Like her great rival La Belle Otero, French Belle Époque courtesan Liane de Pougy was a hugely popular postcard motif of the era. Their blue-blooded suitors may have showered them with gifts and hard currency, but the humblest admirer could buy a piece of the grandes horizontales (or at least their likenesses) for just a few centimes.

Pougy had a home-crowd advantage against the Spanish-born Otero, and her risqué profession was balanced in the public imagination by her sophistication and culture. And while she attracted clients every bit as prestigious as Otero’s, Pougy was much shrewder in shaping and using her image to her own ends. Like Ganna Walska in later years, Pougy embodied a conception of fame which appears eerily redolent of our own age. She complemented her magnetic beauty with a keen fashion sense, sporting a Marcel wave from the hands of the original Marcel (Grateau) himself, with the creations of the age’s greatest designers hugging her snowy white shoulders and tiny waist. In an age of considerable social mobility, Pougy patronised the houses of Fortuny, Paguin, Worth, Poiret and Doucet alongside the noble and royal wives of her clients. She even appeared in fashion advertisements and was the first of many celebrities (including Ganna Walska) to launch a namesake scent.

Pougy also knew how to commoditise the public’s fascination with her love life, and in her book Idylle Sapphique she casts a gossamer veil of fiction over her affair with Natalie Barney. The famed saloniste first spied Pougy in the Bois de Boulogne, wrapped in ermine. Smitten, Barney presented herself en garconne as “the page of love”. She won Pougy over, despite the courtesan’s customary aversion to the mannish female (“We liked long hair, beautiful bosoms, pouts and glances, charm, grace; not woman-boys”).

In comparing the postcard images below with a similar set of Otero, there are some curious parallels. Both, for example, toy with improbable personae, appearing as humble Brides of Christ and in haughty regal splendour. For Pougy, these roles were prophetic – in 1910 she married a prince (Georges Ghika) and in later years served as a Dominican nun, dying in 1950.

Meret Oppenheim, seen yesterday, naturally gravitated to the Surrealists when she arrived in Paris in 1932. For a woman, entrée to André Breton’s clique customarily came in one or more of three modes: model, muse or mistress. Oppenheim was all of these things, for a time, but far too talented to inhabit these roles for long, and too self-possessed to be defined by them.

One of the most famous images of Oppenheim shows her nude behind the wheel of a printing press, a hand and forearm smeared with ink. It was taken by Man Ray in 1933, and between then and 1935 (around the time of her affair with Max Ernst), she also appeared in Man Ray’s short film Poison, along with the filmmaker himself. Even for a Man Ray film there’s not much going on, with the pair smoking and mugging, then Man Ray drinking and giving a hammy preview of his own death. Poison was included in a reel of “home movies“, indicating that it was little more than an experiment. You could see it as a screen test for the role of Surrealist muse; it was a role that Oppenheim, knowing it to be a poisoned chalice, ultimately rejected.

(click here if you don’t see the video embedded below)

Few 20th century photographers did as much to smuggle avant-garde aesthetics into the world of fashion as Erwin Blumenfeld. Born in Berlin in 1897, Blumenfeld made contact with that city’s exponents of Dadaism, and carried their revolutionary principles with him when he moved to Amsterdam. There he developed his own variation on one of Dada’s favoured techniques – photomontage. While his later studies for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar lack the caustic cynicism of these early works, they often exhibit a similarly radical approach to composition. An overview of Blumenfeld’s entire career begins tomorrow at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

Further reading
Dress-down Friday: Valeska Gert

It’s that time of the year again, when costumed apparitions turn society on its head, strange creatures emerge from the undergrowth, and the most diffident wallflower can blossom into a glamorous orchidaceous vision.

Yes, it’s Natalie Clifford Barney‘s birthday. And over at screenwriter Susanne Stroh‘s site, they’re celebrating with quizzes, giveaways and interviews: Jean-Loup Combemale discusses Élisabeth de Gramont, Cassandre Langer talks about Barney’s longtime partner Romaine Brooks, and Suzanne Rodriguez – author of the essential Wild Heart – will be sharing her insights into the birthday girl, so you’ll be in fine company. Find out what happened on Barney’s 50th birthday on this day in 1926 when Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Colette, Djuna Barnes and la toute lesbohème parisienne turned up at the famous salon.

If the above hasn’t sufficiently tempted you it remains only for me to say: THERE WILL BE CHAMPAGNE.

In 1899, author Jean Lorrain reviewed an exhibition by a young artist named Georges Bottini who found inspiration in the dance halls, bars, theatres and brothels of Belle Époque Paris. The writer lauded both the “sooty atmosphere” and “innate elegance” of Bottini’s depiction of this demi-mondaine milieu, one which was very familiar to the noctivagant Lorrain. He returned to it frequently in his writings; his 1904 novel La Maison Philibert, for instance, which was thrashed out to pay the legal fees for one of his numerous libel cases, is a depiction of prostitution written for the vicarious titillation of a bourgeois readership. Bottini was a natural choice as illustrator, and he supplied both line drawings and – as shown below – colour illustrations. Despite his evident talent, Bottini was never far from penury and died in 1907, aged just 33.

