The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris 9780226002422

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T he L ibe r at ion of pa in t ing

T he L iber at ion of

Painting Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris

Patricia Leighten University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Patricia Leighten is professor of art history and visual studies at Duke University. She is the author of Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1894–1914; coauthor of Cubism and Culture; and coeditor of A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by Patricia Leighten All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in China. 21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13    1  2  3  4  5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-47138-9 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-00242-2 (e-book) isbn-10: 0-226-47138-1 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Leighten, Patricia Dee, 1946–    The liberation of painting : modernism and anarchism in avant-guerre Paris / Patricia Leighten.      pages. cm.    Includes bibliographical references and index.    isbn 978-0-226-47138-9 (hardcover : alkaline paper)— isbn 978-0-226-00242-2 (e-book) 1. Painting, French— 20th century. 2. Modernism (Art)—France—Paris. 3. Modernism (Aesthetics)—France—Paris. 4. Anarchism and art—France—Paris—History—20th century. 5. Art—Political aspects—France—Paris—History—20th century. I. Title.    ND550.L45 2013    759.4’36109041—dc23 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Frontispiece Juan Gris, “Bruits de Guerre et Bruits de Paix” (Noises of war and noises of peace), cover, L’assiette au beurre, no. 392, October 3, 1908.

To Mark

I regularly gave drawings to the journals, from 1895 to 1910. This led me to pay a lot of attention to the streets. I also had to make up the caption, to create a complete situation, in short to grasp reality. There was an equal spirit of protest in my drawings. . . . In this period, the influence of the journals on art is incontestable. Thanks to them, painting was liberated more rapidly from academicism. Above all, one can’t compare the attitude of the journals then with those of today. The press had a progressive spirit and the drawings were not made as now, but with love. J a c q u e s V i ll o n , c . 1 9 5 7

Contents

xi xvii 1

List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction. Modernist Heteroglossia Chapter 1

17

Languages of Art and Politics: Salon Painting, Caricature, Modernism Chapter 2

57

The White Peril: Colonialism, L’art nègre , and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Chapter 3

85

A Rationale of Ugliness: Cubism and Its Critical Reception Chapter 4

111

Politics and Counterpolitics of Collage: Picasso, Gris, and the Effects of War Chapter 5

145

Abstracting Anarchism: František Kupka and the Project of Modernism

177

Conclusion. A Politics of Form

181 205 223

Notes Bibliography Index

Illustrations



















1

Figures

Jean Danguy, Muse of Poverty, 1903  19 2 Édouard-Bernard Debat-Ponsan, Humanité pleurant ses enfants (Humanity crying for her children), 1905  19 3 Jules Adler, Les las (The weary), 1897  21 4 Jules Adler, Les hâleurs (The haulers), 1904  21 5 Victor Marec, Expulsés (Expelled), 1900  22 6 Louis Roger, L’accident, 1910  23 7 Bernard Naudin, Vive la Nation! (Long live the nation!), 1904  25 8 Bernard Naudin, “La Fête du 14 Juillet à Brazzaville” (Bastille Day in Brazzaville), L’assiette au beurre, March 11, 1905  27 9 František Kupka, “À bas la Justice militaire!” (Down with military justice!), c. 1902  29 10 Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, “La Catastrophe d’Issy,” L’assiette au beurre, June 27, 1901  33 11 Félix Vallotton, “Ah, mon gaillard! Vous montrez votre derrière aux dames!” (Ah, my naughty fellow! You show your backside to the ladies!), L’assiette au beurre, March 1, 1902  34 12 d’Ostoya, “Rapport de Police: Le nommé Untel s’est suicidé dans la prison du poste” (Police report: The named Untel committed suicide in the post prison), L’assiette au beurre, no. 112, May 23, 1903  35 13 Auguste Roubille, “—Quant à l’ouvrier, s’il est quelquefois ignoble . . .” (As for the worker, if he is sometimes vile . . .), L’assiette au beurre, no. 199, January 21, 1905  36 14 Auguste Roubille, “. . . il est souvent sublime” (. . . he is often sublime), L’assiette au beurre, no. 199, January 21, 1905  36 15 Bernard Naudin, “L’alliance franco-russe” (The Franco-Russian alliance), L’assiette au beurre, July 1, 1905  37

i l l u s t r at i o n s



























16 Ludvik

Markous [Louis Marcoussis], “—Assassin! foutriquet! bandit! . . . les voilà, les acclamations!” (Assassin! runt! criminal! . . . there are your acclamations!), L’assiette au beurre, no. 521, March 25, 1911  39 17 Kees Van Dongen, “Deuxième fantôme: La Pauvreté. L’enfant a soif. La mère a faim. Le lait est tari. L’argent s’est enfui!” (The child is thirsty. The mother is hungry. The milk is dried up. The money is gone!), L’assiette au beurre, no. 30, October 26, 1901  41 18 Kees Van Dongen, “Elle finit par gagner des vingt francs . . . qu’elle dépense” (She ends by making twenty francs . . . which she spends), L’assiette au beurre, October 26, 1901  42 19 Kees Van Dongen, “Cocotte,” L’assiette au beurre, October 26, 1901  42 20 Kees Van Dongen, “J’suis ni musicien, ni chanteur . . . Je suis crève-faim!” (I’m not a musician or a singer . . . I’m starving!), L’assiette au beurre, no. 12, June 20, 1901  43 21 Kees Van Dongen, “Le Peril Blanc” (The white peril), Les temps nouveaux, September 30, 1905  44 22 Kees Van Dongen, “Europe et Macédoine” (Europe and Macedonia)  45 23 Kees Van Dongen, Rotterdam, de Zandstraat, 1899  46 24 Kees Van Dongen, Modjesko, Soprano Singer, 1907  47 25 Maurice de Vlaminck, Maisons à Chatou (Houses at Chatou), 1905–1906  49 26 Henri Evenepoel, Fête aux Invalides, 1898  54 27 Photograph of André Derain in his studio, c. 1905  56 28 Photograph of “El Negro”, New York Times, February 5, 1992  59 29 Fang mask, Gabon (formerly French Congo)  61 30 Kota reliquary, Republic of the Congo (formerly French Congo)  61 31 International Exposition of 1900, pavilion of the French Congo  62 32 “Sacrifices humains au Dahomey” (Human sacrifices in Dahomey)  63 33 Caran d’Ache, “La Lettre du Ministre” (The letter from the minister), L’assiette au beurre, no. 40, January 4, 1902  66 34 Juan Gris, “Guidés par un besoin . . .” (Guided by a need), L’assiette au beurre, no. 387, August 29, 1908  66 35 František Kupka, “Ciel Chrétien au Nègres” (Christian heaven according to the blacks), L’assiette au beurre, May 7, 1904  67 36 František Kupka, “Dieux Nègres” (African gods), L’assiette au beurre, May 7, 1904  67 37 Maurice Radiguez, “Le Bouillon de Tête” (Boiling the head), L’assiette au beurre, March 11, 1905  69 38 Bernard Naudin, “Ces Messieurs s’amusent” (These gentlemen amuse themselves), L’assiette au beurre, March 11, 1905  69 39 Aristide Delannoy, “Gaud, ancient pharmacien” (Gaud, former pharmacist), L’assiette au beurre, March 11, 1905  69

xii

i l l u s t r at i o n s

40 Pierre

Bonnard, illustration for Alfred Jarry, “Ubu coloniale,” from Almanach illustré du Père Ubu (Paris, 1901)  73 41 Pablo Picasso, Enfant avec hutte et palmier (African), sketchbook No. 35, 1905  77 42 Georges Braque in his studio, 5, Impasse de Guelma, c. 1911  86 43 Installation view of Picasso–Braque exhibition, Gallery ‘291,’ New York  87 44 Gelett Burgess, photograph of Picasso in his studio, 1908  88 45 Hall of the Bisons, Paleolithic cave painting, 15,000–8000 bce  89 46 Child’s drawing (anonymous), in Picasso sketchbook Carnet deux, 1901  89 47 Georges Braque, drawing for Grand Nu (Large nude), 1907–1908  90 48 André Derain, Bathers, 1907  91 Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902–1904  92 49 50 Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897  93 51 Teke figure, Republic of the Congo (formerly French Congo)  94 52 Reindeer, Paleolithic cave painting, 15,000–8000 bce  96 53 Pablo Picasso, Factory at Horta de Ebro, summer 1909  97 54 Jean Metzinger, Nude, 1910  99 55 Heinrich Lautensack, drawing from Des Circkels und Richtscheyts, auch der Perspectiva und Proportion der Menscher, 1564  100 56 Benoît Benoni-Auran, Holy Family, Chapelle Notre Dame du Chêne, Vion, 1899–1901  101 57 Luca Cambiaso, Study of Cubic Figures, sixteenth century  102 58 Charles René de Saint-Marceaux, La Tahitienne, c. 1890  103 59 Félix Tobeen [Félix Élie Bonnet], Scène de port à Ciboure (Port scene in Ciboure), 1912  104 60 André Lhote, Entrée du bassin à flot de Bordeaux (Entrance to the wet dock of Bordeaux), 1912  106 61 Henri Le Fauconnier, L’Abondance (Abundance), 1910–1911  107 62 Pierre Lampué, Frontispiece of Byzantine Architecture, n.d.  109 63 Juan Gris, “Autre fois, jeune home, j’ai été un pacifiste” (Formerly, young man, I was a pacifist), L’assiette au beurre, no. 392, October 3, 1908  114 64 Juan Gris, “On a beau bien viser, la Liberté est toujours hors d’atteinte” (They have beautiful aim, [but] Liberty is always out of reach), L’assiette au beurre, November 20, 1909  116 65 Juan Gris, “—Ah! ah! . . . vous vous permettez d’établir votre innocence après quinze mois d’instruction! . . . Allez, mais qu’on ne vous y reprenne plus!” (—Oh! . . . so you dare to establish your innocence after 15 months of inquiry! Get out of here, and don’t let us catch you again!), L’assiette au beurre, no. 391, September 26, 1908  117 66 Juan Gris, Éducation, L’assiette au beurre, no. 387, August 29, 1908  118 67 Juan Gris, “Ainsi que chaque pays que se respecte . . .” (Like all self-respecting countries), L’assiette au beurre, no. 387, August 29, 1908  119

xiii

i l l u s t r at i o n s

68 Juan

Gris, “La Liberté” (Liberty), L’assiette au beurre, no. 387, August 29, 1908  120 69 Juan Gris, Self-Portrait, No. 1, 1909–1910  123 Juan Gris, The Eggs, 1911  123 70 71 Juan Gris, Still Life with Oil Lamp, 1912  124 72 Juan Gris, Man in a Café, 1912  125 73 Juan Gris, Le Lavabo (The washstand), 1912  125 74 Pablo Picasso, Bouteille, verre et journal sur une table (Bottle, glass and news­ paper on a table), fall–winter 1912  129 75 Le Journal, front page, November 18, 1912  135 76 Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet-Music and Wineglass, November 1912  139 77 Juan Gris, Still Life with Checked Tablecloth, 1915  141 78 Louis Rémy Sabattier, Café de la Paix in Wartime, 1917  142 79 František Kupka, Meditation: When Mountain and Valley Are One, 1899  147 80 František Kupka, “Liberté” (Liberty), L’assiette au beurre, no. 41, January 11, 1902  149 81 František Kupka, “Panneau décoratif ” (Decorative panel), no. 41, L’assiette au beurre, January 11, 1902  150 82 Postcard supporting free love circulated by L’anarchie, c. 1905  151 83 František Kupka, “Fraternité” (Fraternity), L’assiette au beurre, no. 41, January 11, 1902  152 84 František Kupka, “Les sauveurs” (The saviors), L’assiette au beurre, no. 41, ­January 11, 1902  153 Victor Morland, “Scenes of Parisian Life,” La Vie Amusante, 1878–1879, and 85 Le Monde comique, 1879–1880.  154 86 František Kupka, L’argent (Money), 1899  155 87 František Kupka, “La révolution” (The revolution)  157 88 František Kupka, “L’état moderne” (The modern state)  157 89 František Kupka, “Rythme de l’histoire—Vague” (Rhythm of history— wave)  166 90 František Kupka, Progrès (Progress)  167 91 František Kupka, “Progrès. (Fin)” (Progress. [End])  167 92 František Kupka, Une Gigolette (A prostitute), 1909  169 93 Anomalies of the Face and the Ear in Prostitutes  169 94 František Kupka, Le “Mec”(Le Confident) (The pimp), 1910  170 95 Pablo Picasso, Absinthe Drinker, 1901  170 96 František Kupka, drawing for Girl with a Ball, 1908–1909  172 97 František Kupka, Étude de femme enlevant sa chemise (Study of woman undressing), 1904–1906  173 98 František Kupka, “Réligions,” cover, L’assiette au beurre, May 7, 1904  174 99 František Kupka, “Dieu du Vatican” (God of the Vatican), L’assiette au beurre, May 7, 1904  175

xiv

i l l u s t r at i o n s



P l at e s



Following page 84







1

Jules Adler, La Grève au Creusot, 1899 2 Jules-Félix Grandjouan, “Question d’art” (Question of art), Le rire, August 16, 1902 3 Kees Van Dongen, Self-Portrait, 1906–1908 4 Kees Van Dongen, Femme fatale, 1905 5 Kees Van Dongen, Liverpool Light House, Rotterdam or The Hussar, 1907 6 Maurice de Vlaminck, Portrait of Derain, 1905 7 Jules Grandjouan, “La Grève” (The strike), L’assiette au beurre, no. 214, May 6, 1905 8 André Derain, Bal des soldats à Suresnes (Soldier’s ball in Suresnes), 1903 9 Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 10 Pablo Picasso, Mother and Child, 1907 11 Pablo Picasso, Head, 1907 12 Pablo Picasso, Nude, 1910 13 Georges Braque, Houses at L’Estaque, 1908 14 Henri Matisse, The Dance (I), early 1909 15 Juan Gris, Hommage à Picasso (Homage to Picasso), 1912 16 Luc-Olivier Merson, La Vérité (Truth), 1901 17 Félix Tobeen [Félix Élie Bonnet], Le Bassin dans le parc (The pond in the park), 1913



Following page 144

Gris, “Bruits de Guerre et Bruits de Paix” (Noises of war and noises of peace), L’assiette au beurre, no. 392, October 3, 1908 19 Juan Gris, Figure in a Café, 1914 20 Juan Gris, Breakfast, 1914 21 Pablo Picasso, Bottle of Suze, 1912 22 Juan Gris, The Table, spring 1914 23 Juan Gris, Musician’s Table, 1914 24 Juan Gris, Still Life with Newspaper (Fruit Dish, Glass, and Lemon), 1916 25 František Kupka, Disques de Newton, Étude pour la Fugue à deux couleurs (Disks of Newton, study for fugue in two colors), 1911–1912 26 František Kupka, “L’argent” (Money), L’assiette au beurre, no. 41, January 11, 1902 František Kupka, Conte de pistils et d’étamines (Story of pistils and stamens), 27 1919–1920

18 Juan

xv

i l l u s t r at i o n s



28

František Kupka, L’Archaïque (The archaic), 1910 29 František Kupka, L’eau ou la Baigneuse (Water or the bather), 1906–1909 30 František Kupka, Amorpha, Fugue à deux couleurs (Amorpha, fugue in two colors), 1912 31 František Kupka, La Petite fille au ballon (Girl with a ball), 1908 32 František Kupka, La Colorée, c. 1919–1920

xvi

Preface and Acknowledgments

The subject of this book has engaged my serious interest since I first began to explore the relation of Pablo Picasso’s art to anarchism in early-twentiethcentury France. Given that focus in my first book, I came to realize that the subject was too big to be viewed through the lens of a single artist. When I returned to this large theme after having completed two more books and numerous other projects, I broadened the scope of my research, thinking about this complex question and its broader allied one, the interrelation of art and politics. It really is daunting, therefore, to undertake thanking all the institutions and people who have helped me on this project, aspects of which I have published and presented in talks and lectures with many lively and helpful exchanges. I would like to thank them all for the conversations, debates, help with access to materials, and funding support, without which this project would have been vastly more difficult. This book has been supported at different stages by the National Humanities Center and Institute for Advanced Study; I am deeply grateful for the recognition of the importance of this subject that such support entailed, and I hope that this publication is a return for their faith in me; special thanks go to Irving and Marilyn Aronberg Lavin. I would also like to thank the institutions and their staffs where I conducted the majority of the research for this book: in Amsterdam, the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis; and in Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale; Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal; Bibliothèque Fourney; Archives Nationales; Institut Français d’Histoire Sociale (with special thanks to Mme Hélène Strub for both her help and her kind interest in my project); the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre de documentation et de recherche du Musée nationale d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou; and the Préfecture de Police, whose superb archives encode the importance of anarchism among artists to the Parisian body politic (I greatly enjoyed the welcome I received there and my lively conversation with its director).

xvii

Preface

I am also grateful to those scholars who read my manuscript, in whole or in part, and gave me welcome advice: Allan Antliff, Mark Antliff, Elizabeth C. Childs, Neil McWilliam, Mary Louise Roberts, and Robyn Roslak. Needless to say, remaining faults are due to my own stubbornness. I offer special thanks to Marilyn Lavin for remembering a sparkling reproduction of Picasso’s Bottle of Suze from 1947 (plate 21), less than halfway to its current age and much closer to its original colors. She also miraculously produced a copy of H. W. Janson’s Modern Art in the Washington University Collection (1947), whose cover it graced when she was a student there; the illustration in this book is based on this reproduction rather than on the work in its current condition. I have also been lucky in my editor, Susan M. Bielstein, and her associate, Anthony W. Burton, who have been helpful in innumerable ways. It’s wonderful to work with true professionals. No one can do a project of this kind without a lot of support from friends and family, without whose understanding scholarship would be hard indeed to pursue, and I particularly want to thank my friends and family near and far. My partner in life, Mark Antliff, has earned such special thanks for his support on so many fronts that I dedicate this book to him. We have worked shoulder to shoulder on numerous scholarly projects, and I am immensely grateful for his knowledge, his intelligence, and above all his humor. Life may well be short, but at least it can be fun.

Parts of chapters 1 and 4 originally appeared in my article “Reveil anarchiste: Salon Painting, Political Satire, Modernist Art,” Modernism\modernity 2, no. 2 (1995):17–47 (copyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press; adapted with permission). Parts of chapters 1 and 4 first appeared as “Modernist Abstraction, Anarchist Antimilitarism, and War” in Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 2 (2011): 113–50. Part of chapter 2 was first published as “The White Peril and L’Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism” by the College Art Association in the December 1990 issue of The Art Bulletin. A revised version of this article was published as “Colonialism, ‘l’Art Nègre’ and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” in Picasso’s ‘Les demoiselles d’Avignon,’ edited by Christopher Green (copyright © 2001 Cambridge University Press; reprinted with permission). Part of chapter 4 was first published as “Cubist Anachronisms: Ahistoricity, Cryptoformalism, And Business-As-Usual in New York,” Oxford Art Journal XVII (Fall 1994): 91–102, published by Oxford University Press.

xviii

Introduction

Modernist Heteroglossia

There is much we do not understand about modernism—that self-conscious response in the arts to rapid social, political, and technological changes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and much less about modernity itself. Jacques Villon’s reminiscence, the epigraph to this book, gets at an enormously important element that has been overlooked. He testified: I regularly gave drawings to the journals, from 1895 to 1910. This led me to pay a lot of attention to the streets. I also had to make up the caption, to create a complete situation, in short to grasp reality. There was an equal spirit of protest in my drawings. . . . In this period, the influence of the journals on art is incontestable. Thanks to them, painting was liberated more rapidly from academicism. Above all, one can’t compare the attitude of the journals then with those of today. The press had a progressive spirit and the drawings were not made as now, but with love. 1

Several interesting themes accumulate in this witness to the development of modernism in pre–World War I Paris, a period known to historians as the “avant-guerre” (prewar). First, Villon highlights the importance of satirical drawings with captions and their appearance in cheap weekly journals of humor and propaganda, which he describes as an expression of his newfound role as a spectator grasping reality in the public sphere and as a creator of forms of protest, done with love. Second, he links that democratic phenomenon to the increasing abstraction of painting, a high art medium, cast in the political language of liberation and progressivism. Why was “the influence of the journals on art” “incontestable”? And how was it that, for Villon—the elder brother of Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp, and Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti—the politics of the satirical press were central to the transformation of painting? This book undertakes to answer these questions and the allied central question of the relation of modernism to politics in prewar Parisian culture. The most notable aspect of artistic and literary modernism is its style. Abrupt transitions, antinarrative structure, surprising juxtapositions—such techniques

1

Introduction

depart from traditional naturalistic modes of discourse and communicate their all-important innovative relation to form. During the avant-guerre, several key modernists, including Pablo Picasso, František Kupka, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Kees van Dongen, viewed anarchist politics as inherent in the idea of their avant-garde art and created new formal languages expressive of a desire to effect revolutionary changes in both art and society.2 Although fauvism, cubism, and Orphism radically altered the art of the twentieth century, the mingled social and aesthetic theories that fostered these movements were all but lost from view, discredited by the disarray of the anarchist, socialist, and antiwar movements with the onset of war, by the overpowering dominance of nationalist discourse during and after the war, by the rise of Marxism and the unrelenting hostility of its adherents to anarchism in the 1920s and after, and by the postwar advent of resolutely apolitical formalist art criticism that followed from the disillusionment created by the trauma of the war.3 Critics and art historians, perhaps most notably Alfred Barr with his famous diagram of relations between major movements in the visual arts,4 have constructed the development of modernism in terms of discreet “isms”: movements seen as unifying and homogenizing the aims of participating artists, while listing those artists in a hierarchy of success and failure, strength and weakness, leader and follower. In this matrix, an apolitical Henri Matisse comes to overshadow the politicized Vlaminck, André Derain, and Van Dongen, and fauvism is drained of its socially critical dimensions; Picasso—seen by many as the only “true cubist”—comes to lead even Georges Braque, while the remaining cubists are dismissed as more (Fernand Léger, Juan Gris) or less (Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier) interesting stringers. What such a structure fails to accommodate is the actual complexity of these movements, the fact that each artist necessarily had differing aims yet were engaged with similar issues, interpreted individually while responding to shared cultural and historical forces. Artists who participated in modernist movements need to be understood in their own terms and not blended into the totalizing concept of a movement, despite common aspects of style inspiring critical slurs that later morphed into a movement name.5 Neither fauvism nor cubism nor Orphism was a preconceived movement with manifestoes issued, as with futurism (even in the futurist movement, though, Gino Severini differs significantly in his preoccupations and aims from the other painters, and the same may be said of each of them).6 For key artists in these movements, anarchist aesthetics and a related “politics of form” played crucial roles in the development of their modernist art in avant-guerre France, but its significance was first suppressed and then forgotten. To view the origins of modernist visual culture in this light fundamentally changes standard art historical narratives, especially as institutionalized in museum culture. Reconsidering modernism’s history in relation to the anarchist movement reveals that, rather than focusing on a small handful of ivory-tower

2

Modernist Heteroglossia

artists retrospectively privileged as canonical by virtue of their later mercantile value, the history of modernism encompasses a broad field of artists—including several key figures subsequently canonized—who made artistic choices in response to the hot realities of shared cultural and political life. Van Dongen, for example, sought a unity of theme and style expressive of his rejection of established art and society much in the way his friend and neighbor Picasso did, and at the same time, though no “market”—intellectual or otherwise—yet recognizes their equivalence. Rather than charting the modernists’ “logical” and ontological drive toward pure abstraction, this book studies the focused, conscious, and purposeful shifts between forms of abstraction and more conventional modes of representation for a variety of purposes and audiences by a range of artists, including members of the avant-garde. Juan Gris, for example, experimented in his little-known caricatures and political satire with crude forms of primitivism and “abstraction” that clearly influenced his later work, while simultaneously exploring realism and postimpressionist devices in both his cartoons and his paintings. Rather than the current galaxy of avant-garde artists, fixed in place by a system privileging “high” painted abstraction and equally high auction prices, a different constellation of figures emerges; their work was valued at that complex time for offering a variety of pictorial solutions to the intertwined problems of self-expression and political philosophy. Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen is a superb example of an artist who was considered of major importance to art and cultural critics in the period under study but whose very allegiance to political themes, caricatural styles, and allegorical and narrative genres—all of which relate to his career as a polemicist—disqualify him as a significant modernist for the willfully amnesiac culture of the postwar period, within many of whose legacies we still operate today. Rather than restricting their aesthetic medium to oil on canvas, these modernists purposely worked in other media—particularly satirical prints—with the aim of reaching differing audiences for specifically political purposes. Many of these left-wing avant-gardists contributed to the culture of political satire in Paris, which entailed their involvement with anarchist journals, such as L’assiette au beurre and Les temps nouveaux, revealing the seriousness of their engagement with social and political issues of the day. And many anarchist modernists pursued nontraditional venues to show their work, participating in the emerging private gallery system or creating their own experimental venue, as with the Action d’art group or the exhibition La section d’or.7 Above all, rather than viewing modernists as isolated, heroic figures, preoccupied only with their creative processes, this book examines how many avant-guerre artists grappled with the pressing social issues of their society and invented a new art in response. Attending to the role of left-wing politics, and specifically anarchism, helps reveal period perspectives on the development of modernist aesthetic languages and avant-garde strategies and presents a telling corrective to post–World War I myths still in force.8

3

Introduction

A n a r c h i s m a n d A n a r c h i s t Th e o r y

No one has put the case for antiauthoritarianism better than Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the “father” of anarchism in France: To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. 9

Proudhon and later anarchists rejected authority and the social system in which they lived and offered an ideal vision of an anarchist future based variously on individualism alone or in combination with forms of federalism. Max Stirner, the mid-nineteenth-century German philosopher, articulated an extreme form of individualism widely influential on at least one strain of anarchism. Petr Kropotkin, a Russian prince and internationally respected geologist, developed his influential idea of anarchocommunism based on his concept of voluntary mutual aid, itself firmly founded on respect for the individual.10 Though, as in any political movement, factions passionately argued a variety of theoretical positions, most anarchists saw themselves as antiauthoritarian, anticapitalist, antimilitarist, antinationalist, antiparliamentarian, anticlerical, and sometimes against industrialization. They were internationalist and many were pacifist; they embraced individual independence and liberty, and a large number—following Kropotkin—affirmed the social necessity and moral virtue of work, imagining a future society of small groups enjoying “natural” relations of interdependence and mutual aid. Although regional pride and ethnic identity were applauded, nationalism and patriotism were despised as manipulative fictions that exploited laborers and led to wars waged for the profit of those in power. Proudhon, living during the rise of the conscript army, saw war as the most tragic injustice of the social system. Antimilitarism became one of the most important themes in the later-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century libertarian movement and is of special significance for the artists discussed throughout this study. Mikhail Bakunin, an active revolutionary, organizer, and writer (his God and the State is a brilliant argument against religion), and Kropotkin, the most influ-

4

Modernist Heteroglossia

ential thinker of the movement in the late nineteenth century, built on Proudhon’s ideas, and by the 1880s and 1890s many scores of anarchist periodicals debated a large and growing body of anarchist thought.11 Bakunin added the violence of an activist, and for a time—which he later regretted—he embraced Sergei Nechaev’s la propaganda par le fait (propaganda of the deed), which rationalized and glorified individual acts of terrorism. Kropotkin argued that the real solution to society’s ills lay with the peasantry, in part because they had endruring roots in mutualism, which he saw as the “natural” form of society: men and women, if uncorrupted by coercive government, will naturally and freely aid their fellows in pursuit of the general well-being of all.12 Kropotkin developed aesthetic ideas from the profound conviction that “primitive” societies—and “primitive” arts—express themselves in more natural, more spontaneous, and therefore better ways. Distinct camps developed over myriad issues, including the relation of the individual to society as well as methods of action. On the one hand, the Reclus brothers (Élisée and Élie), Kropotkin, and Jean Grave, editor of the influential Les temps nouveaux, promoted “anarchism-communism,” in which the individual would exist in harmony with larger society. On the other side—basing their ideas on Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner—were the extreme individualists, such as Zo d’Axa (editor of L’endehors, 1891–1893, and La feuille, 1897–1899), Libertad (editor of L’anarchie, 1905–1914), Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers (associated with L’action d’art, 1913), and Émile Armand (who revived L’endehors from 1922 to 1939), who saw their only duty as a refusal to allow the self to be compromised.13 After the turn of the twentieth century, anarchosyndicalism was promoted in La voix du Peuple, the official organ of the anarchosyndicalist union La Confédération Générale du Travail (founded in 1900), which further split the ranks between those willing to work within an organized structure and those militant individualists for whom such an organization contradicted the very idea of anarchism. An enormous number of related and often contradictory theories, attitudes, and social critiques coexisted in the anarchist movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, articulated by many scores of widely available journals. A broad range of permutations and allegiances affected not only the political and activist figures involved, but also the artistic and literary figures with whom they mingled, who were often no less passionate about issues of individualism, collectivism and la propagande par le fait. Art and the role of the artist were central issues for the anarchists. Proudhon believed that art must serve a moral and social purpose and that art should force people to look at the realities of the life of the poor, fostering a desire for social change. In his Du principe de l’art, he analyzed what he saw as the debauchery of contemporary art: Society divides itself from art; it puts it outside of real life; it makes of it a means of pleasure and amusement, a pastime, but one which means nothing; it is a superfluity, a luxury, a vanity,

5

Introduction

a debauchery, an illusion; it is anything you like. It is no longer a faculty or a function, a form of life, an integral part and constituent of existence. 14

Bakunin also expressed disgust with contemporary art, holding it partly responsible for the awe of the poor for trappings of power: “Artists have become the natural servants of priestcraft and despotism against the liberty of peoples. Ministers of corruption, professors of voluptuousness, prostitutes’ pimps, it is they who have taught the masses to bear their indignity and their indigence.”15 While Proudhon called for an art of pure agitational propaganda, Kropotkin— who discussed art most thoroughly in The Conquest of Bread, basing his aesthetics on Proudhon, Leo Tolstoy, Richard Wagner, John Ruskin, and William Morris—looked to an earlier time when he believed art was unified with life and expressed a true cultural spirit: When a Greek sculptor chiseled his marble he endeavored to express the spirit and heart of the city. All its passions, all its traditions of glory, were to live again in the work. But today the united city has ceased to exist; there is no more communion of ideas. The town is a chance agglomeration of people who do not know one another, who have no common interest. . . . What fatherland can the international banker and the ragpicker have in common? Only when cities, territories, nations, or groups of nations, will have renewed their harmonious life, will art be able to draw its inspiration from ideals held in common . 16

The only way that artists can help, according to Kropotkin in Paroles d’un révolté (1885), is to join with the workers as laborers and unite in experience with them: And remember, if you do come, that you come not as masters, but as comrades in the struggle; that you come not to govern but to gain strength for yourselves in a new life which sweeps upward to the conquest of the future: that you come less to teach than to grasp the aspiration of the many; to divine them, to give them shape, and then to work, without rest and without haste, with all the fire of youth and all the judgment of age, to realize them in actual life. Then and then only, will you lead a complete, a noble, a rational existence.

