Charles Henri Ford’s vanity turns 100 today. Its owner, poet and publisher Charles Henri Ford, was by all reliable accounts born in Mississippi on this day in 1908 but he insisted that he was born in 1913, a fudge which endures on his Wikipedia entry.

Beyond contention, however, is his status as a major cultural catalyst. His influence and relationships ranged from the Surrealists and the interwar expat community in Paris through to the Beats and the Factory, connections which he carried right into the 21st century, dying in 2002. Anyone whose address book has space for both Faulkner, William and Arcade, Penny is surely worth investigating further.

Even allowing for the half-decade headstart, Ford’s early activities are remarkable. At 21 he launched Blues, a literary journal which attracted contributions from the likes of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Soon he was off to Paris with The Young and Evil (co-written with long-time collaborator Parker Tyler) as his calling card. Edith Sitwell, shocked by the novel’s frank depiction of gay urban life, cast it onto a fire. Notorious closet case Edward James, who happened to be on hand, joined in the impromptu book-burning.

The twosome would recur in Ford’s life; James pursued his sister Ruth Ford while promoting the career of artist Pavel Tchelitchew, Ford’s partner. Said artist, meanwhile, was the unlikely object of Edith Sitwell’s passion; he painted a number of portraits of her and turned up in fictional form in her sole novel, I Live under a Black Sun. Sitwell evidently overcame her distaste for Ford’s writing, penning a preface for a volume of his poetry.

While Ford spent much of the 1930s in Paris, there was a sojourn to Morocco with Djuna Barnes. Their affair was a rare excursion to multi-gender relationships for Ford (though not so rare for Barnes). In Morocco they stayed with Paul Bowles and Ford typed up the manuscript of Barnes’ masterpiece, Nightwood. Back in New York at the outset of the Second World War, Ford sought out Tyler once more and they set to work on View, a hugely important journal of avant-garde writing and imagery from both sides of the Atlantic.

Some of Ford’s most fascinating connections elude diagrammatic rendering. While he was a subject for one of Andy Warhol’s famous screen tests, his involvement in the pop artist’s filmic endeavours goes even deeper. Ford, in fact, took Warhol shopping for his first camera. He also introduced him to visionary film artist Marie Menken, who would prove a major influence on Warhol’s moving images, as well as Gerard Malanga, who become a loyal adjutant.

Ford later hosted a salon in his apartment in the Dakota building; in Just Kids Patti Smith recollects attending with Robert Mapplethorpe, although she felt that Ford was intent on recreating his Parisian past. You can read up on the entire sweep of Ford’s career in this informative and entertaining interview from 1986. Meanwhile, here’s an attempt to map Charles Henri Ford’s most important connections:

click through for a more legible view

Further reading
Dress-down Friday: Charles Henri Ford, Charles Henri Ford | collages
Angel (Joseph Cornell/Pavel Tchelitchew)
Dress-down Friday: Djuna Barnes, Djuna 40/80/120, Circles: H.D./Bryher, Djuna Barnes | drawings (Djuna Barnes)
World Famous Aerial Queen, Dress-down Friday: Janet Flanner, El hombre elefante, Pearls: Janet Flanner (Janet Flanner)
Surreal estate, James and the giant artichoke, Strange Flowers guide to London, part 2 and part 3, The James Press, At home with Edward James, 13 books for 2013 (Edward James)
“A huge old baby vulture”, Circles; H.D./Bryher, Edith speaks, Dress-down Friday: Edith Sitwell, Pearls: Edith Sitwell (Edith Sitwell)
Salon queen, Pearls: Natalie Clifford Barney, Circles: Natalie Clifford Barney (Natalie Barney)
Look back with Anger, Go! Go! Go! (Marie Menken)
Review: Howl (Allen Ginsberg)

We lived in the streets, in the cafes, like a pack of mongrel dogs. We had our very own codes. Students and people with jobs were kept out. As for the tourists who came around to gawk at “existentialists,” it was all right to con them. We always managed to have rough wine and hash from Algeria. We shared everything.

Further reading
The valley of Vali Myers
Night Flower

Hugely prolific French photographer Laure Albin-Guillot (1879-1962) embraced numerous styles in her career, including fashion photography, male and female nudes as well as portraits of literary luminaries. Her innovative experiments in micrography transferred the view through the microscope onto paper, revealing tiny terrains of wonder and beauty, as shown in these examples dating from 1931. Starting next week the Jeu de Paume is hosting an exhibition covering Albin-Guillot’s entire oeuvre, the latest in the Parisian museum’s ongoing survey of great photographers past and present.