Further reading
A Lorrain special, part 1 and part 2
Sodom’s ambassador to Paris
La Marquise de Sade
Dress-down Friday: Mathilde de Morny
Circles: Natalie Clifford Barney

Virginia Oldoini, the Countess de Castiglione, died in Paris on this day in 1899. A famed beauty and imperial courtesan, she bowed out just before the end of the 19th century having supplied its greatest series of photographic portraits, her collaborations with photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson.

Italian artist aleXsandro Palombo recently depicted Marge Simpson in Castiglione’s most famous pose (entitled Scherzo di Follia) as part of a series in which the Springfield superstar recreates iconic fashion imagery. Being a fan of both the countess and the cartoon (and if you think The Simpsons has gone downhill I defy you to watch the recent episode where Carl rediscovers his Icelandic roots to a Sigur Rós soundtrack and tell me the show has completely lost it), I’m pretty happy right now.

Further reading
The countess in the afterlife
The countess in the cinema
A Casati family tree
Dress-down Friday: Ganna Walska
Places: Place Vendôme
Because…
Pierre-Louis Pierson: overpainted photographs of Castiglione
Places: Théâtre des Champs-Elysées

Princess Sheila Margaret MacKellar Romanov by Cecil Beaton

Happy new year! I hope you haven’t used up your Christmas book vouchers yet, because there is much published wonder of a Strange Flowers flavour coming our way this year. My resolution is to get through this lot:

The last time we looked at forthcoming bookish offerings, I mentioned Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio, The Pike. Since then it has received the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, and now, a year later, comes a new translation by Lara Gochin Raffaelli of the Italian writer’s first novel, Il Piacere: Pleasure (previously translated under the title The Child of Pleasure), out tomorrow. We can turn to Hughes-Hallett for more on d’Annunzio’s approach:

Half a decade before the motion picture camera was invented, he structured his first novel as though it were a film script. Pleasure‘s narrative is a sequence of lavishly visualised scenes. It employs flashbacks and abrupt cuts, distant views and voice-over-like meditations. [...] In Pleasure, d’Annunzio holds out a vision of a beautiful life, only in the end to condemn it as empty and sterile.

The young D’Annunzio

Like the Italian poet, British occultist Aleister Crowley was both appalling and appealing, though he’s a far more familiar presence in bookshop biography sections, capable of filling a fair-sized shelf on his own. Two more contributions to the crowded Crowleyan canon are due in (the northern) spring: Gary Lachman’s Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World arrives in April, and explores The Great Beast’s influence on the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and too many metal bands to mention. This is not exactly virgin territory but Lachman is more than usually qualified for the job, having written numerous books on the occult after graduating from rock (Blondie).

The other title hits closer to home, revelling in the title The Beast in Berlin: Art, Sex, and Magick in the Weimar Republic, which for sheer button-pushing could have been produced by an online name generator. Tobias Churton’s book draws on previously unpublished materials to describe the two-year stint Crowley spent in Berlin as the Weimar Republic was wheezing to its ignominious conclusion.

The fascination of the Weimar years is self-evident, but the longer I live in Berlin the more engrossed I become by the German Empire (1871-1918) which preceded it. Hopefully the rolling World War One anniversaries which begin this year will also draw more attention to this era. Because while the reactionary, militaristic imperial order is our dominant impression of Germany at the time, there was also an incredibly vibrant counterculture exploring new ideas, rehearsing for new societies and forging new attitudes in ways which appear remarkably modern. Witness this rallying cry for gay rights:

I stress, to avoid any confusion, that these demands in favour of homosexuals relate to nothing more than what adults in free agreement do with each other; and that society must of course protect against those who infringe the rights of third parties, who assault minors, [...] who use violence.

Those words could have been penned last week, but were in fact written 110 years ago by Magnus Hirschfeld in his book The Third Sex. Magnus Hirschfeld: The Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement by Rolf Dose (translated by Edward H. Willis) relates the early struggle to both define a modern gay identity and reform the legislation which policed its expression. Hirschfeld appears again in Edward Ross-Dickinson’s Sex, Freedom and Power in Imperial Germany, 1880-1914, also due around the end of January. It skews academic but sheds valuable light on the conflict between the private and public spheres of Wilhelmine society, the most explosive of those conflicts being the Harden-Eulenberg scandal, a tale of gay cliques in the highest imperial circles which rocked the Hollenzollerns’ entire power structure and may well have hastened its demise.

The cultural space opened up by the collapse of that order had no more radical inhabitants than the Dadaists. Collagist Hannah Höch, the only female artist in Berlin’s 1920 Dadaist “art fair”, is the subject of a welcome monograph to accompany an exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, beginning on 15 January. Another exhibition beginning in Frankfurt on 7 February concentrates on the other city to which Strange Flowers most often gravitates (hey, we’re in good company). Esprit Montmartre, with its subtitle Bohemian Life in Paris Around 1900, is right up our rue. The accompanying catalogue is available in English from April.

The liberated atmosphere of Paris also proved irresistible to foreign publishers hoping to issue works too daring for their countries of origin. A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960, covers a time when the French capital “became a special place for interrogating the margins of sexual culture and literary censorship, and a wide variety of English language “dirty books” circulated through loose expatriate publishing and distribution networks”.