Believing that artists were critical to the success of anarchism and revolution, Kropotkin exhorted them in inspiring terms: You poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, if you understand your true mission and the very interests of art itself, come with us. Place your pen, your pencil, your chisel, your ideas at the service of the revolution. . . . Show the people how hideous is their actual life, and place your hands on the causes of its ugliness. Tell us what a rational life would be, if it did not encounter at every step the follies and the ignominies of our present social order. 17

Though Kropotkin himself envisioned an ideal art along the lines of ancient Greece, his ideas inspired two generations of radical art. For the modern artist to

6

Modernist Heteroglossia

cultivate strategies of primitivism and spontaneity in both art and life was to rebel against the static forms of bourgeois morality and bourgeois art. Kropotkin’s primitivism and emphasis on the role of art in changing social consciousness constituted much of the appeal of anarchism to the artistic and literary generation of the 1880s and 1890s, continuing throughout the avant-guerre (though Kropotkin himself rejected the form it took in his day18). Although inspired by Kropotkin and his followers—for example, the anarchosyndicalist Fernand Pelloutier called for didactic, agitational art in his Art et la révolte (1896)19—modernists rejected these directives, whose authors imagined a naturalist rather than avant-garde art in response. Both neoimpressionists Paul Signac and Camille Pissarro rejected the obligation to subjects with a social message—though they both practiced it many times, especially in prints destined for the anarchist press—in favor of an art expressive of the artist’s individualist sensibilities. Signac’s famous dictum negotiates this dichotomy nicely: “Justice en sociology, harmonie en art: même chose” ( Justice in sociology, harmony in art: same thing).20 A close friend of the anarchist playwright Alfred Jarry, Pierre Quillard, asserted that “the fact alone of bringing forth a beautiful work, in the full sovereignty of one’s spirit, constitutes an act of revolt and denies all social fictions. . . . It seems to me . . . that good literature is an outstanding form of propaganda by the deed.” Typical of many anarchist artists, he had so much faith in the individualist artistic act that he asserted, “Whoever communicates to his brothers in suffering the secret splendor of his dreams acts upon the surrounding society in the manner of a solvent and makes of all those who understand him, often without their realization, outlaws and rebels.”21 Anarchism was without question more influential than socialism as a political philosophy for turn-of-the-century artists, though the latter played a smaller though very significant role in prewar French artistic culture (the distinction between them was often elided until after the war).22 The roots of this phenomenon go back as far as the friendship between Gustave Courbet and Proudhon, though the alliance was not widespread until the 1880s.23 Despite many republican as well as right-wing voices sounding within the symbolist movement, anarchism dominated its aesthetic politics in part because anarchist theory specifically called for the participation of artists in the transformation of society; more significantly, at one end of its spectrum anarchism stood for an absolute individualism fully compatible with a politicized bohemianism.24 This very mingling of anarchism and symbolisme formed the seedbed of early-twentieth-century modernist art theory in important ways, even for later artists and writers who were themselves far from anarchist in their political sympathies. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s monumental influence alone would help account for this, given his involvement with the anarchist movement,25 though there’s no need to locate any single figure given the broad cultural appeal of anarchist ideas articulated in dozens of literary reviews from the 1880s to the First World War and beyond.

7

Introduction

Absurdly stereotyped conceptions of anarchists still predominate in both popular culture and journalism as well as in much otherwise excellent scholarship. Though numerous activists and propagandists “of the deed” expressed their convictions in violent actions, more often than not these were fringe figures who the theorists of the movement like Kropotkin felt obliged, though deeply troubled, to defend.26 During the fin de siècle, neither Auguste Vaillant, who exploded a crude homemade bomb filled with nails in the Chamber of Deputies in 1893, nor Émile Henry, who perpetrated a more deadly bombing of the Café Terminus in the Gare Saint-Lazare in 1894, was part of a group planning such an action, though these were among the most famous anarchist acts at the height of the anarchist terror of the early 1890s. More characteristic of the movement as a whole were the volumes of verbal and visual propaganda in the form of articles, books, pamphlets, broadsides, and satirical cartoons that flooded Paris in this larger period.27 Dedicated to criticizing the government’s status quo for its striking lack of social equity, livable wages, safe working conditions or social insurance, and abuses of power (such as the use of the army to break strikes), anarchist theorists were equally concerned to propagate a vision of a more just society based variously on respect for the individual and on cooperative organizations expressive of mutual interest and mutual aid. The range of anarchist theory is large and no more given to agreement in particulars than other bodies of political thought, hence, I am not interested in formulating general analogies between anarchism and art. Rather, this book details aspects of anarchist theory relating specifically to the work of individual artists in particular historical circumstances: Picasso’s work is related to anarchist anticolonialism, which intersected all anarchist positions, while Van Dongen most pointedly embraced the sexual liberationism of anarchoindividualism and Kupka endorsed the thought of anarchist geographer and theoretician Élisée Reclus, a Kropotkinian anarchocommunist.

M o d e r n i s m a n d “A u t o n o m y ”

Reconsidering the integral relation posited by anarchist avant-gardists between their choices of medium or style and their agitational politics renders problematic the widespread naturalization of the concept of autonomy in definitions of modernism and the avant-garde. No reading of the art criticism from the 1880s to World War I offers the same concept of the autonomy of art evident in either Clement Greenberg’s influential art criticism (beginning in 1939 in Partisan Review) or in the contemporaneous Frankfurt school debates (Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, and Walter Benjamin) and related subsequent theorists. According to Richard Shiff, Greenberg’s Marxist concept of autonomy entails the modernist artist substituting the twin poles of “self ” and “nature” for those of “self ” and “medium,”28 in full though usually dimly sensed retreat from the contradictions of capitalism; Greenberg later emptied his art theory

8

Modernist Heteroglossia

of Marxism and promoted the concept of autonomy as a purified formalism.29 Marxist or not, a concept of autonomy has constituted the dominant theoretical model of modernism and avant-gardism in the visual arts for at least sixty years within art history, literary theory, and cultural studies.30 Peter Bürger in Theory of the Avant-Garde puts the argument this way (referring to the French symbolist movement as “Aestheticism”): The self-criticism of the social subsystem that is art can become possible only when the contents also lose their political character, and art wants to be nothing other than art. This stage is reached at the end of the nineteenth century, in Aestheticism. . . . The apartness from the praxis of life that had always constituted the institutional status of art in bourgeois society now becomes the content of works. . . . Fiction is the medium of a reflection about the relationship between individual and society. In Aestheticism, this thematics is overshadowed by the everincreasing concentration the makers of art bring to the medium itself. 31

Bürger’s claim is grounded in the Marxist understanding that social institutions and patterns structure the individual in ways that change over time; this idea now broadly and rightly underpins most scholarship in the humanities. Yet his claim additionally addresses the “concentration the makers of art bring to the medium itself.” This conception of symbolist artistic agency, however, is contradicted by their notion of the independence of art (“autonomy” was never their word) and their claim that abstract form and color constituted an inherent “universal language of truth.”32 Though Mallarmé is often cited as the quintessential advocate of autonomy, he was deeply engaged with the anarchist movement, with implications for his art, his thought, and his influence in the fin de siècle and avant-guerre periods.33 Anarchist aesthetic theories had great importance for many symbolist poets, artists, and critics, most notably Félix Fénéon, Octave Mirbeau, Gustave Kahn, and Laurent Tailhade, and were monumentally influential on subsequent forms of Parisian avant-gardism.34 For artists subscribing to anarchist aesthetics, art could be at once instrumental in their cultural politics and independent of any bourgeois obligation to endorse naturalism and narrative. The resulting “abstraction” (their word), the freedom for which was claimed via a radical individualism, laid claim to transcendent and idealistic territory thought to have the power to alter the more material social terrain. In the subsequent period, neither the cubists nor their critics used the term “autonomy” either.35 Later inventors of fully abstract or “nonobjective” art—František Kupka, Wassily Kandinsky, and Kasimir Malevich—combined anarchism and Theosophy to arrive at a visual realization of these aims.36 In short, nonobjectivity emerged from closely related forms of politicized mysticism. If this “Idealism”—as both the symbolists and anarchists called their various philosophies—seems dated, that is exactly my point: their calls for “abstraction” were both aesthetic and social. They cannot fairly be called as witnesses to that ivory-tower detachment necessary for formalist or Marxist theories, in which the artist is less a political

9

Introduction

agent in history than an unconscious part of an inexorable historical process. These artists were themselves, precisely, already anticapitalist, in positions resting firmly and often knowledgeably on Marx’s critique of capital. Their resulting work therefore cannot be construed as operating in the service of a meditation on the materials of their art, since they viewed their materials as tools of artistic agency aimed (however “idealistically”) at helping to solve the problems of capital. To put it another way: modernism must be historicized as well as theorized.

Bakhtin and the Discourses of Art

Early-twentieth-century modernism requires of us an understanding of the contemporary issues that inspired these modernists’ choices and recognition of the ways they addressed their subjects, styles, media, venues, and audiences in response. These artistic choices functioned in particular ways in French culture, and I will reconsider aspects of the development of modernism in avant-guerre Paris dealing specifically with the notion of its discourse. This study explores how these artists’ aesthetic choices, often in the service of an anarchist vision, communicated their negotiation of the myriad artistic languages operative at that time. I refer not just to important elements of form—line, color, and space— but also to subject, medium, venue, and audience, all those choices made at a particular historical moment in anticipation of a culturally specific viewer. To consider issues of art and politics in this cultural environment, I want to build on Mikhail Bakhtin’s richly suggestive notion of language as culturally embedded in order to explore the way modernist idioms of visual culture functioned in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. That Bakhtin’s method has itself been perceptively interpreted from an anarchist perspective is evidence not only that his particular form of cultural critique resonates with the political aims and strategies promulgated within the anarchist movement, but that his multivalent and dynamic understanding of language could have particular relevance for an analysis of the artistic strategies and multivalent aesthetics we can identify as anarchist.37 Bakhtin’s theory is based on acknowledging our agency in this process: that choices are made, tensions negotiated, and audiences imagined and addressed, no matter how much we are also constructed by social institutions and structures.38 This book precisely concerns artists who were aware of their historical moment in particular ways, critical of the society they saw around them, and actively engaged in creating artistic languages and forms that might critique and subvert that status quo, if not also change it, within the terms available to them in avant-guerre Paris. Bakhtin’s conception of language is profoundly social, seeing in it all the forms of political pressure as well as responding strategies of resistance. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin unfolds his concept of dialogue in action and probes the relation of language, act, and text to political forces.39 As he argues in his

10

Modernist Heteroglossia

essay “Discourse in the Novel”: At the time when poetry was accomplishing the task of cultural, national and political centralization of the verbal-ideological world in the higher official socio-ideological levels, on the lower levels, on the stages of local fairs and at buffoon spectacles, the heteroglossia of the clown sounded forth, ridiculing all “languages” and dialects. 40

Bakhtin generalizes from such specifics as plays, street songs, and folk sayings to articulate his view of language as inseparable from politics and ideology; he emphasizes that “we are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view.” Thus, “verbal and ideological unification and centralization [in European history] develops in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization.”41 The authoritarianism of this force is countered by forms of resistance to and subversion of its homogenizing force, as in the carnivalesque, in which authority is satirized and a kind of power reappropriated by the satirists. How language is used to resist power, in short, is Bakhtin’s major theme, and “discourse” is individual language in active dialogue with other kinds of language—many kinds of language—including “official” ones. Bakhtin saw all languages as heteroglot, representing “the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth.”42 We speak in a heteroglossia of the many simultaneous languages acting on us and on which we act: gender, race, and class speak through us, both unavoidably and by choice. Bakhtin critiques Ferdinand de Saussure on this exact point, rejecting the notion that the structure of language can be isolated from language-in-use; hence, the language we choose is an intentional response both to what we desire to communicate and, significantly, to what we anticipate will be our listeners’ responses, what we imagine to be their “languages.” This remains true whether we embrace or resist what we take to be our audience’s position. When one social class gains hegemony over others, Bakhtin sees the language or discourse they propagate as expressive of the dominant culture’s centralizing power; whether monarchical or bourgeois, the established order views its assumptions and values as unquestionable, mere truth, and naturalizes its language and cultural forms. Alternative languages—and alternative forms of art and literature—constitute counterdiscourses, positioned in a necessary relationship to the dominant discourse whose assumptions they challenge or satirize. No artist exists outside social experience, nor any audience; thus meaning in a work of art functions in relation to the entire culture, in ways both controlled and uncontrolled by its maker. The implications of Bakhtin’s thought for modernism are rich and illuminate the research presented in this book. I have looked at many categories of what

11

Introduction

might be called “leftist art” in the period, concentrating on instances relating to anarchist thought and activism. From large-scale salon paintings to political cartoons to avant-garde abstractions, artists preoccupied with social criticism sought their appropriate subject, medium, style, venue, and audience based on their differing conceptions of how art influences society.43 Whether they employed “high” or “low” media and aimed at elite or mass audiences were choices consciously made in relation to a complex field of production, marketing, viewing, and collecting. At one end of the spectrum, many socially critical academic artists, such as Jules Adler, operated within the older salons, annually exhibiting naturalist paintings expressive of social concern and addressed largely to the class in power, the bourgeoisie. Other artists—such as Jules-Félix Grandjouan, Bernard Naudin and, for a time, Kupka—abandoned painting altogether in favor of political satire in journals costing half a franc and addressed to the masses and left-wing intellectuals. Yet others, such as Van Dongen, divided their time between such highly readable political cartoons and a deliberately provocative avant-gardism that rejected academic styles and narrative genres in favor of an increasing abstraction that would, according to anarchist theory, pave the way for a new consciousness and a new society even while abandoning the hope of a popular audience. At the other end of the spectrum, modernists like Vlaminck, Picasso, and later, Kupka, pursued avant-gardism alone in the faith that, through sheer expression of their radical individuality and a politicized rejection of statesanctioned artistic conventions and venues, they could help change society in accordance with their anarchist convictions. These choices constantly shifted during this unsettled period. Artists responded to dilemmas posed by popularized and contradictory anarchist ideas. Kropotkin called for anarchist artists to expose “the follies and the ignominies of our present social order” as well as show “what a rational life would be.”44 Other anarchist artists articulated their theory that, alternatively, art should be the untrammeled expression of the emancipated individual, opening the path to a new social order. For example, Paul Signac’s “Justice in society, harmony in art: same thing.”45 The attempt to negotiate both Signac’s individualist aesthetic theory and Kropotkin’s call for art to be addressed to the masses was a no-win formula that produced some of modernism’s telling contradictions among the Parisian avant-garde. Politicized discourse characterized prewar France in general in the realm of the visual arts as well as in the polemical art criticism—ranging in allegiance from extreme right to extreme left—that debated art in general and modernism in particular. Historians of modernism are familiar—through several collections of primary documents—with the relatively small body of criticism written by apologists for modernism. But we remain much less familiar with the nature and scope of the broader range of art criticism—much of it hostile to modernism from various perspectives—that flooded Paris in these years, with its frequent evocation of politically agitating issues for French culture at large.46 This broader criticism of art exhibitions during the avant-guerre reveals some expected and

12

Modernist Heteroglossia

some surprising patterns: 1) that politically and artistically conservative critics lauded academic styles of art even when that style served a thoroughly antiestablishment theme critical of the government; and 2) alternatively, that an enormous range of critics equated systematic departures from traditional artistic conventions of form, space, and color with anarchist attacks on bourgeois society. Though many anarchists stood for highly nuanced theoretical positions, fully articulated in the scores of anarchist journals, art critics were often more impressionistic in their sweeping characterizations. Cubism especially was seen as “anarchist,” “revolutionary,” and “an attack on the social fabric,” whether for good or ill. Equally striking, and perhaps more surprising, is the fact that leftist salon painting did not inspire such politicized criticism.47 My research has forced me to conclude that it was not socially critical subject matter, then, that offended artistic traditionalists so much as avant-garde “attacks” on form itself: on all those inherited conventions of naturalism still taught at the École des BeauxArts and quite systematically labored against by modernists. For example, Maurice Robin in the anarchist and antimilitarist Les Hommes du Jour in 1909 referred to fauvism and cubism as “l’art ultra-révolutionnaire.” Henri Guilbeaux, defending the neoimpressionists in the same journal in 1911, specifically accused Picasso of having produced “grotesque results, ridiculous, only made, it seems, in order to shock the bourgeoisie.” Coriolès, in the conservative Le Gaulois, characterized the avant-garde in 1910 as manifesting “wilfully revolutionary spirit, nay, anarchic tendencies.” And the symbolist Sâr Péladan, by 1911 an extreme opponent of modernism, accused the new art of “anarchy . . . wishing to find a way to proclaim the immortal principles of ’89, in aesthetics.” J. d’Aoust, discussing cubism and futurism in 1912, asked, “In order to be ‘of one’s time’ is it not necessary always to be a little ‘revolutionary,’ in art principally?”48 It is significant that both right-wing newspapers like Le Correspondant and leftwing journals like Les Hommes du Jour aggressively guided their readers to political responses to the art of this period, frequently invoking issues that broadly preoccupied French culture. The artists’ heteroglot responses to the deeply politicized culture of prewar France—as manifest in topical cartoons, forms of primitivism, and avant-garde art—made political statements of their own and must be seen as often purposely provoking such critical reactions. Modernists like Matisse (certainly no anarchist despite his period at the side of anarchist neoimpressionists Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross) may have attracted a form of criticism both dismaying to the artist and based on genuine misunderstanding. Openly anarchist artists like Vlaminck and Van Dongen were neither naive nor unprepared for politicized criticism of this sort. In the first chapter I take up the question of modernist heteroglossia in relation to the cultural “languages” of artistic subject, medium, and style and the class issues of venue and intended audience, considering a range of the artists and issues cited above: the styles, themes, and criticism of salon painting; the

13

Introduction

journals and political content of the culture of satirical graphics; and the early careers of Van Dongen and Vlaminck. Subsequent chapters each look at a particular case and set of circumstances. Chapter 2 considers the awareness on the part of Picasso and his circle of the colonial exploitation that brought African art into the domain of French culture, suggesting further levels of meaning in modernist uses of primitivism. The popular image of Africa in pre–World War I France (embraced as an imagined primal spiritism), the response on the Left to French colonial theory, and the inflammatory debates in the press and Chamber of Deputies in 1905–1906 following the revelations of abuses against indigenous populations in the French Congo and Belgian Congo, form an inextricable part of allusions to “Africa” in the period 1905–1909. This anticolonial crisis reveals that the preference of some modernists for “primitive” cultures could be as much an act of social criticism as a search for a new art, despite their culture’s deeply problematic relation to issues of “race” in which the artists are equally implicated. Chapter 3 continues the investigation into the relation between modernism, primitivism, and politics, reconfiguring our understanding of cubism by exploring questions of audience in the wide range of critics and artists before 1914 who defined that movement within politicized concepts of the “primitive.” The cubists themselves and their apologists purposely sought to transcend a clear distinction between the rational and the irrational by overcoming the imagined separation—on the part of academic critics—between artists’ abilities to create deliberatively and those unconscious urges and primordial drives they believed gave birth to “primitive” art. Considering conceptions of the primitive reveals that they inform the reception of cubism writ large, and not just Picasso’s, Braque’s and Derain’s Africanist period of 1907–1908. Primitivist concepts are rife throughout the primary literature on Cubism across the period to the First World War, for many of the artists themselves, for those sympathetic to them, and for those who opposed them, with the institutional power to back it up. In a large body of statements from both the artists and their critics pro and con, notions of the primitive that were identified with cultures indigenous to Europe were conflated with art that served to define the non-European “other” in the Western imagination. This chapter explores the ways that this discourse was politicized in the context of avant-guerre France. Chapter 4 takes up the case of Juan Gris, an artist only temporarily involved with the anarchists. Gris was engaged with the world of political activism and caricature and subsequently grappled with an avant-garde style already saturated in and associated with antirepublican politics, which he found problematic during the war. He represents the case of an artist attracted to the anarchist movement, who shared some of its convictions—most notably antimilitarism and pacifism—but who later worked to distance his art from that early radicalism. Comparing his work with Picasso’s—especially the collages—reveals an artist in a tense relationship with aesthetic and political forces at work in the development

14

Modernist Heteroglossia

of modernism. In dealing with Gris’s wartime work, I address issues of interpretation in the contested field of collage studies, reconsidering in light of Bakhtin’s approach to language the question of art as meditating on its own production and/or as politically engaged. The most radical abstractionist in this period, František Kupka, is the subject of chapter 5. His constitutes an inverse case, since anarchism was of central and stated concern to him, which led him to produce a large body of vitriolic cartoons, book illustrations for a major anarchist work of theory, and finally— through his mingled Theosophical and anarchist utopian convictions—nonobjective paintings supported by his important treatise La Création dans les arts plastiques (1912).49 Looking closely into Kupka’s own writings helps us not only understand how significant the anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus’s thought was for him but also how far he went beyond Reclus in working out his own anarchist aesthetic project. Kupka’s book is undoubtedly the central text of anarchist aesthetics in the modernist period, and Kupka himself the anarchist artist who brings together all of the previously considered themes in this book. Such a range of artistic styles and strategies reveals the shared compass of concerns yet differing solutions sought by prewar artists to the problems posed by the intersection of political engagement with artistic self-expression. The struggle of individual artists preoccupied with such problems produced bodies of work interestingly complementary as well as contradictory. Van Dongen, Gris, and Kupka—among the most politically and stylistically radical—each reveal a usefully different paradigm, especially when compared to Picasso and Vlaminck. The latter two pursued anarchist paths that purposely avoided satirical journals, depending instead on reaching audiences through the medium of oil paintings exhibited at private galleries (Picasso) or avant-garde salons (Vlaminck). In this book, therefore, I explore the ways in which this milieu nurtured various kinds of politicized art, including a politics of form. How style of any sort is invested with concurrent ideological meaning, though, is only made visible if we are prepared to examine carefully the larger concerns of French political, social, and artistic culture in which and against which such modernism defined itself.

15

1

Languages of Art and Politics S a l o n P a i n t i n g , C a r i c a t u r e , M o d e r n i sm

Where is your exhibition? —In the kiosks. —Jean-Louis Forain 

S al o n P a i n t i n g , C r i t i c i s m , a n d P o l i t i cs , P o s t- 19 0 0

The world of official salon art of the avant-guerre period remains unfamiliar to many, largely because of the assumption that such art continued along an increasingly trivial trajectory after the end of the nineteenth century. All genres of salon art continued up to the First World War, including historical, religious, landscape, still life, and genre painting; there was not only vitality in this work and the larger culture it addressed, but the salons remained powerfully dominant in the art world, both in terms of the market (state and private acquisition) and the massive volume of published art criticism.1 The majority of artists wishing to succeed during the Third Republic, as in the nineteenth century, continued after 1900 to exhibit their works in the mainstream salons under the auspices of the French state, seeking direct sales of exhibited works, portrait commissions, and the establishment of their own ateliers. Indeed, it is the dominance of academic art and theory and its association with state institutions that anarchist and socially critical artists reacted against in developing their subversive and countercultural work. Bourgeois culture, with its central and well-established notions of beauty, harmony, and order, was reflected in the naturalist and idealist art that was exhibited annually in the salons and purchased by the state for regional distribution to provincial museums. The hegemony of this system was resisted and subverted as implicated in an unjust status quo by modernist artists in a variety of ways ranging from subject and style to marketing and exhibition

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venues. But the political problems of the period were also addressed from within the academy by award-winning artists exhibiting in the traditional salons. In 1881, the state-sanctioned salon had been privatized and renamed the Société des Artistes français. Funded and run by its members, the société became the commercial vehicle for artists affiliated with the École Nationale des BeauxArts and its teaching ateliers. The juries for painting and sculpture at the société’s annual exhibitions were constituted of artists from this small circle; its audience was overwhelmingly the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. As Fay Brauer and Christopher Green have discussed, the Société des Artistes français was tacitly recognized to be the official arbiter of French taste, a status challenged in 1890 with the founding of the self-proclaimed Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, an even more restrictive salon.2 The hegemony of these organizations was countered by the unjuried Salon des Indépendants, also recently created in 1884, as a venue for artists excluded from the mainstream salons to address roughly the same audience. The Salon des Indépendants was the vehicle of the Société des Artistes Indépendantes, a group spearheaded by the anarchists Signac and Pissarro and their fellow neoimpressionists.3 As the only juryless salon, this venue was based on the concept of artistic freedom, independence, and individualism and was resultantly a threat to the institutional status quo exemplified by the Société des Artistes français and later the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.4 In 1903, a middle ground was struck between the juried salons and the unjuried Salon des Indépendants with the founding of the Salon d’Automne, which became an avant-garde venue. The Salon d’Automne was juried by a group of artists elected annually by their peers, guaranteeing a regular rotation of the jury committee among the organization’s membership. The Société des Artistes français and Société Nationale were both allowed to hold their exhibitions in the stateowned Grand Palais; in 1904 the Salon d’Automne also gained entrance into this exhibition space by virtue of the support of the City of Paris (as opposed to the national government). By contrast, the Salon des Indépendants remained outside this governmental and institutional frame until 1918, even though the Salon d’Automne specialized in profiling new movements that appeared in this avant-garde venue. As a result the annual Salon des Indépendants was regularly held at temporary quarters, such as the Grande Serre de l’Alma, Cours-la Reine, or the Baraquement du Quai d’Orsay, Pont de l’Alma. These shifting institutional structures reshaped art exhibition along partisan lines and developed alongside the newly emerging system of private galleries and private exhibitions in which modernism flourished.5 For an artist like Picasso, moving out of the socially critical blue and rose periods,6 with his systematic rejection of academic style and venue7 in his Africanist and cubist periods, avant-garde style was invested with political purpose. When this was the case—as with Van Dongen and Vlaminck—outrages on academic naturalism also constituted attacks on the complacent society to which academic idealism was addressed and in which naturalism was now implicated,

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Figure 1 Jean Danguy, Muse of Poverty, 1903. From Salon des Artistes français (Paris: Société des Artistes français, 1903).

Figure 2 Édouard-Bernard DebatPonsan, Humanité pleurant ses enfants (Humanity crying for her children), 1905. Dijon, Musée des BeauxArts. From Salon des Artistes français (Paris: Société des Artistes français, 1905).

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as critics of modernism were quick to assume. They were sometimes wrong, of course, as, for example, with artists like Roger de la Fresnaye; not all modernism was associated with leftism. But for a number of key artists, stylistic vanguardism signified a rejection of bourgeois commodification and a stand against the government and the striking economic inequities of the age, constituting a Bakhtinian counterdiscourse through the “language” of style. At the same time, the continuation of various realist styles after 1900 in the official salons also served to address the social injustices and frequent political upheavals of the Third Republic, through the social commentary of a large number of artists representing varying stripes of the political spectrum and degrees of commercial success. Politicized and even propagandistic works appeared annually from 1900 to the First World War as they had in the previous century, ranging in category from allegory and genre to contemporary history. Many continued aspects of l’art social,8 especially critique of social conditions in the medium of painting, in order to appeal to the conscience of the class responsible for them. These salons were venues that included a cross section of artists representing the political spectrum in Paris, from reactionary to parliamentary socialist and even anarchist, not necessarily excluding—as one might expect—artists vehemently opposed to the state or its sanctioned institutions. Looking at a number of such works brings political issues of the Third Republic into focus. Two artists—Jean Danguy, with his Muse of Poverty (figure 1), and Édouard-Bernard Debat-Ponsan, with Humanité pleurant ses enfants (Humanity crying for her children; figure 2), in the Salon des artistes français of 1903 and 1905, respectively—protested urban poverty and war in allegorical terms.9 Such female personifications fall fully within the visual conventions of the day in satisfying a viewer’s prurient attraction to waiflike vulnerability in one case and fulsome voluptuousness in the other. These artists were not necessarily more conscious that this was part of what they were offering than artists of any previous era: these were the visual conventions of the day, and the social protest was no less seriously intended. Realist scenes of hard labor and harder poverty were more frequent. Jules Adler was a highly successful artist, though less well known than his friend and rival Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen; hors concours after 1898 and a founding member of the Salon d’Automne, he annually submitted large-scale paintings to the Salon des artistes français.10 Having absorbed some of the visual lessons of impressionism, Adler—like Steinlen—applied them to fin de siècle themes of urban poverty and labor. Les Las (The weary), shown in the Salon of 1897 and the 1900 Exposition Universelle, was nearly 71 by 99 inches (figure 3); in it Adler depicted workers of several classes trudging home, wearied by their working lives.11 Les Hâleurs (The haulers [1904]; figure 4) depicts human beings replacing animals in the most exhausting kind of physical labor. The woman and boy in the harness among the larger men is a note of social realism that points to the frequent practice of hiring this cheaper form of labor.

