Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (26 page)

Every so often history gives us a time to savour, a truly defining moment that stands out for all time. 1913 was such a moment. It was as if Clio, the muse of history, was playing tricks with mankind. With the world on the brink of the abyss, with World War I just months away, with its terrible, unprecedented human wastage, with the Russian Revolution not much further off, dividing the world in a way it hadn’t been divided before, Clio gave us what was, in creative terms, arguably the most fecund – and explosive – year of the century. As Robert Frost wrote in
A Boy’s Will,
his first collection of poems, also published that year:

Towards the end of 1912 Gertrude Stein, the American writer living in Paris, received a rambling but breathless letter from Mabel Dodge, an old friend: ‘There is an exhibition coming on the 15 Feb to 15 March, which is the most important public event that has ever come off since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, & it is of the same nature. Arthur Davies is the President of a group of men here who felt the American people ought to be given a chance to see what the modern artists have been doing in Europe, America & England of late years…. This will be a
scream!’
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In comparing what became known as the Armory Show to the Declaration of Independence, Mabel Dodge was (one hopes) being ironic. Nonetheless, she was not wholly wrong. One contemporary American press clipping said, ‘The Armory Show was an eruption only different from a volcano’s in that it was made by man.’ The show opened on the evening of 17 February 1913. Four thousand people thronged eighteen temporary galleries bounded by the shell of the New York Armory on Park Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street. The stark ceiling was masked by yellow tenting, and potted pine trees sweetened the air. The proceedings were opened by John Quinn, a lawyer and distinguished patron of contemporary art, who numbered Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce among his friends.
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In his speech Quinn said, ‘This exhibition will be epoch-making in the history
of American art. Tonight will be the red-letter night in the history not only of American art but of all modern art.’
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The Armory Show was, as Mabel Dodge had told Gertrude Stein, the brainchild of Arthur Davies, a rather tame painter who specialised in ‘unicorns and medieval maidens.’ Davies had hijacked an idea by four artists of the Pastellists Society, who had begun informal discussions about an exhibition, to be held at the Armory, showing the latest developments in American art. Davies was well acquainted with three wealthy New York wives – Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mrs Cornelius J. Sullivan. These women agreed to finance the show, and Davies, together with the artist Walt Kuhn and Walter Pach, an American painter and critic living in Paris, set off for Europe to find the most radical pictures the Continent had to offer.

The Armory Show was in fact the third great exhibition of the prewar years to introduce the revolutionary painting being produced in Paris to other countries. The first had taken place in London in 1910 at the Grafton Galleries.
Manet and the Post-Impressionists
was put together by the critic Roger Fry, assisted by the artist Clive Bell. Fry’s show began with Edouard Manet (the last ‘old masterly’ painter, yet the first of the moderns), then leapt to Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin without, as the critic John Rewald has said, ‘wasting time’ on the other impressionists. In Fry’s eyes, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, at that point virtually unknown in Britain, were the immediate precursors of modern art. Fry was determined to show the differences between the impressionists and the Post-impressionists, who for him were the greater artists. He felt that the aim of the Post-impressionists was to capture ‘the emotional significance of the world that the Impressionists merely recorded.’
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Cézanne was the pivotal figure: the way he broke down his still lifes and landscapes into a patchwork of coloured lozenges, as if they were the building blocks of reality, was for Fry a precursor of cubism and abstraction. Several Parisian dealers lent to the London show, as did Paul Cassirer of Berlin. The exhibition received its share of criticism, but Fry felt encouraged enough to hold a second show two years later.