I can’t stay away from the carnival of crazy that was Belle Époque Paris for long. Historian Mary McAuliffe explores the era in two volumes with Dawn taking the account up to the high noon of 1900. As Twilight steals over the heedless frivolities of the pre-World War One era we find Modernism mobilising, with the likes of Gertrude Stein leading the charge.

It was at a performance of The Rite of Spring that Stein, as we saw, met American writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten (whose extraordinary photographic portraits we glanced at recently), and he would eventually become the literary executor of her estate. All of this and more is related in Edward White’s The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. It follows Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades and the more recent Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White.

James Dempsey explores a lesser known attendant at the birth of modern America in his biography of the mysterious, eccentric Scofield Thayer (captured above by his friend, poet and painter e e cummings). Until now it was a name known to me only from the book Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters, in which John Richardson describes him as a “Jazz Age des Esseintes“, in a chapter entitled “The Madness of Scofield Thayer”. The insanity which enveloped much of Thayer’s life was preceded by a hugely productive period in which he collected avant-garde art and published The Dial. A key outlet for Modernist literature, Thayer’s journal was the first to issue T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, received fan mail from Marcel Proust, and ran an article by Sigmund Freud (a possible conflict of interest seeing as Thayer was under treatment from Freud at the time).

But the Modernism espoused by The Dial made more enemies than friends. Some were threatened by the new forms, others repelled by their practitioners’ arrogant self-absorption, and then there were those who suspected they were being hoodwinked by a vapid, exasperating nonsense. Mock Modernism: An Anthology of Parodies, Travesties, Frauds, 1910-1935, edited by Leonard Diepeveen, reminds us that cultural movements do not simply follow one other in untroubled succession, and that opposition can eschew outright indignation in favour of elaborate caricatures (e.g. J.C. Squire’s poetic parodies), which sometimes even issued from within the Modernist camp (e.g. Brian Howard‘s “Bruno Hat” hoax).

Gertrude Stein (yes, her again) was a frequent target of parodies by everyone from Ernest Hemingway to a New York Times sub-editor (“Gerty Gerty Stein Stein Is Back Home Home Back” ran one headline). And then there was this: “What with one thing and another. What with another and one thing. What with what with what what wit and what not…”. This was an affectionate dig from Stein’s friend and collaborator, Lord Berners, the eccentric English aristocrat and polymath aesthete. His partner for a number of years was a certain Robert Heber-Percy, also known as “Mad Boy” (who was one of the handful of mourners at the funeral of the Marchesa Casati). Even after Mad Boy married he stayed with his wife, and Berners, at the latter’s manor, Faringdon (pictured above – note also the notorious golden rooster); it was a highly unconventional arrangement which recalls the blended family of Edward James and Plutarco Gastelum. The story is told in the forthcoming Lord Berners, The Mad Boy, My Grandmother And Me, the “me” of the title being Heber-Percy’s granddaughter Sofka Zinovieff, who in Red Princess recalled another ancestor, her namesake Sofka Dolgorouky, a Russian princess of revolutionary sympathies.

An even less likely Russian princess was born in my hometown in 1898 with the sub-regal name of Sheila Chisholm. Admired as a beauty in London society, she was photographed by Cecil Beaton (main photo), inspired Evelyn Waugh to write about Forest Lawn Cemetery in The Loved One, bedded the future King George VI and finally wed Prince Dmitri Alexandrovich, nephew of the last Tsar. I always like to see a Sydney girl get ahead, so I’m looking forward to reading her story in Sheila: The Australian Ingenue who Bewitched British Society, by Robert Wainwright.

*

As ever, please let me know if I’ve missed anything. Meanwhile I’ve followed up a couple of missing leads from last year: Best-Kept Boy in the World, the biography of male courtesan Denham Fouts, has been delayed a number of times but according to the publisher it will finally be out in June of this year, as will the collected correspondence of Edward James (yes, him again). And a whole two years ago I mentioned an anthology of the great Decadent figure Count Eric Stenbock which was supposed to appear in 2012; it will hopefully arrive this year but there is no firm date as yet.

Cunard by Beaton

Nancy Cunard – writer, publisher, activist – was born on this day in 1896. She is currently the subject of an exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, specifically her extensive Negro Anthology, published 80 years ago.

Like American writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten, Cunard was suspected of radical chic tendencies in her championing of black culture. However the duration of her commitment as well as the sheer scope of the anthology should stand for her sincerity, even as its title draws attention to the shifts in identity politics between now and then. If from this remove Cunard, and Van Vechten for that manner, sometimes appear gauche in their evidently earnest interest in the black experience, we would do well to remember how few opportunities their age offered for black and white cultures to meet on an equal footing. Curator Sarah Frioux-Salgas explains the significance of the Negro Anthology:

The contributors were militants, journalists, artists, university staff; African-Americans, people from the Caribbean, Africa, Latino-America, America, Europe; women and men. Some of them had been colonised, discriminated against, segregated. This anthology was both a history of the black Americas and of Africa through time but also a political and cultural history of its time. It also revealed the transnational and multi-faceted character of the anti-racist and anti-colonialist struggles of the 1930s, and illustrates the international and transcultural formation that Paul Gilroy called “the Black Atlantic”. Negro Anthology thus carries the reader on a journey between the black Americas, Africa and Europe.