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Figure 3 Jules Adler, Les las (The weary), 1897. Oil on canvas, 180 x 250 cm. Musée Calvet, Avignon. From Salon de 1897 (Paris: Société des Artistes français, 1897); also exhibited at Exposition Universelle, 1900. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 4 Jules Adler, Les hâleurs (The haulers), 1904. Oil on canvas, 138 x 197 cm. Musée de la Tour-des-echevins, Luxeuilles-Bains. From Salon de 1904 (Paris: Société des Artistes français, 1904). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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Figure 5 Victor Marec, Expulsés (Expelled), 1900. From Salon des Artistes français (Paris: Société des Artistes français, 1900).

Of course unemployment was worse than hard labor, as other works exhibited in the Salon des artistes français argued. Expulsés (Expelled; 1900) by Victor Marec (figure 5) is a bleak view of two old people who have been evicted.12 The white-haired woman stands as if stunned, staring at the locked door that leads to their poor home; her partner is sunk in despair. This static composition—with its dramatic uses of chiaroscuro and painterly freedom of execution, including the brilliantly executed still life of their few possessions—serves a powerful vision of this couple’s complete lack of choices. Oeuvre de la Bouchée de pain (fragment) (The mouthful of bread [fragment]; 1908) by Gustave René Pierre depicts a huddled group of poor people dazed and beaten down by their hunger and poverty, waiting in a charitable bread line.13 The artist’s treatment of the faces is quite caricatural, with little detail elsewhere, forcefully evoking an atmosphere of gloom, hopelessness, and mental dullness. Given the strong criticism implied in such works as these, one might imagine that these artists were marginalized in the world of the salons and ignored by critics other than doctrinaire leftists praising them for their subjects. But this was not the case. Marec was a highly respected student of Jean-Léon Gérôme, won the coveted Gold Medal in 1889, and became a full member of the Société des Artistes français the year before Expulsés. The influential and conservative Gazette des Beaux-Arts singled this work out for special notice with a reproduction in its salon review of 1900.14 Pierre’s

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Figure 6 Louis Roger, L’accident, 1910. From Salon des Artistes français (Paris: Société des Artistes français, 1910).

work too received favorable notice, winning the second-class medal for the year in which Mouthful of Bread was shown. Such official recognition suggests that these themes were not offensive to the salon juries, provided that the style and composition sufficiently gestured toward tradition, even when they constituted a veritable call to arms. Maurice Thomassin’s Le Feu dans la mine (Fire in the mine), shown in the Salon des artistes français in 1907, and Louis Roger’s L’accident in 1910 (figure 6) both fall somewhere between genre and contemporary history painting in depicting scenes that indict the conditions of labor considered acceptable by bosses and government regulators alike.15 In Thomassin’s painting the explosion of mine gases that ignited the fire doubtless caused deaths, as such mine disasters continue to do. Émile Zola, the novelist most influential on this political art, evoked just such events in Germinal (1885), his novel set in northern French mining country.16 In Roger’s accident, the body of a man is brought up from the pit of a construction site by his fellow workers. We know that this was a common occurrence from the statistics that survive from the period; there were 3,900 work-related injuries in 1911 in Paris’s working-class nineteenth arrondissement alone, for example.17 The Christlike posture of the limp figure underscores the victimization of workers and suggests the artist’s attitude toward labor accidents; its evocation of the realism of Caravaggio, with his plebeian models, reinforces the Christological allusion. Again, this social criticism was far from damaging to the reputation of Roger, hors concours after 1903, as the Mairie de Saint-Nazaire commissioned him to paint a mural version for its city hall. Another work exhibited by Adler in 1900 was his ambitious La Grève au

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Creusot (Strike at Le Creusot [1899]; plate 1). In 1899, when 51 percent of workers made less than the one franc a day necessary for subsistence,18 nine thousand workers for the Schneider empire of mines and metal works went on strike for better pay and working conditions. Adler’s painting of the miners rising up in protest celebrates the first instance in French history of women demonstrating alongside men in marches.19 This monumental work did much to cement Adler’s reputation, winning public sympathy for his rather grandiose depiction of the noble resolve of the aggrieved laborers; he received lavish praise from Jules Rais in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, who exalted its harmony of landscape and “factory,” of atmosphere and drama, of individual and crowd, of gesture and voice, of the contemporary and the heroic. In a resolved band, to the rhythm of songs of revolt, the miners file past the factory. Man is drawn up opposite the factory smokestack; class organizes itself before the machine; under the shadows cast by the billowing smoke, the promise of the flags reconquers the sun. 20

Rais not only flatteringly summons up the picture’s drama, but he neutralizes the import of the strike itself. By stating that “class organizes itself before the machine,” he muffles the fact that the working class organizes not in opposition to “the machine” or the factory but in opposition to the factory owner and the supporting governmental system. He adds that the woman in the lead reminds him of Eugène Delacroix’s Le 28 Juillet. La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty leading the people), painted following the abortive revolution of 1830; he thus pays Adler’s work a handsome compliment and places it firmly and rightly in the tradition of French revolutionary painting celebrating the struggles for the birth of the Republic, now the status quo. In so doing Rais, rather than acknowledging the threat of class war in Adler’s celebration of strike action, co-opts the painting to republican tradition.21 He concludes that Adler’s work is “the synthesis of the most complete art that has been attempted here, in this poor last salon of this anxious century.”22 Henri Frantz, in his annual book reviewing the salons, raises an “aesthetic problem” in order to doubt kindly whether this work isn’t “un peu trop réaliste,” “a little too realist.” Yet his description of the painting, like Rais, is filled with sympathy for its subject: Against a somber horizon of black hills, of chimneys whose ponderous smoke darkens the atmosphere, a crowd of men and women advance singing with great banners unfurled. In the middle of all these black garments, only the flags contribute a little color. The general unity of this picture would be enough to document for us all the sadness of this scene, to show us the anguish of hunger which can be read on all the faces contracted in exasperation.

But, if the painter has perfectly redeemed the heroic side, in fact dramatic in this scene, can we

not ask ourselves if this representation of the worker completely accords with the plasticity of the whole work of art, and if the interpretation that M. Adler has given to it is not a little too realist[?] 23

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Figure 7 Bernard Naudin, Vive la Nation! (Long live the nation!), 1904. From Salon de 1904 (Paris: Société des Artistes français, 1904). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

For Frantz, though sympathetic with the workers’ “anguish of hunger,” the heroism of the theme is undermined by the unrelenting depiction of its motivating force in poverty. Its overabundance of detail departs from the codes of high art composition, which should subsume such misery in cathartic drama and “the plasticity of the whole.” What Frantz found offensive was what Roland Barthes termed “the reality effect,” that excess of descriptive detail that serves to lend all too much in the way of a realist imperative to the work’s narrative, immersing viewers in the historical moment rather than providing them with the necessary “aesthetic distance” to admire the artist’s compositional techniques.24 The “reality effect” fabricated a “referential illusion” that challenged this critic’s own political position. Clearly Adler did not fulfill the critic’s presumed wish to transcend the gritty realities of the scene, though the failure is encoded in the critical language of abstract form. Thus realism can also be a sign of political threat, though never as serious as radical departures from convention in the formal distortions of the avant-garde. History painting also formed a powerful vehicle for conveying messages, especially scenes of revolutions and the Commune. The anarchist painter and political cartoonist Bernard Naudin looked back to the French Revolution in such works as L’Engagement d’avant-garde; armée du Rhin 1792 (Vanguard engagement; army of the Rhine; 1792), shown in the Salon des artistes français in 1900, and

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Vive la Nation! (Long live the nation!), shown in 1904 (figure 7).25 His compositional structure in the latter work is based on the directional force of an explosion established in the central figure, whose energy radiates outward through the flags, bayonets, and other excited figures. This army struggling against the forces of monarchy combines all the laboring classes of France, with white heads and greybeards mingled in with enthusiastic youth, evoking a mixed brotherhood of revolutionaries. Interestingly, Naudin moved away from the naturalism of the majority of these salon works to a more modernist style, but one that never broke with readability, looking to such artists as Édouard Manet and Steinlen for simplification of form and openness of brushwork. And while Naudin clearly looked as well to his contemporaries showing in the alternative salons—where he could have viewed, for instance, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, and the young Matisse—his own experience as a cartoonist was equally influential on his treatment of the human figure. Naudin was one of those artists whose artistic decisions in many ways proceeded from political considerations, as the simplified and energetic style of his painting demonstrates: highly readable as narrative yet modern and folkish in style, its spirited image celebrates revolutionary action. The audience to whom to address his work was a choice as important as that of subject or style. In 1905, Naudin made a highly significant and telling decision: 1904 was the last year he exhibited a canvas in any salon, since he stopped painting altogether—despite his initial success—in favor of a career as a political cartoonist and graphic artist.26 Simultaneously his subjects shifted from revolutionary history (perhaps too readily co-opted to the republican tradition) to contemporary history and to the social condition of poverty. This is an instance of an artist making a clear choice among the variety of audiences and venues for his work, reflecting the Bakhtinian language of modernism. What Naudin had sought in his painting now continued in his graphic work. Some of the stylistic features of Vive la Nation! echo in Naudin cartoons, such as “La Fête du 14 Juillet à Brazzaville” from L’assiette au beurre of 1905 (figure 8). Naudin treated the most inflammatory subjects in his cartoons, including this dynamiting of an African servant on Bastille Day by French government administrators, a scandal that agitated both colonialists and anticolonialists at this time.27 The simplification of form, expressiveness of line, compositional dynamism, and even the repetition of the tricolor, suggest a stylistic dialogue between these two forms of Naudin’s production. And, significantly, their political position is also shared: one a celebration of the ideal of revolution, the other a damnation of Third Republic parliamentarianism for hypocritical betrayal of the revolutionary ideals it claimed to uphold. Naudin’s decision to abandon the arena of the bourgeois salon in order to devote himself to graphics and satire in the penny weeklies speaks of his desire to reach a different audience: the working class.

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Figure 8 Bernard Naudin, “La Fête du 14 Juillet à Brazzaville” (Bastille Day in Brazzaville), L’assiette au beurre, March 11, 1905. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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T h e C u lt u r e o f S at i r e

Published political satire rose in France in the nineteenth century along with the new medium of lithography and the unstable shifts in government following the French Revolution. According to Michele Hannoosh: In France, the association of Romanticism with revolution (social, political, and aesthetic) extended to caricature too, investing it with a subversive and transformative power. An art that, in its very form, takes liberties with authority, caricature had indeed played a major part in the French Revolution; this role would increase in the nineteenth century, with the easy availability of inexpensive prints and the widespread distribution of illustrated periodicals. Political caricature was one of the fundamental issues of the 1830 revolution, and became, during the early years of the July Monarchy, the main expression of opposition, with the brilliant productions of Honoré Daumier, Jean Ignace Grandville, Charles Joseph Traviès, and others in the weekly pages of La

caricature . 28

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Honoré Daumier was the most notorious caricaturist in midcentury France; his prints appeared from the period of the antimonarchist La Caricature and Le Charivari, published in the 1830s by fellow caricaturist Charles Philipon, to the 1860s and ’70s in Le Boulevard. Under the July Monarchy, satirists were subject to increasing censorship; artists could be arrested for prints that criticized the monarchy too pointedly, as with Daumier’s lithograph Gargantua, published in La Caricature on December 15, 1831, which landed him in prison for six months with a heavy fine. Elizabeth Childs writes, “Censorship was a watchdog of which the artists had to be constantly wary. One learned how to avoid the sensitive; one devised ways to second-guess the arbitrary fine line where lampoons became libel and satire became treason.”29 Childs details the subsequent relaxing and tightening of censorship through to its abolition under the Commune in 1871, with the end of monarchy in France. But the anarchists had a point when they asserted that all governments become interested in self-perpetuation: the Republic Daumier had worked so hard to promote reestablished censorship under the Third Republic. Political satire continued throughout the nineteenth century in France and played an important role in fin de siècle culture, continuing directly into the avant-guerre period. Starting in the 1880s, the major political cartoonist was Steinlen, the most prominent among a vibrant group of anarchist and leftist artists who used graphics to criticize the government and to observe disturbing aspects of contemporary life, including Cross, Jean-Louis Forain, Maximilien Luce, Charles Maurin, Camille and Lucien Pissarro, Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec, Félix Vallotton, and Adolphe Willette (during the Dreyfus Affair, Forain and Willette moved well to the right).30 In 1883, Willette introduced Steinlen to the avant-garde literary and artistic environment of the cabaret Le Chat Noir, and he published in its satirical journal of the same name, as well as Aristide Bruant’s Le Mirliton (1885–1896). His work appeared in Gil Blas illustré (1891–1903), and he did covers for Le chambard socialiste (1893–1894) and the anarchist La feuille (1897–1899). Many of these artists also appeared in the leading anarchisant art journal of the 1890s, La revue blanche (1889–1903), edited by Félix Fénéon31 and most continued after 1900 to engage politics by contributing works of art to new antiparliamentary journals such as the dissident socialist La guerre sociale, the anarchosyndicalist La voix du Peuple, and the anarchocommunist Les temps nouveaux (1895–1914). Such publications also sponsored editions of prints and art exhibitions, through which artists could sell work in support of these journals and presumably reach a sympathetic audience and clientele directly.32 The anarchist cartoon weekly L’assiette au beurre was founded in 1901 and continued to 1912, publishing this older generation of anarchist artists and adding a newer generation, including Gris, Grandjouan, Kupka, Louis Marcoussis, and Van Dongen among other prominent modernists. This was an overtly propagandistic anarchist journal, largely addressed to the working class and expressing a range of anarchist positions responding to current events.

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Figure 9 František Kupka, “À bas la Justice militaire!” (Down with military justice!), postcard for the Ligue Internationale pour la défense du Soldat (International League for the Defense of the Soldier), c. 1902. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Of the artists exhibiting in the traditional salons discussed here—including Adler and Roger—Naudin becomes among the most radical by virtue of the decision to abandon painting for satire and graphics. Abandoning his appeal to the audience of the conservative Salon des artistes français in 1905, he addressed readers of anarchist journals such as L’assiette au beurre, where his drawings appeared alongside those of such well-known anarchist artists as Steinlen, Vallotton, Grandjouan, Van Dongen, Kupka, and scores of others. Though Naudin’s choice to abandon painting was extreme, Van Dongen and Kupka made similar (though temporary) decisions at key moments in their early careers. These same questions of medium and intended audience arose for a large range of artists who in their different ways devoted themselves to politics and aesthetics.33

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Whereas Adler and his colleagues showed in the traditional salons, modernists avoided conservative venues, exhibiting instead in the independent salons and newly emerging private galleries, while some also published satire in the anarchist weeklies and even published propaganda postcards, which were both cheap and widely available. For example, Kupka published Leur discipline (Their discipline; figure 9) for the Ligue Internationale pour la défense du Soldat (International League for the Defense of the Soldier) when this organization was flourishing around 1902. The caption crying “Down with military justice!,” his postcard employs reverse primitivism, casting members of a military tribunal as savages, complete with officer’s epaulettes and a crucifix behind the judge’s bench, with a soldier replacing Christ on the cross.34 Such political choices went hand in hand with aesthetic ones: the development of formal innovations unacceptable within the parameters of the Beaux-Arts tradition and constituting an affront to critics such as Rais and Frantz. The range of eccentric venues paralleled in significant cases choices of high versus low genre and medium, the visual heteroglossia through which modernism communicated. Thus the political cartoons of a great number of artists, including avant-gardists such as Van Dongen, Gris, Kupka, and others, can give us an unusual view into how such questions influenced the development of a modernist idiom and can help us understand their various solutions to the problem of anarchist avant-gardism. The satirical graphics of significant figures in the development of modernism have too often been viewed as irrelevant to the history of modernism and dismissed for a variety of reasons. Assertions that these artists made the cartoons merely for profit or that the cartoons were neutral drawings given a political slant by the addition of captions composed by the editors deny the importance for the artists themselves of the issues and passions such cartoons addressed.35 In fact, the political ideals of these modernist bohemians were central to their very involvement with satirical and anarchist journals, whose editors usually paid the artists very poorly—when they were paid at all.36 Frequently the drawings were donations from the artists.37 And the drawings more often than not were far from neutral: emphatically political in imagery, their satirical treatment and critical thrusts were unmistakable to the artists’ contemporaries, even without captions. Moreover, the artists often composed the captions themselves, assuring that their points were clearly made, as I discovered in numerous surviving original drawings for published cartoons with captions in the artists’ own hands.38 Jacques Villon testified to this aspect of cartooning when he said to Dora Vallier: I regularly gave drawings to the journals, from 1895 to 1910. This led me to pay a lot of attention to the streets. I also had to make up the caption, to create a complete situation, in short to grasp reality. There was an equal spirit of protest in my drawings. . . . Above all, one can’t compare the attitude of the journals then with those of today. The press had a progressive spirit and the drawings were not made as now, but with love. 39

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The political motives of these works have been overlooked for the same reasons the works themselves have been disregarded: the mundane and narrative preoccupations of the political cartoons do not fit with conceptions of these artists’ modernist paintings, with their putatively more “purely” aesthetic concerns or otherworldly spirituality. Even their medium—lithography—contrasts with the oil-on-canvas of the artists’ more “serious” development of an emerging abstraction. A study of the cartoons, however, reveals not only the political indignation central to a large number of these drawings but their frequent expressive freedom, bold simplifications, violent deformations, and strikingly abstract compositions. Such correspondences suggest a stronger formal relationship to the development of modernist painting than has been supposed. More significantly, the parallel rebellion in both their art and the self-evidently anarchist cartoons registers an adversary impulse common to both forms of production. Thus, though the cartoons necessarily remained more narrative than abstract, their adversary posture was registered in much more than the stated politics of the captions. As Villon added, “In this period, the influence of the journals on art is incontestable. Thanks to them, painting was more rapidly liberated from academism.”40 The chief difference is that the cartoons were primarily addressed to a plebeian audience, to the people, eschewing other artistic venues in place for bourgeois collectors.41 The cartoonist Jean-Louis Forain, when asked where his exhibition would be, pointed directly to this issue: “In the kiosks,”42 he quipped, those commercial newspaper and magazine stands on every corner of the city (plate 2). Grandjouan wonderfully depicts both the high visibility of these kiosks and the full range of classes attracted to them. The polar distance between such “low” cartoons and the “high” painted abstractions of these artists covers a subtle and complex terrain, raising questions long considered problematic by Marxist theorists like Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukács, Peter Bürger, and Thomas Crow, questions of fundamental importance for an understanding of the difficult relationship between art and politics for self-proclaimed leftist avant-gardists before the First World War.43 How do artists, responding to a broadly working-class (and intellectual) liberationist movement, bring their left-wing politics into avant-garde abstractions addressed finally not to the masses but to an elite of initiates? This central modernist problem remained unresolved in a period of political and ideological ferment that granted art the potential power—hence the obligation—to liberate consciousness and society. Its failure to do so, along with the later failure of other politically critical artistic movements including surrealism and the situationist international, has put this particular idealism under considerable stress in late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. But even within the ambitions of modernism, contradictions—between the details of political reality and the abstraction of their art, between their populist motives and elitist products—forced an awkward and sometimes hypocritical position on any artist aspiring both to the political and to the avant-garde. In a period of shifting art market structures, cartoons possibly

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offered a way for artists to shape their artistic identities for a variety of audiences and with great freedom of invention. These political cartoons were addressed to a wide audience—from workers to activists to intellectuals—and demanded a simplicity, readability, and directness that in these modernists’ hands resulted in highly inventive means of expression and extreme primitivism. The power of the cartoons brutally communicates contempt and indignation at depicted events and frequently registers what it would be cynical not to recognize as heartfelt social criticism. How central such political preoccupations were for these artists varied greatly, especially considered as expressions of an anarchist critique with aesthetic and theoretical obligations. Accordingly the importance of the cartoons for the development of radical painting and paradigms of engagement varied as well. It is telling that even a seemingly dégagé artist like Villon would evoke the politicized language of the early twentieth century in later recalling his own enormous production of satirical cartoons. As we saw in the case of Naudin, cartoons—with their tradition of social satire, simplification of form, alliance with folk art, and shades of working-class “authenticity”—represented a powerful form of primitivism with which to transform artistic tradition. To get some idea first of the concerns of the anarchist press in this period, it will be useful to look at a range of cartoons by various artists and at their accompanying texts by well-known anarchist and anarchisant writers. Since L’assiette au beurre was such a crossroads for anarchism and modernism, it is important to note that the journal did not represent a particular stripe or rigid posture of anarchism but rather presented a great variety of approaches, from innocuous fun-making to savage criticism of the government, and from fierce individualism to outright fundraising for the syndicalist La Confédération Générale du Travail, sometimes from the same artist as in the case of Steinlen. The editors, Samuel Schwarz (1901–1903) and André de Joncières (1904–1912), had many friends among various anarchist groups, and doubtless their own political positions, but the attitudes expressed in the cartoons were neither consistent nor directed from above.44 Though not always successful, both editors embarked on the journal as a money-making scheme rather than as a vehicle for their own ideas (clearly defined or not), and they therefore gave the artists a great deal of freedom and usually paid them something, though the artists certainly did not consider it well-paid work.45 As Steinlen put it in 1903, “If L’Assiette au beurre weren’t the only periodical in which one can express certain things freely, we would all have abandoned it. By staying on, we make a sacrifice to Art and the [anarchist] Idea.”46 The weekly magazine—consisting largely of full-page cartoons—was thus a vehicle for a variety of anarchist writers and artists whose opinions and barbs run through most of its twelve years. Les temps nouveaux, on the other hand, was the vehicle of its editor, Jean Grave, an anarchocommunist who in 1885 had taken over his friend Petr Kropotkin’s journal La Révolte and represented Kropotkinian anarchism in France.47

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Figure 10 Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, “La Catastrophe d’Issy,” cover, L’assiette au beurre, June 27, 1901.

Grave ran his journal on a shoestring budget and frequently solicited and received donations of money for the publication from his artists and writers, including Van Dongen, Kupka, Camille Pissarro, Signac, Quillard, A. F. Hérold, and Elisée Reclus.48 It was his editorial policy never to pay his contributors for articles or drawings; thus, everything that appeared in Les temps nouveaux was a donation. During the period 1905–1907, when Grave succeeded in getting regular donations of drawings from his pool of satirists, the journal increased significantly in circulation and sales and then dropped off as the artists fell away one by one. A cover by Steinlen early in the life of L’assiette au beurre (figure 10) revealed the aim of that journal; depicting grieving women, children, and old people after a major mining disaster at Issy in 1901, the artist shows every manifestation of grief in an arresting perspective. The red color of the original would have made it highly visible in the kiosks of Paris. Steinlen was already a well-known anarchist artist and satirist who brought attention to the new journal with his contribution. The same was true of Vallotton, whose recognizable style in a cartoon of 1902 depicts indignant policemen arresting a poor man—his clothes in rags—for indecent exposure (figure 11). Poverty is central among themes of injustice in L’assiette. For example, another Steinlen drawing of 1901 depicts an old woman,

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Figure 11 Félix Vallotton, “Ah, mon gaillard! Vous montrez votre derrière aux dames!” (Ah, my naughty fellow! You show your backside to the ladies!), L’assiette au beurre, March 1, 1902.

parked on a bench, asking a homeless man, “are prisons heated?” Two cartoons in L’assiette au beurre by d’Ostoya—a Polish artist and friend of André Salmon about whom little is known49—attack abuse of power. In a special issue on the police dated May 23, 1903 (figure 12), he depicts two policemen beating a man with a bottle and stick, with a caption pointing up police violence and hypocrisy. Accompanying this issue was a larger text by Laurent Tailhade, a well-known anarchist and symbolist poet and writer: “These brutes you pay to defend human life, to guard your homes, your persons, from murderers and thieves—since you don’t have the courage to do it yourself—powerless to guard you and too cowardly to defend you, have in reality no other task than to molest the poor and assassinate the independent.”50 D’Ostoya’s “The Game of the Gentlemen Officers” in “Petite Garnison” (“Little garrison”; June 1904) attacks the German army after the newspapers reported that “the last Councils of War prove that the officers amuse themselves by martyring men.”51 The stark simplicity and figural distortions of these drawings serve an expressionist and narrative purpose and employ numerous familiar modernist devices to achieve their effect: division of surface into large areas of color, high horizon line to flatten space, strong silhouettes, no modulation of figural form, stark contrasts of light and dark,

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Figure 12 d’Ostoya, “Rapport de Police: Le nommé Untel s’est suicidé dans la prison du poste” (Police report: The named Untel committed suicide in the post prison), L’assiette au beurre, no. 112, May 23, 1903.

and powerful compositional relationships of forms appropriate to the depicted action. The arrested gesture of the raised bottle with its white label resonates in stark relation to the unarticulated flatness of the white figure below, with all its symbolism of innocence and victimization. In 1905, Auguste Roubille did a special issue of L’assiette au beurre, entitled “Pensées d’un Ventru” (“Thoughts of a potbellied man”), on state violence and worker oppression.52 In a series of cartoons aimed at exposing the hypocrisy of bourgeois complacence, a potbellied (that is, well-fed) man ponders the “problem” of the working class. In captions that link the series of images, he muses, in the first pair, that “If vile bandits are from dusk to dawn plunged into crime . . . we must concede that daily thousands of heroes work for the glory of France.” This accompanies parallel images in which two men, their weapons still warm, stand over the bodies of their victims: the murderous deed is the same, but one is an apache (slang for a Parisian “tough,” encompassing both workers and thieves)

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Figure 13

Figure 14

Auguste Roubille, “—Quant à l’ouvrier, s’il est quelquefois ignoble . . .” (As for the worker, if he is sometimes vile . . .), L’assiette au beurre, no. 199, January 21, 1905.

