a comprehensive view of the world and the human soul, and a moral responsibility that tends towards austere expression, or rather containment of feelings.”39 The affirmation of order, balance, discipline, and French cultural glory sounds like a virtual recapitulation of the nationalist position. But very quickly Apollinaire introduces a crucial distinction. “Ethnic and national differences give rise to a variety of literary expressions,” he notes, “and it is this very variety that must be preserved.”40 Rejecting the hierarchical nationalist conception of cultural superiority, he argues instead for something like a cultural pluralism. While this is an important gesture in the atmosphere of wartime chauvinism and xenophobia, it seems to merely resituate the problem, not undermine it. While pure French culture is no longer recognized as the universally superior culture, the purity of France appears to remain unchallenged and the borders between France and other nations remain actively policed: the new spirit, argues Apollinaire, “is and means to be a particular and lyrical expression of the French nation,” and “a cosmopolitan lyrical expression would produce only ill-defined works, lacking accent and inner structure, the equivalent of the clichés of international parliamentary rhetoric.”41 But this configuration in Apollinaire’s text is unstable. Whether consciously, as a subtle strategy of resistance, or unconsciously, as the inability of a métèque centrally involved in a cosmopolitan community to

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valorize homogeneity, Apollinaire undercuts the discourse of purity in other parts of his text.42 While insisting, on the one hand, on the need for clearly defined borders between national cultures, he blurs these borders by claiming that what characterizes the new spirit is “the will to explore the truth, to seek it everywhere, in the realm of the imagination but also in other realms – the ethnic for example.”43 Far from limiting itself to the national patrimony, the new spirit reserves the right to explore and utilize the diverse cultures of the globe. Further, while claiming that the new spirit is a distinctively French trait, he expands the parameters of the nation from the ethnically French to “the members of the French spiritual family.” This clearly alludes to the diasporic avant-gardes working in France and effectively undermines any pretensions to homogeneity in the nativist constructions of identity. These affirmations of heterogeneity in the sphere of national identity are supplemented by the celebration of hybridity in the sexual and cultural registers. In relation to sexuality, “The New Spirit” contains an explicit reference to Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias, which was performed a short time a er the premiere of Parade. Discussing the idea of “literary truth,” he notes that “if I were to assume that women no longer produce children, and that, such being the case, men could produce them, I would be expressing a literary truth that could be called a fable only outside literature, and this literary truth would cause surprise. But my supposed truth is no more extraordinary or implausible than the old Greek truths, such as the legend of Minerva being born fully armed from the head of Jupiter.”44 This is clearly an allusion to Apollinaire’s play (like Parade subtitled “Drame surréaliste”) which was produced at the Théatre Maubel on 21 June 1917.45 A raucous and oneiric satire of the nativist obsession with birth rates, the play focuses on Theresa, a disgruntled housewife tired of a life of boredom, docile obedience, and children. In the first scene, during a quarrel with her husband, she expresses her desire to become a soldier, a member of parliament, or a cabinet minister, and proceeds (to the amazement of the audience) to transform into a man. Growing a beard and shedding her bosom (which is revealed to be a number of balloons which she tosses joyfully to the spectators) she declares herself to be “Tirésias” and proceeds to change into her husband’s clothes while chanting “No more children! No more children!” Her husband, on the other hand, dons his wife’s discarded clothes and forcefully argues that if women are unwilling to procreate then men must take their place. The second scene finds the husband nursing his children and explaining that he has

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given birth to 40,051 of them in eight days, so many that the country is now threatened with famine. Subversively then, in both the play and the piece on the new spirit, Apollinaire introduces the spectre of sexual ambiguity, using classicism not to reinforce traditional constructions of sexual identity, but to transport his readers into the liminal space of hermaphroditism – that which transcends conventional notions of both male and female. In the cultural register as well Apollinaire turns to a strategy of hybridization to problematize the nationalist conception of classicism. While maintaining that the new spirit is essentially classical in nature, he insists that it is “neither a mere restatement of classical traditions nor an appendage to the bright show-window of romanticism.” If the classical tradition provides qualities of discipline and restraint, “from the romantic heritage, it seeks to preserve the curiosity that leads to exploration of all domains capable of providing literary material for the exaltation of life in all its forms.”46 The new spirit, then, is a strange hybrid of qualities that the Maurrasians would insist on keeping rigidly separated. For Apollinaire, the key manifestation of the new spirit was undoubtedly the cinema. This is explicitly presented as an archsynthetic medium. Even though “the cinema is in essence a picture book,” poets will learn to dominate this “new art which is more vast than the art of words alone.” One day they will reach the apotheosis of synaesthesia and “direct an orchestra of prodigious dimensions, an orchestra that will include the entire world, its sights and sounds, human thought and language, song, dance, all the arts and all the artifices – more mirages that Morgan LeFay conjured up on Mongibel to compose the book seen and heard by the future.”47 The hybridity of Apollinaire’s cinema extends also to its class status, its fusion of high art and popular culture. Film is, according to him, “the popular art par excellence,” and will develop into the art of the future, not by transcending these popular origins, but by “refin[ing]” them, crossing them with the techniques of the avant-garde in order to produce more challenging and sophisticated pictures.48 It is quite likely that the vision of the cinema expressed in the piece on the new spirit was influenced by the pulp serial Fantômas. In the years leading up to the Great War, France was swept by a mania for the serialized crime thriller by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, and its cinematic adaptation by Gaumont director Louis Feuillade. Both novels and films recounted the exploits of the evil genius Fantômas, “Emperor of Crime” and “Lord of Terror,” an infamous villain

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7 Movie poster for Fantômas (1913). Director, Louis Feuillade. Gaumont / The Kobal Collection / Art Resource.

and master of disguise. They featured outrageous Grand Guignol plots in which Fantômas, disguised in an endless series of masks, robbed and killed a parade of innocent victims while being pursued by Inspector Juve of the Paris Sûreté, and Jerôme Fandor, star reporter for La Capitale. The Fantômas franchise was a tremendous popular success: Souvestre and Allain's series of thirty-two Fantômas novels, (published monthly from February 1911 to September 1913) had sales approaching five million copies, while the films not only did tremendously well at home but were also shown abroad though international distribution.49 But if the general public loved the lurid and melodramatic plots, Fantômas was also idolized (for somewhat different reasons) by the

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avant-garde. Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Robert Desnos, André Breton, Benjamin Péret, and Max Jacob all made reference to Fantômas in their literary work, while Juan Gris, Yves Tanguy, and René Magri e included Fantômas imagery in their paintings.50 In 1913 Apollinaire, together with Max Jacob, founded a Société des Amis de Fantômas, and a year later the advocate of the new spirit celebrated the unparalleled imaginary richness of the series in the literary review Mercure de France.51 Robin Walz has argued that one of the principal reasons for the avant-garde celebration of Fantômas was the serial’s investigation of what we might call carnivalesque identity: the notion that the self was nothing but a mask that could be joyously donned or doffed at will.52 Interestingly, the avant-garde also associated this carnivalesque displacement of identity with classicism: Cendrars described the series as a contemporary retelling of the Homeric epics, and referred to it as “The Aeneid of Modern Times.”53 We can see, then, that if on first glance Apollinaire’s piece on the new spirit appears as a capitulation to the homogenizing values of the Right, a closer reading reveals it to be an assault on the logic of purity and an affirmation, if not a celebration of the hybrid, heterogeneous, and impure. Given this aesthetic agenda one can see why Apollinaire admired Parade and considered it the precursor to his own protosurrealism. First of all, with the more traditionally neoclassical drop curtain integrated into the flamboyant cubist spectacle that followed, the ballet was the classical/Romantic hybrid that the poet called for. Second, with its complete (according to Apollinaire) integration of music, painting, narrative, and dance, the spectacle could certainly be seen as a forerunner to Apollinaire’s synaesthetic cinematic Gesamtkunstwerk of the future. The production was also cosmopolitan, not only in terms of the artists who staged it, but also the characters on the stage, for if the collaborators were Russian, Spanish, and French, their creations were American, French, and Chinese. And finally, like the Fantômas films, both the drop curtain and the performance interrogated the boundaries between illusion and reality and pushed towards the constant reinvention of an open subjectivity. Ethnographic Surrealism The hybrid classicism elaborated by Apollinaire and the contributors to the Ballets Russes would be extremely influential on the next wave of the Parisian avant-garde. Inspired by the daring and innovative nature

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of this work, young writers such as Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, and André Breton took up Apollinaire’s term “surrealism” to describe their own work. They further acknowledged this influence in the genealogies they constructed, identifying their “ancestors” and positioning themselves vis-à-vis the contemporary cultural field. In the literary review Li érature, editors Aragon, Breton, and Soupault traced the genealogy of “Erutaré il” (Li érature spelled backward), the repressed underside of the official literary tradition. Here, side by side with surrealist mainstays Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and Jarry were Apollinaire and Fantômas, while in the “Outline for a History of Contemporary Literature” Aragon gave the Ballets Russes pride of place. However, it was less in early surrealism, with its fetishization of the unconscious, than in what James Clifford has called “ethnographic surrealism” that the creolizing and hybridizing strategies of Parade found their true fulfilment. According to Clifford, the term “ethnographic surrealism” designates a cultural moment when the boundaries between avant-garde art and the emerging field of ethnology were porous. Various intellectuals used the two in tandem in order to effect a “fragmentation and juxtaposition of cultural values” which revealed that “stable orders of collective meaning appear to be constructed, artificial, and indeed o en ideological or repressive.”54 While Clifford convincingly argues for the influence of an emergent ethnographic discourse and, in particular, the impact of Marcel Mauss, crucial as well was the cosmopolitanism of the Parisian avant-garde, the hybridizing strategies of Parade, and Apollinaire’s “New Spirit.” This is evident in a publication like the journal Documents, the shortlived mouthpiece for the views of dissident surrealists such as Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, and others. Many of the figures and movements central to Parade reappear in its pages: Picasso, Stravinsky, jazz, Fantômas. But much more significant than the presence of particular individuals is a shared strategy of subversive juxtaposition and hybridization. The journal was subtitled Archéologie, Beaux Arts, Ethnographie, Variétés and the dialogical relationship between these diverse categories (as well as between word and image) destabilized the purity of their self-contained identities and introduced a critical and creative métissage. This strategy is also evident in the journal’s heavy use of foreign or ethnic materials. The analytical table of contents published at the end of the journal’s first year reveals articles published about (among others) Bulgarian, Byzantine, Chinese, Gaulish, Greek, Greco-Celtic, Hi ite, Roman, Scandinavian, Siberian, and Sumerian culture and art.

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Particular a ention was paid to the cultures of Africa, America, and Oceania. But this was not a fetishization of the “pure” and unspoiled primitive, antithesis of degenerate Europe. The syncretic eye of Documents saw these cultures too as hybrid and mixed. This is evident in Michel Leiris’s review of the paintings of the Sudanese artist Kalifala Sidibé. The heterogeneous nature of Sidibé’s work might be off-pu ing to some European connoisseurs, Leiris writes, victims as they are of the prejudice of the “purity of style” which together with the “high periods” obsesses so many people. As far as I am concerned, I love everything that presents this dimension of mixing, everything mixed blood, from sarcophagi dating from Roman times with faces of splendidly made-up women painted in the most realistic way to Fuegans wearing European pants found in shipwrecks, not forge ing Alexandrine philosophy and the unmatchable elegance of Harlem Negroes along the way.55

Even more forcefully than Apollinaire, Leiris presents a celebration of the mixed up and impure. But even more radical than the journal’s affirmation of the exotic and the hybrid was the insistence (in the manner of Parade) that these were not merely qualities of some distant foreign other, but of the French self as well. In his first article for Documents, Georges Bataille presented a full frontal assault on nationalist conceptions of pure Latin identity. Bataille’s piece considers artefacts from the Cabinet des médailles at the Bibliothèque Nationale where he worked. Examining ancient Celtic coins he investigates the prehistory of French culture. In a stunning subversion of the Maurrassian ideology of latinité and the contemporary a acks on foreigners, Bataille notes that “before the conquest, Gaulish civilization was comparable to the current peoples of central Africa, thereby representing from the social point of view, a veritable antithesis to classical civilization.”56 At the moment of origin, the French were not Greco-Latin but its antithesis, indistinguishable from the “negroes” and métèques that they currently demonize. Further, the conquest did not represent a transcendence of these wild origins. In contrast to the narrative of progress, the orderly and linear move from the state of savagery to civilization, Bataille offers, in the spirit of Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian, a cosmic vision of eternally oscillating order and disorder. The savagery and wildness embodied in Gaulish coins have

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not been eliminated by Latin order but exist as a potentiality ready to be unleashed by “great reversals.” This creolization of pure Latin identity was continued elsewhere in Documents. In “Base Materialism and Gnosticism” Bataille argues that this third- and fourth-century heresy, with its “Persian dualism” and “Judeo-Oriental heterodoxy” introduced “the most impure ferments” into “Greco-Roman ideology.” C.F.B. Miller argues that DOCUMENTS inflicted Oriental pressure on Greco-Roman culture. A conservative editorial commi ee member’s article about Greek coins veered towards the “orgiastic cults” of Dionysus – an Asiatic deity whose mysteries were an early Orientalist topos. When Bataille summoned up Rome, it was in terms of the crazed ritual, imported from the Orient, of Cybele’s priests’ self-castration. Greek magic appeared as a monstrous hybrid of oriental parts. The Hellenistic sculpture of Asia Minor manifested an “irresistible force” analogous to Genghis Khan’s Mongolian hordes.57

Far from embodying the purity of classical form, in Bataille’s hands the Greco-Latin tradition became the apotheosis of hybridity, impurity, and formlessness. While many in the avant-garde celebrated these a acks on a rigid and exclusionary Latin identity, and welcomed the affirmation of foreignness and syncretism, it is important not to engage in a simplistic and absolute opposition of avant-garde cosmopolitanism and French nationalism. Many in the transnational avant-garde themselves struggled with cosmopolitan identity. In the next chapter I will dramatize these struggles by focusing on the vicissitudes of cosmopolitanism in the work and thought of Igor Stravinsky.

4 A Call to Order: Nostalgia and the Vicissitudes of Cosmopolitan Identity in Igor Stravinsky

At a special concert performance in Paris sponsored by the Ballets Russes at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt on 30 May 1927, Igor Stravinsky himself conducted the premiere of a brand new work, Oedipus Rex. A collaboration with Jean Cocteau, the work was composed in secret so it could be unveiled as a surprise for Diaghilev, who was being fêted that evening for his twenty-year involvement with the theatre. Diaghilev was surprised by the new “opera-oratorio,” although not, perhaps, in the way Stravinsky had intended. Unsure of what to make of this strange work, he referred to it as “a very macabre gi .” In the years since this premiere, numerous critics have been equally surprised and put off, not only by Oedipus, but by a number of Stravinsky’s other interwar works dealing with classical antiquity. For these critics, for the master of modernist music to start producing works obsessed with the distant past was a very macabre gi indeed. The series of works in question – Pulcinella, Apollon musagète, Perséphone, Oedipus Rex – have o en been characterized as nostalgic. Theodor Adorno, for example, titles his chapter on Stravinsky in Philosophy of New Music “Stravinsky and Restoration.”1 In this critical context nostalgia is a term of implied denigration, signifying a naive and simplistic longing for the “good old days.” Adorno is straightforward about his dismissal of this longing. “Restoration,” he writes, “is as much in vain in philosophy as elsewhere.”2 More recently, however, a number of critics have argued that nostalgia is actually a complicated affective, cognitive, and cultural state that deserves (and indeed requires) more subtle and complex theorizations.3 The word “nostalgia” comes from two Greek roots: nostos, return home, and algia, longing. Interestingly, though, this is not an ancient Greek word. It was actually coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in

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his medical dissertation of 1688. Hofer was interested in the particular form of melancholy evinced by students from the Republic of Berne studying in Basel and Swiss soldiers fighting abroad. Although he considered the terms nosomania and philopatridomania Hofer finally opted for nostalgia because he felt it was possible “from the force of the sound Nostalgia to define the sad mood originating from the desire for return to one’s native land.”4 Therefore, despite the word’s antiquated sound, nostalgia is roughly coeval with modernity and emerged to describe the typically modern experience of displacement and the longing associated with it. But it would be a mistake to see nostalgia as nothing but this longing. More than just a vague feeling, nostalgia needs to be seen as an emotional state with what philosophers would call intentionality – that is, semantic content. Nostalgia means something; and even more than this it does something. More than just a reactionary yearning for the “good old days,” nostalgia, I will argue, is a key strategy for negotiating traumatic loss and constructing identity. Stravinsky’s nostalgic turn to the classical past needs to be seen as a strategy for dealing with his loss of “home” a er the Russian Revolution, and a means of articulating new forms of personal and musical identity. While his early interwar work shows a fascination with playful, transnational forms of identity, the difficulties of émigré life ultimately overwhelmed Stravinsky. Denied order and stability in his life, he increasingly sought refuge in rigid and problematical forms of nostalgic art. Pulcinella and Carnivalesque Classicism Having seen Parade, Igor Stravinsky noted that it gave him “the impression of freshness and real originality.”5 Si ing in the theatre, as amazed as Diaghilev by Jean Cocteau’s creation, perhaps the composer suffered a twinge of regret at having rejected the young man’s idea for a ballet based on circus and carnival themes several years before. If that is so, Stravinsky would soon have his chance to make up for past mistakes. For even though Cocteau had (at least temporarily) abandoned avant-garde classicism for a more nationalistic and reactionary variant, Diaghilev would soon approach the composer with a proposal to collaborate on an even more explicitly carnivalesque piece of musical theatre – Pulcinella. The idea for using this commedia dell’arte character as the subject of a ballet came from Leonid Massine, choreographer of the Ballets Russes a er the unceremonious departure of Nijinsky. While

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rehearsing Parade in Italy in 1917, Massine stumbled across a street fair performance by the then famous Pulcinella, Antonio Petito. Fascinated, he searched the Naples Public Library for commedia dell’arte plays, and found one entitled The Four Identical Pulcinellas (1700) that seemed suitable for a balletic interpretation. Intrigued by this idea, Diaghilev began searching for apposite music to accompany the performance and developed an interest in various pieces by the eighteenth-century Neapolitan composer Pergolesi. Amazingly, even though Diaghilev and Massine kept their ideas to themselves at this point, Stravinsky and Picasso were at the same time developing an independent interest in the commedia dell’arte. The composer, who was in Italy during the Parade rehearsals in order to conduct his own work, spent much time with the painter, exploring Rome and Naples and sampling their popular and cultural offerings. And in addition to long sessions at museums where they looked at classical and neoclassical art, they a ended commedia dell’arte plays. According to Stravinsky: “We were both much impressed with the Commedia dell’Arte, which we saw in a crowded li le room reeking of garlic. The Pulcinella was a great drunken lout whose every gesture, and probably every word if I had understood, was obscene.”6 But it was to be more than a year until Diaghilev approached Stravinsky with his offer of a commedia dell’arte collaboration. Having assembled a number of Pergolesi fragments, the impresario needed someone to develop, arrange, and orchestrate them into a coherent ballet score.7 This was essentially menial work, not very interesting for a composer of Stravinsky’s stature. And in addition, the composer’s limited knowledge of Pergolesi did not incline him toward the project. “When he said that the composer was Pergolesi,” Stravinsky has wri en, “I thought he must be deranged. I knew Pergolesi only by the Stabat Mater and La Serva padrona, and though I had just seen a production of the la er in Barcelona, Diaghilev knew I wasn’t in the least excited by it.”8 However, despite these barriers Stravinsky accepted the project. In large part his decision to do so must have been financial. The War and the Russian Revolution had made a shambles of Stravinsky’s finances and the Ballets Russes commission would have been an opportunity to earn some easy money. But if Stravinsky’s initial a itude toward the Pergolesi materials had been purely mercenary, it soon changed into something radically different. “I looked,” he writes, “and fell in love.” Certainly the change in part stemmed from the charming character of the fragments

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themselves. But there was more than this. In his Expositions Stravinsky writes that “Pulcinella was my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course – the first of many love affairs in that direction – but it was a look in the mirror, too.”9 More than just a piece of musical hack-work, Stravinsky began to look at Pulcinella as a mirror, as a reflection of his own identity. A student of the neo-nationalist Rimsky Korsakov, Stravinsky had defined himself as a Russian composer and his works as expressions of the Russian soul. Even when cut off from home by war he continued to produce pieces that evoked an ethnographic fantasyland Russia – a world of fairy tales, ancient rites, and peasant customs. But with the Revolution and his official stateless status, his return to the wellspring of his creativity looked more and more remote. It was at just this time that Pulcinella’s carnivalesque classicism gave Stravinsky an alternative to the nationalistic essentialism that he had cultivated up to this point. The open, fluid, carnivalesque understanding of identity is certainly clear in the libre o by Massine and Diaghilev that Stravinsky consulted when composing his music. According to Douglas Cooper (and here I quote at length so as not to miss a turn in this incredibly convoluted plot): Two young ladies, Prudenza and Rose a, who live in neighbouring houses with their fathers, respectively called The Doctor and Tartaglia, are being courted by their gallants Florindo and Caviello. But both young ladies have a secret yearning for Pulcinella, who is indifferent to them because he has his own love, the peasant girl Pimpinella. The gallants, jealous of Pulcinella’s success with the ladies, set upon him, but the three girls come to the rescue. However, when Prudenza and Rose a are driven indoors by their fathers, the gallants return, armed with swords, intent on killing him. The resourceful Pulcinella collapses when the gallants a ack him and they, imagining him to be dead, leave him lying on the ground. But as soon as the gallants have disappeared Pulcinella gets up and walks off. Four li le Pulcinellas then appear carrying on their shoulders a seemingly dead Pulcinella, whose body they lay out in front of the two houses. The two fathers reappear with their daughters and are mourning over the corpse when a figure dressed as a magician enters and proceeds to revive it. Pulcinella, for it is he disguised as a magician, and his companion Furbo, the resuscitated corpse, then drive off the fathers while the gallants, both disguised as Pulcinella, return to pursue their courtship of the

84 Foreign Modernism daughters. The real Pulcinella then intervenes to unmask the gallants and enlist the aid of Furbo, now in the magician’s disguise, to bring about the happy union of the two young couples and proclaim his own marriage to Pimpinella.10

This scenario includes many of the classic carnivalesque topoi identified by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, such as death and resurrection, and the thrashing. But above all it embodies the vision of personhood that is at the heart of this genre: instead of a coherent, well-bounded, and self-identical subjectivity, carnivalesque identity is defined by difference. It is multiple, fragmented, unfinished, and in the process of constantly becoming. Diaghilev and Massine give this powerful, palpable form in their never-ending parade of Pulcinellas (see figure 8). The protagonist is not merely doubled, but appears in some eight different instantiations, with four or five different Pulcinellas sharing the stage at some moments. But it is not just Pulcinella whose identity is in circulation – the mantle of the magician is assumed by two of the characters as well. All of this suggests that subjectivity is not a solid kernel of the real, but something much more fluid and mobile. Inspired by this scenario and the Pergolesi pieces (which he has described as music “so entirely of the people and yet so exotic in its Spanish character”), Stravinsky set out to “breathe new life into sca ered fragments and to create a whole from the isolated pages.”11 But, “before a empting a task so arduous,” writes the composer, “I had to find an answer to a question of the greatest importance by which I found myself faced. Should my line of action toward Pergolesi be dominated by my love or by my respect for his music?”12 In other words, should he merely find a way to respectfully stitch together Pergolesi’s fragments, or should he use the pre-existing material as inspiration for a work of his own creation? For Stravinsky the answer was clear: “In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love? To me it seems that to ask the question is to answer it … Not only is my conscience clear of having commi ed sacrilege, but so far as I can see, my a itude towards Pergolesi is the only one that can be usefully taken up with regard to the music of bygone times.”13 And so, instead of the simple menial task of arranging and orchestration, the composer rewrote and reinterpreted the Pergolesi material, and in this reinterpretation recapitulated the carnivalesque questioning of identity that he found in the libre o.