This second effort was overshadowed by the German Sonderbund, which opened on 25 May 1912, in Cologne. This was another volcano – in John Rewald’s words, a ‘truly staggering exhibition.’ Unlike the London shows, it took for granted that people were already familiar with nineteenth-century painting and hence felt free to concentrate on the most recent movements in modern art. The Sonderbund was deliberately arranged to provoke: the rooms devoted to Cézanne were next to those displaying Van Gogh, Picasso was next to Gauguin. The exhibition also featured Pierre Bonnard, André Derain, Erich Heckel, Aleksey von Jawlensky, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Egon Schiele, Paul Signac, Maurice de Vlaminck and Edouard Vuillard. Of the 108 paintings in the show, a third had German owners; of the twenty-eight Cézannes, seventeen belonged to Germans. They were clearly more at home with the new painting than either the British or the Americans.
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When Arthur Davies received the catalogue for the Sonderbund, he was so startled that he urged Walt Kuhn to go to Cologne immediately.
Kuhn’s trip brought him into contact with much more than the Sonderbund. He met Munch and persuaded him to participate in the Armory; he went to Holland in pursuit of Van Goghs; in Paris all the talk was of cubism at the Salon d’Automne and of the futurist exhibition held that year at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery. Kuhn ended his trip in London, where he was able to raid Fry’s second exhibition, which was still on.
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The morning after Quinn’s opening speech, the attack from the press began – and didn’t let up for weeks. The cubist room attracted most laughs, and was soon rechristened the Chamber of Horrors. One painting in particular was singled out for ridicule:
Marcel Duchamp
’s
Nude Descending a Staircase.
Duchamp was already in the news for ‘creating’ that year the first ‘readymade,’ a work called simply
Bicycle Wheel.
Duchamp’s
Nude
was described as ‘a lot of disused golf clubs and bags,’ ‘an orderly heap of broken violins,’ and ‘an explosion in a shingle factory.’ Parodies proliferated: for example,
Food Descending a Staircase,
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But the show also received serious critical attention. Among the New York newspapers, the
Tribune,
the
Mail,
the
World,
and the
Times
disliked the show. They all applauded the aim of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors to present new art but found the actual pictures and sculptures difficult. Only the
Baltimore Sun
and the
Chicago Tribune
liked what they saw. With critical reception weighted roughly five to two against it, and popular hilarity on a scale rarely seen, the show might have been a commercial disaster, but it was nothing of the kind. As many as ten thousand people a day streamed through the Armory, and despite the negative reviews, or perhaps because of them, the show was taken up by New York society and became a
succès d’estime.
Mrs Astor went every day after breakfast.
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After New York the Armory Show travelled to Chicago and Boston, and in all 174 works were sold. In the wake of the show a number of new galleries opened up, mainly in New York. Despite the scandal surrounding the new modern art exhibitions, there were plenty of people who found something fresh, welcome, and even wonderful in the new images, and they began collecting.
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Ironically, resistance to the newest art was most vicious in Paris, which at the same time prided itself on being the capital of the avant-garde. In practice, what was new one minute was accepted as the norm soon after. By 1913, impressionism – which had once been scandalous – was the new orthodoxy in painting; in music the controversy surrounding Wagner had long been forgotten, and his lush chords dominated the concert halls; and in literature the late-nineteenth-century symbolism of Stephane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue, once the enfants terribles of the Parisian cultural scene, were now approved by the arbiters of taste, people such as Anatole France.