Auguste Roubille, “. . . il est souvent sublime” (. . . he is often sublime), L’assiette au beurre, no. 199, January 21, 1905.

for whom the guillotine waits, while the other is a decorated officer proudly posing before the burning landscape he and his army have devastated. The second pair (figures 13 and 14) contrasts a worker on a barricade before a background of smoke and Paris skyline—a blacksmith whose hammer is his weapon—with a brutal image of the Congo with burning huts, starving children, and dead and dying Africans that litter the path of the colonial army there (in reference to the infamous Congo scandals).53 The potbellied man continues, “—As for the worker, if he is sometimes vile [i.e., when striking], . . . he is often sublime [i.e., when serving in the army].”54 Occasionally prose took equal space in L’assiette au beurre. The July 1, 1905, issue—under the banner “A bas l’alliance russe!” (Down with the Russian alliance!)—demanded an end to the alliance between France and Russia, which was fanning fears of the pan-European war that followed a decade later. Writers as diverse as Grave, Anatole France, Jean Jaurès, Francis de Pressensé, Elisée

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Figure 15 Bernard Naudin, “L’alliance franco-russe” (The FrancoRussian alliance), L’assiette au beurre, July 1, 1905. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Reclus, Lucien Descaves, Urbain Gohier, and Gustave Geffroy collaborated with such committed artists as Steinlen, d’Ostoya, Naudin, and Kupka to protest the dangers they foresaw. Anatole France introduced the political analysis and general tone early in the issue: It is a sign of the new times, comrades, that the bullets which struck the Russian workers on the banks of the Neva whistled in all human ears. . . . But this is not an alliance with Russia, it is completely the contrary, it is an alliance with the Tsar that our Republican government, with its monarchist tendencies, imposes on us. 55

In his contribution, Steinlen depicted the Russian bear seducing the foolish French frog in her Phrygian cap in front of alternating panels of icons and republican emblems, including one that reads ironically “Live free or die.” The bear scoops the coins from the frog’s purse into the open maws of crowned owls

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below, while, in the open space for the text, Anatole France warns of financial disaster from the Franco-Russian alliance: The Russian alliance gave, the French thought, a guarantee against the Triple Alliance [Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy]. But the Russian government only sees there a never-ending source of loans. With French savings it fosters senseless enterprises in the East. May the follies and crimes of Tsarism, in which our rulers and financiers are accomplices, not precipitate our country into a frightful financial catastrophe! Bourgeois economies, henceforth beware the ruble! 56

Naudin, in his drawing, depicted a Cossack soldier in the distance riding away from the scene of his murderous crimes against the poor and starving peasants of Russia (figure 15). The art critic Gustave Geffroy wrote: Alliance with the Russian people, of course yes. But not with Tsarism. It is a monstrosity, this link of the French nation, which made the Revolution, which gave hope to the oppressed of the entire world, with a brutal, bloody, blind and deaf power, which hangs, shoots, imprisons and deports, without laws and without trials, which keeps millions in terror and silence. . . . Allied with true Russia, we have nothing left but to wish ardently for the end of Tsarism, the victory of the Revolution. 57

Thus all these writers and artists take a position in defense of the “true” French Revolution, now betrayed by the government’s alliance with the tsar. Many of the cartoonists of this period were almost exclusively graphic artists for the press. Indeed, for some of the most dedicatedly anarchist, such as Naudin, Grandjouan, and Aristide Delannoy, their commitment to the graphic medium was itself a conscious political stand, subject to legal prosecution as in the previous century. Under police surveillance since 1903,58 Delannoy was only the second artist jailed (in 1909) for his art in the nearly forty years of the Third Republic. Arrested for criticizing the army on the May 1908 cover of Les Hommes du Jour, along with Victor Méric who wrote the text, Delannoy depicted the “pacifier” of Morocco, Général Albert d’Amade, as a blood-stained butcher.59 Gustave Hervé, Almereyda, and Eugène Merle were also imprisoned at this time for writing on the same unacceptable subject. Released because of dangerously poor health after four months, Delannoy was rearrested in December 1910 for further “injuries to the military” due to his drawings published in Pioupiou de l’Yonne. Delannoy died in May 1911 from tuberculosis exacerbated by the poor conditions of his imprisonment in 1909. Grandjouan was prosecuted many times for cartoons and posters from 1907 through 1911, when he was condemned to eighteen months in prison; rather than go to jail like Delannoy, he went into exile and was amnestied by incoming president Raymond Poincaré in February 1913.60 It is important to recognize the risk cartoonists took in publishing political satire, since, though the government

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Figure 16 Ludvik Markous [Louis Marcoussis], “—Assassin! foutriquet! bandit! . . . les voilà, les acclamations!” (Assassin! runt! criminal! . . . there are your acclamations!), L’assiette au beurre, no. 521, March 25, 1911. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

frequently tolerated extreme forms of criticism, it was hard to tell in advance what works would spark prosecution. Ludvik Markous was one of those cartoonists who were also modernist painters, either contemporaneously or later. He “Frenchified” his name (with Apollinaire’s help) to Louis Marcoussis, and by 1910, he was a member of the Picasso circle (though it may have been as early as 1905–1906, according to the memoirs of his wife, the painter Alice Halicka).61 Marcoussis came to Paris from Warsaw in 1903 and supported himself as a graphic artist from 1906 through 1911. In a special issue of L’assiette au beurre of March 25, 1911 entitled “Cortège historique de la IIIe République,” Marcoussis depicted Marianne, the once-beautiful personification of the Republic, as an exhausted and battered old hag, the strings of her Phrygian cap hanging as limply as her breasts, with the scattered and damaged toys of the Third Republic’s follies and scandals all around her: a tiny derailed train, cannon, telegraph pole, and broken Vendôme Column evoking memories of the Commune. The caption suggests that the Third Republic is nearly over, waiting merely for a last financial or political scandal to put it out of its misery: “Tired of this long cortege, Marianne is down. Will it be the Rand or Durand who gives her the coup de grâce?”62 In another drawing from the same issue (figure 16), Marcoussis attacked Georges Clemenceau, prime minister from 1906 to 1909 and a Radical who became famous for his use of the army to break strikes.63 This process became increasingly bloody: two famous instances only a month apart in 1908, at Draveil and at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, resulted in six dead and hundreds wounded. The Clemenceau ministry became known as the “government of assassins,” an accusation repeated in this drawing by the angry members of the working class, all up to their knees in blood. Workers of all ages—a wounded man on

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crutches, a mother with a dead baby, and a handsome old man—all yell at Clemenceau, who cowers behind his umbrella: “Assassin! Worm! Bandit! . . . There are your acclamations!” The umbrella—emblematic of the bourgeois class and its interests—evokes a comparison with the corrupt citizen-king Louis-Philippe, the chief target of that first generation of arch caricaturists in Paris, as he was frequently depicted in La Caricature64; the Phrygian cap worn by the mother with the baby transforms her into Liberty, the true republican spirit. Though the silhouetted crowd in the background achieves a striking simplicity, the relatively detailed and undistorted figures in the foreground as well as the normalized space with its carefully delineated horizon line reveal Marcoussis to be less bold in graphic style than his forebears of the 1890s like Toulouse-Lautrec or Bonnard. Although he was simultaneously developing an abstract cubist style for his avant-garde production, his cartoons are illustrational, effective at communicating his point but not remarkably inventive within the range of pictorial innovation flourishing at this time in the press. Marcoussis’s political positioning, however, is significant not only in relation to European politics of the day but also in suggesting a political base—as Halicka maintains in her memoir—to the radicalism of his later style. Halicka’s claim has not yet been substantiated by scholars, but the relation between contemporary politics and the language of avant-gardism is clearer in the cases of Van Dongen, Picasso, Vlaminck, and Kupka, and tellingly problematized in Gris.

T h e C as e o f Va n D o n g e n

Out of the hundreds of artists publishing cartoons in Paris in this period, none stands out as so expressive as Kees van Dongen, a key fauvist and avowed anarchist. He was already a member of anarchist and symbolist circles as a young man in Rotterdam, and in 1896 he illustrated the cover of the Dutch translation of Kropotkin’s Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal. He made his first trip to Paris in 1897–1898, when he met the influential critic Fénéon through anarchist contacts. As Van Dongen later recalled, “I had met a curious gentleman named Félix Fénéon. I had met him because he was an anarchist. We were all anarchists without throwing bombs, we had those kinds of ideas.”65 In 1900, he moved permanently to Paris, where he became close friends with the most committed anarchists among the neoimpressionists: Luce, Signac, and their major supporter Fénéon. In 1904, he became friendly with Apollinaire, Picasso, Vlaminck, and Derain, and in 1906 moved for a year to 12 rue Ravignan in Montmartre, that locus of anarchism that was the center of the Picasso circle and where Picasso drew his friend’s portrait in his most outrageous Africanist style, nicknaming him the “Kropotkin of the Bateau-Lavoir.”66 As a painter passing through a wild neoimpressionism to a wilder fauvism, as in his Self-Portrait (c. 1908–1909; plate 3)—with its outrageous antinaturalist color, lack of clear three-dimensional form

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Figure 17 Kees Van Dongen, “Deuxième fantôme: La Pauvreté. L’enfant a soif. La mère a faim. Le lait est tari. L’argent s’est enfui!” (The child is thirsty. The mother is hungry. The milk is dried up. The money is gone!), L’assiette au beurre, no. 30, October 26, 1901. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

and suggestion of the artist’s nudity—Van Dongen was a declared anarchist and self-conscious primitive. His involvement with the anarchist press expressed his own political convictions. It also sometimes helped him make needed money though, as with all these graphic artists, most of his income came from selling innocuous drawings to more purely “humoristic” magazines like Frou-Frou, Le Rab’lais, Le rire, and L’indiscret. For anarchist and left-wing journals like L’assiette au beurre (where he was introduced by Steinlen), Cri de Paris, and Les temps nouveaux, he consistently hammered on political subjects critical of bourgeois society and the Third Republic—poverty, prostitution, colonialism, and militarism—while he celebrated bohemian sexual liberationism, the theme that he took with him into his later work. Far from these suggesting the mere pursuit of income, like Bernard Naudin and František Kupka he went through a period in

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Figure 18

Figure 19

Kees Van Dongen, “Elle finit par gagner des vingt francs . . . qu’elle dépense” (She ends by making twenty francs . . . which she spends), L’assiette au beurre, October 26, 1901. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Kees Van Dongen, “Cocotte,” back cover, L’assiette au beurre, October 26, 1901. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

which he disavowed painting to practice the democratic art of prints. He wrote to a friend in Rotterdam in 1901: What is one doing turning out paintings, serving luxury, and this at a time when one is surrounded by poverty everywhere? I thought it would be better to work as much as possible for the common good, for the people as a whole and not for a few deliberate or unwitting rogues. This is why I draw in magazines and have abandoned painting; I just do a bit now and then for myself.

Anita Hopmans has pointed out that, for his retrospective exhibition at Galerie Vollard in 1904, there were virtually no paintings dating from 1896 to around 1903, when Fénéon introduced him at La revue blanche.67 Van Dongen illustrated a special issue titled “Les Prostituées”—a traditional anarchist theme—for L’assiette au beurre in 1901, for which he was paid the un-

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Figure 20 Kees Van Dongen, “J’suis ni musicien, ni chanteur . . . Je suis crève-faim” (I’m not a musician or a singer . . . I’m starving!), L’assiette au beurre, no. 12, June 20, 1901. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

usual sum of eight hundred francs.68 The series—with captions in the artist’s own hand—follows a young prostitute from her initial poverty to her inevitable death from syphilis, passing through a stage of momentary and illusory wellbeing. Her lover having departed when she became pregnant, she is forced to pawn her belongings (figure 17), before turning to illegal streetwalking; Van Dongen, at odds with the general cultural essentializing of crime and prostitution, emphatically locates its origins in poverty. At the height of her success (figure 18), elegantly dressed and brought by carriage to the large department store Au Printemps after a day of work, “She ends by making twenty francs,” the caption tells us, “which she spends.”69 After her decline, illness, and death, her now-abandoned daughter finds herself in the identical situation and ends like her mother before her (figure 19). Another cartoon of 1901 for L’assiette depicts a ragged and bony street musician, who bluntly confesses, “I’m not a musician or a singer. . . . I’m starving!” (figure 20).70 The caption is written in the same transliterated argot in which Émile Pouget wrote his famous and popular anarchist journal, Le Père Peinard, eliding the vowels to approximate underworld and street slang.71 Thus the crude pictorial form, the argotique caption, and the political message are all of a piece, communicating that identification with the lumpenproletariat—the marginal, the starving, and the unemployed—that was the special focus of the anarchists. Van Dongen condemned colonialism through his attack on Christianity and its missionaries. In a cartoon for Les temps nouveaux (1905; figure 21) he simply and eloquently calls Christ “The White Peril,” as He stands possessively and with idiot complacency over cities, factories, armies, cannons, and ships sailing off to exploit exotic lands. Van Dongen’s blunt line caricatures Christ as a drunken

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Figure 21 Kees Van Dongen, “Le Peril Blanc” (The white peril), Les temps nouveaux, September 30, 1905. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

vainglorious fool, in whose name evil deeds are perpetrated but in which he takes a crazy pleasure. The primitivism of the drawing here signifies not so much spontaneity as brutality, and its message could not be clearer or more effective. Among all the artists of this period, Van Dongen goes further than anyone in his stark simplicity of line, form, and spatial setting for their crudely expressive power. At the same time, the setting is conceptual rather than naturalistic and focuses attention on the offensively blasphemous main figure. Van Dongen addressed related antimilitarist themes in “Europe et Macédoine” (figure 22), where huge birds of prey squabble over a corpse wearing a recognizably ethnic Macedonian jacket and boots. Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece absorbed large parts of Macedonia in these years leading to the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, with the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires looking

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Figure 22 Kees Van Dongen, “Europe et Macédoine” (Europe and Macedonia). Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

hungrily over their shoulders as the Ottoman Empire began to collapse. The ironically apt caption is from the Book of Matthew: “Where the dead are, the eagles gather!”(24:28).72 The thick black strokes of ink evoke precisely that aspect of his later painting that offended, or in some cases pleased, Van Dongen’s critics. The anarchist politics of the cartoons and the style Van Dongen developed to serve them are continuous with what critics called his “audacious and violent” painting, exhibited in the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne annually beginning in 1904; to get his start, his friend the anarchist neoimpressionist Maximilien Luce paid Van Dongen’s entrance fee and the costs of framing.73 In his preface to Van Dongen’s first one-person show at the Galerie Vollard in November 1904, Fénéon set the tone of much Van Dongen criticism by describing such works as Rotterdam, de Zandstraat (1899; figure 23) as “restor[ing] the teeming appearance of the poor and heated streets of Rotterdam, the convulsive agitation of industries and the girls of Roode Zand and of Zandstraat struggling with the sailors.”74 He also alludes to the artist’s “violently” coloring some of

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Figure 23 Kees Van Dongen, Rotterdam, de Zandstraat, 1899. Black chalk, brown wash, watercolor and white gouache, 44.2 x 28.3 cm. Boymans Museum, Rotterdam. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

the drawings and thus allies Van Dongen’s traditional anarchist theme of street life with its crude style. But works like this, though already in a spontaneous and simplified style, do not come close to the more genuinely violent later cartoons and fauve paintings. Works like Femme fatale (1905), Liverpool Light House, Rotterdam or The Hussar (1907), and Modjesko, Soprano Singer (1907; plate 4, plate 5, and figure 24, respectively) exhibit crude simplification, stark contrasts, and abstract and amorphous shadows thoroughly comparable to his most extreme cartoons, with the addition of arbitrary and vividly garish color. Marius-Ary Leblond—two cousins (Georges Athénas and Aimé Merlo) who jointly wrote criticism and novels set in colonial Africa—wrote a preface for Van Dongen’s exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune (where Fénéon was in charge) in 1908, in which Liverpool Light House and Modjesko appeared.75 They reveled in the artist’s coloring as expressive of a new modernist primitivism, describing “green acidities, reds of blood-colored mandarin, phosphorous yellows, winey lilacs, electric blues”; making the connection between this primitivist sensibility and the cults of African and child art, they call the figures of such women “European idols,” while the clowns manage to “achieve human expressions in their wooden-doll faces.”76 Modjesko, Soprano Singer depicts a popular Romanian transvestite singer (“the black Patti”) who performed in Paris and Rotterdam

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Figure 24 Kees Van Dongen, Modjesko, Soprano Singer, 1907. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81.3 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Peter A. Rübel. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

around 1905 to 1907; this subject suggests Van Dongen’s interest not only in the music hall but also, as he was an outspoken sexual liberationist, in the socially marginalized sexuality of this figure.77 The offense of such works—fauve in style and all the more offensive by virtue of an application to the human figure—resides not only in the obsessive repetition of marginal subjects like the prostitute, the transvestite, and the poor circus clown but in their ever more cartoonlike treatment. Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlen, Picasso, Kupka, and Van Dongen were all involved with the anarchist movement, and all repeatedly portrayed the social phenomenon of prostitution.78 In Femme fatale, Van Dongen transforms an iconic Christian subject, a Madonna Lactans, into an image of a prostitute. In such works the Madonna’s breast is celebrated as giving life to the infant Christ, simultaneously affirming the role of women in childbirth and child rearing; Van Dongen subverts the image into a corrupted exchange of sex for money.79 The

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garishly made-up woman joylessly advertises her breast as a sexual toy, displaying the jewels and feathers that are the fruits of her labors. One of the jewels—a gold heart—lies just above her breasts, rendering supremely ironic the “love” she offers. Between Van Dongen’s cartoons and his paintings is a corresponding awareness of the origins in poverty and the endings in poverty of such women, as well as the perversion of the female body. Van Dongen believed deeply in anarchist tenets of sexual liberationism, but this is mere exchange value. After 1909, following the contract with Bernheim-Jeune that spelled Van Dongen’s success among the wealthy, the artist transformed his fauve style at the same time that his female subjects shifted from prostitutes to demi-mondaines to mondaines in increasingly innocuous depictions.80 It is all the clearer, then, that the rebellious young artist had been influenced by his immersion in an anarchist bohemia: by an anarchist rhetoric that encouraged sensitivity to the plight of those on the social margin and in which artistic daring was seen to parallel propaganda, by a milieu in which political cartoons themselves could suggest the formal means with which to transform painting into a weapon of avant-gardism.

V la m i n c k , D e r a i n , a n d A n t i m i l i ta r i s m

Maurice de Vlaminck was a fiercely and openly anarchist artist who chose exclusively the path of avant-gardism, publishing no cartoons and only exhibiting in the alternative salons. His political choices went hand in glove with aesthetic ones; the development of formal innovations in his painting were unacceptable within the parameters of the Beaux-Arts tradition and constituted an affront to critics. Vlaminck, employing a ferocious form of painting as propaganda of the deed, offered one of the best instances of this strategy. In his fauve style, he articulated a programmatic violation of inherited forms implicated in an unjust society, created with an anti-establishment audience in mind. Vlaminck’s father was a violin teacher and his mother a piano teacher; in the 1890s he worked as a mechanic and played violin himself in various popular music venues, including café-concerts.81 As an artist he was self-taught, differing in this regard from those with whom he was most closely involved: Henri Matisse, who had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and in the ateliers of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau from 1889 to 1898, and André Derain, who left his engineering studies in 1898 to attend the Académie Carrière. Vlaminck and Derain shared a studio in Chatou in 1900–1901, and that year Derain introduced him to Matisse at the Van Gogh exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune; all three were deeply moved by the show.82 Exhibiting together at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905, Vlaminck, Matisse, Derain, and others came to be called les fauves—the wild beasts—for the rough and open brushwork, antinaturalistic color, and lack of formal structure in their paintings. Their work has usually been viewed as moving impressionism a further step toward complete abstrac-

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Figure 25 Maurice de Vlaminck, Maisons à Chatou (Houses at Chatou), 1905–1906. Oil on canvas, 81.3 x 101.6 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Maurice E. Culberg. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

tion in the name of “feeling”—that privatistic motivator—and this is entirely persuasive. Stopping there for explanation, however, begs the question of the political implications of theorizing such extreme individualism. Though Vlaminck’s anarchism is frequently acknowledged in discussions of the fauves, his art is usually discussed independently from politics or social issues.83 Vlaminck obliquely confronted political subjects in his art. His concentration on kitchen gardens and the outskirts of Paris, rural labor, and the industrial life of the Seine, as in Maisons à Chatou (Houses at Chatou [1905–1906]; figure 25), suggests a rejection of urban bourgeois culture. This is consistent with choices he made in his own life and with the subjects chosen by other anarchist artists of the previous generation, including Pissarro, Signac, and Cross.84 But most significantly, his anarchism was invested in his style. Vlaminck’s career in the alternative salons allied his art with artists whose work was an equally provocative rejection of tradition and good taste (bon goût). These other artists, however, did not necessarily share Vlaminck’s politics; Derain shared Vlaminck’s antimilitarism for two or three years only.85 The interpretation of Vlaminck’s work, like that of Picasso and so many others, has been subject to a passionate attachment to the idea of the “autonomy” of art.86 Since the 1920s and up to the advent of the social history of art in the

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1970s, art critical discourse constructed a version of modernism at once detached from life—or all but the intimacies of personal life—and focused on supposedly purely formal issues of line, color, and form. Artists politicizing their work by virtue of style clearly run the risk of being misunderstood by later generations, who are unable to share the values encoded in their violation of inherited forms, that Bakhtinian counterdiscourse which their art spoke. How many times were the seats of the Théâtre Française or the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre reportedly torn up by crowds outraged at the violation of an Alexandrine meter, the introduction of a rhymeless expletive, or the dancing of an antinarrative ballet? In the next century, we may find it hard to share this crowd’s anger at the transgression of interiorized rules, yet we must accept the conditions of these artists’ choices. This was the shockable audience for Vlaminck’s transgressive paintings, whose theory and practice developed in specific relation to his involvement with the anarchist and antimilitarist movements, especially focused on the Dreyfus Affair. The anarchist theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote that “the end of militarism is the mission of the nineteenth century,”87 and that mission failed. Good evidence of this failure is the Dreyfus Affair, which inaugurated the new century. The affair was a political crisis that began in 1894 and lasted until 1906, revolving around the guilt or innocence of treason on the part of army captain Alfred Dreyfus. When evidence came to light in 1896 pointing to another French officer, public opinion split between supporters of the army—whose leaders covered up the new evidence and in 1898 even forged a document implicating Dreyfus—and those willing to believe in the innocence of a French Jew, calling for the case to be reopened. The controversy and public debate dramatically split French society in the 1890s into anti-Dreyfusards and Dreyfusards, threatening the stability of the republic: for and against the army; for and against the Catholic Church, which supported the army; for and against Jews; for and against the government.88 These issues were far-reaching, with important implications for the success of the Third Republic and the very notion of republicanism. Many Dreyfusards subsequently mistrusted the army (if they were not antimilitarists to begin with), and for the next decade the army worked hard to reestablish its prestige and position in the public sphere. The impetus to antimilitarism and anticlericalism given by the Dreyfus Affair is well known, as is the involvement of artists and writers of the period in its visual and verbal polemic (as in Kupka’s postcard, figure 9).89 The collusion of army and church, both under the auspices of the state, led to an anticlerical reaction on the part of subsequent Radical governments, leading to formal separation of church and state in 1905. An even larger antimilitarist movement was sparked in the following decade by the threat of pan-European conflict; the movement, a loose alliance of pacifists, socialists, and anarchists, gained traction during the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, which led to the outbreak of World War I a year later. In 1904, a congress in Amsterdam founded the International Antimilitarist Association, advocating international brotherhood and insurrection as the right

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response to mobilization. The French anarcho-syndicalist union, La Confédération Générale du Travail, published a Soldier’s Manual to spread revolutionary propaganda in the barracks, advocating desertion.90 At their congress in 1908, the delegates agreed to proclaim a general strike at any declaration of war. Desertion from the French army grew at an extraordinary rate: six thousand in 1902, fourteen thousand in 1907, and thirteen thousand in 1912.91 Socialists, who garnered ten million votes in the 1910 election, also met to consider pacifist tactics. After 1907, socialist leader Jean Jaurès became famous for his speeches throughout France against the coming war. His following became so great that one antiwar speech he gave in a working-class district of Paris—PréSaint-Gervais—in May 1913 was organized in only two days and drew over a hundred thousand people.92 As discussed above, anarchist writers and artists, including modernists Vlaminck, Gris, Van Dongen, and Kupka, among many others, contributed articles and satire to anarchist journals like Le Libertaire, Les Hommes du Jour, Les temps nouveaux, and L’assiette au beurre, while their socialist counterparts published in antimilitarist journals ranging from the revolutionary La guerre sociale to Jaurès’ pacifist L’humanité. Such mass antimilitarism charged the atmosphere for a generation of artists and writers who lived through the prewar period and were forced to make a choice in August 1914 to fight or declare their pacifism.93 One witness is Picasso’s dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. He wrote in his memoirs: As for my political ideas, I was a leftist. [In 1902] I took part in a demonstration on the grave of Zola, who had just died. I was still a very young man, so the only way I could show my interest was to participate in demonstrations and meetings, which I did. I heard Jaurès, [Francis] Pressensé, all the great socialists of the day. The Dreyfus case was fairly recent, and the political atmosphere was unsettled. The right wing was very restless, and the left wing was full of enthusiasm. 94

In this environment of increasing militarization and political crises, the structure of alliances and treaties across Europe made clear the pattern of opposing allies who would act on the declaration of war. The results were accurately foreseen in the broad range of the press, though few conceived of the scale of its actual destruction and virtually none that it would last four long years. While doing his compulsory military service from 1897 to 1900, Vlaminck became a convinced antimilitarist and anarchist.95 Through a fellow soldier, Fernand Sernada, he was introduced to anarchists Sébastien Faure, Charles Malato, Libertad, Almeyreyda, Zo d’Axa, and Laurent Tailhade,96 the last a prominent Dreyfusard polemicist. While still in the military, now a self-described Dreyfusard enragé himself, Vlaminck attended the Rennes retrial of 1899, which found Dreyfus guilty for the second time.97 During this period and continuing into his later life, he contributed what he called papiers révolutionnaires to anarchist journals, including L’anarchie and Fin de siècle; in 1900 and 1901 he contributed to Le Libertaire, edited by Sébasien Faure, and from this period to 1939 he also

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donated paintings to that journal’s annual fundraiser.98 While in the army he studied the works of Zola, Marx, Kropotkin, and Félix Le Dantec,99 whose writings combined Max Stirner’s egoism with scientific determinism. During the period when the government increasingly employed the army against strikers, workers doing their temporary compulsory army service looked past their bayonets at workers back on the factory line. Vlaminck was alert to this class irony and to the political problem of the army’s role in strike-breaking; while in the army, he heard speeches including the following, delivered to men being sent to a strike: “The strikers! These are filthy people. If they make trouble, shoot them!”100 Vlaminck decided to take action against the captain who gave this particular directive. Noting down the exact words, Vlaminck mailed them, with incriminating details, to Urbain Gohier, a leading Dreyfusard, at L’aurore, whose article on the subject resulted in this captain’s transfer to a distant frontier.101 As Vlaminck noted in his memoirs, “I was neither a good nor bad soldier: I was not a soldier. I did not at all take my role seriously.”102 There is no question of Vlaminck’s antimilitarism at this time and through the First World War, in which he refused to serve. Exempted as a conscientious objector, he was nonetheless required to serve as a noncombatant, and the state punitively assigned him to the assembly line of a bomb factory. In an article of December 1900 in Le Libertaire, Vlaminck wrote: And yet the truth is flagrant: it is the worker always anxious not to starve, though dying of work, it is the homeless tramp, the destitute, who find themselves obliged to undergo three years of military service in order to defend the property of others, those who possess: the Rich! the rich who believe that their money honestly belongs to them, the rich who have honor, integrity, fatherland, religion, the rich who give charity, oh irony! . . .

Why doesn’t an alliance exist? . . . The fault is in the enormous number of the disinherited

who do not wish to admit the state in which they vegetate and perish indifferent; they do not wish to comprehend the absurd and wretched nonsense of their alcoholic chauvinism which they howl in cries of “Long Live the Army!,” not realizing that they likewise prop up capital, and that the enemy for them is neither the German, nor the Jew, but to the contrary the possessors of whatever nationality and whatever religion they are. 103

In another article in Le Libertaire in July 1901, Vlaminck bitterly defined anarchism in terms of his own army experience: “Anarchy is the aspiration of every being toward an absolute of justice which condemns the submissiveness, the cowardice, the ignominy, of the spirit of command forming those hunting dogs called ‘soldiers.’”104 Far more serious than being a “good soldier” for Vlaminck was the question of his politics and his art. After leaving the army he continued to frequent the Libertaire circle,105 and when he began to paint it was with a virulent antitraditionalism. His anarchism was translated into an art theory based on spontaneity, primitivism, and extreme individualism. As he put it:

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With my cobalts and vermilions, I wished to burn down the École des Beaux-Arts and to render my impressions without any thought for what was achieved in the past. . . . I wanted to revolutionize habits and contemporary life, to liberate nature, to free it from the authority of old theories and classicism, which I hated as much as I had hated the General or the Colonel of my regiment. . . . I felt a tremendous urge to recreate a new world seen through my own eyes, a world which was entirely mine. . . . I was a tender barbarian, filled with violence. I translated what I saw instinctively, without any method and conveyed it truly, not so much artistically as humanely. 106

In his fauve paintings of 1905, these anarchist ideas rooted in antimilitarism were translated into abstract form. In Portrait of Derain (plate 6), color is not only heightened but arbitrarily violates all sense of local color. Just as the applied paint refuses to describe the ordinary tones of skin, so the absence of light and shadow and the thick, indelicate slabs outlining the head refuse to articulate three-dimensionality of form. This “portrait” thus reduces itself to a caricature of a likeness by virtue of a cartoonlike simplicity and childlike directness, bespeaking the spontaneity and honesty of the primitive Vlaminck aspired to become. His style presents a purposely naive and direct antinaturalism that rejects all conventions of academic painting except that of relative scale: we can see that it is a portrait, but one transformed into a visionary otherness justified by the artist’s Nietzschean and anarchist individualism. Derain met Vlaminck in 1900 and so was exposed to Vlaminck’s anarchist and antimilitarist thought before he was required to begin his own army service in 1901.107 When Derain arrived at his unit, he found that many of his comrades were already of an antimilitarist persuasion.108 Derain himself was sent against striking workers, and he wrote to Vlaminck: “I was at the strikes. Behold a Derain, strap on chin, keeping the strikers in order. Supreme irony!”109 But more bitterly later—probably autumn 1903—he wrote: “Regiments come every day and the officers incite the men against the strikers. . . . The miners are starving and they perceive that this is life or death. All this becomes very, very villainous, although no-one is talking about it in the newspapers.”110 The awareness among engagé modernists of such increasingly routine events was acute, further evidenced by numerous cartoons published in the anarchist press. A special issue of L’assiette au beurre of May 6, 1905 devoted to “La Grève” (“The strike”) repeatedly acknowledged this military policy and points out its ironies, well known to the soldiers. Grandjouan, the most prolific anarchist satirist, who also published cartoons in Le Libertaire and the official anarchosyndicalist journal, La voix du Peuple, depicts on the cover of this issue a soldier fully equipped and beating the drum, followed by the shadowy mass of a regiment led by a figure with epaulettes, bayonets at the ready (plate 7). The drummer is the only soldier fully depicted and is thereby individualized in facing down the mass of angry workers beyond. Two cartoons within this special issue suggested the soldier’s realization of the link to his counterpart. In “Mirage,” also by Grandjouan, a soldier mistakes himself briefly for a worker, crying “What an exploited

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face! . . . But, my God, it’s mine!”111 In the reflection, the soldier’s képi appears as a worker’s slouch hat. In the other, “Émeute, les balles” (“Riot, live ammunition”), Bernard Naudin depicts two soldiers just starting their compulsory service who stand in a line of bayonets facing a barricade manned by striking workers; one says “To think that in two years, one could perhaps be in their place.”112 The antimilitarism expressed in such cartoons is visible in an ambitious work by Derain, painted in 1903 while still in the military: Bal des soldats à Suresnes (Soldier’s ball in Suresnes; plate 8). Artists customarily submitted such large-scale works to the annual salon; in so doing, Derain indicated his public ambition for this painting. He treats the soldiers in a comic manner, focusing on the central joke of the small soldier dancing with a much larger woman. The perspective exaggerates this effect since our viewpoint is from above; we look down at the floor and at the dancing soldier, although we look up into the woman’s grimly stoic face. The soldier’s white gloves, which should suggest the rigor of army dress, evoke rather the gesturing clown, with an unmodulated starkly white silhouette reminiscent of works of the previous decade. For example, Toulouse-Lautrec’s Cirque Fernando (1887–1888) employs a similarly silhouetted white-gloved hand on the red-haired clown. Georges Seurat’s La Cirque (1891) doubles this play with both hands of the clown behind the ringmaster and counterpoint hands of another acrobat to his left. The iconography of the clowns’ and acrobats’ invariably henna-red wigs is subtly echoed in the buffoonish soldier’s red hair and mustache, which in turn reinforces his coloristic incarnation en tricouleur. His grave and anxious concentration on the task of grasping and moving this woman is equally comic, partly for being so closely watched from behind by his taller fellow soldier, who looks on with some combination of envy and amusement. The two Hussards with their sabers and boots ceremonially frame the dancing pair; their boredom and embarrassment at his lustful embrace adds a salacious note to the awkwardness of the social interaction. The caricatural treatment of their bodies and uniforms, all in the prosaic setting of a cheap ballroom, is anything but a glorification of the military.113 Figure 26 Henri Evenepoel, Fête aux Invalides, 1898. Oil on canvas, 80 x 120 cm. Musée d’art moderne, Brussels.