Nancy Cunard was a poet, model, editor, collector, militant, journalist and anti-conformist who symbolises a period in which the artistic and literary avant-garde became intertwined with the political world. Through the great themes examined in Negro Anthology we will present the transnational artistic, literary and political networks constructed by Nancy Cunard in the years between 1910 and 1930, and which have made this anthology a monument to black history.

The most famous image of philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin was taken by German photographer Germaine Krull in 1926. Around this time Krull was more preoccupied by machinery and metal structures than portraiture, while Benjamin was beginning to examine the 19th century Parisian origins of modern consumer culture. At the intersection of their interests were the city’s covered arcades or passages which, then around a century old and fallen far from fashion, presented a sorry spectacle. A series of photographs taken in 1928 shows Krull drawn to their dramatic lines and gloomy dishevelled allure, while Benjamin famously used his thoughts on these early temples of bourgeois materialism as the starting point for the Passagenwerk (Arcades Project), a vast collection of quotations and written fragments which remained unfinished at his death in 1940.

Further reading
Tiergarten

Denham Fouts, “best-kept boy in the world”, would be 100 years old today had he not checked out in 1948. In his highly recommended biography of countercultural eminence Brion Gysin, Nothing Is True – Everything is Permitted, John Geiger records two of Gysin’s pre-war encounters with Fouts. There are brushes with art stars, literary luminaries, fashion royalty and just plain royalty, and it ends with a spectacular scenario which has me wondering anew why no-one has made a movie of Fouts’ brief yet compelling life. And wouldn’t Hotel Sordide be a great title?

It was while drinking at the bar of Athens’ Grande Bretagne hotel that Gysin met a young American who was basking in “internationally distinguished older company,” and who would eventually be immortalized in the writings of Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood, and Gore Vidal. Denham Fouts was an opium-smoking, cocaine-sniffing denizen of what was then known as café society, his circle including Prince Paul, later King Paul of Greece. He also had a reputation as “the most expensive male prostitute in the world,” and had succeeded in generating, as Capote wrote in Answered Prayers, “the successful adventurer’s sine qua non: mystery and a popular desire to examine the source of it.” Fouts invited Gysin up to his suite of rooms, where he rather petulantly phone down to the desk and demanded to be put through to the royal palace. Fouts got Prince Paul on the line, and had him send over “one of those royal guards in ballet skirts with something for us to smoke…We got royally stoned.”

[...]

In the summer of 1938 Gysin encountered the young American writer Jane Bowles in a Left Bank café. Bowles arranged to meet Gysin again, to introduce him to her husband Paul, whom she had married a few months earlier. He was a student of Aaron Copland, and at age twenty-eight already an accomplished composer. Like Jane, Paul Bowles was immediately charmed by Gysin, who was in the company of Denham Fouts. By this time Fouts was living grandly in a palatial apartment decorated with huge Picassos, with a rich young Englishman. Fouts had given his parchment-bound traveling cases to Salvador Dali to decorate, and the artist drew luggage labels reading “Hotel Sordide” and “Midnight Motel”. Gysin was impressed with even the small details of Fouts’ lifestyle, marveling that he wore sports jackets that looked like “itchy tweed” but felt like cat’s fur woven into cashmere.” They spent a lot of time together: “Denham, however, played the untouchable, claiming he liked only preadolescent working-class boys.”

After dining together, Paul and Jane Bowles joined Gysin and Fouts at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto. A telling incident occurred during the performance when Paul tried to silence a woman next to him who was chattering loudly and playing with her emeralds, which he suspected were what interested her most. He was indignant at the disturbance, attributing it to the fact that “most people never listen to anything, naturally.” Only Gysin recognized the woman who was the source of the irritation as Coco Chanel. Later, back at the hotel where Gysin was staying, Fouts sought to impress the Bowleses and Gysin by using a Tibetan bow to shoot flaming arrows out the window into the Champs-Elysées. Paul and Jane were horrified at the “very dangerous procedure” and feared the gendarmes would be called. As for Brion, “he was in favor of it,” Paul Bowles remembered, “but it wasn’t his bow.”

Berlin-born photographer Gisèle Freund (1908-2000) came to prominence in Parisian exile, staging her first exhibition at the Maison des Amis des Livres, whose proprietor Adrienne Monnier is pictured here. Some of Freund’s early photos were taken with 35 mm film offcuts from the cinematic works of Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau. The latter, along with other members of the photographer’s illustrious circle, are here depicted around the start of World War Two. Freund seems to locate the tensions of the time in the faces of her subjects; Stefan Zweig, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were dead within three years, all but Joyce by their own hands. An exhibition of Freund’s work begins today at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

