Buzzing with activity (as well as with the usual array of vermin), La Ruche became home to the most starving of starving artists, many of whom (including Marc Chagall, Ossip Zadkine, Chaim Soutine, Alexander Archipenko, and Jacques Lipchitz) had made their way to Paris from Eastern Europe. Many years later, the painter Pinchus Krémègne recalled that when he first arrived at Paris’s Gare de l’Est, he spoke no French and had only three rubles to his name. The only phrase he knew in French was, “Passage Dantzig,” which fortunately was enough to get him there.
The building looked fine enough from the outside, with its imposing doorway splendidly flanked by carved female figures, or caryatids, but the interior studios were cramped, squalid, and without heat. Worse yet, Boucher’s land was located downwind of a major slaughterhouse and surrounded by a notorious wasteland known as La Zone. Freezing in winter, broiling in summer, it required grit simply to survive there. It was a very cold January when Gabriel Voisin arrived, early in his and La Ruche’s career, at a time when he had just about used up his savings in the effort to develop a heavier-than-air aircraft. He froze until February, when he could afford to put in a stove to heat the place, to tide him over “to the first of the better days,” which indeed came.15 As Marc Chagall later recalled of La Ruche, “You either snuffed it or departed famous.”16
Chagall, who arrived in Paris from Vitebsk in early 1911,17 would of course become famous, but that was far from evident during the early years. Although he breathed more freely in Paris than in his native Russia, this scion of an impoverished Jewish family was at first desperately homesick. It was only the great distance between Paris and Vitebsk that prevented him from leaving, and—in the end—the exhibitions, the gallery windows, and the museums of Paris that convinced him to stay. He wandered through Rue Laffitte, gazing at the Renoirs, Pissarros, and Monets at Durand-Ruel’s, and the Cézannes at Vollard’s. At Bernheim’s, he found van Goghs, Gauguins, and works by Matisse. Yet it was at the Louvre where he “felt most at home.” There, “Rembrandt captivated me and more than once I stopped before Chardin, Fouquet, Gericault.”18
After a period in the Montparnasse warren of studios shared with Antoine Bourdelle, Chagall made his way to La Ruche, where he holed up in one of the tiny rooms on the second floor. “While in the Russian ateliers,” he later wrote, “an offended model sobbed; from the Italians’ came the sound of songs and the twanging of a guitar, and from the Jews debates and arguments, I sat alone in my studio before my kerosene lamp.” Nearby, amid the breaking dawn, “they are slaughtering cattle, the cows low and I paint them. . . . My lamp burned, and I with it.”19
In time, Chagall met Apollinaire, “that gentle Zeus [who] . . . blazed a trail for all of us.” One day while eating lunch together, Chagall asked why Apollinaire didn’t introduce him to Picasso.
“Picasso?” Apollinaire responded quickly, smiling as always. “Do you want to commit suicide? That’s the way all his friends end.”20
Yet during the first months after his arrival in Paris, Chagall was thinking not so much of Picasso as of his acquaintances from St. Petersburg, especially Léon Bakst, the much-lauded set and costume designer for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, who was his former art teacher. Chagall managed to attend that Ballets Russes season, where he saw Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la rose, a new ballet and showpiece for the breathtaking young dancer. Le Spectre was a tremendous success and became a regular on Ballets Russes programs, but Chagall was not impressed. Everything new in it, he objected, was “polished to reach society in a piquant and sophisticated style.” As for him, he was the son of workers, “and often, in a drawing room, . . . I feel inclined to dirty the shining floor.”21
Backstage, he spotted Bakst, who had earlier advised him not to come to Paris, telling him that he would probably die of hunger—hardly a vote of confidence. Yet now, to Chagall’s surprise, Bakst offered to come by and see what he was doing. Eventually he came, and his appraisal was a favorable one: “Now,” he told Chagall, “your colors sing.”22
Despite the favorable splash made by Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la rose, the big news of this Ballets Russes season was Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka.