There was a long nineteenth-century tradition glorifying the military, from Antoine-Jean Gros to Jean-Louis Ernest Meisonnier, while Nicolas Poussin’s style remained a classicizing ideal. But the Dreyfusard Derain, through his simplification of form and rough brushwork, instead stylistically invoked modernism, folk art, and the cartoon—inescapably evocative of satire and propaganda—all of which were read as a calculated insult to the army at a time when the Dreyfus Affair was still grinding through the inquiries. This work purposely echoed a painting by his friend Henri Evenepoel, Fête aux Invalides (1898; figure 26), which was exhibited at the salon at the height of the affair in 1899 and created a storm in the anti-Dreyfusard press, particularly Le Progrès militaire.114 Evenepoel was passionately Dreyfusard, and his work not only treats figural form with modernist simplification—an insult in itself—but confronts the military figures with an angry working man in the center. The anti-Dreyfusards understood this work, correctly, to be an attack on the army; the language of style had become finely tuned in this discourse. Indeed, Derain intensified his antimilitarism in a work only recorded in a little-known photograph of 1904–1905: Derain in his Chatou studio, armed with his palette and brushes, in front of a crude painting of a crucifixion (figure 27). The figure on the cross, though, is not Christ but a soldier, dressed identically to the figure in his Soldier’s Ball, with his cap, jacket, epaulettes, belt, striped trousers, spats and prominent white gloves. The cartoonlike exclamatory marks around the figure emphasize the source of this treatment in political cartoons, such as Van Dongen’s White Peril (figure 21), while its subject is close to Kupka’s postcard decrying military justice (figure 9), with the soldier both in chains before the bench and on the crucifix behind. It is telling that this work is lost to the Derain canon.115 In 1905, Derain wrote to Vlaminck that he had become bored with anarchists. Though his anarchist antimilitarist period was short-lived, Derain, like Vlaminck, nonetheless formed his aesthetic theory in response to it, viewing his colors in these early years as “sticks of dynamite.”116 Needless to say, this was the weapon of choice for anarchist propagandists of the deed, linking Vlaminck’s and Derain’s art of this period metaphorically with acts of anarchist violence. Such radicalism encouraged these artists to push their painting toward outrages on traditional treatment of form and color that were received by hostile art critics as “primitive,” “anti-aesthetic,” “anarchist,” and “anti-French”: “un défi au bon sens et à la raison.”117 In a well-known work such as Portrait of Henri Matisse (1905), Derain’s metaphor of explosion works less within the frame of the painting than in its relation to its academic or even impressionist precursors. As with Vlaminck, the color and brushwork signify spontaneity of execution, connoting direct emotion and uniquely individual vision. The way the marks of paint refuse description speaks of the artist’s refusal to employ the tools of bourgeois illusionism. Such works were as outrageous an act against tradition as was yet conceived within the medium of painting. More radical hybrid forms had already pushed beyond oil on canvas in this period before collage: painted wood

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Figure 27 Photograph of André Derain in his studio, c. 1905, private collection.

reliefs by Paul Gauguin, painted frames by Seurat, and a flurry of transformed utilitarian objects (like a folkish headboard) by Derain.118 But Vlaminck’s form of propaganda of the deed, like propaganda of the written word, performed its destruction symbolically, well within conventions that still rendered his paintings small saleable commodities, if only to a coterie of adventurous modernist collectors. Only Kupka (among those I have researched) took his artistic radicalism to the extreme of losing even this rarified audience. The ways the artists discussed in this chapter chose to present their work and themselves to a public varied as much as their general political aims were shared. This anarchist self-fashioning—from salon to broadsheet to counterexhibition— suggests the complexity of French political and artistic culture at a moment of economic, aesthetic, and social change. Whether such artistic activism in its myriad manifestations could be said to have succeeded as a catalyst for political change in this period is an enquiry I leave to a later chapter. But there is no question that these issues of aim and audience self-consciously motivated a significant part of the art world in prewar Paris and, for some key artists, drove modernism fast and hard away from tradition.

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The White Peril C o l o n i a l i s m , L ’ A r t N e’ g r e , and Les Demoiselles D’Avignon

It is as a man of a race calling itself superior and advanced that I want to make here . . . a sort of public confession, and to ask my brothers of another skin and another color to please forgive us for the crimes that we have committed against them. —Pierre Quillard, Les Illégalités et les crimes du Congo

Picasso, like Vlaminck, represents the case of an artist immersed in the anarchist movement who chose to conduct his career both entirely outside officially sanctioned salons and, after 1902, aloof from the production of political cartoons. But unlike Vlaminck, he also refused to exhibit in the new salons sympathetic to modernism. Michael Baxandall rightly pointed out the absence of Picasso’s name from the list of exhibitors at the alternative salons as the most conclusive evidence of his intentions in this regard.1 His audience, therefore, was elite, consisting of the new class of gallery owners, their relatively adventurous clientele, and a small group of friends and collectors known personally to the artist. None of his work was directed at either the mass of bourgeois collectors or sa majesté le peuple.2 Several recent scholars—including David Cottington, Robert Jensen, and Michael FitzGerald—have concluded that Picasso’s later material success implicates him in the market practices from which he benefited.3 FitzGerald goes so far as to assert the artist’s conscious hypocrisy, rather simplistically trusting to Picasso’s dealer for an account of his “true” attitude toward money and to reject Picasso’s anarchism. Yet clearly political motives on the part of artists—one thinks of Jacques-Louis David, Théodore Géricault, Gustave Courbet, Pissarro, Signac, or Van Dongen—cannot be denied by virtue of their success or willingness to participate in a market system.4 Baxandall is right that Picasso’s nonparticipation in the traditional institutional structures of the Paris art market suggests the artist’s greater complexity of attitudes toward “success” than the calculated venality figured in such accounts.

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Yet if I disagree with Cottington that Picasso’s aesthetic aims necessitate a retreat from politics, I think he raises an important problem that might rather be called the failure of modernism, at least “as politics.” For while, as I argue, Picasso invested his political beliefs in the project of transforming modern art in tune with anarchist aesthetic theories, the absorptive capacities of the dominant culture proved to be larger than the power of his artistic radicalism. Subsequent chapters are meditations on this tension for a variety of artists. It is as important to this book to establish the importance of politics for any reading of Picasso’s work of this period—or Van Dongen’s or Kupka’s—as it is to recognize their art’s ultimate failure to transform society in any manner the artists envisioned. This chapter explores Picasso’s primitivism in its historical moment from the perspective of such anarchist aims.

Primitivism and Colonialism

In the 1880s, a man’s body was stolen from its grave in southern Africa by a Spanish “scientist,” Francesc Darder. He stuffed and mounted the man with an arbitrary spear and shield and presented the result to visiting multitudes at the Barcelona World Exposition of 1888 as “El Negro,” a specimen of “natural history” (figure 28).5 Racism and economic apartheid persist in evolving ways in our own time, on a scale and in a form that reveals the continuing power of colonialism in newer forms of global capitalism. Yet our cultural differences from the colonial period, in conception and in rhetoric, may in part be measured by contemplating this exhibit. A continuum thrives, such that one could still find the figure in place in 1992 in the tiny Darder Natural History Museum in Banyoles, Spain, site of that summer’s Olympic rowing competition. Its presence among the taxidermied animals caused unforeseen problems for Olympic officials faced with a threatened boycott by the outraged African teams. That this controversy—Darder museum officials did not want to change its displays— appeared in the sports section of the New York Times might tell us what a short way we have come. But the creation and acceptance of “El Negro” nonetheless help chart the distance of the present from the colonial world in which modernism developed, a world whose appetite for the exotic was evidently not satisfied by the living Africans walking around the streets of Europe’s cities since ancient times. Turn-of-the-century avant-garde artists and their primitivist aesthetic maneuvers operated in and against this world. Picasso and other modernists could simultaneously share in and be sharply critical of such colonial attitudes in an atmosphere we can no longer experience and in a measure we must work to understand. In regard to Africa, for example, far from extending their social criticism to a radical critique of the reductive view of Africans promoted by the French government for colonial justification, the modernists embraced a

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Figure 28 Photograph of “El Negro,” New York Times, February 5, 1992.

deeply romanticized view of “Africa”—conflating many cultures into one—as the embodiment of humankind in a precivilized state, worshipping idols and enacting violent rituals whose presumed meanings they preferred to mystify than to examine. Modernists subverted the colonial stereotypes of both the Right and the Left. But their subversive revisions necessarily remained implicated in the prejudices from which they derived, so that they now appear no less stereotypical and reductive than the racist caricatures they opposed. The modernists’ aims were to critique civilization by embracing an imagined primitiveness whose authenticity they opposed to a “decadent” West. They subverted Western artistic traditions—and the social order in which they were implicated—by celebrating a Nietzschean return to those imagined primitive states whose suppression they viewed as having cut off a necessary vitality.6 Primitivism focuses colonial issues tellingly, revealing complex and ambivalent relations to issues of race, gender, and power on the part of socially critical modernists grappling with political material. In this light, it is important to recognize how little primitivist works speak of the alien cultures modernists want to appropriate, and how much they speak of the culture to whom their works were addressed, even if only purposely to scandalize it. By evoking an alien, exotic, or paradisal world, they speak of the inadequacies and oppressions of home.7 At the deepest level, primitivists sought a contemporary parallel to an Edenic moment in the artists’ own European “race,” looking to “primitive” cultures—visible in Paris via the French colonies—for a naiveté, spontaneity, and directness European culture had putatively lost. Some sought this liberation for more than themselves. Certainty that the “white race” once enjoyed political and amoral freedom on the model of an imagined and perfect sauvagerie in Tahiti, Guinea, and the Congo animated the anarchist critique of France’s civilizing mission to those lands as tainting the colonies’ hitherto uncorrupted primitiveness, hence their own anticolonialism remains fully implicated in the racism of their historical period.8 This chapter considers the Africanism of Picasso and others as operating both within the French popular image of the “dark continent” and in an anticolonialist milieu at a charged moment of colonial scandal and political debate around 1905–1907. Here Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia aids an understanding of these artists’ and writers’ agency in manipulating cultural languages of form, gender, race, and sexuality in the social and political milieus they had to negotiate. Contemplating the relations between French political and popular culture on the one hand and the French Congo on the other, to which Picasso potently alluded through the masks in his Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; plate 9), expands the cultural resonance of his painting. Here I explore the history of French popular attitudes toward Africa as a locus of the grotesque and the horrific; the systematic and casual abuse in the French Congo; the political scandals in Paris resulting from revelations of the behavior of French officials; and anticolonialist reaction among the Parisian left-wing, including Picasso’s own anarchist circle.9

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By 1907, Picasso had long since moved his work toward simplification and crudity under the influence of the Barcelona modernistes, who already admired Iberian and Catalan Romanesque art in the 1880s and ’90s. He first introduced Iberian forms in his work during 1906. What was new for Picasso in the work of 1907 was not only a more crudely primitivizing style, but resonances of the popular view of Africa and its constitutive part in the French Empire.10 The “dark continent” captured the imaginations of artists and writers working in an anarchist vein as a result of current political scandals and the resulting outcry of the anticolonial opposition of anarchists and socialists to French colonial policy in west and central Africa. These revelations broke upon the world in 1905–1906, the same period that Picasso, Vlaminck, Derain, and others were inspired to “discover” an African art that had been visible in Paris since at least the 1890s.11 Reference to African art not only allowed Picasso to primitivize his figures, it also allowed him to introduce Africa into his work as an allusion whose associations for his French viewers were widely recognized. By conflating his figures with African forms—such as the Fang mask purchased by Vlaminck in 1904 and sold to Derain or the Kota reliquary in the Musée d’Ethnographie (figures 29 and 30)—he violently subverted the formal treatment of the human figure. Rather than clearly depicting a recognizable mask or sculpture from a particular African people, Picasso synthesized aspects of a variety of masks and statues, all from various parts of the French Empire; it was the idea of Africa that Picasso sought.12 His painting necessarily constituted both an act of valuing the products of African culture and an allusion to French brutality that contradicted the nation’s image of itself as a civilizing force, pointing up its bankrupt cultural traditions at a charged period of political debate. At the same time, African sculpture evoked the primitivist mythology of a society in that early stage of culture through which Europe supposedly had long ago passed: the stage of the “childhood” of the European races, a time before history.13 This experience was suppressed (but not erased) by the rigors and falseness of civilization, hence the need on the part of European modernists to find what they took to be authentic “primitive” expressions of thought and feeling that would help them exorcize the interiorized strictures separating them from the authenticity of their own childhoods and of the childhood of their “race.” Needless to say, the trope of black as childlike followed all too easily from this, along with an imagined primal savagery that thoroughly merged with images of and references to African sculpture for any artist or audience of prewar France. Equally, the appearance of such forms in Picasso’s already “grotesque” painting echoed popularized images and associations of superstition, irrationality, and horror, adding to Picasso’s considerable arsenal of anticlassical devices with which he assaulted European traditions of representation and taste, including geometrizing of form, flattening of space, unnaturalistic color, and crudity of execution. “Africa,” as imported into the work, represented not an

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Figure 29  (left) Fang mask, Gabon (formerly French Congo). Painted wood, h. 42 cm. Former Collection of André Derain, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Figure 30  (right) Kota reliquary, Republic of the Congo (formerly French Congo). Wood with sheet brass and copper, h. 50 cm. Herbert Ward Collection, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC.

idyllic, pre-European society but the very opposite of civilized Europe and a threat to it. As such, Picasso’s painting is disturbingly continuous with Darder’s gruesome primitivist construction at the Barcelona exposition, even if also operating as an anticolonialist critique.

“A f r i c a ,” D a h o m e y, a n d t h e C o n g o

With the rest of France, modernists were influenced by popular sources of information about Africa. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the Jardin d’Acclimatation and international expositions concocted displays of colonial peoples in live exhibits. Prior to 1906, cultural groups, supplied by wild animal importers, were regularly exhibited. For Picasso’s generation, the best-known such spectacle in Paris was held at the Exposition Universelle of 1900, which mounted enormous ethnographic exhibits, including recreations of Dahomean and Congolese villages complete with “pikes on which were stuck the actual skulls of slaves executed before the eyes of Bahanzin,” last King of Dahomey,

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and performances of “the rites of fetichism [sic], performed by haggish witchdoctors and priests in their native costumes,” as one guidebook advertised (figure 31).14 Part of the aim of these government-sponsored exhibits was to propagandize French colonial possessions around the world and rationalize their cultural transformations, each colony having its own section.15 Picasso may have visited this part of the exposition on his first trip to Paris as he was exhibiting a painting in another building. Another major source of images and information about Africa was the popular press—itself influenced by prejudice, fantasy, and political interests— reinforced by novels and the accounts of soldiers, missionaries, and explorers, which were often accompanied by lurid, exotic, and fantastical illustrations.16 In the Dahomean Wars of 1890 and 1892, during the “scramble” for colonies, the French conquered Dahomey (Benin) in French West Africa.17 On the fantastical model established by Sir John Mandeville in the fourteenth century,18 travelers who ventured into the interior earlier in the century had returned with tales of animism, human sacrifice, and cannibalism, forming a frightening image of Africans as savage, primeval spirits made much of in the French press. Such mass illustrated magazines as Le Journal Illustré, L’Illustration, and Tour du Monde,

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Figure 31 International Exposition of 1900, pavilion of the French Congo. From Victor Champier, André Saglio and William Walton, Chefs d’oeuvre of the Exposition Universelle 1900 (Philadelphia: G. Barrie & Son, 1900).

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Figure 32 “Sacrifices humains au Dahomey” (Human sacrifices in Dahomey). From Dr. Répin, “Voyage au Dahomey,” Tour du Monde 7 (1863).

and the illustrated supplements of the newspapers Le Petit Journal and Le Petit Parisien, emphasized the purported savagery of customs they misconstrued in accordance with their preconceptions and desires.19 For example, in “Human sacrifices in Dahomey,” published in Tour du Monde in 1863,20 the Dahomean king watches from beneath a canopy while the priests sacrifice his chosen victims, holding their heads aloft (figure 32). A female warrior from Frederick Forbes’s account of 1851 represents similarly bloodthirsty impulses more dispassionately.21 During the Dahomean Wars, the French popular press played up such tales in an attempt to justify French conquest. The press followed the wars themselves only superficially, concentrating instead on legendarily grotesque practices of the natives and illustrating their accounts with uncredited and rather free remakes of earlier engravings.22 The scene of human sacrifice, for instance, accompanied a text in 1863 whose author confesses that he himself had only witnessed the sacrifice of a hyena.23 The implication of cannibalism in these rites was likewise asserted and popularly believed. Though all tales of cannibalism did not actually come from the Dahomean kingdom, such little distinction was popularly made between various groups and regions of Africa that such images came to resonate around the word “Dahomey.” The

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sensationalism of such accounts was given lurid play in the popular press, and in a remarkably short time Dahomey came to represent in France all that was most thrillingly barbaric, savage, and elemental on the dark continent. The Congo region summoned another side to the popular image of Africa, which mixed in suggestive ways with the “Dahomean.” The scandals following government inquiries into events in both the French Congo and Belgian Congo aroused socialist and anarchist opposition, inspiring a heated debate of which modernist writers and artists could hardly have been unaware, even had they been uninterested.24 Indeed, members of Picasso’s circle articulated forcefully critical attitudes toward events in the Congo in political cartoons, most notably André Salmon, Kees van Dongen, and Juan Gris. The Belgian Congo represented the most staggering instance of brutality, but the French Congo closely followed the Belgian model and inspired the equal censure of the left wing. The Congo Free State—all of whose land became the “personal property” of King Léopold of Belgium—was legitimized by the General Act of the Berlin Conference of 1885, which attempted to direct the European powers (or represent them as directed) toward the development, rather than rape, of the colonies.25 Article 6 read: All the Powers exercising sovereign rights or influence in these territories pledge themselves to watch over the preservation of the native populations and the improvement of their moral and material conditions of existence, and to work together for the suppression of slavery and of the slave trade. 26

King Léopold himself freely interpreted the charge enacted here, to which Belgium and France were both signatories, and in 1898 defended a rather ominous view of Belgium’s “civilizing mission”: The mission which the agents of the State have to accomplish on the Congo is a noble one. They have to continue the development of civilisation in the centre of Equatorial Africa, receiving their inspiration directly from Berlin and Brussels. Placed face to face with primitive barbarism, grappling with sanguinary customs that date back thousands of years, they are obliged to reduce these gradually. They must accustom the population to general laws, of which the most needful and the most salutary is assuredly that of work. 27

The Force Publique, or military arm, of the Congo Free State at first enjoyed popularity in Europe for its destruction of the Muslim slave trade, which had still been flourishing in the early 1890s.28 But soon there were reports of rapacious exploitation. As King Léopold’s agents struggled to establish control of the vast region, Africans were forced into labor for their new rulers and into service in the Force Publique.29 Between 1892 and 1914, sixty-six thousand Africans passed through the ranks of the Force Publique, which constituted for many

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Congolese their major contact with the West.30 In the French Congo, too, colonial laws imposed forced labor so many days a year—legally fluctuating between ten and eighty—upon all males between the ages of eighteen and sixty, a practice not discontinued until 1946.31 By far the worst abuses in the Congo involved the collection of rubber from the wild vines that grew in the forests.32 The delegation of this labor to the Force Publique and its mercenaries invited coercion and violence;33 profitable procedures included hostage-taking, mutilations, and executions, sometimes on a large scale. Nominally most of these methods were illegal, but in practice considerations of profit remained sufficient rationale for what amounted to a system of atrocity. This system was criticized by the “Report of the Congo State Commission of Inquiry” (1905) that Léopold was eventually forced to initiate.34 For example, the famed “Casement Report,” sent to the British Foreign Office in 1903, recorded the bizarre accounting system the Belgians used to keep track of ammunition: they required a severed right hand as “proof ” of an unwasted bullet. This was to prevent the soldiers from using their ammunition to hunt game, though many reports noted that soldiers often did hunt animals, and then simply used other methods to obtain the requisite hand. Roger Casement, sent to investigate by the British government, reported that the state, in one six-month period, had used six thousand bullets and concluded, “This means that 6,000 people are killed or mutilated. It means more than 6,000, for the people have told me repeatedly that soldiers kill children with the butt of their guns.”35 Rumors of these abuses of the Berlin Act came periodically to Europe, but more (and more appalling) details were published after the turn of the century, growing by 1905 into a scandal that rocked the French and Belgian governments. Parisian artists responded strongly in a series of cartoons in L’assiette au beurre. For example, in a special issue on the distribution of French government medals (1902; figure 33) Caran d’Ache depicted, in front of a huddled mass of underfed Africans, a vicious dog and a brutish overseer reading the following letter from the minister: “Dear Friend, here people have reported that you have sold blacks, what slander! In any case, between now and July 14th [Bastille Day], just barter them and I guarantee you [your decoration].”36 In the series by Roubille (1905; figures 13 and 14), an image of murder, fire, and starvation illustrated the thought of the bourgeois that “if the worker is sometimes vile [when he strikes and rebels in France] . . . he is often sublime [when he commits ‘legal’ atrocities in the army].”37 Anarchist leader Charles Malato, collaborating with Juan Gris (a neighbor and close friend of Picasso who soon became a major modernist), suggests that the infamously cruel Turks can learn cruelty from the French, whose deeds—as outlined in the Casement report—Gris illustrated in 1908 (figure 34). In words that echo the rationale of the Parti colonial, the caption reads: “Guided by a need for expansion proper to every civilized nation, the Turks will go into the savage lands to bring civilized ways.”38 Another figure

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close to Picasso, the poet and journalist André Salmon, wrote for a special issue on King Léopold, illustrated by d’Ostoya in 1904, which begins with the following song by Salmon, parodying the Belgian national anthem:

Figure 33  (left) Caran d’Ache, “La Lettre du Ministre” (The letter from the minister), L’assiette au beurre, no. 40, January 4, 1902.

Ignoring your happiness, in order that Cabourg and Co. prosper, Work with a boot in the rear, Belgians of color! Grumble no more, poor devils, the price of rubber will rise again. Inscribe on your banners: King, Law and Liberty. 39

In the cartoon, Léopold sings another song celebrating his possession of the Congo, based on slavery and butchery. Kees van Dongen (like Gris, a neighbor and good friend of Picasso before 1909) and František Kupka—both openly anarchist—condemned colonialism through their attacks on Christianity and its missionaries. Kupka’s special issue on religions in L’assiette au beurre (1904) includes the work “Christian Heaven according to the Blacks” (figure 35); white devils (one grasping a chain

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Figure 34  (right) Juan Gris, “Guidés par un besoin . . .” (Guided by a need), L’assiette au beurre, no. 387, August 29, 1908.

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Figure 35  (left) František Kupka, “Ciel Chrétien au Nègres” (Christian heaven according to the blacks), L’assiette au beurre, May 7, 1904. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 36  (right) František Kupka, “Dieux Nègres” (African gods), L’assiette au beurre, May 7, 1904. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

in his clawed fist) and a black God the Father, avenging angel, and seraphim neatly bring a color-inverted heaven to avenge the devilish cruelties of whites in Africa.40 The equally anticlerical Van Dongen, in Jean Grave’s anarchist newspaper Les temps nouveaux (1905; figure 21), bluntly calls Christ, with his prominent stigmata and bleeding heart, “The White Peril.” He depicts Jesus Christ as the drunken, irresponsible ruling force behind militarism and domestic as well as colonial exploitation, who lords it over the cannons, armies, and ships that enforce, in His name, exploitation at home and colonialism abroad.41 For these modernists this political indignation was not inconsistent with an imagined ferocity of dark-spirited “fetish” worship among the Africans on whose behalf they drew attention to injustice, as is demonstrated by another cartoon from Kupka’s special issue on religions (1904; figure 36), in which a sub-Saharan African frenziedly drives spikes into a rigid hierarchical statue in order—as the caption satirically states—to get his God’s attention.42 A sinister allusion to human sacrifice appears in the skulls rolling around the statue’s feet. What Kupka attacks in his whole issue is superstition itself, in all religions, and the

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ways it serves various oppressive power structures; he thus adopts the familiar anarchist strategy of inversion, leveling “savage” and “civilized” in much the way that Picasso will three years later in an Africanizing work such as his Mother and Child (1907; plate 10)—based on traditional Madonna with Child compositions, complete with halo and blue robe of heaven—though Picasso goes much further than Kupka in trying to bring such strategies and concerns into his painting.43 The so-called red-rubber policy destroyed whole areas of the Congo and did more to depopulate the region than the twin ravages of sleeping sickness and smallpox that followed the breakup of social life. Casement and others noted “the great reduction observable everywhere in native life”; for example, in a typical region of the Congo Free State, the population dropped from about two thousand to two hundred between 1898 and 1903.44 The systems of rubber collection and the concessions were quite similar if slightly less grotesque in the French Congo, where tax collection also proceeded on an incentive basis, resulting in abusive methods including the taking of women and children as hostages and outright extermination of “lazy” and uncooperative natives. As a result, village life was almost completely destroyed in the rubber-producing areas of both Congos, resulting in widespread famine and depopulation. Such were the stories that first trickled, and then flooded, out of central Africa.

Anticolonialism in France

Simultaneous with the revelations of the Belgian inquiry into these Léopoldian excesses (and inefficiencies), a comparable scandal broke in France resulting in a government inquiry—the Brazza mission—into conditions in the French Congo. The Gaud-Toqué Affair, involving the exposure of two colonial administrators, revealed numerous arbitrary executions and grotesque murders; these were described in the Parisian press and commented upon in the inflammatory L’assiette au beurre’s special issue of March 11, 1905, “The Torturers of Blacks.” The most famous case of brutality, illustrated by Bernard Naudin (figure 8), was the dynamiting of an African guide (as a sort of human firecracker) on Bastille Day 1903, whose stated—and doubtless successful—purpose was to “intimidate the local population.”45 In an image that could have come straight out of Heart of Darkness (written following Joseph Conrad’s trip up the Congo River in 1890),46 Gaud and Toqué were also accused of forcing one of their servants to drink soup they had made from a human head. Maurice Radiguez imagines this hideous scene (figure 37), with the dissipated Toqué’s contemptuous justification to the horrified African: “Perhaps you’d like veal better? Well it’s plenty good enough for pigs like you!”47 In the same issue, Naudin and Delannoy suggest—depicting “hunts” and enormous piles of bones—that such methods were rather more systematic than spontaneously patriotic (figures 38 and 39).48 Indeed, Toqué’s testimony, reported in Le Temps in 1905, blames French colonial policy generally.

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Figure 37  (top) Maurice Radiguez, “Le Bouillon de Tête” (Boiling the head), L’assiette au beurre, March 11, 1905.

Figure 38  (below left) Bernard Naudin, “Ces Messieurs s’amusent” (These gentlemen amuse themselves), L’assiette au beurre, March 11, 1905. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 39  (below right) Aristide Delannoy, “Gaud, ancient pharmacien” (Gaud, former pharmacist), L’assiette au beurre, March 11, 1905.