“Decadence as an aesthetic movement has always illustrated the fact that interesting things are more likely to be happening on the margins than at the center.” So declared Melanie C. Hawthorne in a 2011 paper entitled “Gisèle d’Estoc: Portraits of a Decadent Woman”.

“Interesting things are more likely to be happening on the margins than at the center” – there you have the central animating assumption of Strange Flowers. And Hawthorne’s book-length treatment of d’Estoc, Finding the Woman Who Didn’t Exist (published on 1 March) provides compelling proof to support her thesis:

This is a book about Gisèle d’Estoc. If you have never heard of her, you are not alone, and you may be wondering (to paraphrase the Victorian “nonsense” poet Edward Lear) who, or why, or which, or what is Gisèle d’Estoc? This book offers some answers to these questions. The short version is this. First of all, the answer to the question “What is Gisèle d’Estoc?” is that it is a pseudonym, but resolving this question only gives rise to another one: “Then who is she?” That is the question some people have been asking for over a century, as they tried to identify the person behind the mask once and for all. You will find out in the course of this book why people cared about finding her, and you will discover that we now know that she was really Marie Paule Alice Courbe (1845–94), who rubbed shoulders with the famous and not so famous of fin-de-siècle France, and who tried her hand at creative endeavors of her own (mainly as an artist and writer).

[...]

Women may have faced many limitations in nineteenth-century France, but not everyone played by the rules and Gisèle d’Estoc seems to have broken most of them at one time or another in her colorful life. She was not the typical French woman of her time, hardly an Everywoman, except in the sense that she was not born to riches or greatness but had a go at seizing them with her own two hands all the same, as it is given to all of us in some way to make a similar effort and see where it lands us. D’Estoc pursued her art to the point of exhibiting at the Paris Salon. She took up both the sword and the pen (and this book will have something to say about the relationship between those two artifacts). She disguised herself as a schoolboy and took both men and women as lovers (and yes, sometimes disguised herself in order to do so). And if, finally, she was not the anarchist bomber she was believed by some to be (as I shall argue), the fact that the accusation was credible testifies to her reputation for action and conflict.

Gisèle d’Estoc en homme

Rodney Graham, Camera Obscura Mobile, 1996

Last winter, Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia put together an exhibition of artefacts related to the writings of Raymond Roussel, France’s literary exception non pareil. Roussel’s books were the Baedekers of an immense and baffling imaginative terrain, and the show paired them with text and artworks which were effectively postcards, home movies, travel dispatches and queer keepsakes sent back from that same realm. Starting with Duchamp, it laid bare the different ways that successive artistic generations have approached Roussel’s singular vision.

Now comes a related exhibition in the Palais de Tokyo, in Roussel’s birthplace – Paris. Starting today, Nouvelles impressions de Raymond Roussel builds on the earlier show while adding more contemporary works whose connection to the author in question may not be readily apparent. “It did not seem necessary for their relationship to that writer to have taken the form of a tribute,” assert the curators, “or even for them to refer to him explicitly.”

This raises the possibility that Roussel’s influence is so covert that the artists themselves don’t know that their hands are guided by an eccentric French writer who died in 1933. Which is quite something. Here is the full statement regarding Nouvelles impressions de Raymond Roussel:

Raymond Roussel is finally being celebrated in Paris: a long overdue event for this writer who for more than a century has occupied a central place in the imaginations of artists— some artists, but not the least important—, embodying the figure of the artist totally dedicated to his work, to the very boundaries of reason, the work of the artist who creates a “complete world”, “following only the inclination of his imagination” (André Breton). “New Impressions of Raymond Roussel” is a follow-up and a complement to the exhibition “Impressions of Raymond Roussel” which was held at the Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid) in 2011 and the Museu Serralves (Porto) in 2012. It outlined a diagonal history of 20th-century art, linking the points between artists and creative people who have talked of the influence of this author and his writings on their work: starting with, Marcel Duchamp, then the Surrealists, but also Michel Foucault or Georges Perec. This time “New Impressions of Raymond Roussel” intends to accord a larger place to the present, and brings together artists encountered during these recent years of research focusing on Roussel. It did not seem necessary for their relationship to that writer to have taken the form of a tribute, or even for them to refer to him explicitly.That would underestimate the nature of those influences, as deep as they are underground, to reduce them to games involving quotation. These works cannot be reduced to a theme and their combined presence here is an exercise in unraveling the motifs – always different – that artists have derived from Roussel, consciously or not, according to a reading which must of course be assumed to have been partial. It is indeed the “greatest magnetizer of modern times,” in the words of André Breton, that this exhibition is recalling to people’s memories; the man who, for Michel Leiris, achieved “escape from the field of Reality into that of Conception”. It involves telling of the power of his poetry, its capacity to transport us into a “topsy-turvy world”; the vast childish and sometimes cruel theater that is the universe of Raymond Roussel.