Adrienne Monnier

James Joyce

Colette

George Bernard Shaw

Jean Cocteau

Vita Sackville-West

Paul Valéry

Stefan Zweig

Sylvia Beach

Thornton Wilder

Virginia Woolf

Walter Benjamin

Further reading
Places: Phoenix Park, Places: Miramare, Wyndham Lewis | portrait studies (James Joyce)
Berenice Abbott | portraits (Joyce, Cocteau, Beach)
Pearls: Colette, A fountain of ink, Dress-down Friday: Mathilde de Morny, La Marquise de Sade, Monsieur le Marquis (Colette)
Pearls: Jean Cocteau, The ghosts of Versailles, Death becomes her, Phantom of the empire, World Famous Aerial Queen, Dress-down Friday: Barbette, Circles: Ludwig II/Sissi, Jacques-Émile Blanche | portraits, Circles: Erika and Klaus Mann (Jean Cocteau)
Lady Ottoline Morrell | photographic portraits (Virginia Woolf)
Germaine Krull | arcades, Tiergarten (Walter Benjamin)

In the words of Salvador Dalí, fellow Surrealist René Crevel had “the sullen, deaf, Beethovenesque, bad-angel face of a fern shoot”. Dalí was just one of numerous artists to capture the French writer’s compelling features, from the great Belle Époque portraitist Jacques-Émile Blanche to the godfather of artsy homoerotic photography, George Platt Lynes. Crevel’s father hanged himself while Crevel was still a teenager, and suicide was a recurring preoccupation of his writings. Tormented by illness and addiction, troubled by his sexuality and tossed about by the ideological cross-currents of Surrealism, Crevel took his own life on this day in 1935.

Berenice Abbott

Dora Maar

George Platt Lynes

André Dürst

Christian Bérard

Jacques-Émile Blanche

Man Ray

Rogi André

Salvador Dalí

Pavel Tchelitchew

Further reading
Pearls: René Crevel
Circles: Erika and Klaus Mann
(and visit the essential Paris/Berlin for more Crevelian eye candy)

Birthday boy Jean Lorrain turns up at your door dressed as a chauffeur, swaying slightly and reeking of ether. He gestures airily in the direction of a horseless carriage, smooths down his moustache with a buckskin-clad hand and fixes you with a penetrating, kohl-rimmed stare.

And you ask yourself: “how far do I want to go?“

Leonor Fini by André Ostier

While I have yet to read it cover to cover, filmmaker Curtis Harrington‘s posthumously published autobiography Nice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood has yielded wonders at whatever point I’ve opened it. Harrington had an uncommonly interesting circle of friends; there he is, for instance, on the set of James Broughton’s The Pleasure Garden. And just now I discovered that Harrington was once assistant to Surrealist eminence Edward James, even lodging with him for a spell in Los Angeles. His tribute to artist Marjorie Cameron, The Wormwood Star, was conceived while living with James and (the text is ambiguous) may have been filmed in their shared abode.

Harrington’s mooted project with another artist, the magnificent Leonor Fini (born on this day in 1907), never came to be, but in mid-century Paris he at least got to meet this most orchidaceous of apparitions. Read his description of their encounter and marvel at the sheer mad wonder of it all:

The door to Fini’s apartment was answered by a slim young man. He guided me through a small entrance hall where three enormous angora cats crouched together on a table and stared at me. Leonor, in an elaborate black velvet dressing gown, rose to greet me from a mauve sofa. She gazed at me in the same intense way as her cats. I asked her what films she admired and she replied by naming two of my favorites, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr and Robert Bresson’s Le journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest).

She brought out an enormous album of photos taken of her and her friends at her summer residence in Italy where they lived in an abandoned tower that belonged to no one. The photos showed them dressed in a series of fantastic costumes and wigs. They lived the surreal life of the imagination in their crumbling tower by the sea. How I longed to go there and make a film out of such elements. Leonor invited me to come and do just that in another year.

Before I left, Leonor invited me to a very special party in honor of fellow surrealist painter, and her longtime lover, Stanislao Lepri. She said, “We will eat exotic food, drink uncommon wines, and everyone will wear extraordinary costumes. We feel you like the same things we do, strange and fantastic things, and we would like you to be there.” She told me that if she had met me that summer in Grasse, she would have invited me to be one of a group of beautiful young men who were in her entourage, her “Dark Angels”, at the legendary masked ball given by the flamboyant designer Carlos de Beistegui. This missed opportunity was one I deeply regretted.

Barney and Romaine Brooks in Florence (from Wild Heart, by Suzanne Rodriguez)

The writer/saloniste Natalie Clifford Barney and her early 20th century Left Bank circle are attracting more attention than ever. A long-time dalliance of Barney’s, Dolly Wilde, is a presiding spirit over Caitlin Moran’s recent How to Build a Girl, and will appear in Megan Mayhew Bergman’s collection of Almost Famous Women early in the new year. Just like last year, screenwriter Suzanne Stroh will be celebrating Barney’s birthday which rounds out LGBT History Month in the US, for which Barney is an honoree this year. Join Suzanne this Friday when she will be interviewing Artemis Leontis, biographer of one of the most intriguing of Barney’s associates. American-born Eva Palmer was not just one of Natalie’s early paramours, she was also married to Angelos Sikelianos, brother of Penelope Sikelianos and thus making her sister-in-law to Raymond Duncan. She shared the Duncans’ obsession with reviving the ways of the ancients in everyday life.