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It was a general massacre, perpetrated in order to make the service work. . . . Toqué, under examination, described the procedure employed to obtain porters before setting off for the outpost. Raids were made on the villages. The women and children were carried off; they were hidden in small huts so that passers-by should not see them. These women and children often died of hunger or smallpox; the women were raped by the local police. These hostages were not set free until the porters arrived. The same method was employed for tax collections. 49

Though the scandal was eventually hushed up, the report of the Brazza mission suppressed, and the perpetrators released after a short time in prison, there was widespread outrage in the newspapers and fierce debate in the Chamber of Deputies. The leader of the parliamentary socialists, Jean Jaurès, led an attack on the forced labor system, though eventually all that resulted was minor juridical reform and essentially the same methods continued. André Gide saw scenes of coercion identical to those described above during his trip up the Congo River in 1926.50 King Léopold, however, lost his private kingdom. After the international outcry and the inquiry he was forced to establish, his private domain was reluctantly taken over by the Belgian government in 1908, though again the methods of economic exploitation changed little and often the agents and administrators themselves stayed on.51 Since much of the substance of the debates both in and out of the Chamber of Deputies during the Gaud-Toqué Affair in 1905–1906 would have been of special interest to the modernists studied here and their anarchist circles, it is important to consider the rhetoric marshaled against the justifications of the influential Parti colonial.52 The arguments of the so-called anticolonialists ranged from critics who wanted a colonial empire, but one that was both more humanitarian and more efficient, to what the term more closely means to us: those who refused to recognize the right of France to impose its will, even in the name of civilization, upon other peoples.53 Jaurès, for example, originally accepted the concept of France’s “civilizing mission,” which he saw as benevolently spreading Enlightenment principles and, eventually, socialist egalitarianism.54 In 1903, he said to the Chamber of Deputies, “If we have always combated the politics of colonial expansion by war, the politics of armed expeditions and of violent protectorates, we have always supported and we are always ready to support the peaceful expansion of French interests and of French civilization.”55 By 1905, however, Jaurès had fundamentally altered his position on colonialism, especially its role in the French economic system; he correctly warned of the threat of pan-European war over competition for new markets and new colonial possessions.56 His outrage at the tales emerging from the French Congo was scathing, and his newspaper L’humanité—in an unrelenting series of articles by Gustave Rouanet—played the major role in exposing the scandals in 1905 and 1906. In a response more explicitly humanitarian, Charles Péguy—beginning to shift from his early socialism to his later nationalism—published in Les Cahiers

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de la Quinzaine the exposés of conditions in the two Congos by Pierre Mille and Félicien Challaye, the latter a member of Brazza’s mission, whose reports the leading newspaper Le Temps had refused to publish.57 Though Péguy declared his devotion to “the liberty of peoples,” like Mille and Challaye, he called for reform rather than withdrawal. When the pacifist Challaye published an expanded form of this pamphlet in 1909, he wrote: Colonisation is a necessary social fact. . . . But justice demands that the domination of the whites should not involve the worst consequences—slavery, robbery, torture, assassination—for the blacks. Justice demands that the natives should derive some advantages from our presence among them. 58

More extreme thinkers rejected colonialism and its “civilizing” premise altogether. Socialist Paul Louis wrote a well-known analysis of the evils of the colonial enterprise in Le Colonialisme of 1905: there is no peaceful colonisation, . . . all colonisation is based on violence, war, the sacking of towns, sharing out of the loot, and slavery, however well or thinly disguised. [The] authority [of the working class] is already sufficient to make its solidarity with the oppressed native population effectively felt, in re-claiming for the latter their essential rights, safeguarding existence and subsistence; it will profit from all debates held anywhere with the aim of frustrating overseas conquests, and pointing out the logical consequences of imperialist expansion. 59

Among the anarchists, the former colonial doctor Paul Vigné d’Octon attacked the colonial system both in the Chamber of Deputies and in his book, Les Crimes coloniaux de la IIIe République (1907); his book was published by the revolutionary socialist Gustave Hervé in whose journal, La guerre sociale, Vigné d’Octon also kept up a stream of articles. In the preface to Les Crimes coloniaux he wrote: I had this dream: at last there existed on this earth justice for all subject races and conquered peoples. Tired of being despoiled, pillaged, suppressed and massacred, the Arabs and the Berbers drove their oppressors from North Africa, the blacks did the same for the rest of the continent, and the yellow people for the soil of Asia.

Having thus reconquered by violence and force their unconquerable and sacred rights,

ravished from them by force and violence, each of these human families pursued the road of its destiny which for a time had been interrupted. 60

The Comité de Protection et de défense des Indigènes held protest meetings and published numerous pamphlets from 1905 to at least 1910.61 At the meeting of October 31, 1905—called jointly by the Comité and the influential Ligue des Droits de l’Homme—speakers included the pacifist Frédérick Passy; socialists Francis de Pressensé and Rouanet; and Pierre Quillard, a well-known Dreyfusard, anarchist writer, activist, and close friend of Alfred Jarry; he was also a poet

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and served as poetry editor for La Mercure de France.62 At this meeting, an excolonial doctor, M. Barot-Forlière, discussed the criminality of those who came to work in the colonies, saying that he had seen all the effects of debt, alcoholism, syphilis, and malaria, as well as the abuse of power, violence, and cruelty. “There is no point in accusing the men,” he concluded to cries of approbation, “but above all it is necessary to accuse our colonial system.”63 Paul Viollet argued against all colonialism: The martial power of Western nations came, thanks to destructive inventions, to make enormous progress, at the moment when half of the world, until then ignorant, was opened to our little Europe. All those who did not have our weapons, savage or civilized, were enslaved, were crushed. A completely new kind of conquest was created: the colony. 64

In milder conclusion, the meeting voted to publish the following statement: The Assembly, profoundly moved by the exposé of illegalities and by the recital of iniquities and crimes which have occurred in several colonies,

Beseech the government to respect in all the extent of the colonial domain the fundamental

principles of Justice and of Law, to refer to tribunals all crimes committed against the natives in colonized lands, in protected lands and in explored lands. 65

Quillard’s speech, like Salmon’s anticolonial diatribe of 1904, is of special interest since he was well-known to Jarry, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ambroise Vollard and other members of the Picasso circle. Quillard inflamed the crowd with his radicalism: Just now we were told that in the French press there is an indifference to colonial issues, an indifference to the crimes that were committed in the Congo and elsewhere. There is no indifference, there is something worse, there is vindication, there is glorification of these crimes. 66

Quillard addressed his speech, as he pointed out, not to the white men and women in the audience but to the blacks; and he concluded not with pity for their “savagery” but with a most unusual recognition of their humanity: “It is as a man of a race calling itself superior and advanced that I want to make here . . . a sort of public confession, and to ask my brothers of another skin and another color to please forgive us for the crimes that we have committed against them.” Whether or not this speech was heard by Picasso or his friends that night, such rhetoric reappeared in the daily papers and would have been repeated in the charged circles in which they moved in these years. The debates and scandals brought a new and heightened awareness of France’s African colonies and, for a politicized avant-garde, concentrated a range of politically charged meanings on everything to do with “Africa.”

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Figure 40 Pierre Bonnard, illustration for Alfred Jarry, “Ubu coloniale,” from Almanach illustré du Père Ubu (Paris, 1901). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Alfred Jarry was especially important since Picasso had known him as early as 1901, on his second trip to Paris. Jarry constituted one of his strongest influences.67 Between 1898 and into the early years of the twentieth century, Jarry came into the circle of La revue blanche, which published his increasingly avant-garde writings when Le Mercure de France found them too difficult.68 The circle of La revue blanche was Dreyfusard and anarchisant, with the outspokenly anarchist Félix Fénéon taking over the editorship from 1895 until the journal folded in 1903; according to police reports, Fénéon was still “militating in anarchist groups” in 1908.69 The journal’s owners, the Natanson brothers, folded Jarry into a circle that included numerous anarchist artists as well as writers, including Pierre Bonnard (who did the illustrations for Jarry’s Almanachs illustré du Père Ubu of 1898 and 1901; figure 40), Félix Vallotton, and Toulouse-Lautrec.70 At this time, Jarry befriended the young poet Apollinaire, whom he often met in the “Cave de Vollard”—downstairs from his gallery and next door to the office of La revue blanche—along with Salmon and Max Jacob, the three main writers of la bande à Picasso.71 Many figures in the Picasso circle testified to having spent time with Jarry and Picasso in mutual gathering places from at least 1901 until his illness in 1907. Apollinaire in Le flâneur des deux rives and Journal intime, Fernande Olivier in Loving Picasso.The private journal of Fernande Olivier, André Salmon in Souvenirs sans fin, and Max Jacob in Chronique des temps héroïques cite daily meals, banquets at Vollard’s gallery and “cave,” Les Quat’z’Arts, Le Lapin Agile, La Closerie des Lilas, and other cabarets and bars of Montmartre and Montparnasse. According to Dubbelboer: Surprisingly little has been written about Jarry’s acquaintance with Vollard, even though this friendship and Vollard’s role in the creation of the [second] Almanac places Jarry’s Almanac firmly in the context of the early artistic avant-garde of the twentieth century. . . . His gallery was famous for its cellar, dubbed the “Cave de Vollard.” This cellar served as a kitchen and dining room, where Vollard would invite writers and artists to eat, drink and discuss. 72

Apollinaire, in his Flâneur des deux rives, lists Jarry and Picasso side by side in the Cave de Vollard along with “le prince des dessinateurs, M. Forain . . . , Odilon Redon, Maurice Denis, Maurice de Vlaminck, Count Kessler, José Maria Sert, Vuillard, Bonnard, K[er].-X[avier]. Roussel, Aristide Maillol . . . , Émile Bernard, Derain, Marius-Ary LeBlond, Claude Terrasse, etc., etc.,” and a “large number of pretty women.”73 Picasso’s very successful exhibition was held in Vollard’s gallery upstairs in 1901, where Pere Manyac, Picasso’s Barcelona friend and dealer at this time, first introduced him to Max Jacob; the same year Jarry’s Almanach illustré du Père Ubu was collaboratively produced—with Vollard, Terrasse, Bonnard, and anarchist poet Félicien Fagus—in the “cave” below.74 In his memoirs, Salmon—who met Picasso in early October 1904—tells numerous stories, revealing an intimacy with Jarry over these years. He detailed the shift from Jarry’s own persona to that of his fictional character Père Ubu; his antimilitarism as the author of the

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novel Les jours et les nuits based on his own military service; his mock militarism as Ubu; and his play with guns, both real and symbolic, among other memories. Jacob also focuses on Jarry’s browning automatic, which he describes as ritually passed to Picasso at a banquet as “the harbinger comet of the century.” Even Fernande Olivier reveals that she knew Jarry personally, telling an amusing story about a night Jarry and Arthur Cremnitz spent drinking when she met them taking all the bottles they’d emptied back to Jarry’s tiny apartment. Salmon described the “daily banquet of the rue de Seine [now rue Champollion],” where he ate with his closest friends: Apollinaire, Jarry, Mécislas Golberg, and the pacifist editor of L’Européen, Arne Hammer. As he testified, in a way that can stand in for the whole group, “I saw Jarry, I heard him, I followed him.”75 Absurdist playwright, master of black humor, and anarchist artist par excellence—Jarry is important for making colonialism one of his major targets at the same time that he summoned up in his works an irrational world of “Dahomean” intertribal slavery and cannibalism. In contrast to Jarry and Picasso, the ordinary range of colonial debate stayed within the confines of Enlightenment principles, swinging between an image of the black as noble savage (in a state out of which whites had long ago evolved) and an image of the black as degenerate savage (from which condition the native must be saved). Jarry and Picasso (in the Demoiselles, Mother and Child, and Head, all 1907; plates 9, 10 and 11) implicitly reject both positions by pointedly reveling in ethnic difference and invoking “tribal” life and art that they see as irrational, magic, and violent, by embracing precisely the symptoms of its so-called degeneracy. Unlike the rationalist Kupka in his cartoons (figures 35 and 36), their works conjure with the idea that it is these very qualities that make Africa superior to European culture, especially as represented by Jarry. Jarry was the quintessential anarchist artist whose political satire was shockingly obvious to his contemporaries.76 In “Ubu colonial,” part of the second Almanach du Père Ubu of 1901, Dr. Gasbag meets Père Ubu on his return from a self-described “disastrous voyage of colonial exploration undertaken by us at the expense of the French government”; like the bloated, self-satisfied bourgeois that Ubu represents, seeking profits for himself at the public’s expense, he brags of his adventures in terms that illuminate and mock colonial mentality: Our first difficulty in those distant parts consisted in the impossibility of procuring slaves for ourself, slavery having unfortunately been abolished; we were reduced to entering into diplomatic relations with armed Negroes who were on bad terms with other Negroes lacking means of defense; and when the former had captured the latter, we marched the whole lot off as free workers. We did it, of course, out of pure philanthropy, to prevent the victors eating the defeated, and in imitation of the methods practiced in the factories of Paris. 77

This anticolonial and cannibalistic theme—with its parallel between the exploitation of poor workers at home and the search for even cheaper labor

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abroad—recurs frequently in Jarry’s work. In a piece of vicious “nonsense” in the conclusion to “Ubu colonial,” Ubu in his disingenuous way attacks Dr. Gasbag for failing to appreciate the black as a completely different animal from the Frenchman: UBU: I remember a little pickaninny who arrived each day from a distant part of town just to empty a lady’s chamber pot under the windows of our dining room, presenting the contents for our inspection with the remark:

Hey you folks look heah: me black me make yellow crap, ma mistress she white she make

black crap.

Dr. Gasbag is thunderstruck: GASBAG: This would merely prove that the white man is simply a Negro turned inside out like a glove. PA UBU: Sir, I am astonished that you should have discovered that all on your own. You have clearly profited from our discourse and deserve advancement. Possibly, when turned inside out in the manner you have described, you may suitably replace the specimen of black slave. 78

Jarry here confronts and manipulates colonial stereotypes and rhetoric as circulated in the French press, reveling in a deliberate vulgarity satirizing the prejudices of French colonials. His stunningly offensive play with the theme of anticolonialism is the other side of his primitivism: the worship of puppets, instinct, and violence. By giving a political context to the African figures in such works as these, Jarry refuses to trade in the essentialized, timeless image of the noble savage. Instead he contextualizes it, acknowledging the political realities that have brought the African “fetishes” into the view of the avant-garde. As a modernist subversive, he plays off the political oppressions foisted on natives by men like Ubu against an image of the African as a cannibal rather than a mere innocent, combining the Dahomean image of the black with that of the oppressed Congolese. He likewise satirically celebrates a whole range of other racist and furtively titillating stereotypes that colonial rhetoric traded in: nudity, rampant sexuality, and lack of inhibition of all sorts, as Bonnard confirms in his illustrations for “Ubu colonial” (figure 40).

Picasso and Primitivism

“In shattering a fragment of the artistic façade,” the artist “touches the social façade,” asserted the anarchist and symbolist poet Gustave Kahn in 1897.79 Parallel to Jarry’s destruction of theatrical forms and traditions, Picasso’s attack on inherited artistic conventions also constituted an attack on “the social façade.” Primitivism became for the modernists a method for revolutionizing style;

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more, this formal radicalism often served, depending on the attitude of the artist, to present an alternative to currently entrenched social and aesthetic norms, mingling concepts of authenticity, spontaneity, freedom from the repression of bourgeois constraints, and free love. Paul Gauguin was a monumental precedent in this regard, and his retrospective exhibitions at the Salon d’Automne in 1903 and 1906 brought his influence to a peak. Gauguin’s rejection of the West in his move to Tahiti and the Marquesas, the myth of his search for a paradise free from bourgeois constraint, and the primitivism of his evolving style, was a potent model for the subsequent generation.80 The primitivism of Picasso and Derain, most notably, like that of Gauguin before them, gestured toward cultures whose transformative powers they admiringly offered as escape routes from the stultification of French culture and academic art.81 Picasso’s Iberian period, for example, simultaneously cast the human form in the provincial Spanish incarnation of archaic Greek sculpture and summoned images of arcadia into play.82 Layered onto these familiar forms and associations of primitivism, in 1907 Picasso went further to summon up disturbing allusions to Africa, now burdened—in the minds of anyone aware of anarchist discourse or indeed of the daily news—with associations of exploitation and white, as well as black, savagery. The “discovery” of African sculpture by the fauves and the date of Picasso’s first encounter has been much debated by scholars. Paudrat, based on a careful reading of all the artists’ and witnesses’ statements as well as a visual study of the artists’ paintings, proposed autumn 1906 as the date of the first real impact of African art on Vlaminck, Derain, and Matisse.83 Scholars currently agree that Picasso would have seen the African works at this time, and Rubin rightly points out that it was not until June 1907 that its influence appeared in his work. Yet all these artists’ familiarity with African sculpture likely predates their interest in it—and its influence on their work—by an even longer time, given the presence of masks and statues from the colonies in Parisian junk shops and the Musée d’Ethnographie since the nineteenth century. Thus Picasso and others may well have been familiar with, but not more than mildly interested in, African objects until events brought the whole subject of Africa to their notice in a pointedly political way. Picasso himself said nothing about it for almost thirty years except for his facetious remark in 1920, “African art? Never heard of it!”84 Picasso’s allegiance to concepts of primitivism that date back to his fin de siècle Nietzschean period and his parallel anarchism would have encouraged an interest in the Congo revelations and subsequent debates, and this could very well have led him and others to look freshly at what already surrounded them. Vlaminck, by his own account, had looked at African art with Derain at the Musée d’Ethnographie several times before his “revelation”—at the time of the scandals—in the bistro in Argenteuil that resulted in his first acquisition of masks.85 This delayed “discovery” parallels Picasso’s late evocation in 1906 of Iberian art with which he and all the Barcelona modernistes had been familiar

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Figure 41 Pablo Picasso, Enfant avec hutte et palmier (African), sketchbook No. 35, 1905. Pen, brown ink and wash on paper, 14.2 x 8.7 cm. Sotheby’s. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

since the 1890s; this perhaps explains why, despite Salmon’s claim of Picasso’s equal formal interest in both African and Oceanic sculpture and the fact that Picasso collected both kinds of objects, it was largely African—and not Oceanic— forms that he incorporated into his art in 1907–1908.86 At least as early as 1905, Picasso was conscious of Africa’s colonial setting. A drawing in a sketchbook of that year shows an African in a loincloth in front of a grass hut, two palm trees, and a river with a tiny figure in a canoe (figure 41). The African is emaciated, mere skin and bone, with an overlarge and crudely simplified head, his arms on his hips forming a diamond shape. This drawing testifies, à la Jarry, to Picasso’s interest in Africa as a place both culturally fascinating and politically oppressed. The insistence on the symmetry of the diamond-shaped arms may suggest early awareness of the Kota reliquaries from the French Congo (Gabon) in the Musée d’Ethnographie from the 1880s on (figure 30). By 1907, reference to African art not only allowed Picasso to primitivize the figures in his works such as Head (plate 11), in which a simple oval face with crude features is overlaid with garishly colored scarification lines. It also allowed him to introduce Africa into his work as an allusion whose associations for his French viewers—whether an actual or imagined public—were extraordinarily complex. Conflating his figures with recognizably African forms, such as the Kota reliquary or Derain’s Fang mask from the French Congo (figure 29), violently subverted the formal treatment of the human figure. As several scholars have pointed out, the search for the “right” mask is misguided, as Picasso synthesized aspects of various African works rather than copying any single one, though they were necessarily all from various parts of the French Empire. African sculpture offered a model of formal simplification based on folk traditions that were believed to go back to prehistory, representing to modernists “authentic primitive” expressions of thought and feeling. As Frances Connelly has demonstrated, as early as the sixteenth century French aestheticians linked concepts of the “grotesque” in two dimensions with caricature, ornament, and the fantastical, while concepts of the “grotesque” in three dimensions suggested the monstrous and the horrific and was specifically associated with Africa.87 African sculptures, resultingly, were viewed as idols and fetishes

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and represented to Europeans as manifestations of the “irrational, mute, and fearful world” in which they imagined the primitive to live; conversion to Christianity routinely involved destruction or exportation of such too-powerful three-dimensional art. The shock felt by eighteenth-century Europeans, who initially viewed Africa through the lens of the “noble savage,” gradually took on shades of sarcasm and contempt as colonization—and its companion “racial theory”—proceeded in the nineteenth century.88 Thus an imagined primal savagery was thoroughly merged with images of and references to African sculpture for any artist or audience of prewar France, and their appearance in Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (plate 9) echoed inherited images and associations of superstition, irrationality, darkness, and “horror,” adding to his already considerable anticlassical arsenal. Salmon asserted in La Jeune peinture française that “in choosing the uncivilized artists as guides,” Picasso “was not unaware of their barbarism”; “the sorcerer’s apprentice was still consulting the Oceanic and African charmers.”89 Elsewhere, Salmon described Picasso’s African and Oceanic sculptures as “primitive wonders,” a collection where “curious wood figures grimace.”90 What Picasso produced in response to this influence were “formidable nudes, grimacing and perfectly deserving of execration,” whose “human effigy appears quite inhuman to us and inspires a kind of dread.”91 Apollinaire used similar language to charactericze the Congolese objects owned by Vlaminck and Derain; he admiringly named them “masks and fetishes,” “grotesque and crudely mystical works,” and “barbaric sculptures.”92 In 1937, Picasso gave a lengthy, compelling, and secret account of his first trip to that warehouse of colonial plunder, the Musée d’Ethnographie, to André Malraux, who did not publish his memory of it until after Picasso’s death: When I went to the old [Musée], it was disgusting. . . . I was all alone. I wanted to get away. But I didn’t leave. I stayed. I understood that it was very important. . . . The masks weren’t just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things. . . . They were against everything—against unknown, threatening spirits. I always looked at fetishes. I understood; I too am against everything. . . . Spirits, the unconscious (people still weren’t talking about that very much), emotion—they’re all the same thing. I understood why I was a painter. All alone in that awful museum, with masks, dolls made by the redskins, dusty manikins. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism-painting—yes absolutely! 93

The interpretation Picasso gives here has been filtered through the experience of Dada and surrealism—especially in using the concept of the unconscious94—and filtered additionally through Malraux, but at the very least we can say that his interest in African art was as much in what he imagined was its function as ritual objects as in its forms, whose very abstraction encoded the mystical power he wanted to appropriate.

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In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the Iberian faces of the two central figures and their crudely simplified forms ally them with Spain’s archaic past and announce Picasso’s origins and preoccupations as outside (and against) the French classical tradition. The context of the brothel points up the prostitutes’ loss of freedom: like slaves, they are bought and sold. At the same time, the exaggeration of their sexual display threatens the spectator/customer as the prostitutes turn their attention from the room to the world beyond the frame. Their primitivist power and hypnotic gaze are anything but alluring, yet they pale in comparison with the violence of the two right-hand figures, whose faces are transformed by African rather than Iberian models and whose presences considerably increase the voltage of the work; their transformation mocks such sexual display, aggressively challenging the image of the classical nude.95 What Picasso’s primitivism does to European art it also does to Europe’s idealizations of sexuality. The radical treatment of the traditional nude female announces the end of the old world of art with a new violence. The violence comes not only from the distortion of the faces and bodies of the two figures, and from the transformation of usually passive nudes in tamed attitudes into aggressively challenging mock-temptresses, but also from the very allusion to Africa embedded in them. Their powers of primitive spirituality overwhelm the European tradition in an act of rebellion. More than this, all those thrillingly nightmarish and well-publicized tales of Dahomey inevitably echo, summoning up an imagined ruthless barbarity that the male modernist makes it his mission to confront. As Sander Gilman has shown, racist assumptions about African female sexuality spilled over to the European prostitute, linked by what was seen as a parallel process of physical and social degeneration.96 The late nineteenth century saw the initiation of sociological and police classification systems for categorizing “biological determinants” of criminal behavior, the very concept of which denies economic motives for criminality, including prostitution.97 Gilman shows that the physiognomic traits attributed to the prostitute were precisely those associated with the African female, all of which “point to the ‘primitive’ nature of the prostitute’s physiognomy.”98 The logical conclusion of this chain of signifiers was that the sexual activity and resulting syphilis of the European prostitute was a sign of her physiological regression to the condition of the Hottentot Venus. Picasso’s prostitutes—in the early sketches attendant on both customer (the sailor) and “medical student” (or inspector)99—necessarily function within this system, as their overt and aggressive sexuality affirms cultural and racial attitudes shared by the artist and his audience even as their formal treatment underscores their threat to the client/viewer. If the prostitutes represent the savage within Europe’s borders, delivering a Dionysian thrill of sexual promiscuity and violence—complete with its promise of escape from both decorum and ordinary consciousness—the Jarry of “Ubu colonial” is a potent precursor.

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All this evocation of “horror” came together—in a manner that selfevidently did not seem contradictory—with outrage at the brutality of the white colonialists. Jarry exhibited a fascination with both sides of this strange African coin. So does Conrad: in the beginning of Heart of Darkness, Marlow is appalled to see Europeans using chain gangs of blacks, overworked and dying; but, finally, for Conrad it is the indigenous evil of human sacrifice to which Mr. Kurtz succumbs through his participation and which the primeval forest somehow compels that is the worst. The attraction to the grotesque, the artist’s obligation to acknowledge, even to experience on some level, the most horrific human truths, was already thoroughly established in the symbolist period by the decadents, with precedents going back to the romantics of the early nineteenth century. Mario Praz’s classic study of this subject details a whole literature’s fascination with a catalog of horrors that includes incest, murder, vampirism, Satan worship, and necrophilia.100 That this embracing of “horror” could be conflated with a larger agenda of social criticism and “liberation” was likewise explored by the previous generation. The new element was Africa itself. Thus both stylistically and thematically these African figures in the Demoiselles are not only unsympathetic to the art and life of established European culture, they are its enemy. This painting’s rhetoric owes much to those anticolonial satires on sub-Saharan Africa central to Jarry’s oeuvre. The raw sexuality of his black characters, their perverseness, like that of Picasso’s Demoiselles, stand against the rational, orderly, decorous world of colonialist Europe; and behind it all lies the exploitation and the brittle and vainglorious cultural superiority that Jarry ridiculed. Ultimately, Picasso’s primitivism, like all primitivism, subverts aesthetic canons of beauty and order in the name of “authenticity.”101 For Picasso and other anarchists, primitivism contravenes the rational, liberal, “enlightened” political structure in which “beauty” and “order” are implicated. The deliberate ugliness of the Demoiselles asserts the persistence, within a selfcongratulatory bourgeois culture, of ugly realities that complacence prefers to elide. By putting forward this new aesthetic, the artist asserts that the culture of such “savages” has a power and a beauty all its own. Picasso’s primitivizing proposes a more subversive alternative ruled out of the accepted terms of debate, namely that the African is neither an inferior brute nor a misunderstood equal, but something more like an absolute other who remains possessed of primordial powers with which modern culture has lost touch, much to its disadvantage. Picasso’s primitivizing style thus aspires, like the African sculptures he admired, to an act not of mere decoration, but of power: a bid to recapture kinds of representational power that the arts of Enlightenment Europe had putatively lost. Contemporary critics also conceived of Picasso and much of the literary and artistic avant-garde as “anarchists in art,” as the journalism of the day abundantly demonstrates.102 By 1910, art reviewers were also using the language

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of the primitive to characterize modern art, which allows us insight into the ways the concept—allied with simplification, deformation, ugliness, and the grotesque—was understood. For example, Henri Guilbeaux, reviewing Picasso’s exhibition at Vollard’s in Les Hommes du Jour in 1911, noted: Mr. Picasso, having done more than show promise, began one day totally to abdicate his personality. He imitated the Spanish masters and others, and he fancied himself the humble successor to the primitives. What he offers us today accentuates the intentional distortions, which sometimes reach the level of the grotesque, the ugly. 103

Georges Lecomte, writing on the “crisis in French painting” in response to the Salon of 1910, warned artists that the public will be “before long worn out with vulgarity, with violence and with savagery, with deformation and with ugliness, with coarse roughness.”104 A debate published in September and October 1912 in La vie and L’action française is wonderfully revealing of the public knowledge of the uses of modern primitivist painting and of its political ambience. An anonymous item in La vie noted, “Some artists have grouped themselves to study the savage soul in its pacifistic manifestations; their aim consists in acquiring a more profound knowledge of ‘l’art nègre.’”105 This group, the article continued, proposed to collect art as well as all sorts of historical objects and curiosities, to organize voyages to the colonies, and to found a small museum, “which will interest in the highest degree artists and scholars.”106 To give some background to this proposed museum and the interest in African art it manifests, the author noted that an antiquary shop in the rue de Rennes displayed in its window Dahomean masks, “fetishes” from the Congo, and symbolic statues from Guinea. He continued: It is there that M. Henri Matisse saw them. This painter, of equatorial coloring and mad with cruel stylization, acquired some to decorate his studio. After him, the Spaniard Picasso, the rigorous draughtsman, bought some. . . . At Vollard’s where the exotics are found in front of the frescos of Gauguin and the gods of Easter Island, the beautiful painter Vlaminck exchanged many of his powerful landscapes for barbaric statues. It is there also that M. Derain obtained some: he draws inspiration not only in his paintings of a hieroglyphic synthesis, but also in his sculpted works.