João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, from Darwin’s Apple, Newton’s Monkey, 2012

Your blogger is back in sunny Berlin (and as of [cranes neck towards window] right now I can say that without irony) and catching up on things missed while reacquainting himself with the gastronomic fads, ambient good cheer and homicidal fauna of his homeland.

It’s always good to see (and in this case hear) ongoing interest in Arthur Cravan. The Swiss-born “performer, publisher, jewel thief, forger, sailor, bon vivant and lover of beautiful women” is examined in a half-hour BBC Radio documentary, entitled Arthur Cravan Memorial Society, which was broadcast last month (and is still available online). Comedian Arthur Smith talks to devotees of Oscar Wilde’s errant nephew such as Roger Conover (who issued 4 Dada Suicides, featuring Cravan’s work) and David Lalé, author of Last Stop Salina Cruz, one of several books to make fiction of the poet’s self-curated myth and mysterious maritime disappearance.

“Whatever the outcome of his sea voyage,” we learn, “Arthur Cravan never really died, he just passed into a realm from where we may occasionally reclaim him as a kind of prophet, a prophet of glorious artistic confrontation with the cold, hard world.” These words sounded oddly familiar, and then I realised I wrote something very similar a year and a half ago.

I never visit Deviates, Inc. without seeing, reading or learning something new.

My latest discovery is Lulu – not to be confused with the shouting ’60s pop star or Frank Wedekind’s femme fatale. No, this Lulu belongs to the category of frocked-up funambulists – a category that until now I naïvely imagined to have one sole occupant: the divine Barbette.

But 60 years before Texan-born Vander Clyde soared above the heads of le tout Paris with the look, name and mien of a zero-gravity soubrette, there was Lulu. Born Sam Wasgate in Maine in 1855, the orphan took to performing in Britain with his adoptive father, famed tightrope walker William Leonard Hunt, “The Great Farini”. Once the child acrobat had amazed London audiences with his dexterity as “El Niño Farini”, a cross-Channel, cross-dressing teenaged Wasgate was soon wowing Paris in frills and ruffles as “The Beautiful Lulu the girl Aerialist and Circassian Catapultist”.

As was the case for Clyde/Barbette later, it was an accident which finally brought Wasgate/Lulu down from the heights, coupled with a reluctance to continue with the female persona. “There was much embarrassment amongst male admirers,” reports an article on the V&A’s website, “when it was revealed in 1878 that Lulu was in fact a man.”
Click to view slideshow.

Yesterday’s gallery was by way of introduction to Remembrance of Things to Come, a 2003 film study of Denise Bellon’s life and career which I caught recently. It was made by Bellon’s filmmaker daughter Yannick, along with Chris Marker (who died last year). Like Marker’s La Jetée (1962), this film makes an impressive virtue of necessity. Where four decades earlier Marker simply lacked the means to shoot moving film and used stills instead, here the stills – that is, Denise Bellon’s photographs – are actually the subject, and aside from a few fleeting pieces of footage, it is these images which tell the story.

It is a story from “when post-war was becoming pre-war”, when the avant-garde was torn between brittle utopias and brutal reality. Bellon was there to immortalise them at work and play, with portraits of the Surrealists in their pre-war heyday and their depleted post-war gatherings. But there is so much besides. Bellon’s lens consumed the Outsider architecture of the Facteur Cheval, anatomical models, the mutilated faces of war veterans, Parisian street scenes, silent siren Musidora, a Lumière brother, the Paris Exposition of 1937, the tribes of sub-Saharan Africa, the city-dwellers of the Maghreb, Finnish military manoeuvres, French civilians surrendering scrap metal for the war effort, oxen being herded through the streets of Lyon, Yannick and her sister (actor Loleh Bellon) in advertising images.