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8 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), costume design for Pulcinella, ballet by Sergei Diaghilev, music by Igor Stravinsky, choreography by Léonide Massine; 1920. Graphite and gouache, Musée Picasso, Paris. © Picasso Estate / SODRAC (2012).

While critics have seen Pulcinella in the context of Stravinsky’s reshuffling of the self, this has o en been misinterpreted. Eric Walter White is typical in his assessment of the ballet’s role in the composer’s life: “This is a moment when he had reached a definite turning point in his life,” writes White. “A er the Bolshevist Revolution, return to Russia seemed out of the question: so, in order to be nearer the heart of musical affairs, he decided to leave Switzerland and se le in France. And at the same time he needed a new set of musical values to replace the old ones. His allegiance to the Russian popular melos was to be transferred to a new melos based on the traditional music of Western Europe, particularly

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Italy.”14 While Pulcinella certainly uses the music of Western classicism, other musicologists have shown that it is a long way from being either purely traditional or purely Western. White himself admits that Stravinsky’s reinterpretation managed to “break up the formal symmetry of the eighteenth century music through the elision or lengthening or repetition of phrases, and also to throw out of focus the traditional harmonic scheme by the use of ostinati and the prolongation of certain harmonies.”15 This observation has been sharpened by Arnold Whi all who notes that the “harmonic modifications principally take the form of introducing diatonic dissonance,” which he traces to the influence of Debussy.16 Stravinsky himself saw Pulcinella as a profoundly radical and innovative work. According to the composer: This is a new kind of music, a simple music with orchestral conception different from my other works. And this novelty resides in the following: Musical “effects” are usually obtained from the juxtaposition of nuances; a piano following a forte produces an “effect.” But that is the conventional, accepted thing. I have tried to achieve an equal dynamism by juxtaposing the timbres of the instruments which are the very foundation of the sound material. A colour only has value in relation to the other colours which are placed next to it. Red has no value in itself. It only acquires it though its proximity to another red or a green, for example. And this is what I wanted to do in music, and what I look for first of all is the quality of the sound. I also look for truth in a disequilibrium of instruments which is the opposite of the thing done in what is known as chamber music, whose whole basis is an agreed balance between the various instruments. And this is quite new; nobody has ever tried it in music. There are some innovations which cause surprise. But the ear becomes bit by bit sensitive to those effects which are at first shocking. There is a whole musical education to be undertaken.17

In the composer’s own opinion, then, Pulcinella inaugurated a new type of differential music. Composition was no longer a function of the arrangement of discrete and inherently meaningful musical quantities, but the construction of a tissue of differences, where musical elements derived their sense exclusively from their context. A fascinating example of this play of differences is to be found in the negotiation of ethnic elements that the piece performs. While it relies on pre-existing Italian material, Whi all notes that “it is far from being

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u erly un-Russian,” and refers his readers to (Stravinsky major domo) Robert Cra ’s statement that “the D minor tenor aria … is a Russian dance, and the horn counter-melody at no. 65 is far closer to Tchaikovsky than to Pergolesi.”18 This non-Western subtext is confirmed by Richard Taruskin in his study of Stravinsky’s Russian influences. In an impressive close reading, Taruskin traces harmonies, rhythms, and arrangements in this “Italian” ballet to models in the arch ethno-fantasies Svadebka, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring. According to Taruskin, this is indicative of what he calls the composer's “Turanian” style, a method that reflects “the land of Stravinsky's musical imagining,” where a self-consciously Russian aesthetic works to undermine the “linear, harmony-driven temporality of Western classical music.”19 He further interprets this riotous mix of elements as an ironic, carnivalesque gesture. In the music of Pulcinella, “beady Scythian eyes seem to glint from behind the mask of European urbanity.”20 According to Taruskin then, Stravinsky’s very music has become carnivalesque: neither purely Russian, nor purely Western, but a new mixed-up or hybrid form. By all accounts the collaborators worked together extremely closely during the planning stages of the ballet, and the same hybridizing spirit that pervades the libre o and music also found its way into the choreography and Picasso’s plans for the set. According to musicologist Marilyn Meeker, Stravinsky’s carnivalized score with its “simultaneity of musical effects – modern and traditional,” was matched by “Massine’s mixture of comic gesture and popular dance styles with classical ballet technique.” It also resonated with “Picasso’s placement of traditional Neapolitan costuming against cubistic sets.”21 But the artist’s preparatory sketches reveal that, as for Parade, he initially conceived of the set as an even more carnivalesque space – a stage within the stage (see figure 9). According to Douglas Cooper, Picasso’s original plans show “a spacious interior with a chandelier, two tiers of boxes, a proscenium arch and ceiling (twisted around to heighten the illusion of space), and a stage set with an arcaded Neapolitan street, which recedes sharply from a fountain with a figure of Neptune in the foreground to a view of the bay with boats and Vesuvius at the end.”22 While this was ultimately deemed too elaborate, “it shows that from the start Picasso wanted to underline the artificiality of the action, its puppet show element, for the dancers would have had to perform in the middle of the false theatre and in front of the inner stage.”23 In a translation of the Parade stage motif, then, Picasso wanted to use the mise en abyme of nested representations to thematize illusion, theatricality, and

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9 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Pulcinella set design. 1920. India ink, gouache, pencil. Musée Picasso, Paris, France. Photo: Christian Jean. © Picasso Estate / SODRAC (2012).

the assumption of roles. Ultimately, however, this arch-staginess did not correspond to Diaghilev’s ideas for the sets and Picasso agreed to eliminate the stage-within-a-stage motif for a representation of a Neapolitan street scene. But while the finished set is supposed to show the “thing itself” and not its representation, the street is executed in such a highly stylized cubist idiom that the air of artificiality and feeling of puppet theatre remain vividly intact. We can see, then, that even though Pulcinella refers explicitly to the narratives, music, and traditions of the neoclassical Grand Siècle it is definitely not a slavish imitation and valorization of the Latin canon. With its modernistic disruption of classical forms, exploration of open, fluid, carnivalesque identity, and Slavic undermining of stable latinité,

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the ballet is a far cry from the paean to order and tradition. And indeed, contemporary reviewers noted the disruptive, hybrid, yet strangely harmonious nature of the piece. A critic from the London Observer noted on 13 June 1920 that “Stravinsky’s adaptation and re-scoring of Pergolesi is not carried out in the spirit of self-effacement goes without saying. But somehow the lapses from Italian melodious purity into unadulterated Stravinsky do not jar, as Leonide Massine’s wonderful choreography follows the changes with such understanding that the dancers … seem to take the ‘lead,’ and the orchestra merely to follow their spontaneous movement. The whole ballet is as bizarre as the intersecting houses and sky-planes of Picasso’s scenery.”24 While the critic for Athenaeum noticed the same genealogy that I have been arguing for, “‘Pulcinella’” he writes, “is merely engaged upon a more elaborate ‘Parade.’”25 This playful and dialogical engagement with the past is reminiscent of what Svetlana Boym has called “reflective nostalgia.” In her important book, The Future of Nostalgia, Boym argues that “two kinds of nostalgia characterize one’s relationship to the past, to the imagined community, to home, to one’s self-perception: restorative and reflective.”26 Reflective nostalgia “dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance.” It “lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.” Paradoxically, this perpetually unfulfilled longing for the past has the potential to open up new paths toward the future. “The past,” writes Boym, “is not made in the image of the present or seen as foreboding of some present disaster; rather, the past opens up a multitude of potentialities, nonteleological possibilities of historical development.” And surprisingly, this form of nostalgia can be ironic or even humorous, revealing that “longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgement, or critical reflection.”27 In its playful relationship with history, and its dialogical negotiation of past and present to construct progressive, forward-looking forms of identity, Pulcinella seems to be a perfect embodiment of reflective nostalgia. Boym, however, argues that this ironic, playful, quintessentially modernist form of nostalgia is not the only variant of this affect possible. Reflective nostalgia, with its self-conscious emphasis on algia, is counterbalanced by restorative nostalgia. This form “puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps.”28 As Stravinsky’s exilic life continued, the composer found it more and more difficult to hold on to

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the openness and play of his early, reflective nostalgia. Ground down by the melancholy of displacement, with Oedipus Rex he dri ed into restorative, sado-masochistic fantasies of the classical past. Sacraments, Sadism, and Oedipus Rex Since the completion of Pulcinella, Stravinsky had “been aware of the need to compose a large-scale dramatic work,” but had been hamstrung by a variety of difficulties.29 Many of these were niggling, quotidian problems. According to Stravinsky biographer Stephen Walsh, “the Revolution and its a ermath le him anxious and, in his own eyes at least, virtually destitute. His home and income were gone, his family sca ered, his future apparently at the mercy of politicians and immigration officials.”30 Further, the end of the war “made li le difference to the Stravinskys’ circumstances … Travel remained difficult, and especially so for White Russians, effectively stateless since the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March. In any case Stravinsky’s financial position remained parlous.”31 The situation became even more difficult when a portion of the composer’s extended family arrived in Switzerland (where he lived during the war) and he was forced to put them up and look a er them. While not tragic or dramatic, the simple everyday problems of exile were worrying and exhausting. But displacement also generated specifically musical problems for Stravinsky. According to the composer, from the time he had become déraciné he had been “unable to resolve the language problem in my future vocal works. Russian, the exiled language of my heart had become musically impracticable, and French, German, and Italian were temperamentally alien.”32 For Stravinsky, whose work in musical theatre was “set in motion by the sounds and rhythms of the syllables,” the loss of his country and his mother tongue had rendered him mute.33 It was only in 1925, when he bought and read a biography of St Francis of Assisi while in Genoa, that he saw a solution to this problem. Reading about the “Saint’s hieratic use of Provençal, the poetic language of the renaissance of the Rhône, in contrast to his quotidian Italian, or Brass Age Latin,” the composer was struck with the idea that “a text for music might be endowed with a certain monumental character by translation backwards, so to speak, from a secular to a sacred language.”34 Stravinsky, then, saw a solution to the crisis of exile and the loss of identity in a move back to the full auratic presence of a sacred language, in his case “Ciceronian Latin.”

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That an opera based on a Greek myth and rendered in the language of ancient Rome should have been inspired by a Christian saint is perhaps somewhat surprising, but religion was much in the air at this point in the composer’s life. Stravinsky himself notes that the music to his opera “was composed during my strictest and most earnest period of Christian Orthodoxy.”35 Strange as it may seem, the Russian’s return to the sacraments was at least in part inspired by his renewed friendship with Jean Cocteau. A er their estrangement, due to the David fiasco and the poet’s subsequent a acks on Stravinsky in Le Coq et l’Arlequin, the two artists reconciled and were seeing much of each other. But by the mid1920s Cocteau was no longer the Prince frivole, nor the avant-garde darling of Parade. He had undergone another of his “moultings.”36 This particular change of identity was caused by the death of his lover, the young literary prodigy Raymond Radiguet (from typhoid brought on by eating oysters). Overwhelmed by the loss of this relationship (which according to Francis Steegmuller had given Cocteau a brief respite from the insecurity and self-loathing that he perpetually ba led), Cocteau suffered a complete emotional collapse that he proceeded to treat by smoking opium. As he later noted “I preferred an artificial equilibrium to no equilibrium at all.”37 But this artificial equilibrium proved to be very fragile indeed and the poet’s self-medication soon turned to full-blown addiction that le him even more physically, mentally, and emotionally devastated. While in this sorry state Cocteau’s friend, the composer Georges Auric brought him to see Jacques Maritain, a meeting that was to have a profound impact on the poet and lead to another reshuffling of the self. Maritain was then a lecturer at the Institut Catholique in Paris. Formerly the theologian of the Action Française, he had since extricated himself from the movement but was elaborating a system of Thomist aesthetics that still had many debts to the intellectual tenor of Maurras’s party. According to Walsh, Maritain’s treatise Art et scolastique “had argued that the instability in late nineteenth-century Catholic thought and late-romantic art had common causes and a common antidote, which amounted to the deindividualization of personal expression and the return to a quasi-medieval ideal of humility and anonymity, and a divine concept of order.”38 Cocteau and Auric hoped that this apostle of order could provide some type of religious alternative therapy for the poet’s problems. Maritain’s wife Raissa described their first visit in her journal: “For the first time Auric brings Jean Cocteau to us. Distraught – despairing almost – since the death of Radiguet, he comes

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to Jacques having been told that he could help him find peace, and God, once again. A er this first visit, God gives me, as I pray for Cocteau, a joyful assurance of his conversion.”39 The conversion did happen, but not without some “pitiless” pressure from the Maritians (to use their own word), and by the summer of 1925 Cocteau was summering at Villefranche in the south of France (a mere two kilometres from the Stravinskys’ current home) and writing his Le re à Jacques Maritain, advertising his return to the fold. During their numerous get-togethers Cocteau and Stravinsky certainly discussed Maritain and religion, and the poet’s positive comments fell on fertile ground. Stravinsky had himself read Art et scolastique in 1920 or 1921 and had been intrigued. Further, as we have seen, the composer was finding it difficult to deal with the multi-faceted chaos of exile and statelessness, and must have found Maritain’s assurances of a fundamental divine order profoundly reassuring. Influenced by these factors he began to read the Gospels and “other religious literature,” even though he had shown absolutely no interest in religion before. And then, a few days before he discovered the book about St Francis, the composer personally experienced a “miracle.” In his own words: At the beginning of September 1925, with a suppurating abscess in my right forefinger I le Nice to perform my Piano Sonata in Venice. I had prayed in a li le church near Nice, before an old and “miraculous” icon, but I expected that the concert would have to be cancelled. My finger was still festering when I walked onto the stage at the Teatro La Fenice, and I addressed the audience, apologizing in advance for what would have to be a poor performance. I sat down, removed the li le bandage, felt that the pain had suddenly stopped, and discovered that the finger was – miraculously, it seemed to me – healed.40

A er relating this anecdote in his Dialogues Stravinsky himself notes that other, more prosaic explanations may be found for his experience. However, he continues, even if this is so, “then the fact that I took it for a miracle is at least as significant for the reader.” Indeed it is, for it shows to what extent he was already being influenced by Cocteau and Maritain, and looking to religion as a solution to the quotidian dilemmas of his exile. Given all of this, it is not surprising that it was a saint’s life that suggested to Stravinsky the best way to approach his Oedipus Rex. Further, as the composition of the opera proceeded, his connection to Maritain and Cocteau became even tighter. Shortly a er his return

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from Italy Stravinsky invited Cocteau to write the libre o for his new opera. Then, during the Russian Holy Week he returned to the Orthodox Church and shortly a er that an Orthodox priest came to live with the Stravinskys. And in June 1926, the composer finally met Maritain in person. But Cocteau’s impact on Stravinsky went far beyond introducing the composer to Maritain and his thought. At the same time that he returned to Christianity, Cocteau was also speculating on aesthetic and political order, meditations that were collected in a book of like-minded essays titled A Call to Order in 1926.41 These essays represent a profound about-face from the aesthetics of Parade and Stravinsky’s contemporary work seems to strongly bear their imprint. A Call to Order begins with a series of meditations on music and the articulation of what we might call an aesthetic physiology. He writes: “SENSES. The ear repudiates, but can tolerate certain kinds of music which, if transferred to the sphere of the nose, would oblige us to run away” (CO, 11). For Cocteau, the ear is the indiscriminate faculty, without standards, intelligence, or judgment, ready to accept that which is pernicious and dangerous. And that music is both of these things Cocteau makes perfectly clear in several of the following aphorisms. “Beware of the paint, say certain placards,” he writes. “I add: Beware of music” (CO, 11). What it is that makes music dangerous he begins to specify in the very next aphorism: “Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you” (CO, 11). For Cocteau, music is an unbounded, oceanic force, always ready to overwhelm and absorb the individual. In opposition to the ambiguity of music and the blurred boundaries of the ear, Cocteau turns to discretely bounded visual art and the aesthetic intelligence of the eye. Strenuously denying the possibility of mechanized perception he presents vision as a distinctly intellectual operation. He notes that “photography is unreal; it alters values and perspective. Its cow-like eye stupidly registers everything that our eye first has to correct, and then distribute according to the needs of the case” (CO, 118). In direct opposition to the indiscriminate ear that lets in everything, desirable or not, the eye is constantly filtering information, editing and arranging it in conformity with the dictates of reason. Furthermore, as an antidote to the dangerous amorphousness of music Cocteau turns to the clarity, the boundedness, of visual form, particularly as represented by sculpture and architecture. “Sculpture, so neglected on account of the current contempt for form and mass in favor of the fluid, is undoubtedly one of the noblest arts. To begin

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with, it is the only one which obliges us to move round it” (CO, 12). In contrast to music, sculpture has clear and distinct borders, well-defined lines, and because of its boundedness, its rejection of fluidity, it poses no threat to the integrity of the individual. These are qualities that music would do well to adopt and in his pithy way Cocteau here introduces the notion of a new, visual music (a topic that he will return to at greater length later in the text): “Musicians ought to cure music of its convolutions, its dodges and its tricks, and force it as far as possible to keep in front of the hearer” (CO, 11; emphasis in the original). Instead of traditional music that amorphously surrounds the listener, the new music will remain rigidly bounded and will occupy a discrete position in space. For precisely the same reasons Cocteau consistently valorizes architecture. As an art of distinct form and mass it provides an alternative to the insubstantiality of music. Throughout the text artists Cocteau approves of, such as Satie or Ingres, are described as “architects,” and he even elaborates a theory of architectural writing: “And yet literary work, like fine architecture, ought to present here and there a resting place for the eye, a flat surface or a simple scheme of decoration alternating with passages which bear the stamp of the architect’s individuality” (CO, 146). In contrast to music, which overloads the mind with over-elaborated sensuous experience, architectural writing provides fundamental forms that give the mind space for quiet contemplation. If the anxieties over transience, rootlessness, and border-crossing were not already clear enough, Cocteau proceeds to elaborate these two positions, fleshing out aurality and visuality with the a ributes of national identity. Discussing the contemporary musical scene Cocteau writes: Debussy missed his way because he fell from the German frying-pan into the Russian fire. Once again the pedal blurs rhythm and creates a kind of fluid atmosphere congenial to short-sighted ears. Satie remains intact. Hear his “Gymnopédies” so clear in their form and melancholy in their feeling. Debussy orchestrates them, confuses them, and wraps their exquisite architecture in a cloud. Debussy moves further and further away from Satie’s starting-point and makes everybody follow in his steps. The thick lightning-pierced fog of Bayreuth becomes a thin snowy mist flicked with impressionist sunshine. Satie speaks of Ingres: Debussy transposes Claude Monet “à la Russe.” (CO, 16–17)

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Music is referred to in precisely the same visual terms discussed above. Bad music, that which appeals to “short-sighted ears,” is music which forsakes visual clarity in favour of imprecise, amorphous dispersion; it is fluid and confused, a fog or a snowy mist. Good music on the other hand has all the a ributes of the eye: the clarity and lucidity of architectural form or a neoclassical Ingres painting. However, these are not abstract or universal qualities, but ones with distinct national associations. Germany and Russia stand for foggy disintegration while France is the representative of coherent visual clarity. The two key poles in this symbolic constellation are Wagner and Satie: the “thick lightningpierced fog of Bayreuth” on the one hand and the Frenchman’s “exquisite architecture” on the other. This is an opposition that Cocteau continues to elaborate later in the text. He writes that “nothing is so enervating as to lie and soak for a long time in a warm bath. Enough of music in which one lies and soaks” (CO, 19). And what is that music? Cocteau tells us in the very next aphorism: “Enough of clouds, waves, aquariums, water-sprites, and nocturnal scents; what we need is a music of the earth, every-day music” (CO, 19).We should recognize in this list not only the tropes of aqueousness and fluidity that tie this particular type of music to the dissolution of the ear, but also the dramaturgy of Wagner’s Ring cycle. It is precisely Wagner’s operas that stand as the apotheosis of aqueous dissolution and have such “enervating” and debilitating effects on rational subjectivity. In contrast to this hazy, Teutonic mysticism Cocteau gives us the clarity and stability of “Latin order.” “I want someone to build me music I can live in, like a house” (CO, 19), he says, and it is precisely Eric Satie, the great architect, who will do the job. “Satie teaches what, in our age, is the greatest audacity, simplicity. Has he not proved that he could refine be er than anyone? But he clears, simplifies, and strips rhythm naked. Is this once more the music on which, as Nietzsche said, ‘the spirit dances,’ as compared with the music ‘in which the spirit swims’? Not music one swims in, nor music one dances on; MUSIC ON WHICH ONE WALKS” (CO, 18). Satie, then, as the future of French music, will provide the solid ground on which one can walk, the solid architectural foundation that will transcend the Wagnerian wave-pool. Frenchness, however, is in itself no guarantee of order and lucidity, and Cocteau offers up Debussy as an example of Latin clarity perverted by the influence of “oriental romanticism.” Cocteau informs us

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that Satie “warned Debussy against Wagner,” and if the Frenchman avoided the German Scylla then he was smashed by the Russian Charybdis. “Debussy played in French, but used the Russian pedal,” Cocteau tells us, and it is the addition of foreign elements that perverts this French music and places Debussy with the Russians and Germans, beyond the pale of Latin clarity. “Wagner, Stravinsky, and even Debussy are first-rate octopuses,” Cocteau writes. “Whoever goes near them is sore put to it to escape from their tentacles” (CO, 18). For Cocteau, Debussy joins the pantheon of foreign musicians whose art is one of absorption, whose music, like an octopus tentacle surrounds the listener, blurring boundaries and threatening critical, rational autonomy. Ultimately, Cocteau rejects this pernicious foreign influence and reaffirms the need for Gallic purity: “The music I want must be French,” he writes, “of France” (CO, 17). All of these influences found their way into Oedipus Rex, making it a radically different neoclassical work than Pulcinella. It should be seen, perhaps, as Stravinsky’s a empt to transform himself from a foreign octopus to an apostle of French order. Interestingly, it was Stravinsky, not Cocteau, who most aggressively pushed this new classicism through to its logical conclusions. It was agreed that the poet would produce a libre o in French which would then be passed on to Jean Daniélou, a theology student, who would translate it into Latin. However, when Cocteau finished the first dra it was roundly rejected by the composer. According to Stravinsky, “Cocteau’s first libre o dra was full of ideas. The second was still full of ideas. I didn’t want ideas. I wanted words.”42 The composer has also noted that the “libre o was precisely what I did not want: a music drama in meretricious prose.” What he wanted was not an “action drama,” but a “still life.”43 We can see that from the very beginning Stravinsky was trying to eliminate (or at the very least minimize) movement and narrative in favour of static visuality. The stage action would not so much tell a story as become a thing itself, an object for the audience’s visual delectation. This reading is confirmed by the ultimate shape of the libre o. What Cocteau finally produced was a radically cut and condensed version of Sophocles’s play. In order to guide the audience and to fill in the gaps in the action, Cocteau developed the conceit of a narrator in modern clothes who appears onstage and relays crucial information. However, Walsh has convincingly argued that “anyone who has ever tried to follow the plot of Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex intelligibly with no prior knowledge of the story will know that it is in fact an impossible task.” And if the