The article concludes with heartfelt enthusiasm: “In the Musée Guimet, in the Musée Cernuschi are collected the masterpieces of the Yellow race. Let each of us work so that Paris will soon possess its Museum of Black Art!”107 Apollinaire had supported a similar idea in an article in Paris-Journal a week earlier when he proposed a state-sponsored “museum for exotic art,” which would receive all of the “artistic” objects from the Trocadéro (as opposed to those of merely “ethnographic” interest) as well as ongoing supplements from colonial administrators.108

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The month following this discussion—which reveals an animated sympathy with the modernists, though perhaps not an insider’s view—La vie reprinted a stunningly racist response to their item that had since appeared in the royalist L’action française: Such is the latest of contemporary aesthetic fantasies. In the ladder of the perversions of taste, it appears it must be the bottom. Below black fetishes, there is nothing. Let us take this occasion to recall that the indulgence professed for the byzantine mosaics and the ape-statues of the basilicas, for the figures of reindeer traced in caves and for the scribbling of infants in primary school, must lead there. The love of the primitive, in art as in politics, suits the black. 109

Most of the “grotesqueries” admired by the modernists since the 1880s are here named with the most withering contempt; but more than this, the admirers of such art are themselves compared to blacks, in their uncivilized tastes as in their uncivilized politics. In inverse manner, La vie’s response affirmed its general support of modernism and its broadly humanistic left-wing politics: We have never dreamed of recommending black art as a canonical model, but its masterpieces can be precious indications for all intelligent artists, for those who do not search simply but impurely to imitate like these traditionalists who wish to restore all the classicisms. One seizes, to study them, the spontaneity of the aspiration common to all humans. 110

Thus for the modernists, to primitivize was not merely to do something to a painting; it was to do something to oneself, and it implied an ambition to do something to the culture at large. It was an act of sympathy with the most profoundly human states and impulses, an act of recognition, even when it entailed “horrors” the refined bourgeois refused to face. Ironically, the fascination with savagery and barbarism attributed to Africans, and the emphasis on fetishism in discussions of African art by Picasso’s friends, constructs the image of Dahomey that for the French justified its conquest. The irony stems from the accusatory presence of African forms in Picasso’s works of 1907 and 1908 that import the political echoes of the Gaud-Toqué Affair. Like Jarry and Conrad, Picasso’s political indignation is counterbalanced by assumptions of irrational and primal spiritism and by the desire to appropriate this power to his art. The complex interweaving of these ideas and events forms an important part of the dense and sophisticated fabric of associations Les Demoiselles d’Avignon summoned up at the time for the circle to whom Picasso showed it. Although the painting was not publicly exhibited at the time, numerous people saw the work in Picasso’s studio, which was quite accessible to a large avant-garde circle of friends, acquaintances, collectors, and hangers-on.111 The scale and careful preparation of this large and ambitious work indicates that Picasso saw it as a major statement and imagined a public for the work; its multivalent strategies speak to many levels of public and private experience

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as well as to conventions of inherited tradition, which this public would have recognized and which Picasso would have expected it to recognize. And part of this recognition—by virtue of “masking” his figures (traditionally, masks reveal rather than hide truth112)—entailed the complicated mixture of ideas, fantasies, political postures, and racial and sexual attitudes relating to Africa as the French public “knew” it in 1907, a public recently agitated by reports of nearly unbelievable yet documented cruelty and illegal exploitation in a colony viewed by so many as undergoing a process of civilization at the hands of their own superior culture. Avant-garde painting for a century and more—David, Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, and Courbet—had offered finely calculated provocations of subject and theme at moments of political anxiety, crisis, and scandal. Picasso’s provocation was similarly motivated, but additionally grappled with a central problem of modernism in general: how to radicalize structure and form and abandon realism and narrative without also abandoning centrally important real-life concerns? Picasso, by “masking” his figures, conflates an exotic and exploited group external to Western society with an equally exploited group within Western society, analogizing the periphery with the corrupt center of French culture. In their power both to attract and repel the male beholder, the Africanized prostitutes capture the ambivalent character of Picasso’s primitivism. Yet if the masks of the individual demoiselles are “horrifying,” the painting as a whole is more so. Although a prostitute’s job is to please (indeed, to satisfy a man’s animal nature), Picasso’s women terrify and repel the spectator; the painting itself, whose traditional job was to offer beauty, mocks and challenges the time-honored status of the easel painting-as-commodity in its refusal to please, its principled ambition to offend. By conflating African masks with an image of European “idols,” Picasso identifies the prostitute as a “grotesque other”; at the same time, he identifies his own avant-garde status as a selfstyled primitive with this same other, overturning European cultural values that would identify the primitive with the degenerate. For colonialists, France had a civilizing mission in Africa; for anarchist avant-gardists, African art and culture had a primitivizing mission for Europe. Like Jarry and Conrad before him, Picasso simultaneously condemns the colonial policies that brought such masks to Europe, yet embraces the very stereotypes that tag African culture as degenerate, as a recuperative cure at home rather than abroad.113 Thus Picasso’s ambivalence is the ambivalence of modernism: a customer of prostitutes and an appreciative exploiter of “Africa,” he operated in and against a colonialist world, addressing himself to audiences equally immersed in the assumptions and animating questions of the day. That his contemporaries and supporters were appalled by his ambitious painting tells us he went too far. Salmon wrote that “nudes came into being, with distortions—for which we were prepared by Picasso himself, by Matisse, Derain, Braque, van Dongen, and first of all, by Cézanne and Gauguin—that were hardly

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surprising. It was the hideousness of the faces that paralyzed with fright the notquite-converted.” According to Roland Penrose, Gertrude Stein was silent and Leo Stein laughed. Even Apollinaire was taken aback and worried that Picasso might destroy the reputations they had both worked hard to establish; he said only one word: révolution. Picasso leaned his huge painting against a wall of his studio and did not exhibit it until 1916.114 In our own time, that we forgot that Africa carried these meanings for modernist primitivism, only tells us something about ourselves.

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1  (above)

2  (below)

Jules Adler, La Grève au Creusot (Strike at Le Creusot), 1899. Oil on canvas, 231 x 297 cm. (Le Creusot, Ecomusée de la Communauté Le Creusot/Montceau). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Jules-Félix Grandjouan, “Question d’art” (Question of art), Le rire, August 16, 1902. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

3 Kees Van Dongen, Self-Portrait, 1906–1908. Oil on canvas, 55 x 38 cm. Private collection. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

4 Kees Van Dongen, Femme fatale, 1905. Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm. Private collection, Paris. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

5 Kees Van Dongen, Liverpool Light House, Rotterdam or The Hussar, 1907. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm. Fridart Foundation, Amsterdam. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

6

7

Maurice de Vlaminck, Portrait of Derain, 1905. Oil on cardboard, 26.4 x 21 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Jules Grandjouan, “La Grève” (The strike), cover, L’assiette au beurre, no. 214, May 6, 1905. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

8  (opposite)

9  (above)

André Derain, Bal des soldats à Suresnes (Soldier’s ball in Suresnes), 1903. 180 x 145.1 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907. Oil on canvas, 243.9 x 233.7 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

10

11

Pablo Picasso, Mother and Child, 1907, oil on canvas. 81 x 60 cm. Musée National Picasso, Paris. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pablo Picasso, Head, 1907. Oil and sand on panel, 17.5 x 14 cm. Collection Claude Picasso. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

12 Pablo Picasso, Nude, 1910. Oil on canvas, 97.8 x 76.2 cm. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

13 Georges Braque, Houses at L’Estaque, 1908. Oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm. Kunstmuseum, Bern, Hermann and Margrit Rupf Foundation. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

14 Henri Matisse, The Dance (I), early 1909. Oil on canvas, 259.7 x 390.1 cm. Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2011 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

15 Juan Gris, Hommage à Picasso (Homage to Picasso), 1912. Oil on canvas, 74.4 x 93.3cm. Gift of Leigh B. Block, Art Institute of Chicago.

16  (above)

17  (right)

Luc-Olivier Merson, La Vérité (Truth), 1901. Wall decoration for l’hôtel WatelDehaynin, canvas stretched over plaster, 222 x 375 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Félix Tobeen [Félix Élie Bonnet], Le Bassin dans le parc (The pond in the park), 1913. Oil on canvas, 90 x 60 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.

3

A Rationale of Ugliness Cubism and Its Critical Reception

I had studied the gargoyles of Oxford and Notre Dame, I had mused over the art of the Niger and of Dahomey, I had gazed at Hindu monstrosities, Aztec mysteries and many other primitive grotesques; and it had come over me that there was a rationale of ugliness as there was a rationale of beauty, . . . which might have its own value and esoteric meaning. Men had painted and carved grim and obscene things when the world was young. Was this revival a sign of some second childhood of the race, or a true rebirth of art? —Gelett Burgess, “The Wild Men of Paris”

This chapter aims to reconfigure our understanding of cubism by exploring the wide range of critics and artists before 1914 who defined the movement within politicized concepts of the “primitive.” Primitivist tropes extended from the “directness” and grotesquerie of Africanism to the arrested elementary drawing techniques in “finished” canvases, and from the concept of an essentialized regional cubism directly tied to local soil (for example, the “Basque” cubism of Félix Tobeen), to the supposedly “infantile” and “degenerate” qualities of the art, such as that reproduced in Albert Gleizes’s and Jean Metzinger’s key text Du “Cubisme” (On “cubism”; 1912).1 Primitivism as a central aspect of modern European art has been well studied in the last two decades, engaging the field of art history with postcolonial discourse in related fields of anthropology, cultural geography, history, and literature.2 Within cubism studies, recognition of the importance of primitivism for a historicized understanding of the movement has been hampered by a long-standing ahistorical view of cubism as rejecting the irrational in favor of a purely rational approach to art making. Such thinking has led historians to utilize terms such as “beautiful,” “balanced,” “austere,” and “classical,” evoking— intended or not—Cartesian concepts of art that the cubists pointedly struggled to overthrow.3 Such concepts ignore the terms of cultural discourse with which

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Figure 42 Georges Braque in his studio, 5, Impasse de Guelma, c. 1911. Archives Laurens.

cubism was actually received when it was new: “ugly,” “violent,” “childlike,” “primitive,” and “insane.” The cubists and their apologists purposely sought to realize a subjective and intuitive vision justified and intensified by the accommodation of unconscious urges and primordial drives they believed gave birth to cave art and other manifestations of the primitive. According to Apollinaire, such sensitivity to the world around them would result in a new, vital, modern instance of the classic.4 Such thinking resulted in seemingly oxymoronic terminology that pervaded the early discourse on cubism, such as Gelett Burgess’s reference to “a rationale of ugliness,” Gleizes’s and Metzinger’s tract conflating

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Figure 43 Installation view of Picasso–Braque exhibition, Gallery ‘291,’ New York. From Camera Work, January 1915, showing Kota reliquary (Gabon) and Picasso, Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table, 1912 (currently Alfred Stieglitz Coll., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

classicism with the intuitive irrationalism of French philosopher Henri Bergson, or André Salmon’s claim that Pablo Picasso had “logically grasped” the geometry of cubism by “choosing the uncivilized artists as guides.”5 Conceptions of the primitive inform the reception of cubism across the whole prewar period, not just Picasso’s, Braque’s, and Derain’s Africanist periods of 1907–1908. Primitivist language is rife throughout the primary literature on cubism writ large for many of the artists themselves, for those sympathetic to them, and for those who opposed them. In the substantial body of statements from both the artists and their critics pro and con, concepts of the primitive identified with cultures indigenous to Europe were conflated with art that served to define the non-European “other” in the Western imagination. Visual documentation also reveals a significant relationship to ideas of the primitive throughout the movement’s history, for example, a photograph of Braque in his studio around 1911 with masks and musical instruments (figure 42) and the gallery view of the Picasso–Braque exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s “291” in December 1914 (figure 43), revealing their recent works—such as Picasso’s collage Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table (1912)—installed with a Kota reliquary (Gabon) and (to settle whether Stieglitz viewed African art as a wonder of nature) a large paper-wasp nest.6 Scholars have previously observed stylistic references to African sculpture in Picasso’s later cubist works and interpreted the act in a variety of ways. For

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Figure 44 Gelett Burgess, photograph of Picasso in his studio, 1908. From “The Wild Men of Paris,” Architectural Record 27, no. 5, May 1910, 407.

example William Rubin discussed the subtle appearance of Picasso’s New Caledonian finial figures—which hang on the wall in Gelett Burgess’s photograph of 1908 (figure 44)—in his Portrait of Kahnweiler (1910); indeed, Rubin notes that Picasso himself pointed out the reference.7 Rubin and Yve-Alain Bois have each discussed the relation between Picasso’s Grebo mask and his paper Guitar of 1912.8 These authors are interested in the style and language of Picasso’s art, and they both assert—from different perspectives—the importance of neo-Kantian theories of perception in the role played by African art in motivating cubists’ drive towards abstraction.9 This conclusion, however, from the vast evidence of the primary sources, was roundly rejected by the artists themselves and all but one of their contemporaneous supporters, Maurice Raynal.10 Despite this attention to issues of style, scholars have not considered the rich complexity of primitivism within broader cubist discourse, in terms either of the aesthetic debates that animated contemporary artists—from the most traditional academicians to avant-gardists—or of its political valences across a spectrum from Left to Right in the avant-guerre. This chapter deals with a number of key paradigms and tropes of the primitive informed by French colonialism, including notions of the “savage” and the grotesque; theories of the origin of creativity in both prehistoric and child art; theories of racial essence, both within and outside the borders of Europe; and the pathologizing of cubism as a sign of primitive regression and degeneration.

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Figure 45  (left) Hall of the Bisons, Paleolithic cave painting, 15,000–8000 bce. Altamira Caves, Spain.

Figure 46  (right) Child’s drawing (anonymous), in Picasso sketchbook Carnet deux, 1901. Charcoal on paper, 13 x 21 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

For French writers before 1914, concepts of the primitive apply to works as various as the caves at Altamira (15,000–8000 bce, discovered in Spain in 1879 but widely thought to be a hoax until proven genuine in 1902; figure 45), children’s drawings owned by Picasso in 1901 (figure 46), African art (see figures 29, 30 and 51), and the art of numerous other cultures distant in time and/or space, including ancient Egypt.11 For apologists of cubism, all such art represented bona fide models of untrammeled creativity, while for adversaries of the movement their influence on this anti-academic art evinced societal degeneration. Their common presence and the attendant language used to describe them indicate the malleability of their meanings for a range of audiences at the same time that they reveal shared notions informing reactions to the movement. A historicized understanding of the critical language of cubism—from its beginnings to World War I—thus needs to integrate the role of primitivism into our understanding of the movement and its reception. Concepts of primitivism encompassing the exotic, the ancient, and the infantile—in the name of authenticity or of degeneracy—shaped the understanding of cubism throughout the period brought to a close by the First World War. Cubism, in short, triggered a critical discourse revealing assumptions about the nature of art and the nature of experience that helps map the stress fractures modernism engendered in the culture of pre– World War I France.

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Figure 47 Georges Braque, drawing for Grand Nu (Large nude), 1907–1908. From Gellett Burgess, “The Wild Men of Paris,” Architectural Record 27, no. 5, May 1910, 405. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

T h e L a n g ua g e o f t h e “ P r i m i t i v e ”

The American children’s writer Gelett Burgess, author of the poem “Purple Cow,”12 visited Paris in the winter of 1908–1909. For an account to be published in New York’s Architectural Record, he sought out the most “shocking” new developments in the art world and in so doing interviewed a number of key modernists, including Braque, Derain, Matisse, Metzinger, and Picasso.13 In his resulting essay, “The Wild Men of Paris,” he reenacted Conrad’s journey to the “heart of darkness”14 but found the primitive beating within the heart of Europe. In writing his article, Burgess gave us one of the earliest documents of cubism, albeit one that was ambivalently tongue-in-cheek. What struck him was not the mere geometric character of the works he reproduced, such as Braque’s preliminary drawing for his Grand Nu (1908; figure 47), Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; plate 9) or Three Women (1907–1908). What interested Burgess most was their ugliness and primitivist character, though he did not like these developments any more than did the laughing crowds he observed at the salon. But he saw pretty clearly what was at stake: It was an affording quest, analyzing such madness as this. I had studied the gargoyles of Oxford and Notre Dame, I had mused over the art of the Niger and of Dahomey, I had gazed at Hindu monstrosities, Aztec mysteries and many other primitive grotesques; and it had come over me that

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there was a rationale of ugliness as there was a rationale of beauty; . . . perhaps, one was but the negative of the other . . . which might have its own value and esoteric meaning. Men had painted and carved grim and obscene things when the world was young. Was this revival a sign of some second childhood of the race, or a true rebirth of art? 15

Burgess pointed out one of the keys to cubism in 1908: a purposeful simplification and distortion of forms in the spirit of seeking a direct expressiveness associated with what modernists took to be “primitive” art of both European and non-European cultures. Evoking Gothic England and France, Hindu India, sub-Saharan Africa, and the New World, he conjured both the present and the past, the exotic and the grotesque,16 the Christian and the pagan. More than that, he identified a “rationale of ugliness . . . which might have its own value and esoteric meaning,” segueing directly to European Paleolithic art as its originary moment. Burgess is supported in this mix of ideas by Derain, who owned a Fang mask from the French Congo that was influential on his Bathers (1907; figures 29 and 48) and other works. Derain equated his own embrace of African art with a return to “nature”: The Egyptian figures have simplicity, dignity, directness, unity; they express emotion almost as if by a conventional formula, like writing itself, so direct it is. So I seek a logical method of rendering my idea. These Africans being primitive, uncomplex, uncultured, can express their thought by a direct appeal to the instinct. Their carvings are informed with emotion. So Nature gives me the material with which to construct a world of my own, governed . . . by instinct and sentiment. 17

Like Burgess, Derain projected his own motives and desires onto his interpreta-

Figure 48 André Derain, Bathers, 1907. Oil on canvas, 132.1 x 195 cm. Museum of Modern Art, William S. Paley and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Funds. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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tion of Egyptian and African art and culture. Braque echoed Derain’s assumptions in his own statement to Burgess when he said: I must . . . create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume, of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is a mere pretext for a decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. 18

The terms these artists and writer employ—primitive, grotesque, instinct, emotion, simplicity, directness, subjective, and nature—are used here to describe the initial phase of cubism through the winter of 1908–1909. As the terms suggest, for these modernists primitivism was not a style but an act of self-authentication—whether modeled on the art of children, cavemen or Africans—locating the source of creativity within the artist in a romantic merger with the elemental that served the purpose of liberating the self. The rediscovery of an elemental self stripped of societal accretions justifies the sorts of naive distortions and extreme simplifications that emulate the art they deemed primitive and have everything to do with what would become cubism throughout the movement’s

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Figure 49 Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902–1904. Oil on canvas, 73 x 91.9 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The George W. Elkins Collection.

Figure 50 Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897. Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 200.7 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim.

prewar history. This goes a long way toward explaining how the entire cubist movement could be viewed as primitivist, and not just by its detractors. The appeal of the late work of Paul Cézanne and Henri Rousseau is continuous with this discourse. Like the cubists, Cézanne’s departures from traditional structures of space and form were made in the name of individual sensibility and the perception of the artist. Rather than representing a break from the Africanized primitivism of 1907–1908, the cubists’ continuing embrace of Cézanne may represent their identification with a critical discourse that labeled Cézanne a modernist primitive. Richard Shiff has examined the ways the concept of the “primitive naïf ”—the artist whose gaucherie guarantees his sincerity, spontaneity, and originality—informs criticism of Cézanne by such contemporary writers as Maurice Denis and Gustave Geffroy (figure 49).19 Cézanne himself embraced this interpretation, as Paul Smith and Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer have shown, identifying himself with the “folk” of his native Provence and signaling his allegiance to his “race” rooted in a Latin “Golden Age.”20 Rousseau too figured as a hero for the cubists for his untutored, childlike art, which conflated a naive European folk style with imaginary exotic subjects, as in The Sleeping Gypsy (1897; figure 50).21 The cubism supporter Roger Allard pointed to Rousseau’s importance in an essay of 1911, retailing how Robert Delaunay, Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, and Metzinger collaborated to present a retrospective exhibition of forty-seven paintings by “Le Douanier” Rousseau at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants as a true “primitive” and key precursor to cubism.22 Apollinaire—the chief cubism supporter of the era—devoted a long article

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to a memoir of Rousseau as late as 1914, paying homage to his achievements and asserting that he “painted with the purity, the grace and the consciousness of a primitive” and was among “the most daring and most significant French artists of the last few generations.”23 Though some have dismissed this homage as sentimentality, Apollinaire’s intellectual and emotional sincerity is important to recognize.

Cubism and Primitivism

Tracing primitivist tropes through the primary literature reveals that they are used both positively and negatively, and that they range—in significantly imperfect counterpoint—from the political Right to the Left. Needless to say, the writers pursue their own intellectual, and frequently political, projects for which cubism was a vehicle. In fact, it is this very complication that makes the primary literature of cubism such a fascinating expression of French culture at this historical moment. André Salmon, in his book La Jeune peinture française (Youthful French painting, 1912), gives his well-known eyewitness account of Picasso’s development of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and its dependence on “Oceanic and African charmers.” He wrote: The artist had already become excited about the black Africans, whom he placed well above the Egyptians. His enthusiasm was not sustained by a vain appetite for the picturesque. Polynesian or Dahomean images appeared “sensible” to him. Picasso, in completely changing his work, would inevitably offer us an aspect of the world not in keeping with what we had learned to see. 24

For Salmon, this major painting led directly to Picasso’s later cubism, and with that base he built his defense of the cubist movement. Discussing the moment of early cubism in 1908, he wrote, “Picasso too had ‘meditated on geometry,’ and, in choosing the uncivilized artists as guides, he was not unaware of their barbarism. Quite simply, he logically grasped that they had attempted the real figuration of being.” He concluded that Picasso “wants to give us a total representation of man and things,” revealing how Salmon viewed works like Picasso’s Nude (1910; plate 12) in relation to the Teke figure acquired by the Musée d’Ethnographie in 1904 (figure 51). Salmon invoked the sculptural “endeavor of the barbarian image makers,” asserting that Picasso was aware of translating three dimensions into “painting, a two-dimensional art, and that is why Picasso must also create by situating these balanced human figures outside the laws of academicism and the anatomical system, in a space rigorously consistent with the unexpected freedom of motion.”25 Salmon’s reference to “the unexpected freedom of

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Figure 51 Teke figure, Republic of the Congo (formerly French Congo). Wood, h. 29.9 cm. Musée de l’Homme, Paris.

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motion” points to the influence of the mathematician Henri Poincaré’s “tactile and motor sensations” and its echo in Gleizes’s and Metzinger’s theoretical text Du “Cubisme”;26 this allusion dates his observation to Picasso’s cubism of 1910–1912, the period when both books were being written, rather than to his earlier Africanist period. Salmon was clearly discussing the importance of African sculpture for an antiacademic art consonant with Poincaré’s concept of the experience of space. Critics hostile to cubism attacked the movement in similar terms to those in which its supporters praised it. Louis Vauxcelles, art critic for Gil Blas, was a major defender of modernism but hated the geometrizing of early cubism. In his review of Braque’s exhibition at Kahnweiler’s in 1908, referring to such works as Houses at L’Estaque (plate 13), he wrote: Mr. Braque is a very audacious young man. The disconcerting example of Picasso and Derain has emboldened him. Then too, perhaps the style of Cézanne and the reminiscences of the static art of the Egyptians obsess him unduly. He constructs deformed men of metal, terribly simplified. He has contempt for form, reduces everything—places and figures and houses—to geometrical patterns, to cubes. Let us not make fun of him, since he is sincere. 27

Vauxcelles clearly described Braque as a primitivist whose “deformed” and “simplified” art recalls “the style of Cézanne” and “the static art of the Egyptians”; this hybrid aesthetic led Braque to reduce nature “to geometrical patterns, to cubes,” a conclusion that gave birth to the movement’s absurd name. Rather than identifying Cézanne’s art with Western rationality and that of ancient Egypt with the irrational, Vauxcelles treated both as value-neutral signifiers whose unnatural coupling is the result of Braque’s pathological “obsession,” which in turn gave birth to the monstrosity that is cubism. In a last-minute concession, Vauxcelles forgave Braque for being “sincere,” suggesting that he may yet step back from the brink and produce a more formally understandable art. Such ambiguity speaks to the anxiety experienced by critics like Vauxcelles, who sought to reconcile conflicting notions of the primitive in reference to artists who openly proclaimed the hybridity of their primitivizing maneuvers. In an interview published in Les Nouvelles in 1909, Vauxcelles compared the primitivism of Braque to that of Matisse, referring to such works as The Dance (I) (early 1909; plate 14) in the clearest statement linking child art and cave art to the development of modernism (figure 52): “From regression to regression, Matisse goes back to the art of the caverns, to the babble of the infant who with a pointed flint traces the silhouette of a reindeer’s head onto the wall. . . . He schematizes, he synthesizes.” He then declared, “And the Kanaka cubes of M. Braque are the direct result.”28 Thus, though Vauxcelles defended the fauves,29 he rejected Braque’s geometrized images—as in his infamous Houses at L’Estaque, which inspired the contemptuous term “cubism”—as an unfortunate outcome of Matisse’s legitimate quest for the primitive. Unlike Matisse, whose primitivizing references were cast by Vaux-

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Figure 52 Reindeer, Paleolithic cave painting, 15,000–8000 bce. Altamira Caves, Spain.

celles as safely confined within the geopolitical borders of Europe, Braque went a step too far by modeling his art on Melanesian (Kanaka) sculptures from the French colony of New Caledonia.30 Braque’s painting, therefore, was the product of an unhealthy, obsessive personality, whereas Matisse—despite his impulse to regress—maintained a more balanced sanity. Like Vauxcelles, but with considerably more sympathy, Léon Werth identified the cubism of 1909 with primitivism. Werth was a novelist and anarchist who combined an interest in avant-garde art with political activism, revealed by his accompanying Salmon to a May 1910 demonstration organized by socialists and anarchists to protest the execution of the French cobbler Jean-Jacques Liabeuf as well as by his polemical contributions to the leftist journal Cahiers d’aujourd’hui from 1912 to 1914.31 Werth was subject to police surveillance at the time he wrote his article on Picasso’s exhibition at Wilhelm Udhe’s gallery in May 1910.32 Given Salmon’s close links with both figures, it is very likely that Werth was aware of Picasso’s own anarchist genealogy33; the article itself is testament to Werth’s forthright honesty in admiring Picasso’s ambitions and criticizing his pictorial results. He described “a landscape of cubic roofs, cubic chimneys, and trees,” likely referring to Picasso’s Factory at Horta de Ebro (1909; figure 53): I could say that Mr. Picasso’s innovative painting is essentially traditional, that it is linked to the great traditions of instinct and to the great traditions of mind. I might invoke the savages of Oceania—no more than necessary—and I might invoke Cézanne, for whom nature was a sphere, a cone, and a cylinder, and who said so. 34

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Figure 53 Pablo Picasso, Factory at Horta de Ebro, summer 1909. Oil on canvas, 50.7 x 60.2 cm. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

As discussed above, Werth’s claim that such works invoked both Cézanne and “the savages of Oceania” echoes the widespread identification of Cézanne as a “modern primitive,” analogous to a non-European counterpart like the roof finials from New Caledonia hanging behind Picasso in Burgess’s 1908 photograph (figure 44). But unlike Vauxcelles, Werth did not attribute the cubists’ conflation of geometrizing techniques derived from Cézanne and Oceanic art to “obsession,” suggesting, rather, that the youthful Picasso was groping toward aesthetic resolution in what is still an experimental art form. As Werth put it, “Mr. Picasso, who fancies himself a geometer, will one day, without knowing it, speak a painter’s language.” Werth’s conclusions are startling inasmuch as geometry—a term rooted in European rationality—is here associated with a drive to primitivize and with artistic models outside the Western tradition. He then speculated:

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The relationship between the geometrical figures created by the mind and the forms of nature has preoccupied philosophers. And if geometry owes its certainties to the suggestions of our senses, why not—reversing directions—go from geometry to nature or else, why not, starting from nature, proceed to a mathematics of the senses, a mathematics that would be art? 35

Werth here alluded to the cubists’ debt to the theory of conventionalism developed by Poincaré, who, in tracing the origins of geometry back to its perceptual roots inadvertently enabled the cubists to create “a mathematics of the senses, a mathematics that would be art.”36 Once again a term traditionally associated with rationality was separated from its Cartesian moorings and cast adrift in the realm of the primitive. Apart from Werth’s mild criticism of Picasso, cubism met with serious opposition among cultural arbiters on the left as well as the right. Henri Guilbeaux—a champion of neoimpressionism and a self-declared leftist with ties to anarchosyndicalism—reviewed Picasso’s exhibition at Galerie Vollard in Les Hommes du Jour in January 1911.37 He was exemplary of leftists skeptical of the movement, judging it more of a publicity stunt than a true artistic endeavor.38 He passionately defended neoimpressionism, but poked fun at Picasso, who “fancied himself the humble successor to the primitives.” He concluded, “What he offers us today”—which would include works like Nude (1910; plate 12)—“accentuates the intentional distortions, which sometimes reach the level of the grotesque, the ugly.” What particularly disturbed him was “women with unappetizing flesh, who, thanks to the painter’s whim, are monstrous or grotesque.” For Guilbeaux, such primitivist distortions culminated in cubism, a position he shared with critics and supporters across the board, including Vauxcelles, Salmon, and Apollinaire. In an article reviewing the Salon des Indépendants in Les Hommes du Jour in April 1911 and citing the work of Léger, Francis Picabia, and Metzinger (whose Nude [1910; figure 54] he would have viewed there), Guilbeaux perceptively noted the influence of “Le Douanier” Rousseau; but this influence, he says, “added to that of Gauguin and more recently to that of Picasso, has produced grotesque results, ridiculous, made it seems in order to shock the middle class (épater les bourgeois).”39 These writers revealed the association of cubism with primitivism into 1911. The key terms defining that relationship were the “ugly” and the “grotesque,” both Bakhtinian counterparts to the “beautiful” and symbolic tropes for cubist opposition to the aesthetic norms of Western painting, which often focused on the female nude as the crucial signifier of transgression (Guilbeaux thought nudes should be “appetizing”). Guilbeaux’s use of the term “grotesque” to describe cubism clearly evinced his association of the movement with threedimensional African sculpture,40 while his preoccupation with Picasso’s uglification (laidification) of the female nude was meant to signify the audacity of the cubist project, which overturned all the aesthetic codes used to portray the female nude as a Western ideal. His criticism thus resembles that of Burgess, but

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Figure 54 Jean Metzinger, Nude, 1910 (lost). From Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du “Cubisme” (Paris: E. Figuière, 1912). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

whereas Burgess gave the cubists the benefit of the doubt, Guilbeaux angrily condemned them for exploiting the nude for mere shock value. The ongoing significance of a primitivist genealogy for cubism of 1909 and after is affirmed in Salmon’s short piece introducing Braque to readers of Paris-Journal in 1911: “Is he not a Black king (a gigantic king) who has come to get himself bleached at the École des Beaux-Arts? Inadequate laundering! Georges Braque went to other steam rooms to wash himself clean of tradition.”41 In this playful portrait, the artist becomes the “primitive,” an African king who has shed himself of tradition and who now stands for a healthy physicality in his life and a lack of social pretention appropriate for an innovative and déclassé modernist. All these writers were not wrong to see African art in later reaches of cubism: numerous works, including Picasso’s Nude or his Portrait of Kahnweiler (1910), continued to

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conjure with styles of African sculpture on view in the Musée d’Ethnographie, including Baga, Teke (figure 51), and Fang figures, all from former French west and central African colonies, with their simplified masklike faces, short legs, prominent buttocks, and elongated trunks and necks. In 1912, two questionnaires on cubism highlighted a new mode of attack by figures outside the movement, including mainstream artists exhibiting at the whole range of salons, from the Indépendants to the conservative Salon nationale des Beaux-Arts and Salon des artistes français, and critics as various as the conservative Camille Mauclair and the radical futurist F. T. Marinetti. The two “enquêtes” were Olivier Hourcade’s “Survey on Cubism,” published in L’action in spring 1912, and Henriquez-Phillipe’s “The Artists Look At Cubism” in the July–December 1912 issue of Les Annales politiques et littéraires.42 Such criticism is remarkable both for its general vitriol and the nature of the accusations deployed against the cubists, which ranged from xenophobic calls for a boycott by the press to claims of charlatanism and denunciations for incompetence. Rather than addressing cubism’s “grotesque” forms, many assaulted its technique, claiming that the cubists’ singular focus on rudimentary drawing resulted in unfinished canvases. To grasp their position, we can compare Heinrich Lautensack’s drawing in his treatise on perspective and draftsmanship, Des Circkels und Richtscheyts, auch der Perspectiva und Proportion der Menscher (1564) with its demonstration of geometrification of masses and Juan Gris’s Hommage à Picasso (Homage to Picasso), shown in the Salon des Indépendants in 1912, with its extreme simplification, fragmentation and geometrizing (figure 55 and plate 15). For many, cubist treatment of form was pathologized as a form of primitive regression rather than as a deliberate uglification symbolic of avant-gardism. African art drops from sight as a signifier in favor of the art of children and the insane. These artists’ assertions followed a pattern earlier established by critics of the impressionists, but whereas they had faulted painters like Claude Monet Figure 55 Heinrich Lautensack, drawing from Des Circkels und Richtscheyts, auch der Perspectiva und Proportion der Menscher (Frankfurt: Georg Raben für Sigmund Feyerabend und Heinrich Lautensack, 1564).