The same voracious lens captured things of which we might otherwise be ignorant. Henri Langlois’s mythical bathtub, for instance, where he stored French film masterpieces before founding the Cinemathèque. Or the Loyalists’ little-known attempt to re-take Spain in 1944.

Remembrance of Things to Come is an important document of an undervalued 20th century photographer, and well worth seeking out. The trailer is below (and if you understand French or Spanish you can see the whole thing here, narrated in the former and subtitled in the latter.)

An elderly lady sits in her apartment among her bric-à-brac, reminiscing about different places she has lived. She chats with her housekeeper, and later a neighbour drops in.

A cosy enough domestic scene, but not one that would have necessarily caught the eye of posterity were it not for the fact that said lady is novelist Colette, the apartment her renowned Palais-Royal eyrie, its knickknacks her equally famous collection of glass paperweights, and the houses she describes the stations of a compelling life, familiar to readers from lyrical descriptions in her books.

This comes from a film made in 1950 by French filmmaker Yannick Bellon, who we encountered yesterday. Colette is first seen taking breakfast and – in a nimble meta touch scripted by the novelist herself – announcing her refusal to appear in the film in which she presently appears. She nonetheless goes on to describe her previous residences, beginning with her first childhood home, set amid the kind of bucolic idyll of which Colette was an unsurpassed chronicler. As Colette’s mind wanders back to these homes, so too does the camera.

Oh, and the neighbour? That’s her friend and fellow Palais-Royal resident Jean Cocteau. He banters affectionately with Colette, calling her “a fountain of ink” as he marvels at her ability to produce work while offering the impression of utter indolence.

Anyway, you can see all this for yourself, below.

Enjoy!

I doubt there’s a word, or words, which can do justice to the astonishments below. This, ladies and gentlemen and fabulous gradations betwixt, is Mathilde de Morny. Born 150 years ago today, she was the pinnacle of hard butch Belle Époque amazon trans-aristo realness. Having completely abandoned the trappings of her assigned gender as the 19th century drew to a close, she withdrew from society a few short years into the 20th. Thereafter she pulled a mantle of mystery about her noble shoulders, living in melancholic seclusion until her death in 1944.

This is the first time I’ve seen evidence of Mathilde in later years. Here she is, in the hot glare of the flash, not quite ready for her close-up, some time in the 1930s. The man seen with her is photographer Willy Michel, who installed Paris’s first photo booth in his studio in 1928, where these candid shots, in a familiar strip format, were taken. Mathilde seems scarcely to relish the occasion, mostly avoiding the camera’s impertinent scrutiny and imperiously withstanding Michel’s attempts to get a smile out of her.

If however you’re unfamiliar with Mathilde – Monsieur le Marquis, Missy, la Marquise de Belbeuf, Méphistophela, la Marquise de Sade, Uncle Max – well, frankly I envy the discovery you are about to make. You can start your own sesquicentennial exploration among Strange Flowers’ back pages and read up on her life, her literary legacy, her bête noire, her wardrobe. Oh, also if you are unfamiliar with her, I should point out that she’s on the right in these shots:

As we saw yesterday, French photographer Willy Michel set up the first photobooth in Paris in 1928. There he pioneered the “selfie with star”, which has become the red-carpet scourge of anyone anywhere famous for anything. Michel squeezed into the shot with dozens of between-the-wars notables, though many of his booth companions, it must be said, would only be recognizable to the keenest aficionado of the Parisian stage. The selection below features some of the more notable names; common to almost all (Erich von Stroheim being the exception) is an infectious, joyful candour.

Jean Marais

Jean-Louis Barrault

Maria Casarès

Erich von Stroheim

Maurice Chevalier

Yvette Guilbert

Artur Rubinstein

Bing Crosby

Edwige Feuillère

Further reading
Missy and Willy
Phantom of the empire (Jean Marais, Edwige Feuillère)
Death becomes her (Maria Casarès)
Moondog on film (Jean-Louis Barrault)

Remember last November’s blow-out of photographic wonders? They’re doing it again tomorrow – that is, Sotheby’s in Paris are once again staging an auction of the greatest names in photography from the medium’s inception to the present day.