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narrator is supposed to facilitate such understanding then “the account of this story given in the vernacular by Cocteau’s Speaker is defective in many crucial respects.”44 In some cases, the narrator leaves out information crucial to comprehension. For example, he mentions Oedipus’s reluctance to return to Corinth, but never explains that this is because he still regards Polybus as the father that he is fated to kill. This omission, however, makes the resolution of the drama inexplicable, for it is difficult to see why Oedipus does not realize that he has committed the parricide and incest predicted by the oracle when he begins to understand that he has killed Laius. In other cases, the Speaker presents information out of sequence or confusingly so that it is equally obscure and resistant to comprehension.45 Given the opacity of a device putatively used to render the text transparent, Walsh concludes that “it is natural to see the Speaker less as a comprehension aid than as a structural device both for articulating the musical tableaux vivants of the Latin se ing and for emphasizing their monumentality and artificiality.”46 The Speaker, then does not narrate the piece, but facilitates its architecture and, like a tour guide, leads the audience through the opera’s “wax works” scenes.47 In this insistence on “architecture” and tableaux we can see a dramatic shi to the visuality and rigid staticity of Cocteau’s new reactionary aesthetics. As Walsh implies in the quote above, this is also manifested in Stravinsky’s choice to use Latin instead of a living language. The composer himself has noted that Latin “had the great advantage of giving me a medium not dead, but turned to stone, and so monumentalised as to have become immune from any risk of vulgarisation.”48 In a bald rejection of the fluidity and metamorphosis of Pulcinella Stravinsky once again pushes the libre o toward an immobility verging on ossification. This valorization of the monumental and inert is also reflected in Stravinsky’s music, which tends toward stasis both rhythmically and harmonically. The composer himself noted that “I exploit rhythmic staticity in the same way as Sophocles…The rhythms in Oedipus are more static and regular than in any other composition of mine to that date … If I have succeeded in freezing the drama in the music, that was accomplished largely by rhythmic means.”49 Contemporary musicologists have also found this frozen quality in the opera’s harmonies and use of tonality. According to Walsh, the piece utilizes a “tonality without fi hs” which is “somewhat inert, since it establishes centres without a criterion of movement away from them.”50 A further consequence of Stravinsky’s manipulation of tonal harmony is to “rob the cadence of

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its traditional role of marking-out rhythmic and harmonic structure, and to induce a certain sense of structural inertia as a result.”51 But if both the libre o and music display an obsession with stasis, this tendency finds its apotheosis in the dramaturgy of the piece. According to Stravinsky, “I had begun to visualize the staging as soon as I started to compose the music.”52 What he imagined was a distinctly un-operatic spectacle which mirrored the still-life character of the text and music. In Stravinsky’s conception “No one ‘acts’ and the only individual who moves at all is the narrator, and he merely to show his detachment from the other stage figures.”53 The main characters “stand rigidly,” moving “only their heads and arms … like living statues.”54 The opera completely eliminates all physical expression of affect, personality, and individuality. This depersonalization is further enhanced by the elaborate costumes pictured by the composer. Stravinsky’s initial idea was that the chorus should only be seen as a series of cowled heads. “My first and strongest conviction,” he writes in Dialogues, “was that the chorus should not have a face.” This annihilation of an individualized subjectivity quickly spread to the main characters as well. “Except for Tiresius, the Shepherd, and the Messenger,” he writes, “the characters remain in their built-up costumes and in their masks. Only their arms and heads move.”55 In contrast to Pulcinella where masks gave the characters freedom to transform themselves, to explore alternate subject positions, here the obliterating costumes deny them any sign of personhood at all. And not only do the costumes deny the characters subjectivity, like traps or prisons, they prevent them from pursuing and forging it. “In my original version,” writes the composer, “I did not even allow them exits and entrances.” Caught in their sculptural shells, the characters have become statues, without freedom or will. Stravinsky, however, holds out the possibility of one avenue of action or expression – the voice. “The people in the play relate to each other not by gestures,” he writes, “but by words.” And while they are caught in an enforced stasis, “during their arias,” they become “vocally, though not physically, galvanized statues.”56 But this is a blind alley, for as we have seen, the composer noted that Latin provided him with a linguistic medium turned to stone; not a register of action and expression, but the “dead, desiccated language of chemists and lawyers.”57 There is a profound anti-humanism in these relentless assaults on individuality, personality, and expression. Further, from the composer’s statements it is evident that he was perfectly aware of this and indeed stove for it: “I consider this static representation a more vital way to

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focus the tragedy not on Oedipus himself and the other individuals, but on the ‘fatal development’ that, for me, is the meaning of the play. Oedipus, the man, is a subject for a type of symbolic treatment which depends upon the interpretation of experience and is principally psychological. This did not a ract me as musical material, and if it had, I would have constructed the drama differently – for example, by adding a scene from the childhood of the prince.”58 Issues of subjectivity are simply uninteresting to Stravinsky and he avoids them in favour of the annihilating play of formal relations. But, given what we know about both Stravinsky and Cocteau, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that issues of subjectivity are not so much uninteresting as dangerous and painful, and that they are not simply avoided, but fled from. In a comment that implies an aestheticizing escape from personal anxiety, Stravinsky notes that “crossroads are not personal but geometrical, and the geometry of tragedy, the inevitable intersecting of lines, is what concerned me.”59 By eliminating living beings, personal tragedies (such as exile, death, and addiction) become nothing more than the sublime aesthetic spectacle of geometric convergence. Cocteau and Stravinsky, then, use classicism in Oedipus Rex as a means of negotiating personal and cultural anxiety. Not, as in Pulcinella, by accepting the fragmented and unstable character of modernity and using it to liberate the creative potential of the self, but by desperately trying to seize and ossify it. It is significant that architectural tropes would dominate discussions of Stravinsky’s piece, for according to Boym “restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past.”60 It is, what we might call, a monumentalizing sensibility. According to Denis Hollier and Andreas Huyssen, the search and desire for the monumental in modernity is always the search and desire for origins.61 This was particularly evident during the bourgeois nineteenth century. As the political, economic, and industrial revolutions began to strip away the religious and metaphysical security of previous ages, the monument (o en rendered in a neoclassical style) came to guarantee origin and stability as well as depth of time and space in a rapidly changing world that was experienced as transitory, uprooting, and unstable. And while one can see how this would be a comforting and even therapeutic gesture, its problematical nature is also evident. For a fixed (one might even say reified) notion of history and an insistence on the continuity of past and present can (and did) easily slide into hegemonic, exclusionary, and authoritarian conceptions of personal and national identity.

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In the case of Oedipus Rex, Stravinsky’s insistence on an enforced staticity results in a cruel and repulsive violence. As Oedipus squirms at centre-stage, trapped in his sculptural skin and mouthing a dead language while misfortune a er misfortune is heaped on his head, the proceedings begin to look very much like a spectacle of sadism. Stravinsky notes that “the stage figures are more dramatically isolated and helpless precisely because they are plastically mute, and the portrait of the individual as the victim of circumstances is made far more starkly effective by this static presentation.”62 Without a trace of compassion for his characters, the composer receives a delicious shudder of pleasure by watching their helpless contortions in the trap he has laid for them. But the violence in the opera is not only sadistic, it is masochistic as well. Although it purports to propel the composer beyond the banal chaos of the exile’s life into a world of divine order, it actually locks him into an endless, inescapable repetition of the traumas of displacement. Stripped of his agency, Oedipus is frozen in the very moment of his transgression and exile. Turned into a statue, the king is denied the prospect of movement, change, and the journey to a new home at Colonus. As Stravinsky’s aesthetic avatar, Oedipus becomes the apotheosis of a melancholy displacement and homelessness. Having seen the Berlin premiere of the Oedipus, Theodor Adorno took note of the simultaneously inert and annihilating nature of the work. In a typically strident review he described the opera as “a preHandelian oratorio stripped of its flesh, its skeleton blown to bits, the fragments reassembled in the shape of the skeleton, then filled up and held together with concrete.”63 But where others saw an enforced stasis, Stravinsky saw only the most perfect order. As the 1920s progressed into the 1930s this concept became the cardinal value in the composer’s mental universe. Suffering the anxiety of the stateless exile in an increasingly uncertain Europe, the composer turned more and more to the consolations of a Maritainian Christianity and a static classicism. “The more you cut yourself off from the canons of the Christian Church,” he told a Belgian interviewer, the more you cut yourself off from the truth. These canons are as true for the composition of an orchestra as they are for the life of an individual. They are the only place where order is practiced to the full: not a speculative, artificial order, but the divine order which is given to us and which must reveal itself as much in the inner life as in its exteriorization in painting, music, etc. It’s the struggle against anarchy, not so much disorder as

A Call to Order 101 the absence of order. I’m an advocate of architecture in art, since architecture is the embodiment of order; creative work is a protest against anarchy and nonexistence.64

Increasingly denied order in his life, the composer asserted it ever more vehemently in his work. But at the same time, the forces of a different sort of order were starting to rally around Europe, forces that considered Stravinsky part of the problem, not the solution. A er performing a concerto that followed Oedipus Rex in Berlin, the composer was vilified in the xenophobic Right-wing press for perverting German values. Fritz Stege called the piece “a desecration of Bach … which, beneath the makeup of French civilization, reveals clearly enough the savagery of half-Asiatic instincts.”65 It would not be long before Stravinsky was added to the lists of undesirables and was condemned for producing “degenerate Bolshevik art.” As we shall see in the next chapter, very similar sentiments were also stirring in France, sentiments which would ultimately enthrone reactionary classicism and sound the death knell for its cosmopolitan, avant-garde challenger.

5 The Face of the Nation: State Fetishism and Métissage at the Exposition Internationale, Paris 1937

In 1937 an aesthetic controversy exploded in the pages of the French press. The controversy centred on a sculpture by the Franco-Lithuanian artist Jacques Lipchitz. Lipchitz had been commissioned to produce a monumental piece, Prometheus Strangling the Vulture, for the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques de la Vie Moderne. However, as the time to exhibit the statue approached, word spread that Lipchitz’s handling of the theme was unconventional and inappropriate. The organizers, fearing a hostile reaction on the part of the public, decided at the last minute to remove the statue from its central position in the Grand Palais where it was to be housed and to place it outside the building.1 But the popular press was not satisfied with this gesture and launched a concerted a ack on both the artist and his work. The first salvo was fired by Le Figaro. The newspaper printed a photograph of the sculpture, accompanied by the headline, “What is this monument?” and a caption that read, “What does it represent?”2 Writing in the Mercure de France, Bernard Champigneulle opined that the statue’s “coarseness revolts passers-by” and expressed regret that “we presented to visitors of the Exposition an example so poorly aligned with contemporary French sculpture and its traditions.”3 But the worst was yet to come. In April and May of 1938 the daily Le Matin began to wage a war against the statue that included scurrilous a acks on the sculptor himself. Numerous articles appeared, o en on the first page of the newspaper. One writer quipped that the piece had been placed near the Grand Palais in order to “demonstrate by contrast classical French taste and what will become of it under the influence of the Bolsheviks.”4 Another insulted “the gigantic pile of garbage, supposedly sculpted, placed on the Champs-Elysées,” and noted that its presence there was impossible

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10 Jacques Lipchitz, Prometheus Strangling the Vulture. © The Estate of Jacques Lipchitz, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York.

to understand unless it was a joke by a politician seeking to show “the level of barbarism and brutalization to which Russian ‘art’ had fallen.”5 All the pieces called for the removal of the statue. Sadly, the art world took up the calls of the journalistic Right and launched its own campaign. Conservatives made the rounds of the ateliers and academies soliciting signatures from students and artists calling for the removal of the work. Looking at photographs of the statue today, one has difficulty understanding what all the controversy was about. Granted, the piece resists the kind of nostalgic classicism preferred by the conservative elites of the capital in favour of a vaguely primitivist aesthetic composed of undulating, bulbous forms. But the result is hardly illegible,

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as the headlines in Le Figaro would lead one to believe. Indeed, compared to the spatial fragmentation and distortion that cubists and futurists had been producing in the capital for some thirty years, Prometheus Strangling the Vulture seems a model of transparency and clarity. Why then, did it provoke such hostile and passionate responses? In order to answer this question I am going to examine the statue against the backdrop of debates on national identity that flared in France just prior to the International Exposition. While presented as a forum for international cooperation and reconciliation during the tense 1930s, both contemporary observers and current historians have seen the Exposition Internationale as precisely the opposite: a site of intense ideological conflict and a “‘contested [terrain]’ for the articulation of collective national identities.”6 While states a empted to assert the superiority of their political and social systems by mounting elaborate displays of their economic and cultural achievements, the most fundamental propaganda ba les were fought in a medium much more visceral and direct: the architecture and decorations of the national pavilions themselves. These pavilions were presented not merely as reflections of national character but as living, breathing national characters. Personifications of the nation, these characters were to function as exemplary national subjects, model citizens bearing the traces of an idealized national identity. The centrality and importance of this state fetishism, however, put France in an extremely awkward and problematical position. While the dictatorships could easily present totalizing images of identity, France, increasingly ethnically diverse and profoundly divided over the meaning and mandate of the Third Republic, could not. The exhibition organizers a empted to neutralize this ethnic and social fragmentation aesthetically by using the material culture of the Exposition Internationale to present a single, coherent vision of French identity. Relying on stereotypes of unity, coherence, and wholeness, the Exposition organizers constructed a “classical” France infinitely able to absorb foreign elements and transform them into the immutable stuff of latinité. With his radical rereading of the Prometheus myth, Lipchitz’s statue must have seemed like a direct challenge to this strategy. Fusing Latin clarity with an Oceanian primitivism, the sculptor rejected the fantasy of French purity in favour of a vision of national identity as métissage, a rearticulation that cultural conservatives could perceive only as a dangerous and debilitating miscegenation.

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From Commodity Fetishism to State Fetishism On 24 May the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques de la Vie Moderne officially opened, and Paris prepared to play host to the world, not merely in the conventional sense of welcoming foreign visitors onto French soil but by unveiling a miniature version of the world itself in the heart of the French capital. The fair offered the interested spectator a global survey of contemporary human accomplishment: pavilions dedicated to every conceivable French trade and industry; national pavilions of forty-two sovereign nations and empires; a string of exotic structures housing the natural and cultural riches of various colonies; and palaces of art, science, and ethnography. All were contained in the area stretching from the Trocadéro Hill on the Right Bank across the Seine to the base of the Eiffel Tower. For the dedicated flâneur willing to spend some money and expend a li le energy, the world was at his feet. A 1937 exposition was first proposed in 1929 by Julien Durand, a Radical politician from the Doubs region. In Durand’s original conception, however, this fair was to be essentially aesthetic in nature: an exhibition of the decorative arts based on the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels. But with the Wall Street crash and the ensuing global depression, the focus of the exposition shi ed to address the challenges to the international economic and social order. By 1933, the government under the Radical Edouard Daladier announced its intention to host a fair centred on the themes of industrial and decorative arts, workers’ and peasants’ lives, and intellectual cooperation. By the following year, however, the economic crisis that had prompted the shi in the character of the exhibition had led to its outright cancellation. In a time of depression and financial austerity, neither the central government nor the city of Paris felt they could justify such an expensive endeavour. But the fate of the exposition would soon be reversed. Under pressure from both the business and artistic communities, the newly appointed conservative Gaston Doumergue resuscitated the fair and a empted to use it as a financial instrument to kick-start the moribund economy of France. According to Edmond Labbé, a retired high civil servant appointed by Doumergue as the commissioner general of the exposition, the fair would “stimulate French production, provide the best forum for serious publicity, pull inactive capital out of its torpor, help in the expansion of domestic trade, and perhaps even in an intensification of

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international exchange,” all of which would contribute to “reviving the economic vitality of France.”7 This conception of the Exposition Internationale, however, was complicated by the increasing tension of international affairs. With the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Franco’s assaults on the Spanish Republic, and German rearmament, Europe seemed on the brink of war. The promotion of peace, therefore, became a subsidiary cause of the exposition. Most o en this was linked to the promotion of trade in the hope that a disruption of commerce could be avoided by the sublimation of international hostilities into peaceful economic competition. This interweaving of pacifism and capitalism was boiled down to an aphorism by Robert Lange, the author of a contemporary monograph on the exposition: The Exposition of 1937 will mark a place in history because of its universality which must serve peace, because of the quality of its effort to overcome the economic crisis . . . Today’s assembly takes place at the hour of economic crisis and international tension: Against hate, for Peace! Against poverty, for Prosperity!8

But the lo ier aims of the exposition organizers were soon shaken by the realization that some of the international participants would be using the fair for less-than-idealistic purposes. French officials and fair organizers became aware of the fact that many foreign nations were tuning up their propaganda machines and that France needed to compete or risk being trumped at home. The rapporteur of the Chamber of Deputies’ finance commission insisted that France needed to devote intellectual and financial capital to the cause of self-promotion, “if we want France, through its own propaganda, to be capable of responding to the propaganda efforts that other nations will certainly make in connection with the exposition.”9 National identity and propaganda had increasingly been the focus of the fairs as they developed through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The earlier fairs had a largely commercial function. They provided a forum for the display and comparison of consumer goods and industrial products that were classified by category and nation of origin and exhibited in large international halls. For Walter Benjamin, the quasi-mystical reverence with which these goods were displayed transcended the utilitarian mandate of the fairs. These were not mere trade shows but “places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish,”10 devoted to

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establishing the “mystical character of commodities.”11 With the growth of nationalist movements in Europe and the widespread a empt to “invent” national traditions, the expositions saw the increased popularity of discrete national pavilions, which began to displace the more fluid, cosmopolitan exhibition spaces by the early 1900s. According to historians such as Shanny Peer and Eric Hobsbawm, by 1937 this transformation was complete: the expositions had shi ed from displays of commercial wares to the display and propagandizing of separate nations as collective entities. The Exposition Internationale had become the ideal forum for the projection of a representation of the nation to the rest of the world. This change is succinctly summarized by a contemporary observer of the 1937 exposition: In 1900, foreign delegations had merely provided space and cover to the motley crowd of national exhibitors. This time, for the most part, they exposed not products, but nations . . . In 1937 objects were not included for their own sake, but as parts of a synthetic whole encompassing the economic, social, and political activities of a people. Commercial publicity disappeared and was replaced by national propaganda.12

One of the key sites for the articulation and propagandizing of this national identity was the architecture of the national pavilions themselves. The pavilions functioned not merely as containers for the national (and nationalist) content within but as symbolic stand-ins for the nations they represented. In various debates and discussions during the exposition, the pavilions were routinely anthropomorphized, discursively transforming them into avatars of the nation. We can see this rhetorical tendency in both general comments about architecture and specific descriptions of buildings. In his piece “Architecture at the Exposition of 1937” Edmond Labbé notes that “the face of France was . . . fashioned by French architecture that imprinted a design and a physiognomy on her.”13 This trope of the face was also used by Émile Condoyer in his article for Larousse, “Faces of the Nations at the Exposition,” where he states that “every palais is a face where [the national soul] is reflected.”14 In some of the descriptions of specific buildings the anthropomorphism becomes much more active and we actually see the pavilions come to life. In his discussion of the new Trocadéro the writer for Le Journal describes the building’s “surfaces with the pink pallor of young flesh” and leaves us with a final image of the new structure’s two wings, “its grandiose arms open in an ample gesture of welcome.”15 If

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the newly animated Trocadéro struck the writer for Le Journal as a gentle, welcoming creature, child-like with its pink fleshy exterior, other buildings were more sinister and threatening once brought to life. These were qualities that Albert Speer noticed in his own work. “My architecture represented an intimidating display of power,” he wrote; “my buildings were heavy and menacing, constructed, so to speak, with too much muscle on them.”16 The opposite of the innocent, welcoming child, Speer’s muscle-bound warrior presented a frightening spectacle of martial vigour. This shi from commodities to national identity should be seen, however, not as a radical rupture but as a further displacement of the religious energies involved in fetishism. The anthropomorphism of the pavilions is perhaps the most obvious and literal manifestation of what Michael Taussig has called “state fetishism,” the tendency to “casually entify ‘the State’ as a being unto itself, animated with a will and mind of its own.”17 Building on Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, Taussig has pointed to the essentially phantasmatic nature of this vision of the state and its tendency to subjectify the objective while it objectifies the subjective. Taussig approvingly quotes anthropologist A.R. RadcliffeBrown, who notes that “‘the State in this sense [as an “entity over and above the human individuals who make up a society”] does not exist in the phenomenal world; it is a fiction of the philosophers.’”18 For Radcliffe-Brown what does exist is “‘an organization, i.e. a collection of individual human beings connected to a complex set of relations . . . there is no such thing as the power of the State; there are only, in reality, powers of individuals – kings, prime ministers, magistrates, policemen, party bosses and voters.’”19 While Taussig agrees with the proposition that the state is an unreal entity, he diverges from Radcliffe-Brown in his insistence that the unreal can have very real effects. “For what the notion of State fetishism directs us to,” he writes, “is the existence and reality of the political power of this fiction, its powerful insubstantiality.”20 This is exactly what we find at the Exposition Internationale: although they are fantastical creatures, fictional characters, the national palais do the very real work of creating a national identity. The French Palais de Chaillot presents an exceptional example of this state fetishism and its role in identity formation, not because of its success but because of its dismal failure. Profoundly divided as a nation, the French could not agree on a story to tell about themselves, and this lack of consensus resulted in a pavilion that was itself profoundly split. Although putatively embodying the progressive values of the Popular Front, the

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building in fact presents a palimpsest of conflicting agendas and ideologies. Instead of countering the propaganda efforts of the dictatorships with a coherent image of France, the Trocadéro showed the Republic in the midst of an identity crisis. A Return to Order The planning and preparation of the Exposition Internationale took place not only in an atmosphere of international tension but in an environment of extreme division and conflict within France itself. Economic depression led to political destabilization and a fraying of the social consensus. Unable to control the economic situation, between 1932 and 1934 five cabinets lasted less than twelve weeks each, leading to a crisis of confidence in the parliamentary system and the increased popularity of the brutal street politics of Right-wing groups such as the Croix de feu and the Jeunesses patriotes. The fear that fascism was taking hold in France led the Socialists, Communists, and centrist Radicals to form a united le ist front in 1935 and organize their own demonstrations in opposition to those of the Right. One scholar has counted “1063 riotous assemblies, processions, or demonstrations” between February 1934 and May 1936, a situation that historian Shanny Peer dubbed “moral and psychological civil war.”21 But the crisis over French identity went much deeper than political or economic instability and touched such key issues as ethnic diversity and the meaning of Frenchness. At the beginning of the century the nation experienced a “demographic crisis” that stirred up longstanding French anxieties over degeneration and emasculation. This crisis was managed by recruiting foreign labourers to work in industry and agriculture. By the First World War some 300,000 foreigners worked in France, the majority of them nonwhite workers from North Africa, Indochina, China, and Madagascar.22 Anxious about the impact of this large, visible population of immigrants, the government deported many of them a er the war, preferring to recruit white labourers from Italy, Spain, and Poland, nations whose blood was deemed more “compatible” with the “transfusion” needed by an “anemic” France.23 Some did stay, however, and by 1926 some 1,500 black African workers resided in Paris. These numbers were supplemented by soldiers from France’s African and Caribbean colonies who fought for France in the First World War and remained in the capital a er the armistice. A portion of the population responded positively to these immigrants: the