Unlike Firebird, the story for Petrushka was Stravinsky’s, and he had written much of the music even before the story was fully developed. From the outset, Stravinsky had in mind the equivalent of Punch and traditional puppet theater as well as Punch’s forerunners in the Commedia dell’Arte. “I had in mind,” he later wrote, “a distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios.” Soon afterward, during Diaghilev’s visit to Stravinsky in Switzerland, he persuaded Stravinsky “to develop the theme of the puppet’s sufferings and make it into a whole ballet.”23
Stravinsky finished the score in Rome, where the company was giving performances during an international exhibition, and it was there that rehearsals for Petrushka began. It was not long before the choreographer, Michel Fokine, found himself overwhelmed by the complexity of Stravinsky’s rhythms. Fokine later wrote that “it was necessary to explain the musical counts to the dancers. At times it was especially difficult to remember the rapid changes of the counts.”24
From Rome, the company went to Paris and the Théâtre du Châtelet, where the musicians were so overwhelmed by the score that they burst out laughing when they first saw it. Nothing was right with the sets or the lighting, and chaos threatened to destroy the dress rehearsal. Even on opening night there was a delay in raising the curtain while Misia Edwards raced home for the cash to give Diaghilev to pay the costumier.
Yet the production—starring Nijinsky and Karsavina, and conducted by young Pierre Monteux—was an overwhelming success. This success, according to Stravinsky “was exactly what I needed in that it gave me the absolute conviction of my ear as I was about to begin The Rite of Spring.”25
Soon after Petrushka’s premiere, Stravinsky met Erik Satie at a luncheon at Debussy’s, and they became friends. In 1915 Stravinsky would dedicate his “ice-cream wagon Valse” in Eight Easy Pieces in homage to Satie, and the following year Satie in turn dedicated his song “Le Chapelier” to Stravinsky. “He was certainly the oddest person I have ever known,” Stravinsky later wrote, “but the most rare and consistently witty person, too.”26
Debussy and Ravel had been friends of Satie’s since his Montmartre days, and Satie’s bold innovations, especially his harmonic inventiveness, had an impact on both composers, which Ravel in particular was quick to acknowledge. In a score of Ma Mère l’Oye, for example, Ravel wrote: “For Erik Satie, grandpapa of ‘The Conversations of Beauty and the Beast,’ and others. Affectionate homage from a disciple.”27 Debussy expressed his admiration by orchestrating two of Satie’s three Gymnopédies. And in January 1911, Ravel and other musicians decided to introduce some of Satie’s works to the public through their newly formed Société Musicale Indépendante (SMI).
At this concert, Ravel played several of Satie’s works and certainly approved (and may well have written) the program note, which saluted Satie as “a forerunner of genius,” whose works “anticipated the modernist vocabulary” with “the almost prophetic character of certain harmonic inventions which they contain.” M. Maurice Ravel, the program note went on, “bears witness to the esteem which is felt by the most ‘advanced’ composers for the creator who a quarter of a century ago was already speaking the daring musical ‘jargon’ of tomorrow.”28
Suddenly Satie was a celebrity, bathed in laudatory public recognition. Publishers sought out his early works, and he began to acquire a significant following among young musicians. The only downside to this happy state of affairs was Debussy’s absence from the January concert and apparent annoyance that Ravel was responsible for presenting the works of Debussy’s longtime friend to the public. Still, only a few months after the SMI concert, Debussy included his orchestral versions of Satie’s two Gymnopédies in a Paris c
oncert that he conducted of his own works (an inclusion that Satie gratefully interpreted as prompted by Ravel’s earlier concert).29 Unfortunately, on this occasion it was Debussy’s orchestrations that caught the critics’ attention, prompting Satie to comment sadly, “Why won’t he allow me just a little corner of his shade? . . . I don’t want to take any of his sun.”30
Ravel, for his part, continued to be free in his praise of Debussy. In March, he told an interviewer that “there is more musical substance in Debussy’s Après-midi d’un faune . . . than in the wonderfully immense Ninth Symphony of Beethoven.” Contemporary French composers, he added, “work on small canvases but each stroke of the brush is of vital importance.”31