That means early exponents like Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Eugène Atget and Adolph de Meyer; an extraordinary Nadar image of a hermaphrodite (one of the highest estimates), a Pierre-Louis Pierson image of La Castiglione, no less. It continues with Laure-Albin Guillot, Germaine Krull, Pierre Molinier, Raoul Ubac, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson (including the famous image of prostitutes in Mexico), Robert Mapplethorpe, Horst P. Horst, right up to Ed Ruscha and Nan Goldin.

If you go along please say hi to my imaginary self; he often bids heavily at these things.

On the eve of the First World War, on the auspiciously palindromic date of 31.3.13, Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Elysées opened its doors. It was the newest concert hall of a city whose promiscuous flirtation with a vast range of diversions saved it from becoming a stuffy musical centre in the Central European mould.

But the sobriety of this new theatre’s facade signalled the earnestness of its intent. It was designed by Auguste Perret, a specialist in the kind of concrete construction of which the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées was an outstanding example. Here the extravagant gestures were to be confined to the stage and the theatre was a brusque interloper among the Second Empire streetscapes which dominate Paris to this day. Robert Mallet-Stevens’ Art Deco audacities lay ahead in the 1920s, and even then they were confined to a quiet part of town. But here, if not on its namesake thoroughfare then at least nearby on the avenue Montaigne, was a stark ash-coloured temple owing little to the gilt music boxes which otherwise housed the orchestras and opera companies of Paris, their format barely changed since the 18th century.

A few days after the opening, a gala event bigged up the domestic market, with a programme boasting five of France’s greatest living composers. Not that they were entirely happy to share the stage. The tensions between tradition and innovation then simmering in the city’s music scene were exemplified by two figures in particular: Camille Saint-Saëns, champion of high Germanic Romanticism on one side, with Claude Debussy attempting to belatedly drag music into the 20th century on the other.

Those tensions came famously and definitively to breaking point just a few weeks later. That’s when – 100 years ago today – the Ballets-Russes presented a new ballet choreographed by Vaslav Nijinksy to music by Igor Stravinsky. The score of Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) emerged out of a deceptively calm beginning and soon erupted with the crushing, rhythmic violence of regeneration and initiation, heedless new green shoots forcing their way through hard, winter-weary ground. At times it sounded like squabbling avalanches, sometimes like the vengeful natural world creeping up behind the human race only to dash it into a fiery sea. This turbulence was met with an equally tumultuous audience reaction, triggering the most notorious music-inspired riot in history. Saint-Saëns was present but made for the door in disgust. Critic, writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten stayed on, and left this vivid account:

I was sitting in a box in which I had rented one seat. Three ladies sat in front of me and a young man occupied the place behind me. He stood up during the course of the ballet to enable himself to see more clearly. The intense excitement under which he was laboring, thanks to the potent force of the music, betrayed itself presently when he began to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists. My emotion was so great that I did not feel the flows for some time. They were perfectly synchronized with the beat of the music. When I did, I turned around. His apology was sincere. We had both been carried beyond ourselves.

(Oh, and then he went back the next night and met Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, because that’s just how he rolled.)

The performance was one of the pinnacles of invention which made 1913 the annus mirabilis of early Modernism. But the story of its reception continues to resonate so strongly because it implicitly flatters us, we, who smugly imagine that of course we would have sided with the innovators had we been there. In any case it didn’t take long for Stravinsky’s score to be recognised as one of the greatest of the age and by my own utterly unacademic reckoning it contains at least 47 of the 100 most thrilling moments of 20th century music. For a more thoughtful account of the ballet, its genesis and its context I can highly recommend Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise, while { feuilleton } has some fascinating insights into the evolution of the piece over the last century.

Naturally there were many other renowned performers in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées after this deafening fanfare of the new age. However I am going to assume you are sufficiently familiar with the likes of Isadora Duncan, Herbert von Karajan, Maria Callas, Arturo Toscanini and Josephine Baker, and ask that you indulge me as I describe some of the lesser known personalities associated with the theatre between the wars.