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heightened visibility of Africans in the streets of Paris and the active expatriate African-American jazz and literary communities helped fuel a mania for “negritude” among Parisian intellectuals.24 Others, however, were not so tolerant and worried about the effects that this population would have on the purity of French blood and French identity. Predictably, these anxieties took sexualized forms. Eugène Apert, founding member of the French Eugenics Society, invoked the image of a rising tide of miscegenation when he noted that Algerian, Moroccan, and Senegalese soldiers had “sown li le half-breeds” throughout the French countryside.25 With the economic crisis of the 1930s, these racist a itudes became more widespread and virulent: visible minorities were easy scapegoats for the perceived collapse of French society. With the victory of the le ist Popular Front in May of 1936, President Léon Blum a empted to use the Exposition Internationale as an instrument for national reconciliation. He expressed hope that the fair would give French citizens “the feeling of national cohesion” and make them “more greatly aware of their profound unity and strength.”26 But the nature of the nation – whether it was a “pure,” homogenous society or a diverse, cosmopolitan one – remained unresolved. The Popular Front was itself ambiguous on the ma er. On the one hand, the government spoke about the exposition in the best universalizing rhetoric of republicanism. But on the other hand it sanctioned buildings that sent a radically different message. Edmond Labbé spoke about the exposition in messianic terms: not merely as a mechanism for economic revitalization, an opportunity to work for pacifism, or an affirmation of national identity, but as a revival of humanism and a crucible for the formation of new subjectivities. Relying on a familiar trope, Labbé noted that “in 1937 we are celebrating the memory of René Descartes; it was in 1637 that the immortal Discourse on Method was published in Leyden. Our Exposition must be Cartesian.”27 For the commissioner the Exposition Internationale had to embody the principles of rationality, stability, and coherence associated with Descartes. Labbé then made clear his reasons for framing the exposition in this particular way. We must present to the public a kind of panorama of modern techniques, including the most simple and most complex material techniques, including that which contemporary pedagogues audaciously call “cultural” techniques, those methods of training the body and mind which will assure the France of tomorrow an industrious youth more skillful, more

The Face of the Nation 111 competent, more sure of itself and its destiny than the generations tried by the war and the [economic] crisis.28

Labbé calls for an exposition that will shape a younger generation of Frenchmen and help them shake off the deleterious effects of a modernity in crisis. The exposition will help make them into coherent, integrated individuals, well-balanced Cartesian selves. The fair “will be a manifestation of contemporary humanism, a humanism that exalts all the powers of man, because it has discovered that all of these powers are, in reality, inseparable, and it will thus make its contribution to the work for peace and contribute to the progress of humanity.”29 The exposition, then, would do its part for the formation of a new national subject imbued with the progressive, humanistic, republican values of the Popular Front. This pedagogical function of the exposition was further underscored by the comments of the minister of agriculture for the Popular Front who argued that world’s fairs no longer functioned primarily to create a new clientele for products but had become “centers of a raction and education for the masses.”30 But if the discourse about the exposition in general was carried on in good humanistic and universalizing terms, the debates about architecture, and the architecture itself, seemed to veer off in a different direction. The exhibition organizers saw architecture as a privileged tool for the regeneration of an emba led French identity. For Labbé, the success of the exposition would depend “to a large degree on its architectural conception and the quality of its execution,” not only because architecture surrounds the spectators, giving them shelter and a ractive vistas, but because “it materially expresses the conception of the whole.”31 Architecture, then, not only gave physical form to the abstract ideas that constituted and defined the exposition but functioned as a material synecdoche for the regenerated wholeness of self and society that the government was working towards. In order to express these values, the fair organizers called on architects to work within certain parameters, to develop a particular style that suited the abstract ideas they wished to embody. The official architectural formula of the exposition was “harmony of the most revolutionary modernism with the most profound respect for the formidable patrimony of traditions.”32 The buildings of the exposition were to be traditional and yet audacious in their reinterpretation and renovation of the most venerable styles. This reconciliation of contemporaneity and tradition would moderate both the excesses of various modernist styles and the sterile fantasy of

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historical “pastiche,” resulting in a kind of Au ebung, a higher form of reason and order, associated by Labbé with “le génie français.”33 Both organizers and architects saw this ideal architecture embodying reason, order, tradition, and national identity as a call for the return to an idiom of classicism. Problematically, however, other states also associated themselves with classicism – most notably Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. According to the Album officiel, the Italian pavilion was “conceived in a manner both classical and modern,” an evaluation seconded by Labbé, in whose opinion it joined (“always harmoniously”) the “great Roman tradition” and the “geometries of modernism.”34 Not wanting to be outdone, the Germans insisted on their own classical pedigree. Their pavilion guidebook, wri en by prominent Nazi art critics and officials, denied that German classicism was “mere slavish copying” and instead insisted that the similarities sprang from a world view shared with the ancients: “The reason for the fundamental harmony of our buildings with those of the Ancient World is a similar a itude towards building as such.”35 Analysing the sculpture of the Third Reich, Christian Zervos, editor of the journal Cahiers d’art, noted that “the influence of antique statuary is visible throughout,” and his article quotes one artist who states that “we believe in the encounter between German genius and Greek genius.”36 There seemed to be Hellenes everywhere you turned. But the coherence of classicism as an image of humanistic, republican France was not only challenged by the association of this style with Europe’s totalitarian regimes, it was compromised by the authoritarian and racist legacy of this movement in twentieth-century France itself. Critics such as Kenneth Silver have traced the twentiethcentury revival of classicism to the xenophobia and cultural chauvinism propounded by the French Right during the First World War. As I noted in chapter 3, war propaganda celebrated the French as the heirs of Latin reason, while dismissing the Germans as the embodiments of medieval superstition and autocracy.37 If however, twentiethcentury classicism has its origins in wartime and the binary opposition of French and Germanic identities, by the 1930s it had taken on other meanings and was being used to confront different social and political realities. This is clear in a work like Profits et pertes de l’art contemporain, by Waldemar George, a prominent and powerful art critic who had been appointed an inspector a ached to the department of works of art at the Paris International Exposition of 1937 where he

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oversaw the production of decorative murals for the World’s Fair.38 George’s project is framed as a critique of the decadence of post-Davidean painting. The author begins by constructing a genealogy of modern classicism against which he opposes the debacle and betrayal of contemporary art. He deals with a number of European painters – David, Ingres, Delacroix, Corot, Renoir, Degas – whom he sees participating in and further developing a specifically “Latin” tradition. All of the artists are described in broad, classicizing terms: Delacroix is the painter who orders chaos, who returns to “Romanité,” whose orientalism evokes “classical antiquity” and a “Latin rhetoric”; Corot is seen as a “Classique” who participates in the “ancient tradition of Roman res gestae”; Renoir “latinizes the impressionist style . . . like a painter of the classical tradition” (PP, 22–7). What unites all of these figures is a particular visuality. All of these artists have particularly sharp, particularly acute vision. David, for example, is described as having “the eye of a lynx” (PP, 22). But, this is not vision that merely registers physical surfaces; rather it is a seeing that goes “à fond”: to the essence, ground, foundation. And in fact George a acks the idea of optical truth as the sole truth of painting. For George vision is merely the (necessary) road to a higher mental truth, a fundamental truth of ideas. Art that neglects to take this final, crucial step to the world of ideas violates its essential spiritual mission: “art that is a representation of the visible universe and nothing else has ceased to be an expression of the spirit [esprit]” (PP, 18). For George, this deep, penetrating vision reveals a number of truths about humanity and the universe that he refers to as “humanism”: namely, the order and intelligence of “harmonious man”; the coherence of space; and the accord between man and the universe, the microcosm and macrocosm. For George, however, these fundamental metaphysical and aesthetic truths have, for the most part, been forsaken by contemporary European culture. Instead of celebrating “harmonious man,” the ideal of Western civilization, European artists have instead been seduced by visions of a pantheistic primitive man. For George, this turn to primitivism has its roots in the social crisis caused by modernity and especially the insidious effects of capitalism. He sees primitivism as a flight from the ubiquitous rationalization and reification of the twentieth century. However, for George the rebellion is ultimately impotent because in rejecting the evils of rationalization it se les on something even worse. Primitivism throws out the baby with the bath water. In opposing capitalism, it je isons thinking and reason as well and for that reason

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“cannot liberate modern man” (PP, 56). However, more than simply the antirationalism of “primitivism” offends George, and it is here that the racist component of his thinking is glaringly obvious. What bothers him is the rejection of Western civilization and the embrace of non-European cultures that this move towards primitivism entails. For George the proper opposite of “industrial order” is “Greek and Roman order” not the disorder of Asia or Africa. The impressionist fascination with Japanese art or the modernist obsession with African art connote for him “a hate of Periclean Athens, the Renaissance, and the French Grand Siècle” (PP, 89). For George, the art of Asia and Africa is not only different from the art of the West, but its very antithesis, or, as he puts it, “the negation of Occidental order” (PP, 84). This negation is presented in a series of binary oppositions: where Western art is rational, “primitive” art with its animism and occult forces is irrational; where Western art celebrates human freedom, “primitive” art abdicates this freedom and places humanity in a static world of supernatural forces beyond human control; where Western art cultivates an ideal of beauty and perfection, “primitive” art wallows in ugliness and the grotesque; and where Western art insists on cultivation, control, and self-restraint, “primitive” art abandons itself to a debauch of instinctual satisfaction. If George’s negative valuation of non-Western cultures was not clear enough he applies the coup de grâce of an unambiguous trope: Western culture’s fascination with Asia and Africa is “a Faustian union, a damnation. Man sells his soul to the devil” (PP, 84). The Trocadéro The authoritarian and racist nature of this interwar French classicism was clearly evident in the debates over the most important French building at the exposition – the newly rebuilt Palais de Chaillot. Standing on the Trocadéro Hill on the Right Bank overlooking the Champs de Mars, the Palais functioned as the Entrée d’honneur to the Expo and offered spectators a striking view of the entire fair and the French capital beyond. This spot was not unused to grandeur, having served as an important architectural landmark for over a century. The proposed site of Napoleon’s Palace of the King of Rome, the “Trocadéro Villa” celebrating the taking of the Andalusian fort of the Trocadéro in 1823, and a triumphal monument to Napoleon I, the hill loomed large in Parisian architectural imaginary before any monumental building had actually been erected.39 In 1876, a er Haussmann’s renovations had turned the

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11 Anonymous, 19th century, The old (“Moorish”) Palais du Trocadéro, Paris. Ca. 1900. Coloured period photograph. Adoc-photos / Art Resource, NY.

area into a series of gardens, a palace was constructed there for the 1878 World’s Fair (see figure 11). A certain segment of opinion had never thought much of this palace. In 1878 a writer for the Revue de France opined that this “Assyrian or Moorish or Byzantine” monument “resembles, with its two minarets, the immense bonnet of an ass, with its two big ears”40 (see figure 11). However, in the early 1930s, when it was decided that the Exposition Internationale would take place along the MontparnasseChaillot axis, the level of vitriol unleashed against the Old Trocadéro reached unprecedented new heights. Many commentators reproached the building for “having deprived walkers crossing the summit of the hill of a magnificent view point.”41 With this large structure dominating the Trocadéro hill, the panorama of Paris was almost completely eclipsed. But the vast majority of the criticisms were directed against the old building’s exotic, “oriental” style. One writer seemed to positively foam at the mouth when he raved against “this Turkish bath establishment,” with its “fake Lebanese variegated aspect” similar to an

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12 Cartoon from L’Humanité, 22 March 1936.

“enormous stone shellfish with atrophied claws.” Why wait so long, he wondered, to eliminate these “Moorish abominations that dishonored the sky of Passy,”42 to remove, as another writer put it, this “mass which was a weight on the chest of Paris?”43 For the old building’s critics, the structure had the look of a subaltern mongrel, not the Gallic purity to which they aspired. As the building that would anchor the exposition site and represent France in the eyes of the world, the Old Trocadéro was clearly unacceptable. Debates over the building’s external appearance were mirrored by deliberations over what to do about its interior spaces. From the early years of the century through the 1920s the Trocadéro housed a highly eccentric ethnographic museum. Like the taxonomic system of Borges’s Chinese sage, the “Troca’s” categorization and display practices seemed to defy all rational and scientific principles. According to James Clifford, “the Trocadéro was a jumble of exotica.” With its “mislabeled, misclassified objets d’art,” its “costumed mannequins, panoplies,

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dioramas, massed specimens,” the museum was a place where “one could go to encounter curiosities, fetishized objects.”44 The problem with the Troca, however, was not merely its baroque, Wunderkammer nature but the fact that the pieces on display (African, Oceanian, Inuit) were presented not as “artefacts” but as works of art. Instead of situating the works in a cultural context as manifestations of particular “primitive” societies, they were presented as discrete aesthetic objects just as the works of the European masters in the Louvre or the European avant-garde in the Musée d’Art Moderne. The reception of these works seemed to further underscore the cultural leveling performed by their presentation as aesthetic objects. The Troca became a favourite haunt of the avant-garde, particularly the surrealists and cubists, who studied the works on display and borrowed from them in their own artistic experiments. For conservatives, this cultural métissage represented everything that was wrong with contemporary France: the loss of objective order and hierarchy, the encroachment of relativism, the loss of faith in progress and development, the degeneracy of culture makers who would abandon their spiritual patrimony in favour of the primitive fetishes of l’art nègre. The debates over the appearance of the Trocadéro were not merely aesthetic or museological ba les but touched on raw and pressing issues of national identity. Indeed, the discourse generated by the Trocadéro reveals profound anxieties over cosmopolitanism and the problems of métissage, or racial mixing, in interwar France. At a time when the very notion of Frenchness was perceived to be under threat, the use of a “Moorish” building to represent France in the eyes of the world, or a museum housing “primitive” works that influenced European artists, would generate tremendous anxieties. In the fantasies of reactionaries and cultural pessimists, both of these facts stood as signs that French identity and cultural authority were degenerating and that the colonials were ever more rapidly colonizing the nation. A er much deliberating and many false starts, a new Trocadéro was approved, one more stylistically and ideologically consonant with the France of the 1930s. The new building would include not only a large open terrace from which spectators could enjoy a magnificent view of the City of Light but a brand new “scientific” museum – the Musée de l’Homme. When the scaffolding came down, revealing the structure designed by architects Louis-Hippolyte Boileau, Jacques Carlu, and Leon Azéma, the critics were almost uniformly impressed. Gone now was the riot of Moorish gewgaws, replaced by a building of the

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purest reason and order (see figure 13). The new Trocadéro is perfectly symmetrical, a model of balance and harmony. Looking at it from the Seine side, one can see that the building is organized around a large open space – where the Moorish building once stood, one now finds a terrace that looks out over the Seine, the Eiffel Tower, and the Champs de Mars. Framing this space on either side are two large wings with classical columns, while directly under the terrace is a façade with nine metopes flanked by two monumental stairways that lead to pools, gardens, and fountains. Almost uniformly, commentators saw the new building as a rejection of foreign exoticism and a reaffirmation of classicism and Frenchness. Le Figaro praised the palace’s “classical style, capable of aging without going out of fashion.”45 Bâtiments et travaux publics noted that “the architectural ‘parti’ adopted by the authors is inspired by French tradition . . . characterized by the predominance of the horizontal. The alignment of the pilasters is reminiscent of old colonnades. The absence of capitals and fluting, the infrequency of sculpted motifs, the simplicity of cornices a est to its modernity. The elegance of the proportions is incontestable.46 Louis Gillet, the academician, claimed that in the new Trocadéro “all the mediocrities, the li le ornamental miseries, have been reabsorbed, erased, replaced by a great truly French harmony, which offers a complex mixture of urbanity and nobility, of courtesy and austerity.”47 The new Trocadéro, then, is a profoundly “classical” structure, one that is in line with the grand tradition of French architecture. And yet it is not an anachronism; the building’s authors have not slavishly imitated the past but have channelled its spirit into distinctly modern forms. Further, all the qualities associated with the building’s classicism are also bound up with its Frenchness; the two, in fact, are interpenetrated, inseparable. Only by throwing off foreign influences, specifically degenerate Orientalism, is the Trocadéro able to reclaim the balance, harmony, and nobility that is its patrimony. In a series of equivalences, then, French equals classical equals harmonious, balanced, and rational, and this entire equation is contrasted to foreign chaos. If we combine these various tropes with the anthropomorphism of the building that we observed previously, we can clearly see the allegory of national identity that the pavilion performs. As a person who is quintessentially French and classical, endowed with the key a ributes of order, proportion, and reason, the Trocadéro functions as an idealized French citizen. As an allegory of national identity the building projected an image of France into the international competition of national

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13 The Trocadéro (Palais de Chaillot). Photo © by author.

representations and gave the French spectators a model for their own subjective self-fashioning. The Trocadéro also sought to actively fashion French citizens through the medium of visuality, the key modality of classicism as identified by Waldemar George. The second major criticism of the old Trocadéro was its eclipsed view. In the remodelled building this problem was solved by destroying the central Moorish building and replacing it with a large barren terrace that offered a spectacular vantage point for the visual delectation of Paris. This new promontory was mentioned again and again in enthusiastic reviews of the structure. Louis Gillet bragged that “there is hardly any site that possesses such a commanding view,” and André Dezarrois, the museum official, noted, “It is from the new terrace of the new Palais de Trocadéro that the eye takes possession of this ephemeral and Babylonian city.”48 Art historian James Herbert sees this site of the gaze as the space of subjectivity-construction. “Looking down on the world embodied in the pavilions of the Champ de Mars,” writes Herbert, “the spectator regarded itself as the subject of that object.”49 Looking down from the Trocadéro hill, the spectator felt himself to be in a position of mastery, a transcendent God-like eye “taking

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possession” of the world. Imagining himself in this position of mastery, “the spectator imagined itself to be French,” saw himself as one with the anthropomorphized structure whose wings, like giant arms, seized the world in a gesture of embrace – or more likely domination.50 The architecture of the pavilion not only created an idealized citizen as a model for French spectators but actually made the spectators into this citizen: it put them in a space where they would identify with this citizen’s domineering gaze and see themselves as this citizen. The particular type of visual experience offered by the Trocadéro should perhaps be called panoramic. The panorama was a pre-cinematic visual entertainment invented around 1787 which presented spectators with landscape painting reproducing a 360-degree view. According to Stephan Oe ermann, “the panorama reproduced a new optical experience in pictorial form: the possibility of seeing in a full circle without obstruction, of having a broad overview, seeing beyond the previous limits of the horizon.”51 This seems to be the material analogue of the classicist visuality that emerges with David and other European painters in the late eighteenth century and finds a late spokesman in Waldemar George.52 The panorama, like classical vision, removes the spectator from the flux and confusion of the lifeworld and places him above the fray, in the position of the Godhead, from where one can see a higher order of coherence and rationality. According to Oe ermann, “‘Panoramic’ vision is primarily a way of ‘ge ing a grip’ on things, a grip that leaves what is observed undamaged, but surrounds and seizes the whole.”53 For the Frenchman looking down from the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot with classicist eyes, the panorama of contemporary Europe did not look chaotic and bewildering but was the model of perfect order, with all dangerous ambiguities and crossings rigidly defined and contained. Looking down from the Trocadéro hill, the spectator would see a stable Europe commi ed to peace and reconciliation; a technologically progressive France producing a variety of desirable commodities; and a happy, docile, and skilled workforce, labouring blissfully in both the colonial and French regional sections of the fair. The ordering of the classicist gaze was also apparent in the new museum (the Musée de l’Homme), where it tidily resolved the ambiguities of subject and object, Frenchman and colonial, that dominated the Old Troca. Like the Exposition in general, on the face of it the museum appeared liberal and progressive. Its effect, however, was in many ways racist and exclusionary. Clifford notes:

The Face of the Nation 121 The Musée de l’Homme’s African sculptures were displayed regionally along with other objects, their significance functionally interpreted. They did not find a place beside the Picassos of the Musée d’Art Moderne, located a few streets away. As we have seen, the emerging domains of modern art and ethnology were more distinct in 1937 than a decade before. It is not merely whimsical to question these apparently natural classifications. At issue is the loss of a disruptive and creative play of human categories and differences, an activity that does not simply display and comprehend the diversity of cultural orders but openly expects, allows, indeed desires its own disorientation.54

Where the Troca staged a dialogical encounter between centre and periphery, Frenchman and colonial, in which both were, in turn, subjects and objects of inquiry, in the new museum these relations were formalized and in the process impoverished. Henceforth the Frenchman would be the observing subject; the colonial, the observed object. And the dialogical exchange that might have questioned this entire taxonomic system would be rigorously proscribed. If, however, the Trocadéro a empted to construct a subject that was purely classical and French, with all of its dangerous elements externalized, projected to discrete sites where they could be contained and domesticated, like the colonials labouring blissfully on the Ile de Cygnes in the middle of the Seine, in practice it was unable to actualize this ideal subjectivity. Critics insisted on the Trocadéro’s unsullied Frenchness and expressed hysterical joy at the banishment of all foreign contaminants. These affirmations of purity, however, are nothing but instances of the most deliberate misrecognition, for the critics knew very well that the Trocadéro was not “pure.” In order to save money, the wings of the original Moorish “monstrosity” were retained and were integrated into the new structure, covered with a classical veneer.55 According to Michel Roux-Spitz, the architects “were demolishing without demolishing; they were preserving the worst of the Trocadéro: the form of its layout with its two rubber arms indefinitely stretched out, its indecisive form and a negligible decorative effect.”56 In L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, André Bloc complained that “conserving the shell of the building saves li le money and we become slaves to a layout that any self-respecting architect can only condemn.”57 In a piece titled “Deux palais pour un,” the arts journal Beaux-Arts complained about the use of the old building’s wings with their “weak and illogical curves.”58 It was recognized, then, that the building was a hybrid, a mongrel, and not the French

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purebred its champions claimed it to be. Instead of staying contained “out there” foreignness quite literally erupted in the middle of the homogeneous national self. What Is This Monument? Perhaps we can now return to Lipchitz’s Prometheus Strangling the Vulture and understand why it provoked such intense feelings of anger and outrage. For a spectator in 1937 (particularly a conservative spectator) a neoclassical artefact would have called up such highly charged issues as the coherence of national identity, racial purity, and the clarity and rationality of modern subjectivity. Lipchitz’s handling of the Prometheus myth was so outrageous because it not only frustrated traditional expectations of how these values should be represented, it seemed to explicitly reject the values themselves. Instead of the classicism of immutability and transparency valorized by George, Lipchitz’s piece invoked the fluidity and ambiguity of the baroque. The art historian Alfred Werner has argued: With its absolute minimum of facial and bodily expression, its abstract cloud shapes, the Prometheus is unmistakably of our time. A Bernini would have produced something more explicit, and yet his name comes to mind. Both artists have a theatrical conception, both dematerialize the plastic volume by dissolving the mass in fluid atmosphere, both give animation to their work by exploiting the play of light and shadow (which in the Prometheus, intensifies the notion of struggle). Both have that dynamic vitality that is alien to the static principle of classic sculpture.59