Ravel also told the interviewer that “I am happy that I am alive today. . . . I love our modern life; the life of the city, of the factories as well as the life among the mountains and at the sea-shore.”32 In direct contrast, Debussy that year was ill, exhausted, and miserable. He was overworked, his wife was interminably sick with liver complaint, and he was overwhelmed with bills. “July bristles with bills, landlords and a whole collection of domestic worries which repeat themselves every year with a distressing regularity,” he wrote his publisher. “I always end up 3,000 francs short, and even by selling my soul to the devil I don’t know where I shall find them.”33
In addition, there was the rocky state of Debussy’s marriage. After a seaside holiday, he wrote Jacques Durand that “the truth is that at the end of this holiday we have to admit we don’t know why we came.”34 Emma’s staunch opposition prevented Debussy from traveling to Boston that autumn to see a production of Pelléas conducted by his good friend André Caplet, then assistant director of Paris’s Colonne Orchestra. Debussy wrote Caplet of the “continual arguments and battles,”35 and added that “I have not . . . told anybody what it cost me to give up my journey to America.”36 “Sometimes,” he confided to Robert Godet in December, “I’m so miserable and lonely . . . though there’s no way round it and it’s not the first time. Chouchou’s smile helps me through some of the darker moments.”37
By now, Isadora Duncan had begun to explore themes of darkness, hopelessness, and despair. Her audiences, and especially the critics, found her depiction of the Furies in Orpheus especially unsettling. Her life had become unsettling as well. She wrapped up her stay at Singer’s English country house, where she had been thoroughly bored, by having a brief but intense affair with Debussy’s friend André Caplet, whom she had hired to play the piano to accompany her in this remote spot. Early in 1911 she then departed for New York and another tour of American cities with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony, which did not go well. She was drinking too much and putting on weight. Anna Pavlova—who had by now quit Diaghilev’s company and was touring the United States on her own—easily provided a ravishing contrast. For the first time in memory, Isadora faced half-empty houses.
That November, Isadora danced with some of her better pupils at the Théâtre du Châtelet, where a shoulder strap on her tunic broke in the middle of the performance, exposing her breasts. As a result of this scandal, she was investigated for “public indecency,” and police were subsequently posted in the theater to make sure that she experienced no further wardrobe malfunctions. She was outraged. “If they annoy me about this,” she informed a journalist, “I will dance in a forest naked, naked, naked . . . with the song of birds and elemental noises for an orchestra.”38
Singer, for his part, decided that he had better provide Isadora with a theater of her own.
Paul Poiret was inherently dramatic, and so it was no surprise when the 1910 Ballets Russes production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade provided the inspiration for him to launch an array of exotic Oriental fashions, including his 1911 harem pantaloons and, soon after, his so-called lampshade tunics. The photographer Edward Steichen was enchanted with these novelties and published photos of them in the April 1911 issue of Art et Décoration, making Poiret and Steichen the originators of what quite possibly was the first modern fashion shoot.
Poiret from the outset of his career had created his most fantastical costumes for the stage, and the rest of his output had always exuded a theatrical quality. This, of course, especially appealed to women like Isadora Duncan, Ida Rubinstein, and the dance hall queen Mistinguett. Still, Poiret never limited himself when it came to potential customers. It was now that he decided to expand the merchandise he offered to include furniture, room decoration, and perfume. He had transformed one particular apartment in Isadora Duncan’s studio into a lushly dangerous retreat, whose windows were sealed and whose doors “were strange, Etruscan tomb-like apertures.” According to Duncan, “sable black velvet curtains were reflected on the walls in golden mirrors,” and “a black carpet and a divan with cushions of Oriental textures” added to the heightened sense of drama.39 Now, much like Isadora Duncan, the wealthy could nest in dreamy abodes swathed in lush Paul Poiret decor.
Not surprisingly, Poiret accompanied the launching of each piece of his growing empire with appropriate splash and glamour, and so in 1911 his new fragrance company, Parfums de Rosine, received a memorable outing at an over-the-top costume ball themed as the Thousand and Second Night, for which Poiret commanded his three hundred guests to dress in Oriental garb. Those who failed to do so were politely asked to help themselves to appropriate costumes that Poiret had provided or (gasp) leave.