Suzanne also has some particularly exciting news about a film she is writing, a thriller set in Florence during World War Two and featuring Barney, Brooks, and other familiar faces. It is based on Francesco Rapazzini’s biography of Élisabeth de Gramont, as well the forthcoming book All or Nothing: Romaine Brooks (1874-1970). That book’s author, Cassandra Langer, will be giving a talk at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art on November 20, when a transcription and translation of the only known recording of Brooks (1968) will also be presented to the archives by Suzanne Stroh and Jean-Loup Combemale.

Edith Olivier at the entrance to Daye House by Rex Whistler

Happy new year!

In the first full week of 2015, by the light of the first full moon, here’s a look at some of the more interesting books coming our way this year.

The year 1800, or thereabouts, has always been a line in the sand marking the beginning of Strange Flowers’ notional timeline. It’s not completely arbitrary: it is around then that the assertion of radical individuality becomes apparent in cultural history. Naturally there had been compellingly singular figures before that, but with the American and French Revolutions and ensuing upheavals, including the rise of Romanticism, came something recognisably akin to our present-day ordering of Western society. And that order brought with it the possibility of presenting a persona not merely derived from one’s assigned station in life.

The finest example of this is the dandy, who embodied a self-willed nobility appropriate to the age of Napoleon, the ultimate self-made man. Published this week, Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut finds the rebel in the dandy, although author Elizabeth Amann concedes that it is not always easy to recognise: “We tend to think of the dandy as disengaged and indifferent, too superficial to espouse a political cause and too self-absorbed to care about society.” Amann looks beyond the classic Regency mode of Dandyism, examining the Muscadins and Incroyables and other tribes of 1790s Paris – both revolutionaries and reactionaries – and the sartorial codes by which they communicated their political allegiances.

The quartet profiled in W. Sydney Robinson’s The Last Victorians are Victorians only in the sense of being born before 1901 (and Arthur Bryant only just), all coming to prominence later in the 20th century. Life-writing enthusiasts will recognise the format as a borrowing from Lytton Strachey’s radical quadruple biography, Eminent Victorians (1918). In reevaluating Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning, General Gordon and Thomas Arnold, Strachey was calling the entire foundation of Victorian Britain into question. Robinson’s subtitle – A Daring Reassessment of Four Twentieth Century Eccentrics – is promising, but his subjects (a government minister, a historian, a cleric, a broadcasting executive) are hardly sacred cows. Does anyone reading this have any long-cherished illusions about W. R. Inge they can’t bear to see up-ended? Or even know who W. R. Inge was?

Both incontestably Victorian and undeniably eccentric, Frederick Rolfe is the subject of Rolfe, Rose, Corvo, Crabbe by Miroslaw Aleksander Miernik, which concentrates on the writer’s multiple personae and posthumous reputation. It’s more a thesis than a page-turner, but that’s precisely what makes it significant, indicating as it does that Rolfe may belatedly be coming into academic focus. Readers looking for a more accessible entrée to Rolfe’s legacy are directed to Robert Scoble’s recent The Corvo Cult.

This year marks 100 years – more or less – since the anti-art movement Dada emerged out of New York and Zurich. I say “more or less” as it wasn’t until the following year that the Cabaret Voltaire opened and Hugo Ball issued the first Dada manifesto. But in February 1915, Ball delivered his bitter, unsentimental Memorial for Fallen Poets in the capital of wartime Germany, a key moment for the performance wing of what would later be termed Dada. That same year he ended up in Zurich with his wife, writer Emmy Hennings, along with Hans Arp and Tristan Tzara, while Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp settled in New York. The movement might not have had a name, but by 1915 its key components were all in place.

Ball is the cover star of Jed Rasula’s wonderfully titled Destruction was my Beatrice (actually a quote from Stéphane Mallarmé), which is due out in June and claims to be “the first narrative history of the emergence, decline, and legacy of Dada”. If I tell you there is also a forthcoming book reassessing the role of women in Dadaism, without scrolling down you already know it’s going to be called Mamas of Dada, right?

It’s a timely study; last year, the long-whispered suggestion that “Dada Baroness” Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was pivotal to the presentation of Duchamp’s infamous urinal, and thus the revolutionary reimagining of the artwork, finally received serious attention. And for the German readers there’s an unrelated forthcoming collection addressing the same subject: Die Dada: Wie Frauen Dada prägten.

Barbara McCloskey’s The Exile of Georg Grosz examines the post-Dada career of another prominent Dadaist. According to John Heartfield, he and George Grosz received membership cards for the German Communist Party from the hands of Rosa Luxemburg on New Year’s Eve, 1918. It’s a deeply symbolic exchange, as revolutionary momentum passed from dyed-in-the-wool Marxists to the rabble of artists parading under the banner of Dada. Just over two weeks later Luxemburg was assassinated and her Spartacist rebellion crushed. But Grosz and his associates channelled their fury into their art right through the Weimar Republic and into exile.

In observing the death last week of another German exile, Luise Rainer, many reports naturally concentrated on her achievement in winning back-to-back Oscars. But reflecting further on her passing, it occurred to me that with her goes the last living link to the Weimar performance tradition: Rainer took dance lessons from Mary Wigman, was schooled in stagecraft by Max Reinhardt and later inspired Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle.