Lipchitz’s Prometheus rejects the verities of George’s classicism in favour of a radically different conception of personhood: undulating and flowing, he embodies an open subjectivity, a self defined by metamorphosis and change. Further, with his “absolute minimum of facial and bodily expression” he invokes the “primitive” figures of Africa and Oceania, deconstructing the opposition between the European classical self and the debased foreign other.60 Prometheus recapitulates the vision of French identity articulated by the Trocadéro: not the official identity championed by French conservatives but the uncanny doubled identity that emerged from the building’s inability to actualize the values that it putatively embodied. Instead of demonizing the fragmentation and foreignness that emerged on the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot,

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Lipchitz’s Prometheus celebrated it, turning to métissage and hybridity as the key values of a rearticulated Frenchness.61 For conservatives violently resisting these changes, Lipchitz’s vision was radically threatening. The threat was compounded by the artist’s ethnicity – his identity as both Jew and Eastern European. In the 1920s, France pursued a policy of increased immigration from Eastern Europe. While initially these immigrants were seen as preferable to the visible racial minorities that had been recruited before the war, this optimism and idealization soon wore off. By the mid-1920s, the reluctance of Eastern Europeans to assimilate “properly” sparked a revival of the rhetoric of invasion and siege that had been used to describe the German “assaults” on French culture during the war. For example, in 1925 the literary journal Cahier du mois devoted an entire issue to the harmful influence of the East on French culture, featuring interviews with prominent authors such as André Gide and Paul Valéry; the following year Henri Massis published a book titled The Defense of the West.62 Louis Vauxcelles struck the appropriate pitch of hysteria when he raved: A barbarian horde has rushed upon Montparnasse, descending on [the art galleries of] Rue La Boëtie from the cafés of the 14th arrondissement [Montparnasse], u ering raucous Germano-Slavic screams of war . . . Their culture is so recent! When they speak of Poussin, do they know the master? Have they ever really looked at a Corot? Or read a poem by La Fontaine? These are people from “somewhere else” who ignore and in the bo om of their hearts look down on what Renoir has called the gentleness of the French School – that is, our race’s virtue of tact.63

Within this Eastern European horde the Jews were singled out as particularly undesirable immigrants. In the aesthetic sphere this anti-Semitism manifested itself in debates over the “problem” of Jewish painting. Modernist art produced by Jewish painters was denounced as “messy,” “frenzied “ Romanticism, and Pierre Jaccard’s “L’Art grec et le spiritualisme hébreux” argued that the Semitic race was u erly incapable of producing any kind of naturalistic art and found its opposite in the formal idealism of the Greeks.64 By the Exposition of 1937 this popular sentiment against Eastern Europeans, Jews, and their hideous modernism had reached its boiling point. French writers of the Right began to express a virulent xenophobia (using rhetoric reminiscent of contemporaneous Nazi assaults on “degenerate art”) and sometimes even sympathy for the racist policies

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14 George Pla Lynes (1907–55), Artists in Exile, photograph taken on the occasion of an exhibition at Pierre Matisse Gallery, Seligmann, Eugene Berman. From le to right, first row: Ma a Echaurren, Ossip Zadkine, Yves Tanguy, M... © Estate George Pla Lynes. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

of the totalitarian regimes. Writing in the Revue hebdomadaire, René Gillouin asked “What is the School of Paris?” and went on to answer: “A rendezvous of métèques, flocking to Paris from their native Lithuania, Podolsk, and Czechoslovakia, where they didn’t have the slightest chance of a career.”65 Once in France, however, these talentless hacks succeeded “in a trice” by conspiring with a corrupt art market that used the techniques of modern advertising in order to dupe a gullible public. Gillouin lamented that foreigners succeeded when “hundreds of artists

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of good French race . . . vegetate all their lives in an obscure mediocrity.”66 And in the end, disgusted by the state of his nation, he could only admire Nazi Germany and fascist Italy for having the sense to “literally vomit” these outré modernists out of their countries.67 Under ferocious a ack by the journalistic, academic, and artistic Right, the city of Paris caved in and decided to remove Lipchitz’s statue. Le Matin gloated that “following our protest, the abominable third-rate statue in the Champs-Elysées will be removed from its pedestal.”68 Meanwhile, at a dinner hosted by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Georges Laroux praised the city’s decision, arguing that the removal had been necessary “for the artistic prestige of our country.”69 That spring Lipchitz watched as workmen took down the statue, quartered it and carted it away. Given the choice between fantasies of coherence and homogeneity, and the reality of dispersal and hybridity, Parisians resolutely chose the former. From Paris to New York Disturbed by the increasing intolerance within France and the looming threat of war from abroad, many members of the cosmopolitan avantgarde began to leave Paris. “I have decided to leave insane Europe,” wrote Alexander Archipenko as he departed for the United States. “We creative people feel that our effort is useless in a place that is destined for catastrophe.”70 Lipchitz himself fled Paris in May 1940 and arrived in New York on 13 June 1941. Within six months on either side of his arrival, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, André Masson, Ma a, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Ossip Zadkine, and Amédée Ozenfant had all done the same. A photograph, taken on the occasion of the exhibition Artists in Exile (Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, March 1942), shows many of them si ing together.71 At precisely this time, in his studio on Twenty-third Street, Lipchitz was hard at work on two of his most challenging reinterpretations of the classical canon: The Rape of Europa (1941) and Theseus and the Minotaur (1942).72 With the self-appointed heirs of Greece and Rome imposing order and purity on the Continent, a classicism stressing openness and cosmopolitanism had found a new home in another city of exiles.

Epilogue: The Ba le of the Tuileries: Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Memory in France

At the turn of the millennium, in the spirit of reflection occasioned by a time of endings and beginnings, French intellectuals engaged in a massive stocktaking of the previous century of Parisian art. In classic fin-desiècle fashion, the conclusions reached were overwhelmingly gloomy and apocalyptic: for a city that had started the century as the undisputed leader of modern art, many found Paris, at the turn of the new century, sadly outmoded and hopelessly out of touch with contemporary developments. While debates raged in the press and public forums which a empted to account for this spectacular fall, however, another project was taking shape in the capital which presented an optimistic counterbalance to the prevailing pessimism of these discussions. Commissioned by the state, the abstract sculptor Alain Kirili was organizing the introduction of modern sculpture to the Tuileries garden, a central site in the cultural landscape of Paris which had, to this point, been dominated by traditional and neoclassical works. More than just an update or faceli of the garden, Kirili saw his project as nothing less than a celebration of the city’s maligned modernist past and a springboard for continued innovation in the new century. In the debates that raged in France in the years leading up to the millennium, three distinct positions emerged on the meaning and legacy of the modernist past. The least radical of these identified the Second World War as the turning point in Paris’s cultural fortunes. As noted in the last chapter, with the onset of hostilities many key modernists fled Paris and rese led in New York City. Although the relationship between the two cities has remained a controversial topic, many have seen this exodus as the catalyst for a major reorientation of the international cultural landscape – the moment when Paris slipped into decline

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and was displaced by New York as the new capital of modern art.1 This moment was crucial, however, not only because of shi s in the artistic population, but also because of the traumas and moral ambiguities of the Nazi Occupation. With Paris invaded and a massive swastika hanging from the Eiffel Tower, officials began a major assault on the art world. Legislation was passed authorizing the confiscation of Jewish property and the seizure of works of art, as a consequence of which some 22,000 pieces were shipped to Germany.2 A series of propaganda exhibits was staged in key Parisian museums – the “Exposition antimaçonnique” at the Petit Palais in 1940; “Le Juif et la Fance” at the Palais Berlitz in 1941; and the “Exposition Internationale: le Bolchévisme contre l’Europe” at the Salle Wagram in 1942 – while in an echo of Entartete Kunst canvases by “degenerates” such as Picasso, Miró, Picabia, Klee, and Ernst were slashed and burned in the gardens of the Musée du Jeu de Paume. While Beaux-Arts magazine promoted the official anti-modernist and anti-Semitic position, Jews were secretly rounded up and dispatched to the death camps in the east, including sixty-four artists of the School of Paris.3 Further, a number of the artists who remained in Paris cultivated associations that would brand them, in the minds of some, as collaborators. Arno Breker, Hitler’s favourite sculptor and the winner of important state commissions in Nazi Germany, studied in Paris between 1927 and 1933 and formed close friendships with both Maillol and Despiau. During the Occupation he returned to Paris as part of an official Nazi-Vichy cultural exchange. In 1941 he organized a tour of German cities by a group of prominent French sculptors such as Despiau, Bouchard, Landowski, Lejeune, and Belmondo. The following year, a major retrospective of Breker’s works was held in the Orangerie in occupied Paris, and the opening was a ended by Despiau and Maillol among others. None other than Jean Cocteau wrote a fulsome publicity article in the newspaper Comoedia entitled “Salute to Arno Breker.”4 That same year a monograph on Breker was authored by Despiau, while in 1943 the German artist travelled to Banyuls-sur-mer to execute a bust of his friend Maillol. Most disturbingly, apparently Maillol accepted a commission from Hitler to design a fountain for Berlin, but died in a car accident before he had begun the work.5 For those articulating this position, the forties represented a depressing spectacle of flight, collaboration, and the diminishment of Parisian culture. But while the Second World War seemed like the evident moment of shi to some, others had different ideas, most notably Philippe Dagen,

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art critic of Le Monde, and Jean Clair – critic, curator, and former director of the Picasso museum.6 For Dagen the 1940s were not the beginning of the decline, but the fulfilment of a tendency that had started earlier in the century. Elaborating a more radical position that resonates with the perspectives of critics such as Kenneth Silver and Christopher Green, Dagen argued that in the a ermath of the First World War Parisian culture fell under the influence of the reactionary Right with its ideology of French Latin identity and its aesthetics of neoclassicism, and it is this “bi er nostalgia” that is the crucial step leading to the debacle of fascist aesthetics in the 1930s and 1940s and the decadence of contemporary French art. The ideological “refusal” of cosmopolitan modernist art was paralleled by an institutional refusal: collectors avoided contemporary art, particularly the French state which fell fi y years behind in the nineteenth century and never recovered. Dagen’s main interlocutor was Jean Clair, who elaborated an even more radical and pessimistic view of modernism. For Clair, the quest to find the moment of crisis for the avant-garde was a red herring, because the avant-garde itself was the problem. In his book, The Responsibility of the Artist, he argued that it was a “perversion” modelled on the utopias of the extreme Le and Right, which it also furnished with the main articles of their faith. “All I want to understand,” noted Clair, “is why the students of the Bauhaus built Auschwitz. Well, it’s the same taste: for the tabula rasa, the massive remaking.”7 Far from being creative and progressive, for Clair, modernism was destructive and authoritarian at its very core. Somewhat surprisingly, in this gloomy atmosphere of reflection on the meaning and legacy of Parisian modernism, a rather remarkable project was initiated. In 1986 the French government commissioned a sculpture from Alain Kirili, a Parisian sculptor living in New York. In 1996 the piece, Grand commandement blanc, was reinstalled on the fringe of the Tuileries garden near the Orangerie museum. During the dedication Kirili noted his excitement at bringing twentieth-century sculpture into contact with the art of the past, and wondered out loud why there was not more modern art in the Tuileries. Inspired by these comments, the Minister of Culture, Philippe Douste-Blazy, asked the sculptor on the spot if he would be willing to undertake the task of bringing modern sculpture into the garden and Kirili agreed. What followed was a long process of negotiation, alliance building, and political wrangling. A number of cultural conservatives (most notably Jean Clair) opposed the project, and at one point, seemingly in defiance of Kirili’s vision, two works by Paul Belmondo (in the kind of neoclassical style vilified

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by Philippe Dagen) were “implanted” on the “triumphal way,” the main thoroughfare of the Tuileries. But in the end the Ministry of Culture intervened and Kirili’s project went ahead. What the artist produced was not a predictable retrospective on modernist sculpture, but an idiosyncratic and subjective collection of works designed to make a historical and philosophical intervention in the debates about Paris and modern art. “I want to defend modern art in the Tuileries,” he noted. “Not postmodern art. Modern art. At a time when the extreme Right is pressing so hard on culture, I want to say yes, we are the capital of modern art.”8 Kirili assembled a group of works by artists such as Auguste Rodin, Henri Laurens, Henry Moore, Germaine Richier, Alberto Giacome i, Max Ernst, Jean Dubuffet, David Smith, and Louise Bourgeois. Acting “like an artist, not a commissioner,” he skilfully arranged them throughout the garden in order to create what he has called “a symphony in three dimensions for twentieth- and twenty-first-century sculpture.”9 The metaphor is apt because in this installation Kirili deploys many of the tropes and strategies of deterritorializing musicality that we traced in the previous chapters. There is, first of all, the cosmopolitanism of the assembled artists. The art historian Robert Storr has noted that the works were realized by artists from “Italy, Mali, Poland, and the United States as well as France.” While many of the artists lived in France or had connections to French aesthetic traditions, “what counts, finally, is not the nationality of the artists and the links that may be found between them and France, but the internationalism of the whole, an internationalism that reinforces the status of each of those who were solicited to provide work.”10 This is not the “bi er nostalgia” that insists on seeing art in essentially national terms, but a vision of modernism as a cosmopolitanism, with Paris as its capital. There is further the work of estrangement that this collection of works performs on the French cultural tradition. The garden and its environs are a particularly dense site of French culture and history. The garden was established in the sixteenth century by Catherine de Medici. During the reign of Louis XIV it was remade by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre in the French classical style perfected at Versailles. From the time of the Revolution, the garden was increasingly a space devoted to public leisure and was decorated by numerous neoclassical statues such as: Nymphe (1866) and Diane Chasseresse (1869) by Louis Auguste Lévêque; Périclès distribuant les couronnes aux artistes by Jean-Baptiste Debay Pėre (1835); and Le Serment de Spartacus by Louis

130 Foreign Modernism

Ernest Barrias, (1869). While modern art was largely absent from the garden, in the mid 1960s André Malraux, then Minister of Culture, made a concession to modernism by adding numerous works by Aristide Maillol. However, far from disrupting the coherence and harmony of the garden, the Maillol statues merely cemented the identity of the site as a material embodiment of French classicism. Further, the garden is intimately connected to other sites and works central to deep-seated conceptions of French identity. Two great museums bracket the Tuileries – the Louvre on one end, bastion of traditional works from antiquity to the Romantics, and the Orangerie on the other, home to Monet’s famous water lily series. And the triumphal way is part of a greater axis that continues to Napoleon’s arch, the Egyptian obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, and finally the Arc de Triomphe. In an interview with Alain Kirili, Julia Kristeva has addressed the fashion in which the sculptor’s installation engages this site of history and culture. “This space,” she notes, “invites us to a dialogue between the Tuileries, site of popular tradition situated in the heart of Paris, the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde, and the works of the contemporary artists that you chose.” This perspective is seconded by Kirili himself. “If I wanted to have my sculpture installed in the Tuileries,” he replies to Kristeva, “it was so it could dialogue with Monet’s white flowers and the obelisk in the Place de Concorde.” What is the effect of this dialogue? Kristeva a empts to anatomize the experience. “I like to imagine that this installation can initiate a sort of meditation,” she notes. “All art is a kind of thought, but perhaps we see this most clearly with modern art, if we will admit that thought is not calculation, or adaptation, or integration, but a revolt in the etymological sense of the word, that is to say simultaneously a return to memory and an innovation, a disclosure of the past and a rebirth. All of the works present here summon memory and lead it to a renewal.”11 The kind of thinking embodied in modern art, then, is the very opposite of restorative nostalgia, where the mind is led back to a comfortable set of established connections, resonances, and identities. It precisely troubles those connections by leaping forward into the unexpected, unknown, unthought. It is, in short, a kind of estrangement. In her review of Kirili’s installation Karen Wilkins has demonstrated how this works. Describing the sculptures, she comes first to Kirili’s own Grand commandement blanc, “a sca er of white-painted geometric forms, each raised on a short plinth, suggestive now of some alphabet, now of an arcane equation of likes and unlikes, now of a gathering of

Epilogue: The Ba le of the Tuileries  131

15 Alain Kirili, Grand commandement blanc 1985. Jardin des Tuilieries. Photo © by author.

alert, frontal figures.” For Wilkins there is a similitude between “the floating lilies of Monet’s Nympheas and the hovering elements of Kirili’s sculpture against the green lawn,” and she sees a “casual dialogue” formed “between the small, crisp components of Kirili’s sculpture in the foreground, and the obelisk and the other rhetorical flourishes of the Place de la Concorde in the background.” But if the work calls up these venerable icons of the French tradition, “the economy, the animation, and the presentation of elements ‘on sticks’ all acknowledge Kirili’s admiration for David Smith.”12 Grand commandement blanc, then, brings the mind back to the canon of French art and simultaneously causes it to leap ahead to the work of the American Abstract Expressionist sculptor. The dialogue established between these unlikely interlocutors serves a deterritorializing function. Seen through the lens of Smith’s work, the works of the French tradition begin to appear alien, unfamiliar. The strange echoes and resonances between the works of the French tradition and those of a cosmopolitan modernism suggest, not the clarity and distinctness of these two categories, but their instability and porousness. This recognition is an experience that Kristeva

132 Foreign Modernism

16 Louise Bourgeois, The Welcoming Hands 1996. Jardin des Tuilieries. Photo © by author.

has wri en about: “strangely the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. A symptom that precisely turns ‘we’ into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible. The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities.”13 The alien, then, is not simply something out there, but something at the very heart of the supposedly coherent and homogeneous self or community. The complex viewing strategies initiated by Kirili’s installation invite this recognition. They encourage a defamiliarization, that is, they challenge viewers to see their home and themselves as unfamiliar, unheimlich. For Kristeva, this uncanny deterritorialization can function as a “destructuration of the self that may either remain as a psychotic symptom or fit in as an opening toward the new, as an a empt to tally with the incongruous.”14 It can, in other words, manifest itself as a desperate rearguard action to reestablish homogeneity, or serve as an invitation for a radical reinvention

Epilogue: The Ba le of the Tuileries  133

of the self, an opening onto something new and unprecedented, an opportunity for creativity and invention. This is precisely what is thematized in a work that might stand as the metaphorical centre of Kirili’s Tuileries installation – Louise Bourgeois’s The Welcoming Hands. The work features ten sculptures of bronze hands laid on granite stones. Clearly echoing Rodin’s hand sculptures, the work explicitly addresses the theme of displacement that we saw in more coded form in Rilke’s metabolization of Rodin. This connection was made by Robert Storr during his address at the inauguration of Kirili’s installation in the Tuileries, 29 June 2000. Storr noted: “Briefly installed in a park in the south of Manha an, on the side of the river and in view of Ellis Island, the island that millions of immigrants passed through on their first arrival to the United States, the nodes or groups of hands that make up The Welcoming Hands are in a sense emblematic of immigration – gestures of welcome that the artist herself received from strangers when she arrived for the first time in America.”15 Sited in view of Ellis Island, the quintessential icon of immigration, the work is clearly a commentary on migration and displacement, key experiences of the twentieth century. But Storr continues his reading, pointing out a further complexity. “Now, definitively installed in the heart of her hometown,” he notes, “these sculptures acquire a new set of connotations, since they embody the welcome offered to someone who is back a er a long absence.”16 This is a sensitive reading, but it does not go quite far enough in unpacking these connotations. For who is this someone? The statue now represents, I would argue, not the Frenchman, foreigner in America; nor the stranger, foreigner in France; but an even more complex situation, the Frenchman foreigner in France. It thematizes the deterritorialization of the French self so eloquently described by Kristeva, the recognition that at heart we are all strangers: frail (note the hands represented are those of the old and very young) and in need of succour, welcome, and community. In her conversation with Alain Kirili, Kristeva notes that the modernist works in the Tuileries “remind us of our past and suggest the times to come.” The Welcoming Hands embodies precisely this split temporality. Witness to a moment of ever increasing mobility and the presence of strangers, o en perceived as alien and threatening, the work looks back to the modernist past with its celebration of cosmopolitanism and diversity and projects itself into the future, a utopian future of tolerance and community that it welcomes with open arms.

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Notes

Introduction 1 2 3 4 5

Silver, Esprit de Corps, 3–4. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 87, 156, 295. Ibid., 267. The following discussion of the symptomatic, critical, and transformative registers of texts is indebted to the work of Dominick LaCapra. See, for example, History, Politics, and the Novel, or Soundings in Critical Theory. 6 Silver, Esprit de Corps, 135. 7 Ibid., 130, 257. 8 Mercer, introduction, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, 12. 9 Silver, Esprit de Corps, 239–40; emphasis mine. 10 Ibid., 253, 137. 11 The term “critical cosmopolitanism” has been used by Walter Mignolo and Rebecca Walkowitz. Kobena Mercer also titles one of the sections of his book Cosmopolitan Modernisms, “Critically Cosmopolitan.” Walkowitz has argued that Bruce Robbins’s “cosmopolitics,” Melba Cuddy-Keane’s “critical globalization,” James Clifford’s “discrepant cosmopolitanism,” and Homi Bhabha’s “vernacular cosmopolitanism” should be considered cognates of this term (Cosmopolitan Style, 8–17). 12 For good general introductions to this field, the socio-historical context of its origin, and its ambiguities, see Braziel and Mannur, “Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies,” in Theorizing Diaspora; Mercer, introduction in Cosmopolitan Modernisms; and Walkowitz, “Introduction: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Modernist Narrative,” in Cosmopolitan Style.