In 1922 the theatre was purchased by the wealthy and much-married opera singer Ganna Walska. “The only satisfaction my much coveted bank account ever gave me was the opportunity to create a centre of music in Paris at the beautiful Théâtre des Champs-Elysées,” she declared in her memoirs. “It is a well-known fact,” she claimed at another point, “that the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées is the most beautiful theatre in Paris.” Actually it was a far from universal opinion, but this assumption of an objective state of affairs coextensive with her own subjective view was typical for a woman who persisted in her self-perception as a feted diva when the music world regarded her largely as a punchline.

Never let it be said, however, that she didn’t go for adventurous programming. In April 1924, writer, painter and composer Lord Berners presented the premiere of his sole opera, Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrément. Anyone familiar with Berners’ persona and artistic output, which was hardly of the most radical bent, might be surprised to learn that Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat featured on the same bill. In fact Berners was a close friend of Stravinsky’s, even sharing a house with him and Diaghilev in Paris. In any case Berners’ opera was met with warm applause but tepid reviews and had to wait almost 90 years for a revival.

Later that same year René Clair presented a short film in the interval of a piece by Francis Picabia performed by the Ballets Suédois. Entr’acte featured an appearance by Picabia himself, along with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and other avant-garde luminaries. With its audacious disdain for conventional narrative, it is widely regarded as the first film to earn the adjective “Surrealist”.

It was a word to be applied with caution, as Valeska Gert discovered to her cost in 1926. Her appearance on the Comédie stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées was announced with posters around Paris (evidently without Gert’s consent) marketing her performance as “Surrealist dance”. The manifesto which defined Surrealism had only recently appeared and its author André Breton zealously policed usage of the label. This provocation by a German dancer could not go uncontested, and he assembled a crack troop of loyalists to stage a protest which was evidently as raucous as that which greeted Le Sacre du printemps. The Surrealists blew whistles and Breton himself leapt on to a seat and loudly asserted that he, and only he, would decide what was surreal and what wasn’t. According to Gert herself the audience alternately shouted “She is amazing! Wonderful!” and “Chuck out the German cow!” Incensed, she broke the fourth wall with a reply of “Vous êtes des idiotes!“. The police were called, Breton and associates taken into custody and Gert was able to finish her performance. She was back in 1930, although her advance publicity wisely omitted any mention of Surrealism.

But what of the chatelaine herself? Ganna Walska was hardly going to resist the lure of an empty stage for long; a stage, what’s more, which she owned. In 1929 she found the subject matter for a new piece in someone who is never far from Strange Flowers’ thoughts:

When several painters after seeing me in “Nozze di Figaro” said how strangely I resembled the portraits of the famous Castiglione, “La Divine Comtesse“, who reigned as Queen of Hearts over the Tuileries and its romantic emperor, Napoleon III, immediately I began to read and learn everything about that legendary beauty and to collect her portraits, of which about nine hundred are in my possession.

Leaving aside the question of reliability in Walska’s account (“several painters”? really?) it was a powerful identification which resonated strongly in the singer’s self-presentation. In Castiglione, Walska had discovered the mirror that only another obsessive narcissist can supply. She engaged the highbrow composer Jacques Ibert to write the music, with the book by Régis Gignoux, who took extensive liberties with the truth. The piece met with no great outpouring of either acclaim or ridicule, and unless a lot changes between now and 2029, sadly its centenary is unlikely to match the interest in Stravinsky’s immortal Rite.

Ganna Walska as the Countess de Castiglione

Heat gotcha down? Allow me to propose something light for the start of the (Northern) summer. Here we have American dancer Loie Fuller, who wowed Belle Époque Paris with her hypnotic twirling under dazzling coloured lights. She’s here to demonstrate how you can keep yourself and anyone within a 50-metre radius cool using just a few simple dance steps and a hectare of tulle (not suitable for: escalators, public transport, step class). Take it away, Loie:

By 1923, Dadaism had more or less run its course. The revolutionary anti-art movement was riven by infighting and arguably had no other option than to turn its nihilistic energies on itself. At the same time the Surrealists, who had found a way out of the Dadaist cul-de-sac with a combination of Marxist politics and Freudian aesthetics, were on the rise.

The definitive break between the two groups came 90 years ago today, in Paris. It was an event hosted by Tristan Tzara in the Théâtre Michel, the “Soirée du Cœur à Barbe”, named for the Dadaist journal Le Cœur à barbe (“Bearded Heart”). It was an attempt to rally the waning forces of Dadaism, to get the old gang back together. But as you will know from any movie where a criminal band regroups for one last heist, it could only end in disaster.