The ferment of Weimar creativity is further examined in The Partnership by Pamela Katz, who co-wrote 2012’s biopic Hannah Arendt. The book opens in 1927 with the meeting of Bertolt Brecht and his most famous collaborator, Kurt Weill, and sheds light on a lesser-known (and under-credited) co-writer, Elisabeth Hauptmann. It also looks at Brecht and Weill’s actress wives, Helene Weigel and Lotte Lenya (respectively).

Around the same time that Brecht met Weill, Harry Crosby was looking for a scarf for his wife Caresse when he first encountered Kay Boyle, who was working in Raymond Duncan‘s Paris boutique – seriously, that’s the kind of para-historical factoid I live for. It also hints at the wonders promised by a forthcoming volume of Boyle’s letters, of which there were apparently around 30,000. “One of the Lost Generation modernists who gathered in 1920s Paris, Kay Boyle published more than forty books, including fifteen novels, eleven collections of short fiction, eight volumes of poetry, three children’s books, and various essays and translations. Yet her achievement can be even better appreciated through her letters to the literary and cultural titans of her time.”

Boyle was just one of numerous American women who gravitated to Paris at that time who felt it more sympathetic to their artistic temperament, sexuality or race, or – in the case of performer Ada Smith, a.k.a. Bricktop – all of the above. Bricktop’s Paris, by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, uses both fiction and non-fiction to depict women of colour in the City of Light.

More postcards from the margins in Almost Famous Women. Published tomorrow, Megan Mayhew Bergman’s book weaves stories around the real lives of Dolly Wilde, Joe Carstairs and other characters to whom Strange Flowers hasn’t yet been introduced but is sure it will like.

The (northern) spring opens this year with three books about Rex Whistler on the same day. Hugh and Mirabel Cecil, authors of 2012’s In Search of Rex Whistler, return with two books which delve further into the sources of their subject’s elegant, fantastical works. Love and War and Family, Friendships, Landscapes are available individually or in the stunning slipcase pictured above, and cover Whistler’s personal connections, both romantic and otherwise (Whistler’s heterosexuality never ceases to surprise).

Rounding out the trio is A Curious Friendship, in which Anna Thomasson explores Whistler’s relationship with the much older writer Edith Olivier, who became something of a den mother to the Bright Young Things, who frequently gathered at her home, Daye House. It’s not immediately clear why Whistler should be experiencing such a rush of attention now, although the fact that his works enter the public domain this year can’t hurt.

Finally we come to Jean Findlay’s Chasing Lost Time. I recall seeing reviews for this biography of C. K. Scott Moncrieff last year, but it appears to have been held over. Best known as the first major translator of Proust into English, Moncrieff was clearly a complex character:

From the outside an enigma, Scott Moncrieff left a trail of writings that describe a man expert at living a paradoxical life: fervent Catholic convert and homosexual, gregarious party-goer and deeply lonely, interwar spy in Mussolini’s Italy and public man of letters – a man for whom honour was the most abiding principle. He was a decorated war hero, and his letters home are an unusually light take on day-to-day life on the front. Described as ‘offensively brave’, he was severely injured in 1917 and, convalescing in London, became a lynchpin of literary society – friends with Robert Graves and Noel Coward, enemies with Siegfried Sassoon and in love with Wilfred Owen.

What’s not to like?

It’s that time of the year again, when costumed apparitions turn society on its head, strange creatures emerge from the undergrowth, and the most diffident wallflower can blossom into a glamorous orchidaceous vision.

Yes, it’s Natalie Clifford Barney‘s birthday. And over at screenwriter Susanne Stroh‘s site, they’re celebrating with quizzes, giveaways and interviews: Jean-Loup Combemale discusses Élisabeth de Gramont, Cassandre Langer talks about Barney’s longtime partner Romaine Brooks, and Suzanne Rodriguez – author of the essential Wild Heart – will be sharing her insights into the birthday girl, so you’ll be in fine company. Find out what happened on Barney’s 50th birthday on this day in 1926 when Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Colette, Djuna Barnes and la toute lesbohème parisienne turned up at the famous salon.

If the above hasn’t sufficiently tempted you it remains only for me to say: THERE WILL BE CHAMPAGNE.

In 1899, author Jean Lorrain reviewed an exhibition by a young artist named Georges Bottini who found inspiration in the dance halls, bars, theatres and brothels of Belle Époque Paris. The writer lauded both the “sooty atmosphere” and “innate elegance” of Bottini’s depiction of this demi-mondaine milieu, one which was very familiar to the noctivagant Lorrain. He returned to it frequently in his writings; his 1904 novel La Maison Philibert, for instance, which was thrashed out to pay the legal fees for one of his numerous libel cases, is a depiction of prostitution written for the vicarious titillation of a bourgeois readership. Bottini was a natural choice as illustrator, and he supplied both line drawings and – as shown below – colour illustrations. Despite his evident talent, Bottini was never far from penury and died in 1907, aged just 33.

Further reading
A Lorrain special, part 1 and part 2
Sodom’s ambassador to Paris
La Marquise de Sade
Dress-down Friday: Mathilde de Morny
Circles: Natalie Clifford Barney

Virginia Oldoini, the Countess de Castiglione, died in Paris on this day in 1899. A famed beauty and imperial courtesan, she bowed out just before the end of the 19th century having supplied its greatest series of photographic portraits, her collaborations with photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson.