136 Notes to pages 8–10 13 Mercer, introduction, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, 9. 14 For discussions of cosmopolitanism as rootless world citizenry, see Mercer, introduction, 10 and Paul Overy “White Walls, White Skins: Cosmopolitanism and Colonialism in Inter-war Modernist Architecture,” also in Cosmopolitan Modernisms, ed. Mercer. 15 Walkowitz identifies three main strands of the contemporary discourse on cosmopolitanism: “a philosophical tradition that promotes allegiance to a transnational or global community, emphasizing a detachment from local cultures and the interests of the nation; a more recent anthropological tradition that emphasizes multiple or flexible a achments to more than one nation or community, resisting conceptions of allegiance that presuppose consistency and uncritical enthusiasm; and a vernacular or popular tradition that values the risks of social deviance and the resources of consumer culture and urban mobility.” Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style, 9. As examples of the “cosmopolitan universalist” (or “planetary humanist”) tradition, see Posnock, Color and Culture, and Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism?” in Respondents, For Love of Country, ed. Cohen. For the anthropological tradition, see most notably Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, and Routes. For the vernacular tradition, see Nava, “Cosmopolitan Modernity,” and Visceral Cosmopolitanism. As an index of the deep contemporary divisions over this term, consider the role of the “aesthetic” in understandings of cosmopolitanism. While authors such as Vinay Dharwadker and Samuel Scheffler have separated and marginalized the aesthetic dimensions of cosmopolitanism in favour of a focus on the political, writers such as Bruce Robbins and Rebecca Walkowitz have argued instead for the central role of aesthetic experience. See Dharwadker, introduction to Cosmopolitan Geographies; Scheffler, “Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism”; and Robbins, Feeling Global. 16 In addition to the works already referenced above, see Bhabha, The Location of Culture. 17 James Clifford, “Mixed Feelings,” in Cosmopolitics, ed. Cheah and Robbins, 365. 18 Clifford, Routes, 37. 19 Mercer, introduction, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, 8. 20 Ibid., 18. 21 Ibid., 7. 22 Ibid., 9. 23 Clifford, Routes, 30–1. 24 See, for example, Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism” and “A Politics of Neologism: Aimé Césaire,” both in The Predicament of Culture;

Notes to pages 10–15 137 Archer-Straw, Negrophilia; Blake, Le Tumulte Noir; Stovall, Paris Noir; and Silver and Golan, The Circle of Montparnasse. 25 LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 32–3. 1. Travelling Culture: Rilke, Rodin, and the Poetics of Displacement

1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Portions of this chapter were previously published as “‘A Fragment from Another Context’: Modernist Classicism and the Urban Uncanny in Rainer Maria Rilke.” Comparative Literature 62.3 (July 2010): 262–82. © 2010 University of Oregon. Clifford, Routes, 43. Ibid. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 277. Antoine Marès, “Pourquoi des étrangers á Paris?” in L’École de Paris, 138– 47. The literature on France and foreigners is vast. See, for example, Lequin, Histoire des étrangers et de l’immigration en France; Kaspi and Marès, Le Paris des étrangers; Marès and Milza , Le Paris des étrangers depuis 1945; and Monnier and Vovelle, Un art sans frontiers. This is not to say that cultural reasons for immigration and economic and political ones were mutually exclusive. Many artists had complex political and/or economic reasons for coming to Paris in addition to their cultural motives. Lipchitz, My Life in Sculpture, 4. Marès, “Pourquoi des étrangers á Paris?” 144. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. Quoted in Bougault, Paris Montparnasse, 14. Ibid., 42. Marès, “Pourquoi des étrangers á Paris?” 143. József Csáky and Giorgio de Chirico arrived the same way. Prater, A Ringing Glass, 88. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 98. See Prater, A Ringing Glass, 173; and Huyssen, “Paris/Childhood,” 115. This approach is well justified by comments the poet himself made about the talking cure. While he steadfastly refused to be analysed, Rilke claimed that his work was “nothing but a self-treatment of the same sort” as analysis. See Kleinbard, The Beginning of Terror, 9. Despite these suggestive comments Rilke scholarship has traditionally been hesitant to explore the connection between Rilke’s writing and psychoanalytic issues. Huyssen has observed that “the insights of psychoanalysis have by and large been

138 Notes to pages 15–24

16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

shunned by Rilke scholars as irrelevant,” and Kleinbard has added that “[a] number of recent commentators on Rilke’s work continue to divorce the poetry from the poet’s life, as if any a empt to read the Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus, and other great poems by Rilke with understanding enhanced by consideration of his life and by psychoanalytic insights demeans the poetry and deprives it of proper aesthetic appreciation.” See Huyssen, “Paris/Childhood,” 116, and Kleinbard, The Beginning of Terror, 13. Huyssen, “Paris/Childhod,” 123. Kleinbard, The Beginning of Terror, 4–5. See Cobban, A History of Modern France, 3:86. On Maurras, see Antliff, Inventing Bergson, 16–38; Cobban, A History of Modern France, 86–90; Co ington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, 54–67; Marilyn McCully, “Mediterranean Classicism and Sculpture in the Early Twentieth Century,” in On Classic Ground, ed. Cowling, and Mundy, 324–32. L’Action francaise, no. 175, 1 octobre 1906, p. 173. Unsigned commentary on the “Morel report” of the Groupe toulousain d'action francaise. Co ington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, 59. Cited in ibid. Ibid., 55. Maurice Barrès, “Contre les étrangers,” in L’oeuvre de Maurice Barrès, 20 vols (Paris 1965–9), 2:161. Co ington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, 58. Robert Hass, “Looking for Rilke,” introduction to Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. by Mitchell, xi. See ibid. and Prater, A Ringing Glass, 266, 363, 18. Kleinbard, The Beginning of Terror, 7. Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Mitchell, 38. All further references will be given in the text as MLB. For different a empts to connect the uncanny with the figure of the foreigner, see Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves; and Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, 291–322. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 359. Huyssen, “Paris/Childhood,” 126. Ibid, 137. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Fünf Gesänge, August 1914,” in Gesammelte Werke, 3:389–97. Translation in Prater, A Ringing Glass, 252. Prater, A Ringing Glass, 258.

Notes to pages 25–35 139 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48

Ibid., 283. Ibid., 293–5. Ibid., 297. Rilke, Rodin, 19. Herea er referenced in the text as R. In her fascinating chapter on Rodin in Art Nouveau in fin-de-siècle France Debora Silverman provides an interpretation of the sculptor’s work that may serve as a useful supplement to Rilke’s more abstract reading. Silverman historicizes Rodin and argues that his understanding of the body and subjectivity was greatly influenced by the psychologie nouvelle of Charcot. Rodin’s vision of the body as constant motion was (at least in part) informed by Charcot’s theories on the corporal expression of nervous overstimulation due to the excessive sensory barrage of the modern city. The parallels and connections to Rilke are obvious and extremely suggestive (229–70). Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 12. Ibid., 12 Ibid., 13. J.B. Leishman, introduction in Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 17. For sonnets not reproduced in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, see Die Sone e an Orpheus, geschrieben als ein grab-mal für Wera Ouckama Knoop (Leipzig: InselVerlag, 1946). Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 498. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 113. Ibid., 87. See Prater, A Ringing Glass, 363.

2. Becoming Minor: Archipenko, Bergson, and Deterritorialization 1 Hughes, Consciousness and Society, 33. 2 Ibid., 41, 38. 3 See Hughes, Consciousness and Society; Cobban, A History of Modern France, 3:85; Co ington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, 54ff. 4 For a general account, see Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France 1900–1914. 5 Deleuze and Gua ari, Ka a, 16. 6 Ibid. 7 Jay, Downcast Eyes, 69. 8 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 128. 9 Ibid., 129 and 132.

140 Notes to pages 36–42 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Ibid., 125. Ibid., 100. Jay, Downcast Eyes, 202. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 15. Ibid. Cited in Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism, 13. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 12–13. See Jay, Downcast Eyes, 203–8; Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Radical Modernism, 13–16; Antliff, Inventing Bergson; and Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–1914. See Co ington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, 57; and Hughes, Consciousness and Society, 114. Antliff, Inventing Bergson, 21–3. It is incorrect to suggest that Bergson was universally vilified by the Right. While some factions violently opposed him, others found him useful for their anti-rationalist crusades. Maurice Barrès, for example, rejected Cartesian rationalism and inclined to Bergsonian intuitionism to undergird his position: “The procedures of regular argumentation give the illusion of scientific method,” wrote Barrès in 1900, “but they lead us nowhere. Establishing the idea of France on logic does not satisfy me; I want them to be founded on feeling” (Co ington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, 56). Similarly, there are important Bergsonian aspects of Georges Sorel’s critique of bourgeois democracy and doctrine of class integralism. For an extensive consideration of Bergson’s complex position in French intellectual life, see Antliff, Inventing Bergson. Benda, Belphégor, foreword (unpaginated); herea er cited in the text as B. The following discussion of the École and academic classicism relies heavily on Ellio , “Sculpture in France and Classicism, 1910–1939,” 283–95. Clearly this is not true across the board. Modernist critics such as Guillaume Apollinaire and (the early) Waldemar George supported and publicized avant-garde sculpture from the very beginning. Ellio , “Sculpture in France and Classicism, 1910–1939,” 289. Etienne Aureillan, “Maillol et Despiau: glories nationals,” Insurgé (23 June 1937): 5. George, Maillol, 62. Cladel, Aristide Maillol, 127. Frère, Conversations avec Maillol, 273. Cladel, Aristide Maillol. Ibid., 148.

Notes to pages 42–50 141 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Rewald, Aristide Maillol, 12. Cladel, Aristide Maillol, 146. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 141. Denis, Aristide Maillol, cited in On Classic Ground, ed. Cowling and Mundy, 148. Cited in On Classic Ground, ed. Cowling and Mundy, 149. Claude Orland, “Maillol,” Combat (November 1937). Cladel, Aristide Maillol, 74. Rewald, Aristide Maillol, 14. Cladel, Aristide Maillol, 130–1. Cowling and Mundy, On Classic Ground, 153 (Elizabeth Cowling’s catalogue notes on Maillol in On Classic Ground). Ibid., 156. Cited in ibid. Cited in Karshan, Archipenko: International Visionary, 110. See Michaelsen and Guralnik, Alexander Archipenko, 18. Karshan, Archipenko: International Visionary, 110. On the Trocadéro, see chapter 5. I deal with Apollinaire extensively in the next chapter. Archipenko, Archipenko, 15. Ibid., 89, note 68. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 89, note 69. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 21. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 61. Deleuze and Gua ari, Ka a, 17. Ibid. Archipenko, Archipenko, 28. Deleuze and Gua ari, Ka a, 19. Wight, Alexander Archipenko, 22.

142 Notes to pages 50–62 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Cited in Michaelson and Guralnik, Alexander Archipenko, 21. Ibid., 24. Archipenko, Archipenko, 56. Michaelson and Guralnik, Alexander Archipenko, 25. Archipenko, Archipenko, 53. Cited in ibid., 56. Cited in ibid., 57. Ibid. Ibid., 58. See ibid., 53, and Michaelson and Guralnik, Alexander Archipenko, 25. Archipenko, Archipenko, 53. Deleuze and Gua ari, Ka a, 22. Cited in Michaelson and Guralnik, Alexander Archipenko, 25. Archipenko, Archipenko, 53.

3. The Aeneid of Modern Times: Hybridity and Cosmopolitanism in Parade 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Quoted in Cabanne, Pablo Picasso, 209. See Silver, Esprit de Corps, 93–103. Ibid., 104. Kobena Mercer, “Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination: The Aesthetics of Black Independent Film in Britain,” in Theorizing Diaspora, ed. Braziel and Mannur, 255. The historical and theoretical literature on hybridity is vast. As an introduction, see Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Culture, Globalization and the World System, ed. King, 41–68; G.C. Spivak “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Williams and Chrisman, 66–111; and Young, Colonial Desire. Quoted in Bougault, Paris Montparnasse, 88. Antoine Marès, “Pourquoi des étrangers á Paris?” in L’École de Paris, 141. See Patai, Encounters, 174–5. Cited in Silver, Esprit de Corps, 4. Ibid., 6–7. Cited in Silver, Esprit de Corps, 8. Co ington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, 58. Ibid. I use quotation marks because the relationship between the two men is ambiguous and has been the object of intense debate. I return to this issue later in this chapter.

Notes to pages 63–7 143 14 Interestingly, this entertaining took place at Hôtel Biron, a wonderful but dilapidated building where Cocteau rented a room. Two other famous residents of the Biron at this time were Auguste Rodin and Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke was at this very moment writing Malte Laurids Brigge, but it appears that the two men did not know each other until later. See Steegmuller, Cocteau, 39 and 42. 15 Cited in Steegmuller, Cocteau, 69. 16 See ibid., 82. 17 Ibid., 190. 18 Faure, Du néoclassicisme musical, 166, 167, 312. The union sacrée was a call to different factions of French society to put aside their differences and present a united front in the defence of nation during wartime. In Kenneth Silver’s words, this was “far less a true non-partisanship than the triumph of the Right and the capitulation of the Le effected under the aegis of nonpartisanship.” See Esprit de Corps, 109. For a discussion of nostalgia, see chapter 4. 19 Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual, 70–85. 20 This is not to say that Cocteau was consistently radical or subversive in his work. See chapter 4 for an extensive discussion of his frequent ideological shi s. 21 Silver, Esprit de Corps, 119. 22 It is important to note, however, that Silver does not see the avant-garde ballet as radical in intention. He notes that the “authors’ intention had been to pique, to surprise, but finally to charm the audience and not to antagonize it. Cocteau, Picasso, Satie, and Diaghilev had been neither oblivious to the audience’s reaction nor disdainful of it: they had merely miscalculated it.” See Esprit de Corps, 119. My interpretation is in clear disagreement with this position. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 119–21. 25 Cited in ibid., 117. 26 See, of course, Bakhtin Rabelais and His World. In this magisterial work Bakhtin notes that “the contents of the carnival-grotesque element, its artistic, heuristic, and unifying forces were well preserved … in the commedia dell’arte (which kept a close link with its carnival origin)” (34). According to Bakhtin, Carnival experience, “opposed to all that was ready-made and completed, to all pretense of immutability, sought a dynamic expression; it demanded ever changing, playful, undefined forms. All the symbols of the carnival idiom are filled with this pathos of change

144 Notes to pages 68–71

27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34

and renewal, with the sense of the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities” (11). A celebration of constant change and hybridity, the carnivalesque “reflects a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of birth and death, growth and becoming … The other indispensable trait is ambivalence. For in this image we find both poles of transformation, the old and the new, the dying and the procreating, the beginning and the end of metamorphosis” (24). Bakhtin makes clear that this is especially true of the carnivalesque conception of subjectivity. The carnivalesque self is the “ever unfinished, ever creating body … The unfinished and open body.” In the commedia dell’arte tradition this is o en represented by way of the mask or the disguise: “The mask is connected with the joy of change and reincarnation, with the gay relativity and with the merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself. The mask is related to transition, metamorphoses, the violation of natural boundaries, to mockery and familiar nicknames. It contains the playful element of life; it is based on a peculiar interrelation of reality and image, characteristic of the most ancient rituals and spectacles” (39–40). Cocteau seems to be signalling his debt to this tradition of carnivalesque gaiety when he notes that “our wish is that the public may consider Parade as a work which conceals poetry beneath the coarse outer skin of slapstick. Laughter is natural to Frenchmen: it is important to keep this in mind and not to be afraid to laugh even at this most difficult time.” Cited in Steegmuller, Cocteau, 183. On Wa eau, see Norman Bryson’s excellent “Wa eau and Reverie,” in Word and Image, 58–88. On the difference between “analytic” and “synthetic” cubism, see Silver, Esprit de Corps, 349ff. See Cooper, Picasso Theatre, 31. Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual, 78. Ibid., 74. For an account of the subversive character of the music halls in the nineteenth century (and official anxiety about them), see Clark, “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” in The Painting of Modern Life, 205ff. Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual, 79–82. For jazz in Paris, see Blake, Le Tumulte Noir; Archer-Straw, Negrophilia; and Jackson, Making Jazz French. Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual, 84. In this respect consider Franz Ka a’s roughly contemporaneous novel Amerika. It is significant that Ka a would choose to set his immigrant fantasia in New York City. The novel also demonstrates a profound unawareness of the geography of the United States: in the novel San Francisco is in

Notes to pages 71–6 145

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45

46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

the East and New York and Boston are separated by the Hudson River. See Ka a, Amerika. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 177 and 189. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Parade,” reproduced in full in Steegmuller, Cocteau, 513–14. Ibid., 513. Silver, Esprit de Corps, 238. Guillaume Apollinaire, “The New Spirit and the Poets,” trans. Francis Steegmuller. Reprinted as an appendix to Steegmuller, Apollinaire, 333. Ibid., 336. Ibid. Born Wilhelm de Kostowitzky in Rome to a Polish mother and an unknown father, Apollinaire held Russian citizenship (as Poland at that time was part of the Russian Empire) but lived his entire life in France and took a French name. His status as a foreigner, and especially as an Eastern European, o en put him into a fragile position in his adopted country. He was a acked by xenophobes and anti-Semites (even though he was Roman Catholic, French anti-Semites “couldn’t imagine a Pole not being a Jew” wrote Apollinaire) and when he was wrongly accused of stealing the Mona Lisa and provisionally released from prison there was talk of him being expelled from France as an “undesirable foreigner” (Steegmuller, Apollinaire, 223 and 229). Apollinaire, “The New Spirit and the Poets,” 333. Ibid., 340. See Apollinaire, “Les mamelles de tirésias,” in Oeuvres poetiques, 865–913. For a discussion, see Cecily Mackworth, Guillaume Apollinaire and the Cubist Life, 222–3. Apollinaire, “The New Spirit and the Poets,” 333. Ibid. Ibid., 334. For a history of the Fantômas novels and films, see Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism, 42–58; and “Serial Killings: Fantômas, Feuillade, and the MassCulture Genealogy of Surrealism,” The Velvet Light Trap: A Critical Journal of Film and Television 37 (March 1996): 51–7. Walz, Pulp Surrealism, 70–3. See Guillaume Apollinaire, “Fantômas,” Mercure de France, 16 July 1914, 422–3. See Walz, “Serial Killings,” for a discussion. See Walz, Pulp Surrealism, 58–62. See ibid., 70.

146 Notes to pages 77–84 54 Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism” in The Predicament of Culture, 117–18. 55 Michel Leiris, “Kalifala Sidibé Exhibition (Galerie Georges Bernheim),” Documents 6 (1929), 343. For a discussion, see Denis Hollier, “The Question of Lay Ethnography [The Entropological Wild Card],” in Undercover Surrealism, ed. Ades and Baker, 60–1. 56 Georges Bataille, “Le cheval académique,”Documents 1 (1929): 27–31. Translated as “The Academic Horse,” by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson, in Undercover Surrealism, ed. Ades and Baker, 237–9. 57 C.F.B. Miller, “Archaeology,” Undercover Surrealism, ed. Ades and Baker, 48. 4. A Call to Order: Nostalgia and the Vicissitudes of Cosmopolitan Identity in Igor Stravinsky 1 Adorno, “Band 12: Philosophie der neuen Musik: Strawinsky und die Restauration,” in Theodor W. Adorno Gesammelte Schri en, 10192. 2 Adorno, “Band 10: Kulturkritik und Gesellscha I/II: Wozu noch Philosophie,” in Gesammelte Schri en, 8152. 3 See, for example, Boym, The Future of Nostalgia; Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern” (Toronto: University of Toronto, University of Toronto English Library, 1998 [cited 15 October 2007]), h p://www .library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html; and Andreas Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins,” Grey Room 23 (spring 2006); 6–21. I myself have broached the issue of nostalgia in several different publications. See “Nostalgic Medicine from a Blue Bo le,” Krytyka 12 (January–February 2008): 1–2: and “Under the Blue Bo le: Habsburg Nostalgia in Post-Soviet L’viv,” in From Moment to Monument (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag, 2009), 125–38. 4 Cited in Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 3. 5 Steegmuller, Cocteau, 190. 6 Stravinsky and Cra , Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, 104–5. 7 Contemporary musicological research has determined that many of these fragments were in fact wrongly a ributed to Pergolesi. 8 Cited in Walsh, Stravinsky, 307. 9 Cited in White, Stravinsky, 286. 10 Cooper, Picasso Theatre, 44–5. 11 Stravinsky, Chronicle of My Life, 135 and 136. 12 Ibid.

Notes to pages 84–91 147 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Ibid., 136–7. White, Stravinsky, 286. Ibid., 284–5. Whi all, Music Since the First World War, 51–3. Cited in Walsh, Stravinsky, A Creative Spring, 312. Whi all, Music Since the First World War, 51. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2:1502. Taruskin defines “Turanianism” thus: “Eurasianists saw Russia as a thing apart from Europe (and from Asia as well), a separate landmass (they called it ‘Turanian’), a separate world. In its most radical manifestations Eurasianism was wholly a product … of the postrevolutionary emigration.” This particular conception of national identity was “conditioned by an idea of Russia and of Russian culture that did not and could not exist inside Russia.” See ibid., 1:15–16. Therefore, underlying Stravinsky’s self-consciously artificial and stylized “Western” identity was a “Russian” identity no less stylized and constructed. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1505. Meeker, “Pu ing the Punch in Pulcinella,” 80. Cooper, Picasso Theatre, 46. Ibid. Cited in Meeker, “Pu ing the Punch in Pulcinella,” 80. Ibid. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 41. Ibid., 41, 49–50. Ibid., 41. Stravinsky and Cra , Dialogues, 21. Walsh, Stravinsky, 285. Ibid., 294. Ibid., 22. Stravinsky and Cra , Dialogues, 22. Ibid., 21–2. Walsh, Stravinsky, 26. The term is Cocteau’s. As Francis Steegmuller has demonstrated, Cocteau’s biography reveals a predisposition to personality disorders. The poet encountered extreme instability in childhood which manifested itself in a lifelong fragility and fluidity of the ego. According to Steegmuller, Cocteau was a kind of “Fregoli,” a nineteenth-century Italian actor famous for his ability to assume different roles: “Throughout his career … he kept changing his guise, his views, his activities; to use a word he liked, his life was a

148 Notes to pages 91–101

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

series of ‘mues’ – moultings. But between Fregoli and Jean Cocteau there was the great difference that Cocteau was seldom only an actor. Usually he actually was each person whose role he was playing.” See Steegmuller, Cocteau, 4. Ibid., 347. Walsh, Stravinsky, 499. Cited in ibid., 381–2. Stravinsky and Cra , Dialogues, 26. Cocteau, A Call To Order, 11. Herea er cited in the text as CO. Cited in Steegmuller, Cocteau, 355. Stravinsky and Cra , Dialogues, 22. Walsh, Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex, 11 and 12. See ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 17. The term is Stravinsky’s. See Stravinsky and Cra , Dialogues, 24. Cited in Max Harrison, “A Tragedy of Epic Impersonality,” video liner notes to Julie Taymor's production of Oedipus Rex for PBS, n.d.: 1–3. Stravinsky and Cra , Dialogues, 29. Walsh, Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex, 32. Ibid., 36. Stravinsky and Cra , Dialogues, 23. Except where noted, the following comments on the dramaturgy are taken from ibid., 23–4. Preface to the published score, cited in Walsh, Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex, 21. Ibid., 19. Stravinsky and Cra , Dialogues, 23. The phrase is Arthur Lourié’s. Lourié was Stravinsky’s friend and the author of several philosophical treatises on the composer’s music. Quote taken from Walsh, Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex, 22. Stravinsky and Cra , Dialogues, 24. Ibid. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 41. See Hollier, Against Architecture; and Huyssen, “Monumental Seduction.” Stravinsky and Cra , Dialogues, 24. Adorno, “Band 19: Musikalische Schri en VI: Berliner Memorial,” Gesammelte Schri en, S., 16216. See Walsh, Stravinsky, 500. Cited in ibid., 510.