The programme, at least, was as prestigious a collection of names as avant-garde interwar Paris could offer. Music by Stravinsky, Satie, Milhaud and Auric, poems by Jean Cocteau, Philippe Soupault and Tzara himself. There was a trio of short films (of which more later) and a performance of Tzara’s play Le Cœur à gaz (“The Gas Heart”), with angular costumes by Sonia Delaunay.

In the audience was a Surrealist claque including Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos and Benjamin Péret, led by chippy blowhard André Breton. Soon after it began, the evening descended into the chaos for which it was effectively pre-programmed. Writer Pierre de Massot took to the stage unannounced and recited a litany of names of those “fallen on the field of honour”, including André Gide, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. It was the second name on this list which evidently provoked the audience, and Breton led a charge in defence of the absent Spanish painter, and broke Massot’s arm (and it wasn’t the last time he’d pull a stunt like that, either).

Things went forme de poire again during Tzara’s play, and the unfortunate actors discovered that Delaunay’s stiff costumes, while visually striking, weren’t much use in a mêlée. Many of the participants were dragged off to the local police station, with the director of the Théâtre Michel surveying the wreckage, mournfully exclaiming, “my lovely little theatre!”. “Never,” claims writer Neil Baldwin, “had so many poets fought in one spot with such relish.” A repeat performance had been scheduled for the following evening but it was, for obvious reasons, cancelled.

But at the heart of the “Bearded Heart” was a moment of comparative calm which also marks one of the most significant moments in non-narrative cinema. Three short films were shown, the first by Americans Charles Scheeler and Paul Strand called Manhatta, based on the Walt Whitman poem of the same name, which was quoted in the intertitles. It was made in 1920 and thus predated similar filmic essays of the urban machine like Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt. The second was Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21, a rigorous study of squares and rectangles, made in 1921.

What followed was the premiere of the first moving picture by an American who had previously concentrated on photography. Man Ray’s Le Retour à la Raison (“Return to Reason”) was around two and a half minutes long, and contained a number of the visual devices familiar from his still images of the time: tumbling haberdashery, Kiki de Montparnasse’s breasts. It was later hailed as the first Surrealist film, a status which, although contested, was an indication of where Man Ray’s future lay.

Here are the three films presented that night:

Society aesthete Baron de Redé died nine years ago, and so he was spared the sight of his life’s work, the preservation of Paris’s Hôtel Lambert, going up in flames early this morning. The town palace, situated on the Île Saint-Louis, was built by Louis Le Vau, who also created Louis XIV’s Versailles (that’s a lotta Louis). Once inhabited by Voltaire, the Lambert had been undergoing a controversial restoration for its new owners, members of the Qatari royal family, which at least meant that no-one was in the building at the time.

More on the Lambert, the baron, his parties and his memoirs.

Around here, Dress-down Friday is usually dedicated to individuals of outstandingly idiosyncratic style, so this entry is a little off-beam. At first glance these images, which all date from 1913, have much in common with other fashion plates of the time, with their fanciful neo-Rococo imagery viewed through an Art Nouveau filter. But beyond the modish fête galante style you may notice the artist’s focus isn’t always on the clothes, especially in the black & white drawings.

These illustrations were created for a French magazine by the name of La Vie parisienne, and while the non-committally titled magazine did indeed feature fashion among its range of subjects, its target reader was not, as a rule, the lady of the house. This early 20th century publication was a precursor to later soft porn titles for men, its deceptively innocent images considered quite risqué in their time.

But if these pictures are sedate compared to those found in their present-day equivalents, they are far more restrained than others produced by the same hand. Gerda Wegener was a Danish artist who arrived in Paris in 1912. Highly versatile, her illustrations for La Vie parisienne fell at about the mid-point of a continuum which stretched from fashion plates for Vogue to erotic illustrations for works by Casanova.

It is about now that I must confess that part of my motivation in posting these images (apart from their obvious appeal and the insight they offer into the tastes of 1913) is to introduce the extraordinary story of Gerda and her transsexual husband Einar. I couldn’t improve upon its telling by the late, lamented Coilhouse, so if you want to know how two people can live in a menage à trois, click and read on. Oh, and there you can see examples of Gerda’s erotica as well (may be NSFW, depending on where you W).