Italian artist aleXsandro Palombo recently depicted Marge Simpson in Castiglione’s most famous pose (entitled Scherzo di Follia) as part of a series in which the Springfield superstar recreates iconic fashion imagery. Being a fan of both the countess and the cartoon (and if you think The Simpsons has gone downhill I defy you to watch the recent episode where Carl rediscovers his Icelandic roots to a Sigur Rós soundtrack and tell me the show has completely lost it), I’m pretty happy right now.

Further reading
The countess in the afterlife
The countess in the cinema
A Casati family tree
Dress-down Friday: Ganna Walska
Places: Place Vendôme
Because…
Pierre-Louis Pierson: overpainted photographs of Castiglione
Places: Théâtre des Champs-Elysées

Page 13 [August] 1931 Barbara Ker-Seymer 1905-1994 Presented by Barbara Ker-Seymer’s partner Barbara Roett (born 1927) in 1997. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/archive/TGA-974-5-2-15

Which, as it happens, would not be entirely out of character. “If she arrived to stay at the Ritz she would tie her hair up in a scarf, ask room service to send up a pail and some brushes and start scrubbing the bathroom,” writes Sebastian Faulks in The Fatal Englishman. Even the revivification might be considered appropriate for a woman who was often accompanied by a white rat who, she claimed, had been reincarnated.

So who was this strange, compulsive yet well-connected individual?

She was born Violette Ney d’Elchingen on this day in 1878, the issue of one illustrious Napoleonic line who would later marry into another. Despite these august familial bonds, her later life comes down to us not as a grand narrative but rather a series of provocative vignettes. Her real habitat appears to be the memoirs of the age. She inevitably appears as one of a conga line of names, all attendees of some between-the-wars boho blowout or other, her rotund form slipping away before the reader gets to know her. We find her, for instance, snubbing Proust before the famous 1922 dinner at which he met Joyce. The princess was apparently pained by an unflattering caricature of her as a tightwad in À la recherche du temps perdu, but it is typical of Murat’s arm’s-length relations with posterity that no-one seems sure which character is meant to be her.

In 1930 Janet Flanner informs her New Yorker readers of Murat’s attendance at a party thrown by Élisabeth de Gramont at which she “led in a Harlem wedding party as mother of the bride”. This is the very party, no less, where Dolly Wilde dragged up as her famous uncle. Murat was a subject of some of Dolly’s few published words. They record another encounter between the two women; their shared pharmacological and sexual tastes account for the voluptuous fug of the recollection:

…’Madame la princesse’ – legend, tradition, the great name … The next meeting in her hotel, in the anonymous sitting-room, people, opium, drinks, the stimulant of artificiality leading to flirtations, exaggerations, the target of our wit, of our inner eye being the monstrous creature on the sofa who, through the haze of her smoke and drink, still retained a startling lucidity: the befuddled oracle, the unfallible débauchée with blind eyes and shapeless mouth – a presence rather than a human being. Her magnetism, defending the insolent ravages of time, consoled her vanity … Initiated into opium smoking … I found myself alone for the first time with this telepathic presence. Bemused with illusory happiness, affection became electrical between us. But her élans towards me … met with an unconscious drawing back, and her flattery met only with the impertinence of surprise. Night succeeded night, her magnetism crystallizing slowly – I was confused, my mind enthralled, my senses subordinated to my vision.

This is a rare glimpse into Murat’s inner life; a rumoured affair with Marie Laurencin is one of the few other indications that she might actually have maintained an existence away from the revelry. That the princess was addicted to opium was, however, widely acknowledged. Her most magnificent appearance in the anecdotes of the era finds her sharing a pipe with René Crevel in a decommissioned submarine she kept for the purpose in Toulon. Photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer captured the princess in the port town, even there a marginal figure (Ker-Seymer’s happy snaps preserved in the Tate Archive are well worth a look; her subjects include Brian Howard, Frederick Ashton and a young, galactically camp Bunny Roger).

The physical descriptions of Murat are rarely complimentary: French art dealer René Gimpel compared her hair to “a roof of well-twisted thatch…horizontal curls resembling miniature stove pipes.” For model Bettina Bergery, she was something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, “The Princess who changed into a Frog”. Nina Hamnett‘s biographer Denise Hooker describes her a “an enormous mountain of a woman”.

But exploring the Hamnett connection reveals another Murat, one generous not just in form but in nature as well. Hamnett and Murat mixed in similar circles, crossing paths in Le Boeuf sur le Toit (“What didn’t she know of the ins and outs of Paris?” said Augustus John admiringly of the princess). Murat, contrary to her tightfisted reputation, supported the perpetually penniless Hamnett for years, who repaid her loyalty by accompanying her to rehab (although she would toss the Vichy water away when no-one was looking). Yet another of those glittering mosaic pieces finds the two women at dinner with Nancy Cunard and Ronald Firbank to which the latter – disastrously – turned up sober, his habitual hysteria replaced by excruciating silence.

Violette Murat died in 1936, and whatever else there is to learn about her beyond these walk-on parts is captive in unpublished diaries and letters, awaiting the attention of a sensitive biographer.

God speed.