Notes to pages 102–8 149 5. The Face of the Nation: State Fetishism and Métissage at the Exposition Internationale, Paris 1937

1 2 3 4 5 6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19

An earlier version of this chapter was published as “The Face of the Nation: State Fetishism and ‘Métissage’ at the Exposition Internationale, Paris 1937.” Grey Room 23 (spring 2006): 96–120. © 2006 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachuse s Institute of Technology. See the documents in file F12 12181(1), Archives Nationales, Paris. Le Figaro (Paris), 17 October 1937, p. 3. Bernard Champigneulle, Mercure de France, Paris, 15 November 1937. Le Matin, 2 May 1938, p. 1. “Un défi à l’art français et au bon gout,” Le Matin, 24 April 1938, p. 1. See Peer, France on Display, 5–8; and Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe 1870–1914,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm and Ranger, 271. Edmond Labbé, “Ce que sera l’exposition internationale de Paris 1937,” in Le régionalisme et l’exposition internationale de Paris 1937 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1936), 122. Lange, Merveilles de l’exposition de 1937, 15. Peer, France on Display, 29. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Exposé of 1935),” in The Arcades Project, 7. Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” in The Portable Karl Marx, 445. Peer, France on Display, 7. Labbé, L’architecture à l’exposition de 1937, in the Archives Nationales, Paris, F12 12125. Émile Condoyer, “Visages des nations à l’exposition,” Larousse, in Archives Nationales, Paris, F12 12143. “Le nouveau Trocadéro sera-t-il pret a temps?” in Le Journal, 17 February 1937. Press clipping in file F12 12150, Archives Nationales, Paris. Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture, 40. Michael Taussig, “Maleficium: State Fetishism,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Apter and Pietz, 218. See also Taussig, The Magic of the State; and Coronil, The Magical State. Taussig, “Maleficium,” 219. Taussig quotes A.R. Radcliffe-Browne, preface, African Political Systems, ed. Meyer Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), xxii. Cited in Taussig, “Maleficium,” 219.

150 Notes to pages 108–20 20 Taussig, “Maleficium,” 219; emphasis in original. 21 Peer, France on Display, 21. 22 Tyler Stovall, “Paris in the Age of Anxiety, 1919–1939,” in Stich, Anxious Visions, Surrealist Art, 206. 23 See Camiscioli, “Producing Citizens, Reproducing the ‘French Race.’” 24 See Stovall, “Paris in the Age of Anxiety,” 208. 25 For a discussion, see Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race, 87–8. 26 Léon Blum, preface, Exposition internationale des arts et techniques. Paris 1937. Album-programme (Paris: Editions Parisiennes de l’Exposition, 1937). 27 Edmond Labbé, interview in Warnod, Exposition ’37, 111. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Peer, France on Display, 40. 31 Edmond Labbé, in Rapport général, 2:13 32 Lange, Merveilles de l’exposition de 1937, 50. 33 Edmond Labbé, L’architecture à l’exposition de 1937, in the Archives Nationales, Paris, F12 12125. 34 Programme quotidien officiel de l’exposition internationale des arts et techniques, 19 June 1937, no. 7; and Edmond Labbé, in Rapport général, 11. 35 Karen Fiss, “The German Pavilion,” in Art and Power, ed. Ades, 108. 36 Cited by Ades, “Paris 1937: Art and the Power of Nations,” in Art and Power, ed. Ades, 62. 37 See Silver, Esprit de Corps, 93–103. 38 George, Profits et pertes; hereina er referred to in the text as PP with appropriate page numbers. 39 See Gournay, Le nouveau Trocadéro, 68–71. 40 Lange, Merveilles de l’exposition de 1937, 86. 41 Ibid. 42 Julien Green, “Testament du Trocadéro,” Le Figaro (Paris), 2 January 1936, 1. 43 Louis Gillet, “Coup d’oeil sur l’exposition,” La Revue des Deux Mondes (Paris), 15 May 1937, 330. 44 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 135. 45 “Le nouveau Trocadéro sera un palais de style romain,” Le Figaro (Paris), 4 January 1936, 1; and Gournay, Le nouveau Trocadéro, 97. 46 Gournay, Le nouveau Trocadéro, 97. 47 Gillet, “Coup d’oeil sur l’exposition,” 329. 48 Cited in Herbert, Paris 1937, 23. 49 Ibid., 27. 50 Ibid.

Notes to pages 120–3 151 51 Oe ermann, The Panorama, 20. 52 David himself was a great advocate of this new technology and took his students to the panoramas on the Boulevard Montmartre. “It is here,” he told them, “that one must come in order to study nature.” See Irwin, Neoclassicism, 371–2. 53 Oe ermann, The Panorama, 22. 54 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 140. 55 For photographs, see Gournay, Le nouveau Trocadéro, 83, 160–1. 56 Comoedia, 11 December 1935. 57 André Bloc, L’architecture d’aujourd’hui (Paris), January 1936. The article is called “La question du Trocadéro: un maquillage qui coute 65 millions.” It features a le er by the architects Carlu, Boileau, and Azéma, and a response by Bloc. Bloc’s response is on p. 7. 58 “Deux palais pour un,” Beaux-Arts (Paris), 26 July 1935. 59 Alfred Werner, “Lipchitz, an Evaluation,” in Van Bork, Jacques Lipchitz, 218. Lipchitz has referred to his work in similar terms. He noted that his work of the 1930s and 1940s was “very free and baroque in its organization” and represented “a new and open expressionist type of composition.” See Jonathan Fineberg, “Lipchitz in America,” in Lipchitz and the Avant-Garde, ed. Lipchitz et al., 59–60. 60 Lipchitz was a lifelong collector of non-Western sculpture and artefacts. He bought his first piece (a painted wooden statue e from the Dahomey of French West Africa) in 1910 and supplemented his interests with visits to the Troca. In 1935, just before starting work on Prometheus, he purchased a mask made by the Toma of Guinea. Lipchitz described his relationship with this “primitive” art as a series of “encounters” and noted that he “bought sculpture of all cultures from which I could learn something.” See Patai, Encounters, 87; and Sarah L. Eckhardt and Natasha C. Ritsma, “A Collector and a Workman: Lipchitz and Non-Western Art,” in Lipchitz and the Avant-Garde, ed. Lipchitz et al., 103. 61 For Lipchitz this open, cosmopolitan self was essentially a democratic self. The artist has noted that “the Phrygian cap that I placed on Prometheus had a particular significance for me as a symbol of democracy; what I was trying to show was a pa ern of human progress that to me involves the democratic ideal. So, in a certain way, this is a political sculpture, propaganda for democracy.” See Lipchitz with Aranson, My Life in Sculpture, 139. 62 See Romy Golan, “The École Français vs. the École de Paris,” in The Circle of Montparnasse, ed. Silver and Golan, 85. 63 Louis Vauxcelles, cited in ibid., 85.

152 Notes to pages 123–9 64 Ibid., 81–3. 65 René Gillouin, “La farce de l’art vivant,” La Revue Hebdomadaire (Paris), 15 January 1938, 282–3. 66 Ibid., 283. 67 Ibid., 280. 68 “A la suite de nos protestations l’abominable statue-navet des champs Elysées va qui er son piédestal,” Le Matin (Paris), 4 May 1938, p. 2. 69 Ibid. 70 Michaelsen and Guralnik, Alexander Archipenko, 56. 71 See Jonathan Fineberg, “Lipchitz in America,” in Lipchitz and the AvantGarde, ed. Lipchitz et al., 56–7. 72 Both show flowing, serpentine figures doing ba le with bulls, figures of authoritarianism. Lipchitz has been perfectly blunt about the political content of the Theseus piece: “The Minotaur is Hitler,” he writes, “and I was thinking about de Gaulle as Theseus.” See Lipchitz with Aranson, My Life in Sculpture, 159. Epilogue: The BaĴle of the Tuileries: Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Memory in France 1 See Chassey, “Paris-New York: Rivalry and Denial.” 2 Wilson, “Saint-Germain-des-Près: Antifascism, Occupation, and Postwar Paris,” in Paris: Capital of the Arts, 240. 3 Ibid. 4 Steegmuller, Cocteau, 440. Cocteau claimed that he wrote the piece with the understanding that his cooperation would exempt French film employees from having to serve in Germany. A er the Occupation he was either cleared by one of the Conseils d’Epuration, or not summoned at all – the facts are unclear. Regardless, despite his official innocence some bad feeling has lingered and Cocteau himself was reportedly torn by guilt for the rest of his life. 5 Patrick Ellio , “Sculpture in France and Classicism, 1910–1939,” in On Classic Ground, ed. Cowling and Mundy, 293. 6 For a lively account of the debate between the two, see Adam Gopnik, “In the Garden of Bien et Mal,” in The New Yorker, 6 April 1998, 60–3. 7 Ibid., 62. See also Jean Clair, La responsabilité de l'artiste: Les avant-gardes, entre terreur et raison (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). 8 Quoted in Gopnik, “In the Garden of Bien et Mal,” 62. 9 Kirili and Kristeva, “La beauté, éclosion de l’insolite: Entretien entre Alain Kirili et Julia Kristeva,” in La sculpture moderne et contemporaine au jardin

Notes to pages 129–33 153

10 11 12 13 14 15

16

des tuileries, by Kirili, Kristeva, and Storr, 14; and Karen Wilkin, “Sculpture in the Tuileries,” New Criterion 18, no. 1 (September 1999): 43. Academic Search Elite, EBSCOhost (accessed March 6, 2011). Robert Storr, “Entre parentheses,” in La sculpture moderne et contemporaine au jardin des tuileries, by Kirili, Kristeva, and Storr, 7–8. Kirili and Kristeva, “La beauté, éclosion de l’insolite” in La sculpture moderne et contemporaine au jardin des tuileries, by Kirili, Kristeva, and Storr, 14. Karen Wilkin, “Sculpture in the Tuileries.” Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 1. Ibid., 188. Robert Storr, “Gestes de retour,” in La sculpture contemporaine au jardin des Tuileries – Inauguration par Catherine Tasca et Michel Duffour, jeudi 29 juin 2000. www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/actualites/communiq/dostuileries.htm. Ibid.

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Index

References to illustrations are in italic. Académie, 40 Action Française, 4, 16–18, 38, 91 Adorno, Theodor, 80, 100 aesthetic form: and cosmopolitanism, 136n15; and Maillol, 41–2 “Airbus, The” (Sanchez), 8 Album officiel, 112 Alcoforado, Mariana, 23 Allain, Marcel, 74–6 Amerika (Ka a), 144–5n34 Ansermet, Ernest, 69 Antliff, Mark, 4 Apert, Eugène, 110 Apollinaire, Guillaume: and Archipenko, 46; a acks on, 145n42; and avant-garde sculpture, 140n23; background of, 145n42; and classicism, 72, 73–4; and foreign influences, 145n42; and national identity, 72–4; and Parade, 66, 71, 76; and Picasso, 71, 72; and surrealism, 71, 76, 77 Apollinaire, Guillaume (works): Les Mamelles de Tirésias, 73–4; “The New Spirit and the Poets,” 72–4, 77; program note for Parade, 71–2

Apollon musagète (Stravinsky), 80 Aragon, Louis, 77 Archipenko (Archipenko), 47, 50 Archipenko, Alexander: and Apollinaire, 46; and art, 48–9, 50; artistic connections of, 46–7; background of, 46; and Bergson, 34, 46–52, 54; and concaves, 52–6; and creative evolution, 47–8, 50, 56; and cubism, 52–6; and deterritorialization, 51–2, 56–7; and foreign influences, 46, 50–1, 54–5; and intuition, 48; and minor aesthetic, 50, 53–6; and musicality, 49–50, 54; and New York City, 125; and Paris, 14, 34, 46; and positive negative space, 53–4; and the Right, 50–1; and Rodin, 51, 52; and travelling culture, 50–2 Archipenko, Alexander (works): Archipenko, 47, 50; Bather, 52; Porteuse, 52; Woman Combing Her Hair, 51, 52–3 architecture: and Cocteau, 94; as display of power, 108; and the Exposition Internationale des Arts

170 Index et Techniques de la Vie Moderne (1937), 107–8, 111–12; and Maillol, 42; and Moorish buildings, 115–19, 121–2; and Oedipus Rex, 97, 99, 100– 1. See also the Trocadéro “Architecture at the Exposition of 1937” (Labbé), 107 L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui (Bloc), 121 art: and Archipenko, 48–9, 50; and cinema, 74; and Maillol, 44; visual power of, 36–7 Art et scolastique (Maritain), 91–2 “L’Art grec et la spiritualisme hébreux” (Jacquard), 123 artists’ colonies: and foreign artists, 14; La Ruche, 46 Artists in Exile (exhibition), 124, 125 Art Nouveau in fin-de-siècle France (Silverman), 139n40 Asian art, 114 Athenaeum, 89 “At the Salon Des Independents,” 56–7 Auric, Georges, 91 authoritarianism, 152n72 Azéma, Leon, 117 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 84, 143–4n26 Ballet Russes (productions): Le Diable Bleu (Cocteau), 64; Parade, 63–71, 76; The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky), 64 Ballet Russes and surrealism, 77 Barrès, Maurice, 17–18, 140n20 Barrias, Louis Ernest, 129–30 “Base Materialism and Gnosticim” (Bataille), 79 Bataille, Georges, 77, 78–9 Bather (Archipenko), 52 Bâtiments et travaux publics, 118

Baudelaire, Charles, 30 Beaux-Arts, 121, 127 Belmondo, Paul, 127, 128–9 Belphégor (Benda), 38, 39 Benda, Julien, 38–40 Benjamin, Walter, 13, 106–7 Bergson, Henri: and Archipenko, 34, 46, 46–52, 54; and Barrès, 17, 140n20; and the dissolving modern subject, 34–7; influence of, 33–4, 37–8; and liquidity, 36; and music, 36–7, 38–40; and the Right, 34, 38– 40, 140n20; theory of memory, 54 Bergson, Henri (works): Creative Evolution, 37; Time and Free Will, 33–7 Berman, Eugene, 124 Bernard, Jean-Marc, 17 Bernard, Joseph, 40 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 122 Bhabha, Homi, 8, 135n11 Bifir, 14 Bloc, André, 121 Blum, Léon, 110 the body, 26–9 Boileau, Louis-Hippolyte, 117 Bolshevik influences, 96, 101, 102 Bouchard, Henri, 127 Bourdelle, Emile Antoine, 40 Bourgeoise, Louise, 129, 132, 133 Boutroux, Emile, 33 Boym, Svetlana, 89, 99 Brancusi, Constantin, 14, 41 Braque, Georges, 52, 60 Breker, Arno, 127 Bretano, Be ina, 23 Breton, André, 76, 77, 125 Buchloh, Benjamin, 4 bulls, 152n72 Buñuel, Luis, 9

Index 171 Cahiers d’art, 112 Cahiers du mois, 123 A Call to Order (Cocteau), 93–6 Camoin, Charles, 60 Carlu, Jacques, 117 carnivals. See circus and carnival themes Carpentier, Alejo, 9 Cartesian philosophy: and Bergson, 33–4, 140n20; and the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques de la Vie Moderne (1937), 110–11; and Maurras, 16; and perspectivalism, 35–6; and the Right, 140n20; and the spatial self, 35–6, 48. See also Descartes, René Catherine de Medici, 129 Cendrars, Blaise, 46, 76 Césaire, Aimé, 9 Chagall, Marc: and Les Maîtres de l’Art Indépendent exhibition, 41; and New York City, 125; and Paris, 14 Champigneulle, Bernard, 102 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 139n40 cinema: and Apollinaire, 74; and Fantômas, 74–6 circus and carnival themes: and Bakhtin, 143–4n26; death and resurrection, 84; and Fantômas, 76; and identity, 83, 84; and Parade, 66–7, 69–70, 81, 143–4n26; and Pulcinella, 81–9; and the thrashing, 84 Cladel, Judith, 42, 43, 44 Clair, Jean, 128 class: and cinema, 74; and class integralism, 140n20; and Rilke, 18–20 classicism: and Apollinaire, 72, 73–4; and Archipenko, 54–5; and cultural tradition, 38; and Fantômas,

76; and George, 119, 120, 122; as hybridity, 79; and Independent sculpture, 40; and Maurras, 16–17, 38, 62; and modernism, 30; and national identity, 16–18, 59, 104, 112–14; and new Trocadéro, 117–22; and nostalgia, 128; and Oedipus Rex, 96, 99–100; and Parade, 71; and primitivism, 114; and Profits et pertes de l’art comtemporain, 112–14; and Prometheus Strangling the Vulture, 102, 103, 122–3; and race, 123, 125; and the Right, 59, 61–2, 112–14, 123, 125; and Rilke, 29–30; and synthesis, 42; and visuality, 113, 119–20 Claudel, Paul, 33 Clifford, James: and cosmopolitanism, 8–10, 135n11; and ethnographic surrealism, 77; Routes, 12; and travelling culture, 12; and the Trocadéro, 116–17, 120–1 Clouard, Henri, 17 Cocteau, Jean: and carnival themes, 143–4n26; and Fantômas, 76; and identity, 63, 91, 147–8n36; and ideology, 143n20; and Picasso, 63, 143n14; and religion, 91–2, 93; and Stravinsky, 64, 81, 91–3; and the Second World War, 127, 152n4 Cocteau, Jean (works): A Call to Order, 93–6; Le Coq et l’Arlequin, 91; Le Diable Bleu, 64; Le re á Jacques Maritain, 92; Oedipus Rex (Stravinsky and Cocteau), 80, 90, 92–3, 96–101; Parade, 63–4, 66–7, 69–71; Le Prince Frivole, 63; “Salute to Arno Breker,” 127, 152n4 Combat, 43 commedia dell’arte. See circus and carnival themes

172 Index Comoedia, 127 concaves, 52–6 Condoyer, Émile, 107 Consciousness and Society (Hughes), 33 conservatism. See the Right convex forms, 52 Cooper, Douglas, 69, 83–4, 87 Le Coq et l’Arlequin (Cocteau), 91 Corot, Jean-Baptiste Camille, 113 cosmopolitanism: and Apollinaire, 72–4; as contamination, 17–18; the cosmopolitan self, 151n61; critical cosmopolitanism (term), 135n11; and Lipchitz, 151n61; and Parade, 76; and Paris, 13–14; and Rilke, 32; strands of dialogue on, 136n15; and travelling culture, 12 Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Mercer), 135n11 Co ington, David, 62 Cra , Robert, 87 Creative Evolution (Bergson), 37 Les cris de Paris, 70 cubism: and Archipenko, 52–6; and Bergson, 37; and concaves, 52–6; as foreign, 61; and national identity, 59; and Parade, 65, 67–9, 76; perspective of, 42; and Pulcinella, 87–9 Cuddy-Keane, Melba, 135n11 curtain design, for Parade, 5 Dagen, Philippe, 127–8, 129 dailies. See newspapers Daladier, Edouard, 105 Dalí, Salvador, 125 Daniélou, Jean, 96 David, Jacques-Louis: and classicist vitality, 120; and panoramas,

151n52; in Profits et pertes de l’art comtemporain, 113 death and resurrection, 84 Debay Pére, Jean-Baptiste, 129 Debussy, Claude, 86, 94, 95–6 de Chirico, Georgio, 41 Defense of the West, The (Massis), 123 Degas, Edgar, 113 degenerate art, 101, 123, 127 Delacroix, Eugène, 113 de la Fresnaye, Roger, 60 Delaunay, Robert, 60 Deleuze, Gilles, 34, 50, 51, 56 Denis, Maurice, 17–18, 43, 44–5 Denver Museum, 55 Déracinés, Les (Barrès), 17 Derain, André, 60 Descartes, René: and Bergson, 35, 140n20; Discourse on Method, 110–11; and “perspectivalism,” 35. See also Cartesian philosophy Desmoiselles d’Avignon, Les (Picasso), 3 Desnos, Robert, 76 Despiau, Charles, 40, 127 deterritorialization, 51–2, 56–7, 131–2 de Zarate, Ortiz, 60 Dezarrois, André, 119 Dharwadker, Vinay, 136n15 Diable Bleu, Le (Cocteau), 64 Diaghilev, Serge: and Ballet Russes, 63–4; and Cocteau, 81; and Oedipus Rex, 80; Parade, 63–5 Dialogues (Stravinsky), 92, 98 Diane Chasseresse (Lévêque), 129 Discourse on Method (Descartes), 110–11 displacement and foreignness: and Cocteau, 94–5; and fragmentation, 31; and modernism, 12; and

Index 173 nostalgia, 80–1; and Oedipus Rex, 100; and Parade, 71; and Rilke, 13, 14–16, 19–25, 31; and Stravinsky, 81, 83, 85–7, 89–90, 92; and Tuilleries garden installation, 130–3; and the uncanny, 20–3; and Welcoming Hands, 133 Documents, 77–9 Doumergue, Gaston, 105 Douste-Blazy, Philippe, 128 Dubuffet, Jean, 129 Duchamp brothers, 46 Duchamp, Marcel, 60 Duchamp-Villon, Raymond, 60 Du Cubisme (Gleizes and Metzinger), 47 Duino Elegies (Rilke), 26, 137– 8n15 Dunoyer de Segonzac, Henri, 60 Durand, Julian, 105 Eastern Europeans, 123–5 Echaurren, Ma a, 124, 125 École de Paris, 62 École des Beaux-Arts, 40–1, 46 economic crisis, 105–6, 109, 110 Eliot, T.S., 37 Ellis Island, 133 Entartete Kunst, 127 Ernst, Max, 41, 125, 127, 129 Esprit de Corps (Silver), 3–4, 59 ethnographic surrealism, 77 eugenics, 110 Eve (Rodin), 28 exhibitions: “Exposition anti-maçonnique,” 127; Les Maîtres de l’Art Indépendent, 41 exile. See displacement and foreignness “Exposition anti-maçonnique,” 127

Exposition des Arts Décoratif et Industriels (1925), 105 “Exposition Internationale: le Bolhévisme contre l’Europe,” 127 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques de la Vie Moderne (1937): 105–6; Album officiel, 112; and national identity, 104, 106–9, 110–12; and Prometheus Strangling the Vulture, 102–4; as tool for national reconciliation, 110–12. See also the Trocadéro Expositions (Stravinsky), 83 “Faces of the Nations at the Exposition” (Condoyer), 107 Fantômas (Souvestre and Allain/ Feuillade), 74–6, 5, 77 Faure, Michel, 64 Feuillade, Louis, 74–6 Figaro, Le, 102, 104, 118 “Five Hymns” (Rilke), 24 fluidity. See transformation and movement Fokine, Michel, 63 foreign influences: and Apollinaire, 145n42; and Archipenko, 46, 49, 50–1, 54–5, 56–7; Asian art, 114; and Barrès, 17; and Bergson, 34, 39–40; and Cocteau, 94–6; and deterritorialization, 51–2, 56–7, 131–2; and ethnographic surrealism, 77; German influences, 61, 95–6; and latinité, 104; and Maillol, 44–5; Moorish buildings, 115–19, 121–2; and music, 69–70; Orientalism, 115–19, 121–2; and Parade, 66–70; and primitivism, 103–4, 113–14, 120–1, 122–3, 151nn60–1; and Prometheus Strangling the Vulture,

174 Index 102; and race, 123–5; Russian influences, 85–7, 96, 101, 102, 147n19; and Stravinsky, 96, 101; and Wagner, 95–6. See also immigration; métissage foreignness. See displacement and foreignness Foujita, Tsuguharu, 60 Four Identical Pulcinellas, The, 82 fragmentation: and Archipenko, 52; and displacement and foreignness, 31; and modernity, 99; in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 13; and Prometheus Strangling the Vulture, 104; in Pulcinella, 99; and Rilke, 13, 24, 26–9, 52; and Rodin, 52 France: and economic crisis, 105–6, 109, 110; and immigration, 109–10, 123; political unrest, 109. See also national identity French Académie, 40 French Eugenics Society, 110 Freud, Sigmund, 20–1 Fulcher, Jane, 64, 69, 70 The Future of Nostalgia (Boym), 89 futurists (Italian), 37 generalization, 44–5 George, Waldemar: and avant-garde sculpture, 140n23; and classicism, 119, 120, 122; and Maillol, 41–2, 43; Profits et pertes de l’art comtemporain, 112–14 Germany. See Nazi Germany Giacome i, Alberto, 41, 129 Gide, André, 17, 123 Gillet, Louis, 118, 119 Gillouin, René, 124–5