Cubism, however, had still not been generally accepted. Two days after the Armory Show closed in New York,
Guillaume Apollinaire
’s publishers announced the almost simultaneous release of his two most influential books,
Les Peintres cubistes
and
Alcools.
Apollinaire was born illegitimate in Rome in
1880 to a woman of minor Polish nobility who was seeking political refuge at the papal court. By 1913 he was already notorious: he had just been in jail, accused on no evidence whatsoever of having stolen Leonardo da Vinci’s
Mona Lisa
from the Louvre. After the painting was found, he was released, and made the most of the scandal by producing a book that drew attention to the work of his friend, Pablo Picasso (who the police thought also had had a hand in the theft of the
Mona Lisa),
Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, and a new painter no one had yet heard of, Piet Mondrian. When he was working on the proofs of his book, Apollinaire introduced a famous fourfold organisation of cubism –
scientific, physical, orphie,
and
instinctive
cubism.
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This was too much for most people, and his approach never caught on. Elsewhere in the book, however, he wrote sympathetically about what the cubists were trying to achieve, which helped to get them accepted. His argument was that we should soon get bored with nature unless artists continually renewed our experience of it.
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Brought up on the Côte d’Azur, Apollinaire appealed to Picasso and the
bande à Picasso
(Max Jacob, André Salmon, later Jean Cocteau) for his ‘candid, voluble, sensuous’ nature. After he moved to Paris to pursue a career as a writer, he gradually earned the tide ‘impresario of the avant-garde’ for his ability to bring together painters, musicians, and writers and to present their works in an exciting way. 1913 was a great year for him. Within a month of
Les Peintres cubistes
appearing, in April, Apollinaire produced a much more controversial work,
Alcools
(Liquors), a collection of what he called art poetry, which centred on one long piece of verse, entitled ‘Zone.’
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‘Zone’ was in many ways the poetic equivalent of Arnold Schoenberg’s music or Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings. Everything about it was new, very little recognisable to traditionalists. Traditional typography and verse forms were bypassed. So far as punctuation was concerned, ‘The rhythm and division of the lines form a natural punctuation; no other is necessary.’
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Apollinaire’s imagery was thoroughly modern too: cityscapes, shorthand typists, aviators (French pilots were second only to the Wright brothers in the advances being made). The poem was set in various areas around Paris and in six other cities, including Amsterdam and Prague. It contained some very weird images – at one point the bridges of Paris make bleating sounds, being ‘shepherded’ by the Eiffel Tower.
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‘Zone’ was regarded as a literary breakthrough, and within a few short years, until Apollinaire died (in a ‘flu epidemic), he was regarded as the leader of the modernist movement in poetry. This owed as much to his fiery reputation as to his writings.
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Cubism was the art form that most fired Apollinaire. For the Russian composer
Igor Stravinsky,
it was fauvism. He too was a volcano. In the words of the critic Harold Schonberg, Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet produced the most famous
scandale
in the history of music.
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Le Sacre du printemps
(The Rite of Spring) premiered at the new Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May and overnight changed Paris. Paris, it should be said, was changing in other ways too. The gaslights were being replaced by electric streetlamps, the
pneumatique
by the
telephone, and the last horse-drawn buses went out of service in 1913. For some, the change produced by Stravinsky was no less shocking than Rutherford’s atom bouncing off gold foil.
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Born in Saint Petersburg on 17 June 1882, Stravinsky was just thirty-one in 1913. He had already been famous for three years, since the first night of his ballet
Firebird,
which had premiered in Paris in June 1910. Stravinsky owed a lot to his fellow Russian Serge Diaghilev, who had originally intended to become a composer himself. Discouraged by Nicolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, who told him he had no talent, Diaghilev turned instead to art publishing, organising exhibitions, and then putting on music and ballet shows in Paris. Not unlike Apollinaire, he discovered his true talent as an impresario. Diaghilev’s great passion was ballet; it enabled him to work with his three loves – music, dance and painting (for the scenery) – all at the same time.
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Stravinsky’s father had been a singer with the Saint Petersburg opera.
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Both Russian and foreign musicians were always in and out of the Stravinsky home, and Igor was constantly exposed to music. Despite this, he went to university as a law student, and it was only when he was introduced to Rimsky-Korsakov in 1900 and taken on as his pupil after showing some of his compositions that he switched. In 1908, the year Rimsky-Korsakov died, Stravinsky composed an orchestral work that he called
Fireworks.
Diaghilev heard it in Saint Petersburg, and the music stuck in his mind.
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At that stage he had not formed the Ballets Russes, the company that was to make him and many others famous. However, having staged concerts and operas of Russian music in Paris, Diaghilev decided in 1909 to found a permanent company. In no time, he made the Ballets Russes a centre of the avant-garde. His composers who wrote for the Ballets Russes included Claude Debussy, Manuel de Falla, Sergei Prokofiev, and Maurice Ravel; Picasso and Leon Bakst designed the sets; and the principal dancers were Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, and Léonide Massine. Later, Diaghilev teamed up with another Russian, George Balanchine.
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Diaghilev decided that for the 1910 season in Paris he wanted a ballet on the Firebird legend, to be choreographed by the legendary Michel Fokine, the man who had done so much to modernise the Imperial Ballet. Initially, Diaghilev commissioned Anatol Liadov to write the music, but as the rehearsals approached, Liadov failed to deliver. Growing desperate, Diaghilev decided that he needed another composer, and one who could produce a score in double-quick time. He remembered
Fireworks
and got word to Stravinsky in Saint Petersburg. The composer immediately took the train for Paris to attend rehearsals.
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