Of course no one could resist the enticements he offered, including a harem (starring a luxuriating Madame Poiret) enchained in an immense golden cage; the unquestionably dramatic actor Edouard de Max perched on a mountain of cushions, where he told stories from the Thousand and One Nights; pink ibises that stalked among gushing fountains in the darkened garden; and a hidden orchestra that played softly in the background, while monkeys, parrots, and parakeets chirped and swung. Dancers danced, a monkey merchant provided comic relief, and the bar did enormous business with drinks color-coordinated to match the setting. At the evening’s climax, flames unexpectedly rose from the ground and then “spread out like glass flowers.” Suddenly “the air resounded with a rending thunder,” followed by a “luminous rain,” alternately silver and gold, which “left behind phosphorescent insects hanging to the branches and suspended everywhere in mid-air.”40
Sorbet evening ensemble by Paul Poiret, 1912. Silk chiffon and satin, embroidered with glass beads and trimmed with fur. From Mme Poiret’s collection. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Great Britain. Photo Credit: V & A Images, London / Art Resource, NY. © ARS.
“Naturally,” Poiret commented long afterward, “there have been people who have said that I have these fêtes as an item of advertisement, but I want to destroy this insinuation.” In fact, he added, “I have never believed in the virtue of advertisement.”41 Such protests brought knowing smiles to those who witnessed these grand displays. “He was a patron of the arts, and he dressed an époque,” wrote André Salmon, giving Poiret his due. “All the same, he was something of a Barnum.”42
Matisse finished off the previous year in Spain, having experienced an almost complete physical and emotional breakdown. His father had recently died; Shchukin had rejected the Dance and Music panels for which Matisse had (in his words) moved heaven and earth for more than two years;43 and the critics had been brutal, both at the Salon d’Automne and the subsequent London Post-Impressionist show. Shchukin soon changed his mind and sent for Matisse’s panels, but Matisse fled south in hope of unwinding his unbearably taut nerves. By the time he reached Seville, he had not slept for more than a week and was in a state of virtual collapse. A friend helped nurse him back to health, and Matisse at last invited the abandoned and furious Amélie—who in turn had fled to her sister and father—to join him in Seville. As it turned out, money for her ticket was scarce, and so Amélie returned on her own to Paris, where the two eventually met and made up.
That spring of 1911, Matisse talked with Count Kessler in Paris about the mo
ckery that greeted the new in art, which Matisse admitted caused him much suffering. “Often,” Kessler recorded in his journal, “he wakes up in the middle of the night and tosses about sleepless, thinking of the malicious critique of some unknown journalist.”44 Still, Matisse had embarked on another project, or series of projects, for Shchukin, and soon he and the entire family would leave once again for a summer of work and play in their beloved Collioure.
That autumn, Matisse traveled to Moscow with Shchukin, to inspect the space where Shchukin proposed to hang La Danse and La Musique. Not only had Shchukin reconciled himself to the audacity of his newly acquired panels, but he wanted to commission eleven additional decorative paintings, all of them large. Shchukin’s goal was clear. As he told Matisse, “I want the Russian people to understand that you are a great painter.”45
Gertrude Stein completed The Making of Americans in the autumn of 1911. Friends already were reading portions of the enormous manuscript and trying to find a publisher, which proved difficult; the manuscript would go unpublished for years.46 On occasion she uncharacteristically admitted discouragement, but then immediately propped herself up with the comforting knowledge, “I am a rare one. I have very much wisdom.”47
She was buoyed by the conviction that she was paralleling Picasso in her unconventional approach to literature, without the usual narrative line, much as Picasso and his fellow Cubists were challenging traditional painterly usages of images and space. Afterward, she wrote: “I was alone at this time in understanding [Picasso], perhaps because I was expressing the same thing in literature.”48 More specifically, she explained that in writing The Making of Americans, she was trying to “escape from inevitably feeling that anything that everything had meaning as beginning and middle and ending.”49 In the process, she believed she was becoming closer to Picasso than to her own brother.
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 28