Gleizes, Albert, 37, 46, 47, 60 Golan, Romy, 4, 7 Goll, Ivan, 56 Gouel, Eva, 62 Grand commandement blanc (Kirili), 128, 130–1, 1 1 Green, Christopher, 3–4, 7, 128 Gris, Juan, 14, 46, 60–1, 76 Ground Beneath Her Feet, The (Rushdie), 31 Gua ari, Félix, 34, 50, 51, 56 “Gymnopédies” (Satie), 94 hands: and Rilke, 21, 27–8; and Welcoming Hands, 132, 1 2, 133 Hass, Robert, 18 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène (baron), 114–15 Heidegger, Martin, 25 Herbert, James, 119–20 Hitler, Adolf, 127, 152n72 Hobsbawm, Eric, 107 Hofer, Johannes, 80–1 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 24 the hole, 53–4 Hollier, Denis, 99 Hughes, H. Stuart, 33 Huidobro, Vincente, 9 Hulme, T.E., 37 humanism, 111, 113 L’Humanité, 116 Huyssen, Andreas, 23, 99, 137–8n15; “Paris Childhood,” 13, 15 identity: and Cocteau, 91, 147–8n36; and nostalgia, 81, 89; in Pulcinella, 84, 89, 98; and Stravinsky, 81, 83, 84–6, 98, 147n19; and Turanianism, 147n19 imagist poetry, 37

Index 175 immigration: and national identity, 109–10; and Orpheus, 31–2; and race, 123–5; and wartime Paris, 60–1; and Welcoming Hands, 133. See also foreign influences Imperial Theatres dancers, 63 inclusion, 56 Independent sculpture, 40–6 Ingres, Jean-Auguste Dominique: and Cocteau, 94–5; in Profits et pertes de l’art comtemporain, 113 Ingres style: and Archipenko, 52; and Cocteau, 94–5; and Picasso, 58 Insurge, 41 intuition: and Archipenko, 48; and Bergson, 36 Italian futurists, 37 Italy (fascist): and classicism, 112; and race, 125 Jacob, Max, 76 Jacquard, Pierre, 123 Jay, Martin, 35, 36 Jentsch, Ernst, 21 Jews: and Bergson, 39–40; and race, 123–5; and the Second World War, 127 Journal, Le, 107–8 journals and magazines: Athenaeum, 89; Bâtiments et travaux publics, 118; Beaux-Arts, 121, 127; Bifir, 14; Cahiers d’art, 112; Cahiers du mois, 123; Combat, 43; Documents, 77–9; L’Humanité, 116; Insurge, 41; Larousse, 107; Li érature, 77; Mercure de France, 76; La Nouvelle Review Française, 17; L’Occident, 17; Revue critique des idées et des livres, 17; Revue de France, 115; Revue hebdomadaire, 124–5

Joyce, James, 3 “Le Juif et la Fance,” 127 Ka a, Franz, 34, 144–5n34 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 60–1 Kirili, Alain, 126, 128–33; Grand commandement blanc, 128, 130–1, 1 1 Kisling, Moise, 41, 60 Klee, Paul, 127 Klein, Melanie, 15 Kleinbard, David, 15, 18–19, 137–8n15 Knoop, Gertrud Ouckama, 26 Knoop, Vera, 26 Kohut, Heinz, 15 Korsakov, Rimsky, 83 Kraus, Karl, 25 Krémègne, Pincus, 14 Kristeva, Julia, 3, 130, 132, 133 Kubism. See cubism Kupka, Frantisek, 60 Labbé, Edmond, 105–6, 110–12; “Architecture at the Exposition of 1937,” 107 LaCapra, Dominick, 6, 11 Laing, R.D., 15 Landowski, Paul, 127 Lange, Robert, 106 language: and Bergson, 35–6; and Rilke, 22–3, 25; and Stravinsky, 90–1, 96–8 Lao Tse, 53 Larousse, 107 Laroux, Georges, 125 La Ruche, 46 Laserre, Pierre, 17 Latin, 90–1, 96–8 latinité: 62; and Bataille, 78–9; and the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques de la Vie

176 Index Moderne (1937), 104; and foreign elements, 104; and Maillol, 43–5; and Maurras, 17; and Parade, 66, 67; and Parisian culture, 128; prehistory of French culture, 78–9; and race, 62. See also métissage Latin Thought (Maillol), 43 Laurens, Henri, 41, 129 LeFauconnier, Henri, 46 Léger, Fernand, 46, 60, 125 Leiris, Michel, 77, 78 Lejeune, Louis, 127 Le Nain, Antoine, 6 Le Nain, Louis, 6 Le Nôtre, André, 129 Le re á Jacques Maritain (Cocteau), 92 Lévêque, Louis Auguste, 129 Lipchitz, Jacques: and the cosmopolitan self, 151n61; and New York City, 125; and non-Western sculpture and artefacts, 151n60; and Paris, 13–14, 60; work as baroque, 151n59 Lipchitz, Jacques (works): Prometheus Strangling the Vulture, 102– 4, 1 3, 122–3, 151nn60–1; The Rape of Europa, 125; Theseus and the Minotaur, 125, 152n72 liquidity, 36 Li érature, 77 Lochplastik, 53 Louis XIV (king), 129 Lourié, Arthur, 148n57 the Louvre, 46 Lynes, Georges Pla , 124 Magri e, René, 76 Maillol, Aristide, 40–6; and aesthetic form, 41–2; and Archipenko, 47; and Breker, 127; and

generalization, 44–5; importance of, 41; and latinité, 43–5; and Les Maîtres de l’Art Indépendent (exhibition), 41; and Maurras, 43–5; and synthesis, 42; and Tuilleries garden, 130; and Venus de Milo, 42–3; and the Second World War, 127 Maillol, Aristide (works): Latin Thought, 43; The Mediterranean, 43; Thought, 43; The Three Nymphs, 45, 45 Maire, Gilbert, 17 Maîtres de l’Art Indépendent, Les (exhibition), 41 Malraux, André, 130 Malte (character). See Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The (Rilke) Mamelles de Tirésias, Les (Apollinaire), 73–4 Maritain, Jacques, 91–2 Maritain, Raissa, 91–2 Martinie, A.-H., 41 Marx, Karl, and community fetishism, 108 masks: and the carnival, 143–4n26; and Fantômas, 75–6; and Oedipus Rex, 98; and Pulcinella, 98 Massine, Leonid (works), Pulcinella. See Pulcinella (Diaghilev, Massine, Picasso, and Stravinsky) Massis, Henri, 123 Masson, André, 125 materialism, 33 Le Matin, 102–3, 125 Maurras, Charles: and Bergson, 38, 39; and classicism, 16–17, 38, 62; and French Latinité, 16–17, 62; and Maillol, 43–5; and royalism, 44, 62 Mauss, Marcel, 77

Index 177 mechanism, 33 Mediterranean, The (Maillol), 43 Meeker, Marilyn, 87 memory, 54 Mercer, Kobena, 6, 8, 9, 59, 135n11 Mercure de France, 76, 102 metamorphosis. See transformation and movement métissage: and Apollinaire, 72–4; and Documents, 77–9; and national identity, 104, 131–2, 133; and Parade, 71; and Prometheus Strangling the Vulture, 104, 122–3; and the Trocadéro, 117, 121–2. See also foreign influences; latinité Metzinger, Jean, 37, 46, 47, 60 Mignolo, Walter, 135n11 migration. See displacement and foreignness Miller, C.F.B., 79 minor aesthetic: and Archipenko, 50, 53–6; and Bergson, 34; and metamorphosis, 56 minor literature: characteristics of, 50, 51; idea of, 34 Miró, Joan, 127 Mistral, Frédéric, 16 Mithouard, Adrien, 17 modernism: and Archipenko, 49, 52–6; and Bergson, 33–9; and classicism, 30; and displacement and foreignness, 12; and fragmentation, 99; and German culture, 61; ideological refusal of, 128; and Kirili, 129; and New York City, 126–7; and positive negative space, 53; and Pulcinella, 99; and Rilke, 23, 29–32; shi in social thought during 1890s, 33; and surrealism, 66, 71, 76; and thought, 130; and

transformation, 12; a er the First World War, 58–9 Modigliani, Amedeo, 14, 41, 60 Monde, Le, 128 Mondrian, Piet, and New York City, 125 Monet, Claude, 94, 130, 131 Moore, Henry, 129 moultings, 91, 147–8n36 movement. See transformation and movement Musée de l’Homme, 117–18 music and musicality: and Archipenko, 49–50, 54; and Benda, 39; and Bergson, 36–7, 38–40; and Cocteau, 93–6; and foreign influences, 69–70; and Pulcinella, 85–6 Nardal, Paule e, 10 national identity: and Apollinaire, 72–4; and Barrès, 140n20; and classicism, 16–18, 59, 104, 112–14; and Cocteau, 94–6; and cubism, 59; debates on Frenchness, 109–10; and Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques de la Vie Moderne, 104, 106–9, 110–12; and immigration, 109–10; and Independent sculpture, 41; and latinité, 104; and Maillol, 44; and métissage, 104, 131– 2, 133; and Parade, 59, 64–71; power of, 30; and Prometheus Strangling the Vulture, 122–3; and race, 18, 110; and state fetishism, 108; and Stravinsky, 147n19; and the Trocadéro, 118–19, 122; and Tuilleries garden, 130. See also France nature: and Bergson, 37; and David, 151n52

178 Index Nazi Germany: and classicism, 112; and degenerate art, 123; and occupation of Paris, 127; and race, 123–5 neoclassicism. See classicism nested representations, 87–8 newspapers: Comoedia, 127; Le Figaro, 102, 104, 118; L’Huminité, 116; Le Journal, 107–8; Le Matin, 102–3, 125; Mercure de France, 102; Le Monde, 128; Observer, 89 “The New Spirit and the Poets” (Apollinaire), 72–4, 77 New York City: and Amerika, 144– 5n34; Artists in Exile (exhibition), 125; Ellis Island, 133; and foreignness, 71; immigration to, 125, 133; and modernism, 126–7 Nietzche, Friedrich, 95 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 63, 81 nostalgia: and classicism, 128; and reflective nostalgia, 89–90; and restorative nostalgia, 89–90, 99; and Rilke, 26; and Stravinsky, 80–1, 83, 89–90, 99; as term, 80–1 Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The (Rilke), 13, 15, 19–23, 27–8 Nouvelle Review Française, La 17 Nymphe (Lévêque), 129 Nympheas (Monet), 131 Observer, 89 L’Occident, 17 Oedipus Rex (Stravinsky and Cocteau), 80, 90, 92–3, 96–101 Oe ermann, Stephan, 120 “On the Influence of the Judeo-German Cartel of Painting Dealers on French Art” (Tollet), 61 optical illusions, 54–6 Orientalism, 115–19, 121–2

Orpheus (mythological figure), 26, 30–2 “Outline for a History of Contemporary Literature” (Aragon), 77 Ozenfant, Amédée, 41, 125 “The Painter of Modern Life” (Baudelaire), 30 Palais de Chaillot. See the Trocadéro panoramas: and David, 151n52; and the Trocadéro, 120 Parade: audience reaction to, 65–6, 68, 143n22; and cinema, 76; circus and carnival themes, 66–7, 69–70, 81, 143–4n26; and classicism, 71; compared to Pulcinella, 89; and cosmopolitanism, 76; and displacement and foreignness, 71; idea for, 64; intentions of artists, 64–71, 143n22; and national identity, 59, 64–71; and Stravinsky, 81; and surrealism, 71 Parade (artists): Apollinaire (program note), 71–2; Cocteau (libre o), 63–4, 66–7, 69–71; costume of the Chinese (Picasso), 0; Diaghilev (choreography), 63–5; Picasso (visual design), 63–71, 65; Satie (music), 63–5, 69 Paris: and cosmopolitanism, 13–14; and the Second World War, 60–1, 126–7, 152n4; at turn of millennium, 126 “Paris Childhood” (Huyssen), 13, 15 Pavlova, Anna, 63 Peasant’s Repast, The (Le Nain), 6–7 Peer, Shanny, 107 Péret, Benjamin, 76 Pergolesi, Giovanni Ba ista: and Diaghilev, 82; and Stravinsky, 82,

Index 179 84, 87, 89; wrongful a ribution to, 146n7 Pergolesi, Giovanni Ba ista (works): La Serva padrona, 82; Stabat Mater, 82 Périclès distribuant les couronnes aux artistes (Debay Pere), 129 Perséphone (Stravinsky), 80 perspectivalism, 35 Petito, Antonio, 82 Petrushka (Stravinsky), 87 Philosophy of New Music (Adorno), 80 photography, 93 Picabia, Francis, 41, 46, 127 Picasso, Pablo: and Apollinaire, 71, 72; and Cocteau, 63, 143n14; concave and convex forms, 52; destruction of work, 127; and Documents, 77; interwar style of, 5–7, 38–9, 58–9; and Paris, 14, 62–3; perspective of, 42; and Stravinsky, 82; and wartime Paris, 60, 62–3 Picasso, Pablo (works): costume design for the ballet Pulcinella, 85; costume of the Chinese for the ballet Parade, 0; Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, 3; Parade, 63–71; Parade curtain design, 65; Pulcinella, 82, 87–9; Pulcinella set design, 88 plastic sensibility, 38–40 Plato, 42 pluralism, 56 Porteuse (Archipenko), 52 positive negative space, 53–4 positivist thought, 33 Pound, Ezra, 37 primitivism: and classicism, 114; and George, 113–14; and Prometheus Strangling the Vulture, 103–4, 122–3,

151nn60–1; and the Trocadéro, 116– 17, 120–1 Le Prince Frivole (Cocteau), 63 Profits et pertes de l’art comtemporain (George), 112–14 Prometheus Strangling the Vulture (Lipchitz), 102–4, 103, 122–3, 151nn60–1 propaganda, 25, 127 Proust, Marcel, 71 Pulcinella (Diaghilev, Massine, Picasso, and Stravinsky): circus and carnival themes in, 81–9; compared to Oedipus Rex, 96–9; compared to Parade, 89; costume design, 85; fluidity and metamorphosis in, 97; fragmentation and modernity, 99; idea for, 81–2; and identity, 84, 89, 98; masks in, 98; and musical values, 85–6; and nostalgia, 80; and Picasso, 80, 82, 85, 87–9, 88; and reflective nostalgia, 89; set design (Picasso), 88; and Stravinsky, 82–7, 89 Puvis de Chavannes, 52 Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin), 84, 143–4n26 race: and Bergson, 39–40; and Eastern Europeans, 123–5; and immigration, 123; and Independent sculpture, 41; and Jews, 123–5; and latinité, 62; and Maillol, 44–5; and national identity, 18, 110; and the Right, 16–18, 123–5 racial mixing. See métissage Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., 108 Radiguet, Raymond, 91 Rape of Europa, The (Lipchitz), 125 reflective nostalgia, 89–90

180 Index Renoir, Pierre Auguste, 113 The Responsibility of the Artist (Clair), 128 restorative nostalgia, 89–90, 99 Revue critique des idées et des livres, 17 Revue de France, 115 Revue de Monde Noir, 10 Revue hebdomadaire, 124–5 Rewald, John, 42, 43–4 Richier, Germaine, and Tuilleries garden, 129 the Right: Action Française, 4, 16– 18, 38, 91; and Archipenko, 50–1; and Bergson, 34, 38–40, 140n20; and classicism, 59, 61–2, 112–14, 123, 125; and immigrants, 123–5; and latinité, 104; and Parisian culture, 128–9; and Profits et pertes de l’art comtemporain, 112–14; and Prometheus Strangling the Vulture, 102–4, 122–3; and race, 16–18, 123–5; and the Second World War, 143n18 Rilke, Rainer Maria: and displacement, 13, 14–16, 19–25; and fragmentation, 13, 24, 26–9, 52; and mental problems, 14–16, 137–8n15; and Paris, 14–16; and politics, 25; and Rodin, 10, 13, 14, 26–30, 52, 133, 139n40; and war, 23–5 Rilke, Rainer Maria (works): Duino Elegies, 26, 137–8n15; “Five Hymns,” 24; The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 13, 15, 19–23, 27–8, 143n14; Rodin, 26–30; “Sonnets to Orpheus,” 26, 30–2, 137–8n15 Ring cycle (Wagner), 95 Rite of Spring, The (Stravinsky), 3, 64, 69, 87 Robbins, Bruce, 8, 135n11, 136n15 Rodin (Rilke), 26–30

Rodin, Auguste: and Archipenko, 51, 52; and Bourgeois, 133; and Brancusi, 14; and Charcot, 139n40; Eve, 28; and fragmentation, 52; and Hôtel Biron, 143n14; and Rilke, 10, 13, 14, 26–30, 52, 133, 139n40; and Tuilleries garden, 129 Ronebek (trustee), 55 Rosenberg, Paul, 38 Routes (Clifford), 12 Roux-Spitz, Michel, 121 Rushdie, Salman, 13, 31 Russian influences, 85–7, 96, 101, 102, 147n19 sacred language, 90–1, 96–8 sadism, 100 Salomé, Lou Andreas, 14 “Salute to Arno Breker” (Cocteau), 127, 152n4 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 8 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 3 Satie, Eric, 94, 95, 96; Parade, 63–5, 69 Scheffler, Samuel, 136n15 Schnegg, Lucien, 40 sculpture: and the body, 26–9; and Cocteau, 93–4; and École des Beaux-Arts, 40–1, 46; and French Académie, 40; and Independent sculpture, 40–6; and Lipchitz, 102– 4, 122–3, 125, 151nn60–1; and Maillol, 40–6; support for avant-garde sculpture, 140n23; and Tuilleries garden, 126, 128–30 the self: and Archipenko, 48; and the carnival, 143–4n26; the cosmopolitan self, 151n61; the spatial self, 35–6, 48 Seligmann, Kurt, 124, 125 Senghor, Leopold, 9

Index 181 the senses: and Archipenko, 48; and Cocteau, 93–6; and plastic sensibility, 38–40; and Rilke, 15 Serment de Spartacus, Le (Barrias), 129–30 serpentine figures, 152n72 Serva padrona, La (Pergolesi), 82 Severini, Gino, 14, 41 sexual ambiguity, 73–4 Sidibé, Michel, 78 sight. See vision and visuality Silver, Kenneth: on classicism and cultural chauvinism, 59, 112; and Dagen, 128; Esprit de Corps, 3–4, 6–7, 59; on interwar modernism, 3–7; on Parade, 66, 67, 70, 143n22; on union sacrée, 143n18 Silverman, Debora, 139n40 Smith, David, 129, 131 Socé, Ousmane, 9 social thought, 33 “Sonnets to Orpheus” (Rilke), 26, 137–8n15 Sorel, Georges, 33, 140n20 Soupault, Philippe, 77 Soutine, Chaim, 41 Souvestre, Pierre, 74–6 spatial fragmentation. See fragmentation the spatial self, 35–6, 48 Speer, Albert, 108 Stabat Mater (Pergolesi), 82 Stampa, Gaspara, 23 state fetishism, 108 Steegmuller, Francis, 91, 147–8n36 Stege, Fritz, 101 Stein, Gertrude, 63 Storr, Robert, 129, 133 Stravinsky, Igor: and Cocteau, 64, 91–3; and Commedia dell’Arte,

82; and displacement, 81, 83, 85–7, 89–90, 92; and Documents, 77; and identity, 81, 83, 84–6, 98, 147n19; and Lourié, 148n57; and Maritain, 92; and musical values, 85–6; and nostalgia, 80–1, 83, 89–90; and Parade, 81; and Pergolesi, 82, 84, 87, 89; and Picasso, 82; and religion, 92–3; and Russian influences, 85–7, 147n19; and static visuality, 96–8, 100 Stravinsky, Igor (works): Apollon musagète, 80; Dialogues, 92, 98; Expositions, 83; Oedipus Rex, 80, 90–3, 96–101; Perséphone, 80; Petrushka, 87; Pulcinella, 82–7, 89; The Rite of Spring, 3, 64, 69, 87; Svadebka, 87 surrealism: adoption of term, 77; creation of term, 71; ethnographic surrealism, 77; and Parade, 71, 76 Svadebka (Stravinsky), 87 synthesis, and classicism, 42 Tanguy, Yves, 76, 124, 125 Taruskin, Richard, 87, 147n19 Taussig, Michael, 108 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 87 Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, 80 Theseus and the Minotaur (Lipchitz), 125, 152n72 Thought (Maillol), 43 thrashing, 84 Three Nymphs, The (Maillol), 45, 45 Time and Free Will (Bergson), 33–7 Tollet, Tony, 61 transformation and movement: and Archipenko, 47–8, 50, 56; and the carnival, 143–4n26; and Cocteau, 95; and modernism, 12; in

182 Index Pulcinella, 97, 98; and Rilke, 27–9; and travelling culture, 31–2 travelling culture: and Archipenko, 50, 51–2; a itudes of, 30; concept of, 12; and minor aesthetic, 50; and Rilke, 30–2; and transformation, 31–2 the Trocadéro: cartoon from L’Humanité, 116; and classicism, 117–22; criticisms of Old Trocadéro, 115–16; ethnographic museum in, 46, 116–17; history of, 114–17; and métissage, 117, 121–2; and the Musée de l’Homme, 117– 18; and national identity, 108–9, 118–19; old Palais du Trocadero, 115; Palais de Chaillot, 119; as welcoming, 107–8. See also architecture; Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques de la Vie Moderne (1937) Tuilleries garden: Eve (Rodin), 28; Kirili installation, 126, 129–33 Turanian style, 87 Uhde, William, 38–9 Ulysses (Joyce), 3 the uncanny, 20–3 union sacrée, 143n18 Valéry, Paul, 123 Vauxcelles, Louis, 123 Venus de Milo (Alexandros of Antioch): caricature in cartoon, 55, 56–7; and Maillol, 42–3

Villon, Jacques, 60 Visan, Tancrède, 37 vision and visuality: and Archipenko, 50; and Benda, 38–9; and Cocteau, 93; and George, 113; and imagist poetry, 37; and optical illusions, 54–6; and panoramas, 120, 151n52; and Rilke, 21–2; and sensibility, 39; and Stravinsky, 96–8, 100; and the Trocadéro, 119– 20; and the Venus de Milo, 43 Vlaminck, Maurice de, 60 Wagner, Richard, 95–6 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 8, 135n11, 136n15 Walsh, Stephen, 90, 91, 96–8 Walz, Robin, 76 war (quality of), 24–5 Wa eau, Jean-Antoine, 68 Welcoming Hands (Bourgeois), 132, 132, 133 Werner, Alfred, 122 White, Eric Walter, 85–6 Whi all, Arnold, 86–7 Wight, Frederick S., 52 Wilkins, Karen, 130–1 Williams, William Carlos, 37 Winnicot, D.W., 15 Woman Combing Her Hair (Archipenko), 51, 52–3 Zadkine, Ossip, 14, 60, 124, 125 Zervos, Christian, 112