In The Trembling of the Veil, W. B. Yeats recalls a visit to the Parisian home of poet Paul Verlaine, there encountering a “slovenly, ragged man”. Unnamed in the book, it is none other than our favourite dandified klepto-hobohemian, Bibi-la-Purée (who died on this day in 1903), known for memoirbombing just about any account of the literary avant-garde in Belle Époque Paris:

Paul Verlaine alternated between the two halves of his nature with so little apparent resistance that he seemed like a bad child, though to read his sacred poems is to remember perhaps that the Holy Infant shared His first home with the beasts. In what month was it that I received a note inviting me to “coffee and cigarettes plentifully,” and signed “Yours quite cheerfully, Paul Verlaine?” I found him at the top of a tenement house in the Rue St. Jacques, sitting in an easy chair, his bad leg swaddled in many bandages. He asked me, speaking in English, if I knew Paris well, and added, pointing to his leg, that it had scorched his leg for he know it “well, too well” and “lived in it like a fly in a pot of marmalade.” He took up an English dictionary, one of the few books in the room, and began searching for the name of his disease, selecting after a long search and with, as I understood, only comparative accuracy “Erysipelas.” Meanwhile his homely, middle-aged mistress made the coffee and found the cigarettes; it was obviously she who had given the room its character; her canaries in several cages hanging in the window, and her sentimental lithographs nailed here and there among the nude drawings and newspaper caricatures of her lover as various kinds of monkey, which he had pinned upon the wall. A slovenly, ragged man came in, his trousers belted with a piece of rope and an opera hat upon his head. She drew a box over to the fire, and he sat down, now holding the opera hat upon his knees, and I think he must have acquired it very lately for he kept constantly closing and opening it. Verlaine introduced him by saying, “He is a poor man, but a good fellow, and is so like Louis XI to look at that we call him Louis the Xlth.” I remember that Verlaine talked of Victor Hugo who was “a supreme poet, but a volcano of mud as well as of flame,” and of Villiers de L’Isle Adam who was “exalté” and wrote excellent French ; and of In Memoriam, which he had tried to translate and could not. “Tennyson is too noble, too Anglais ; when he should have been broken- hearted, he had many reminiscences.”

At Verlaine’s burial, but a few months after, his mistress quarrelled with a publisher at the graveside as to who owned the sheet by which the body had been covered, and Louis XI stole fourteen umbrellas that he found leaning against a tree in the Cemetery.

Why I am only finding this out now I do not know, but: Paris’s array of enticements is currently augmented by an exhibition dedicated to the wonderful Pierre Loti, French writer, adventurer and fearless sartorial event. J’arrive, j’aime, je m’en vais is at the Musée du Quai Branly, the French capital’s motley assortment of non-Western art and artifacts, until 29 September.

The exhibition explores his childhood, his travels, his costumes, his high society connections, his folie for sailors as well as his long fascination with le dernier voyage – death. Along with Loti’s books, drawings and personal effects, the exhibition features a darkened alcove shielded by black velvet curtains offering nothing more than a centennial recreation of a scent made for Loti in 1913. “Rose d’amour” contains Damascean rose, lilac, mint and violet, as I discovered on a brief visit to the wonderful and frightening world of perfume blogs. Sometimes I feel that trying to summon the vanished existences of marginal figures is like describing scent, but having now read actual descriptions of scents I realise I probably have the easier deal.

But the important thing is, Strange Flowers now has something to put in its bathroom cabinet alongside Eau de Castiglione and Ganna Walska’s “Divorçons“.

Further reading
Disenchanted
Dress-down Friday: Pierre Loti
Obsèques de M. Pierre Loti
Pierre Loti | drawings

Well, look who’s back. Again.

Swiss-born boxer/poet/shit-stirrer Arthur Cravan is the subject of the latest edition of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s magazine La Règle du jeu. Cravan, who embarked from the coast of Mexico in 1918 and was (let’s not kid ourselves) never seen again, has had more comebacks than Cher. The title of the issue – “Arthur Cravan est vivant!” – has become an article of faith, professed over and over by those for whom Cravan’s myth can never be exhausted.

The issue is being launched tonight in Paris, with a “soirée de projection et débat“.

Further reading
Arthur Cravan Memorial Society
Pearls: Arthur Cravan
Three shows
Arthur Cravan: poet, boxer, blogger
Arthur Cravan est vivant!
Float like a butterfly, sting like a butterfly