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Figure 56 Benoît Benoni-Auran, Holy Family, Chapelle Notre Dame du Chêne, Vion, 1899–1901. Oil on canvas, 385 x 230 cm.

for making the preparatory method of the academic sketch an end in itself,43 cubists were accused of primitivizing their art through recourse to childrens’ drawing manuals and preliminary exercises in drawing still in use at the École des Beaux-Arts. Comparing these mainstream critical reactions to impressionism and to cubism, the focus shifts from color to drawing as the principal stylistic element, but the terms of discourse—which made avant-garde art a diacritical subset of academic technique—remained remarkably similar. Comparing some of these academic artists’ own art to cubist work helps us locate their critiques within their own practices. Charles-Lucien Léandre was a student of Alexandre Cabanel and a wellknown caricaturist44 whose cartoon The Model’s Mother (1901) is set in an artist’s studio and reveals something of Léandre’s expectations for painting. Our glimpse over the artist’s shoulder of a fulsome nude frolicking with cupids positions Léandre with the sort of work for which his teacher was famous. Approached by Henriquez-Philippe, he responded: Cubism! Well, it did not require a great deal of effort on their part to find the system! I ask you, what modest teacher of drawing . . . does not know that the planes forming the surfaces of a body can be inscribed within all the geometrical figures! Those are the abc’s of drawing. 45

Benoît Benoni-Auran, another student of Cabanel, regularly exhibited works in a realist style at the Salon des Indépendants and Salon d’Automne, a more idealist version of which he used for religious commissions (figure 56).46 He reiterated the complaint that cubist technique was little more than an art school drawing exercise—something like Luca Cambiaso’s Study of Cubic Figures (figure 57)—although he was not entirely unsympathetic: “The Cubists? They invented nothing. They draw in accordance with the first principles taught in school. . . . A rough draft does not satisfy me.” The interviewer asked, “Do you believe that the Cubists’ canvases are only rough drafts?” He replied, “No, certainly not. They want to simplify drawing. That is a fine desire. But to simplify excessively is to return to principles, and I find that that is insufficient.” He then added more sympathetically, “But I would not think of denying that the Cubists have talent. They are artists, true artists, and that makes me think. Their works interest me a great deal. But I do not understand painting as they do. I believe that these artists, whom I respect, are making a mistake.”47 Ernest-Henri Dubois was a noted sculptor of statues, busts, and medals; he claimed that the cubist geometrizing of figures was a common means for determining “planes of construction, light, and shadow.”48 But the cubists, he felt, erred in mistaking “a means of execution” for “a result.”49 These same claims were also advanced by Vauxcelles, who in October 1912 claimed in Gil Blas that the cubists’ doctrine is “within the reach of children” and in December repeated that the cubists’ geometrizing of form was in rank imitation of basic drawing exercises taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.50

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Figure 57 Luca Cambiaso, Study of Cubic Figures, sixteenth century. Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Uffizi, Florence.

The painter Luc-Olivier Merson, a member of the Institut, and Albert Robida, a painter and caricaturist,51 went further with this charge against the cubists and simultaneously pathologized them: Robida did so with a touch of irony, Merson without. Robida claimed that the cubists had embarked on a “dangerous game,” indulging in a “delirium of the palette” for “laughs”; their art had attracted not art critics “but doctors specializing in mental illness.”52 Merson asserted that the images published in Gleizes and Metzinger’s tract On “Cubism,” such as Metzinger’s Nude (1910; figure 54) or Gleizes’s The Bathers (both works were exhibited at the 1912 Indépendants), were comparable to the art of the mentally ill in Marcel Réja’s book on the art of the insane (1907) or to the schematic drawings in Gaston Quénioux’s instruction manual for primary school children (1910).53 Merson compared cubist paintings to the art of not only “children or sickos,” he also included “Australian savages” in the mix, thus constituting a trilogy commonly associated with the primitive.54 His own Truth (1901), a staircase mural for the Hôtel de Watel-Dehaynin, Paris (plate 16)55—rooted in neo-Renaissance classicism complete with allegory of truth in the form of a nude female—reveals his aesthetic distance from the cubists. Many artists correlated cubism with primitive degeneracy, encompassing notions of the grotesque and technical oversimplification. Charles René de Saint-Marceaux was a symbolist sculptor exhibiting at the conservative salons whose own works embraced a colonial aspect of the primitive, as is clear in his terracotta mask studies of colonial women, such as L’Algérienne (The Algerian

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Figure 58 Charles René de SaintMarceaux, La Tahitienne, c. 1890. Terra-cotta, h. 37.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

woman; c. 1889) and La Tahitienne (The Tahitian woman; c. 1890; figure 58). This admirer of female colonial beauty declared cubism to be “an invasion of systematic ugliness in art.”56 He echoed Burgess’s early reference to a “rationale of ugliness,” evoking sub-Saharan aspects of the movement rather than his own Orientalism. This argument conflating cubist geometry with an unbalanced return to the ABCs of drawing elicited a tongue-in-cheek response by the anonymous author of an article published in Les Hommes du Jour in 1913, which advocated “Amorphisme” or “Formlessness,” parodied in the illustration of an empty rectangle by “Popaul Picador,” a thinly veiled Pablo Picasso.57 The anonymous author patiently explained that the cubist painters should not be “reproached for their geometrical preoccupations” as it “was difficult for them to conceive of the objects in a less rudimentary form,” suggesting that the aim of the cubists was precisely to stop with the base building blocks of art. That they still conceived of objects at all—suggested the author, who may have been Francis Picabia—was due to their still being “the victims of the preoccupations and prejudices of their time.”58

C u b i s m a n d “ R ac e ”

Two important apologists for cubism located the primitive within the artists themselves by identifying them with notions of regional “race.” Olivier Hourcade was an ardent regionalist who founded the journals Les Marches du Sud-Ouest, which trumpeted Hourcade’s native Gascony, and La Revue de France et des pays français, which promoted regionalist movements throughout French-speaking Europe and North America. In La Revue de France in February 1912, he pushed his regionalist agenda on the art critical front by arguing that cubist painter Félix

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Figure 59 Félix Tobeen [Félix Élie Bonnet], Scène de port à Ciboure (Port scene in Ciboure), 1912. Pen and ink on paper, 46.5 x 61.5 cm.

Tobeen, “with the fervor of a primitive . . . wants to convey his [Basque] homeland.” According to Hourcade, Tobeen’s paintings, such as Scène de port à Ciboure (Scene of Ciboure port; 1912; figure 59), which simplifies form in a geometrified landscape, and the more abstract Le Bassin dans le parc (The pond in the park; 1913; plate 17), sing tunes in patois and in Basque. That pink soil is made of the union, in the painter’s soul, of the thousand lights that illuminate the Basque region, and maintains within itself the dominant hue of the pink sand of Ciboure. . . . It is not unusual . . . to find, on the canvas, a corner of pink fresco painted with the dirt of his home region. 59

He added that Tobeen’s models “are true Basques. . . . We do not have before us some nondescript peasants of 1911, we have the race, the peasant who has always been, and whose dialect will not give way to the French language.” Hourcade— the most fiercely regionalist of cubism’s critics—celebrated the essentialized and timeless peasant rooted in the soil of France, as opposed to his urban counterpart, who is part of history unfolding in the modern era.60 The same argument essentializing “race” and region was articulated by the Italian Ardengo Soffici in his article “Picasso and Braque,” published in La Voce in August 1911.61 Like many among the Italian avant-garde, Soffici identified culture as a form of secular religion able to inspire the moral and political regeneration of Italian society.62 His prewar endorsement of modernist aesthetics was filtered through his fierce embrace of the doctrine of toscanità, or Tuscanness, which he believed would unite avant-gardism with indigenous populism. Thus, Soffici came to view himself as the Florentine equivalent of Cézanne. Like his French model, he embraced both modernist aesthetics and his regional identity, substituting Tuscany’s landscape and culture for Cézanne’s Provence. In his article, Soffici sought to reconcile cubism with regional identity through Picasso’s status as an outsider bridging the gap between modern Paris and his native

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Spain. He recast Picasso’s move from the early Africanizing phase to his cubism of 1911 in terms of the artist’s racial status as a Spaniard: The decisive step, the one that led Picasso into a realm of much more advanced experimentation, came [when he began to study] the painting and sculpture of the ancient Egyptians and the related—and perhaps even more innately synthetic—art of the savage peoples of southern Africa. . . . Perhaps it was thanks to his almost Moorish origin that once Picasso had come to comprehend and love an art that was both ingenuous and great, simple and expressive, rough and refined, he immediately appropriated its essential virtues.

But, he then claimed, as a European “refined by culture” and imbued with “modern sensibilities,” Picasso would “go much further in the expression of ” plastic values intrinsic to African art in order to create a new aesthetic at once modern and primitive.63 Soffici claimed that the hybrid nature of cubist primitivism— which reached beyond Europe to encompass the art of sub-Saharan Africa—was the product of Picasso’s own miscegenation. Happily, Picasso’s “almost Moorish” origins did not overwhelm his European sensibility, suggesting that cubism as an idiom should only be practiced by Europeans in close proximity to African culture, such as Italians or Spaniards.64 The latter may have inherited the taint of Moorish blood, but their art remained fundamentally European. One of the commonest references in the literature on cubism was to cave art—such as that in Altamira, Spain—evoking the origins of European creativity and frequently compared to child art, such as one of the children’s drawings of circa 1901 owned by Picasso (figures 45, 46 and 52). According to his friend and secretary Jaume Sabartés, Picasso himself later declared that “no one has made anything better than primitive sculpture” and went on specifically to admire “the precision of the engraved lines in the caverns,” observing that “the Assyrian bas-reliefs still retain this purity of expression.”65 Readers will recall that Louis Vauxcelles asserted in 1909 that, as in The Dance (I) (plate 14), “Matisse goes back to the art of the caverns, to the babble of the infant who with a pointed flint traces the silhouette of a reindeer’s head onto the wall.”66 And Olivier Hourcade, in his essay on cubism in 1912, claimed that all art had its origins in the prehistoric cave painting of his own native region of Gascony.67 Art critic Jacques Rivière shared this view of the importance of cave art, even while he pursued his own conservative agenda in La Revue d’Europe et d’Amérique in March 1912.68 Elevating André Lhote above all others—as in his Entrée du bassin à flot de Bordeaux (Entrance to the wet dock of Bordeaux; 1912; figure 60)—he went to the greatest lengths to defend cubism in light of presumed motives behind prehistoric art: If the savage seeks to fix the image of an animal he saw bolting away . . . he will try to return to it its integrity, the only thing that interests him . . . ; far from attaching himself to the particularities of his vision, . . . he will attempt . . . to restore the object itself, pure, alone, intact, and true. 69

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Rivière makes direct conclusions about contemporary art from what he takes to be these primal features of creativity: We now understand the true meaning of painting, by virtue of its origin. . . . The painter . . . will not forget his naive ancestor’s intention: he will have in the face of nature . . . that secret and sly greediness that seeks to seize hold of the object while turning it completely around. . . . But, in order to do that, he will have to show it as he has never seen it. 70

Thus cubism’s geometrizing and simultaneity is justified in terms of the prehistoric, and fully European, primitive.

T h e C ultural P o l i t i c s o f C r i t i c i s m

Many articles reveal social and political tensions in these aesthetic debates of the avant-guerre, mingling numerous primitivist tropes. One of the most virulent of cubism’s detractors was Urbain Gohier, the well-known leftist journalist. 71

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Figure 60 André Lhote, Entrée du bassin à flot de Bordeaux (Entrance to the wet dock of Bordeaux), 1912. Oil on canvas, 97 x 130 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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Figure 61 Henri Le Fauconnier, L’Abondance (Abundance), 1910–1911. Oil on canvas, 191 x 123 cm. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.

His article “Our Painting” in Le Journal in October 1911 reviewed the Salon d’Automne with its famous “Cubist” Room 8, which included Metzinger’s Le Goûter (1911) and Le Fauconnier’s L’Abondance (Abundance; 1910–1911; figure 61). Asking “Isn’t there enough ugliness in the world?,” he offers the painters’ answer in his own words: Our canvases did not come from our imagination, but were taken from life, from a neurasthenic, hysterical, epileptic, alcoholic, . . . morphine-addicted humanity. . . . Thus, these bizarre anatomies, these deformations, these contortions, these drab or frantic faces are your own. Our painting is faithful.

Gohier, who preferred academic classicism, found cubism perfectly expressive of a decadent society. In the name of logic, balance, and “our heredity, our climate, our noble and sweet horizons”—all essentialized aspects of the French race and tradition he was defending—he rejected the primitivist basis of cubist paintings,

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which looked like “the efforts of a caveman,” and he concluded that modernism was indeed a realist image of present-day degeneracy in art and society.72 Among responses in the press to the cubist paintings on view at the Salon d’Automne of 1912, Gabriel Mourey, the art critic for Le Journal, thought the cubists “the most deplorable, the most reprehensible, the most dangerous” artists and, above all, mostly foreigners. He concluded, “We are pursuing at this very moment the syndicates of teachers, who propagate in youth the hatred of patriotism; what a pity that there exists no law permitting a judiciary action against the painters who propagate in the public the hatred of beauty!”73 This link between foreigners and ugliness in the realm of the fine arts was made again by the socialist Pierre Lampué, the ranking senior municipal councilor of the City of Paris and its former president, who publicly challenged the right of the cubists to exhibit in government-owned buildings such as the Grand Palais, where the Salon d’Automne was held.74 His attack on cubism cast its “deformation of art” as an assault on the French government, largely by foreigners like the Spaniard Juan Gris, whose Homage to Picasso (1912; plate 15) was in the Salon des Indépendants that year, or Franco-Cuban Francis Picabia, whose Dances at the Spring I (1912) hung in the Salon d’Automne as he wrote, along with works by the Czech Kupka, Italian Amadeo Modigliani, and Polish-American Elie Nadelman. Of course the Spaniard Picasso was well-known in the press, and it did not help that Lampué took Metzinger to be German.75 Lampué’s open letter in Le Matin to the undersecretary of the fine arts surpassed Mourey’s scorn with an accusation that this art actually represented an attack on “the dignity of the government . . . since it appears to be taking such a scandal under its protection, by housing such horrors in a national monument.” The cubists “act in the art world the way Apaches do in ordinary life.”76 The term apache was frequently bruited in the press to denote anarchists and street riffraff (many of them recent immigrants from Spain, Italy, and Corsica), complete with its primitivist association with the fiercest resisters to Euro-American colonization on the North American plains.77 For the pictorial “horrors” that resulted Lampué specifically evoked the colonialist language of la mission civilisatrice.78 Lampué himself was a successful photographer specializing in architecture who exhibited for many years in the photographic salons. His works, such as the Frontispiece of Byzantine Architecture (figure 62), could be purchased at the Giraudon Bibliothèque photographique, which commissioned and sold photographs of works of art, architecture, and archaeological monuments to artists and was located across the street from the École des Beaux-Arts.79 In addition to commercial motives, Lampué seems to have manifested the idealistic and ideological mission of preserving and promoting the classical and Christian past; hence the cubist “attack on tradition” violated nationalist sentiments encoded in his own aesthetic position. His denunciation needs to be understood in the environment of patriotism and xenophobia, with particular animus against the Germans, that was mount-

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Figure 62 Pierre Lampué, Frontispiece of Byzantine Architecture, n.d.

ing during the buildup to World War I. Recent scholars have studied the ways this nationalist discourse was taken up in debates over French culture and the related fear that the French were being subjected to a foreign invasion on commercial and cultural fronts in advance of the military.80 Lampué’s letter was far from being a merely rhetorical gesture; it raised serious political issues and was taken up in the Chamber of Deputies for debate at the level of the state. Only the spirited defense of Matisse’s friend Marcel Sembat, the socialist deputy from Montmartre, kept the worst repercussions at bay.81 As the cubist movement developed (rather than disappearing as a foolish fashion, as some had hoped), accusations from cultural conservatives grew increasingly negative. But such views were not always generated along political party lines. Defense of cubism from the left wing—for example, from Signac, Gustave Kahn, Salmon, Apollinaire, Werth, and Hourcade—counterbalanced attacks from such prominent leftist writers as Gohier, Vauxcelles, and Guilbeaux.82 And Lampué’s assault was tempered not only by the defense of the socialist Sembat, but by the open-minded reserve of a conservative academician like BenoniAuran and the thoughtful explanations of the conservative Rivière.83 All this criticism of cubism running throughout the entire prewar movement, in short, shared repeated patterns of primitivist tropes. On the one hand, the models of cave art, child art, and all the non-European cultures distant in time or space lead to proclamations of sincerity, spontaneity, authenticity, and an admirable directness—even brutality—that lie at the heart of the new painting. On the other hand, they lead to arrested development of academic technique, deformation, ugliness, savagery, madness, and social degeneracy. Regardless of political stripe or aesthetic taste, however, none of these critics missed the primitivism driving the cubist movement.

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The cubists themselves, living through the same cultural, political, and social forces as their critics and apologists, understood and variously played to such discursive expectations in their work: they could not have been surprised by the language in which the criticism was cast, pro or con. What this study makes clear is that cubism’s detractors and apologists shared the same operative assumption: that cubism represented a quest for the primitive through its engagement with tropes of the European and non-European other. What befuddled cubism’s critics was the movement’s eclectic transgression of divisions between the rational and irrational, between the European folk and sub-Saharan Africa, and between advanced geometric form and those elemental impulses attributed to African and Oceanic art. These transgressions led its detractors to protest that cubist aesthetics did violence to some of Europe’s most cherished signifiers, such as the civilizing capacity for logic or veneration of the female nude. With the possible exception of Gauguin and the symbolists, no art movement had attempted to turn academic teaching so thoroughly against itself. Cubism was the first movement, both in its origins and sustained through its prewar development, to pursue the ambition of delineating the primitive in a universalizing frame, encompassing art from around the globe and reaching back to its primordial origins both in the form of cave painting and child drawing. That it was colonization that created this notion of the “global,” underwritten by new concepts of the “universal,” underscores the responsiveness of modernism in general and cubism in particular to significant changes in European culture and gives us some perspective on the cubists’ attempts to act as historical agents in their environment rather than as passive celebrants.

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4

Politics and Counterpolitics of Collage Picasso, Gris, and the Effects of War

Oh yes, I found that in the newspaper, and it was my way of showing I was against the war. —Pablo Picasso to Pierre Daix, apropos of Bottle of Suze (1912) Sometimes I wonder whether, in order to be fed, I shall not be forced to enlist for a war which does not concern me either by virtue of my nationality, character or ideas. All those of us who had sketched out our way through life must now change everything temporarily and get along as best we can. For, mon cher ami, I can see that, in the nightmare through which we are passing, previous engagements are no longer valid and each of us must make his own way. —Juan Gris to D.-H. Kahnweiler, August 16, 1914

To a major extent, understanding that most difficult and contested of modernist inventions—collage—hinges on understanding its relations to culture: culture as tradition (the past), popular/mass culture (the changing present), culture as ambition (the future). On the one hand, collage conjured with a new popular audience in the incorporation of mass-produced materials such as newsprint, artificial wood-grain paper, or commercial packaging, as well as in the evocation of popular culture in the form of music hall, cabaret songs, and jazz; on the other hand, the actual elite audience for such difficult modernist works of art seems to belie such populism.1 This is a fundamental contradiction within the practice of cubist collage. In this chapter I compare Pablo Picasso’s politicized collages—and the prewar period in which he made them—to those of Juan Gris, who worked to depoliticize his art in the entirely different atmosphere of the war itself. The previous chapter revealed how the development and reception of cubism was immersed in public debates of the day. It follows, then, that collage would be understood at that time as further primitivist attack on tradition, ever simplifying the treatment of form in innovative ways and ingeniously violating traditional uses of artistic materials. As I discussed in the introduction, Bakhtin’s

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term “heteroglossia” connotes precisely the complexity of “languages” these inventions spoke to the artists’ contemporaries. To compare Picasso’s and Gris’s uses of collage, I need first to look at Gris’s substantive career as a political satirist in the period before he became a cubist.

J u a n G r i s a n d P o l i t i c a l S at i r e

Gris, as much as Picasso, was an artist especially relevant to the project of this book, as he began as a draftsman and political cartoonist, addressing these works to a much wider audience than that for avant-garde art. His history of political engagement and published satire needs to be taken into account in order to understand his career and, especially, his collages. Although his earlier satire evinces his sharply socially critical position, in the collages of 1914 and after he attempted to distance his work from the political arena in which Picasso’s collages had operated. As I discussed more generally in chapter 1, the political cartoons of many avant-garde artists give us a novel view into how questions of subject, style, medium, and audience influenced the development of modernist idioms. The satirical graphics of such figures in the development of modernism have too often been viewed as irrelevant to their painting and dismissed for a variety of reasons. Assertions that these artists made the cartoons merely for profit or that the cartoons were neutral drawings given a political slant by the addition of captions deny the importance for the artists themselves of the issues their cartoons addressed. A good case in point is Gris, who has always been treated as an apolitical artist, whose cartoons have seemed to represent the best instance of “radicalization” by editors. For example, in his biographical monograph, Kahnweiler treated the cartoons as superlatively unimportant, mentioning them only in the context of how Gris made a living in Paris from 1906 to 1910.2 In 1983, Mark Rosenthal expressed the same view of this body of work, though he offered an astute appreciation of some of the cartoons’ formal effects as “signals” of his later work: “powerful juxtapositions of shapes, foreground-background reversals, patterning, and visual rhyming” as well as “prominent wall patterns, mirrors, doors, and windows.”3 As is common in discussions of Gris’s work, none of the cartoons reproduced convey political criticism in the nature of the drawing, and only one caption—of the sort that it has been easy to assume was composed by an editor—addresses a political subject. Marilyn McCully and Robert Rosenblum likewise perceptively noted the relationship between Gris’s cartoons and his later paintings, though looking only at the formal echoes between them.4 Christopher Green in 1992 went further in rightly suggesting that Gris inserted “deliberately artificial signs . . . from the idioms of caricature” into his later painting, purposely blurring the categories of high and low; yet in doing so, Gris “denies uncompromisingly the current caricatural tradition of ‘truthful’ realism and all that it entailed in

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terms of moral engagement with the social and political questions of the day.”5 This assertion does not hold up if we examine the larger body of Gris’s satirical production. The memoirs of Gris’s friends bear witness to an early “revolutionary” Juan Gris who was very concerned with social injustice. According to Alice Halicka, a painter and wife of Louis Marcoussis, “like his comrades [Van Dongen, Villon, Vallotton, Kupka, and Marcoussis], hate for society pushed this young rebel to substitute for vitriol and dynamite the acid of his drawings and the violence of his captions.” After joining the cubist movement, “he quickly took a place in the highest rank serving in this way art and revolution at the same time.”6 His friend, art critic Waldemar George, called Gris “this atheist, this revolutionary, this defaulter from the Spanish army.”7 Spanish art historian Juan Gaya Nuño, contradicting the prevailing view of Gris in French and Anglo-American accounts, wrote in 1975 that “everybody knows about his political convictions, which were totally republican [that is, in the Spanish context, antimonarchist], and his religious—or rather anti-religious—ideas.”8 This version of Gris, which his cartoons can affirm, combines the familiar trio of antiauthoritarianism, anticlericalism, and antimilitarism. Gaya Nuño added that Gris avoided military service and, since he did not pay the exemption fee, was officially a “fugitive” and could not return to Spain, just like his fellow countryman Picasso.9 On August 16, 1914, Gris wrote to his dealer, Kahnweiler, that the war “does not concern me either by virtue of my nationality, character, or ideas.”10 While Gris was almost certainly never a committed anarchist, he was allied to anarchism and socialism by virtue of his expressed antiauthoritarianism, antimilitarism, and anticlericalism; additionally he collaborated with writers such as Charles Malato for the anarchist L’assiette au beurre and published expressly anarchist cartoons in that venue. In 1906, Gris moved to Picasso’s apartment building, nicknamed the BateauLavoir, at the height of its life as an anarchist hang-out, and in 1908 was eating at Picasso’s every day, according to Gris himself in a letter to a friend in Spain.11 While his closeness to the Picasso circle alone would prove little about the influence of anarchist rhetoric on Gris, his political satire testifies to the importance of his brief involvement with the movement. Gris’s cartoons are extraordinarily inventive in their formal means, and formed for Gris—parallel to Van Dongen (see chapter 1)—an arena for experiment strongly related to his subsequent painting. Again, as with Van Dongen, many of his cartoons are explicitly political in a way not dependent on captions; in any case numerous drawings for cartoons include manuscript captions in Gris’s hand.12 A cartoon from L’assiette au beurre illustrated by Rosenthal seems to support the notion of Gris as disengaged from politics; an old man speaks to a younger man in a café (figure 63): “Formerly, young man, I was a pacifist. But age has come, and now I have understood that it is necessary to defend the honor of the country.” “With my skin?” . . . asks the younger man. “Well, of course! Not with

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mine!”13 Such an innocuous drawing could be easily politicized by a caption and has led to the assumption among scholars of several things that are either untrue or unknown: that it was not part of Gris’s commission to write the caption, that he was unconcerned with—or even unaware of—the final use to which his drawing would be put, and that he did not sympathize with the politics expressed by the work as published. But if we are to understand such a work, we need to look

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Figure 63 Juan Gris, “Autre fois, jeune home, j’ai été un pacifiste” (Formerly, young man, I was a pacifist), L’assiette au beurre, no. 392, October 3, 1908.

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at the entire issue of the journal in which it appeared and also grasp why the theme of pacifism mattered at that time. The cartoon in question was originally published in a special issue of L’assiette au beurre of October 3, 1908, entitled “Bruits de Guerre et Bruits de Paix” (“Noises of war and noises of peace”), the cover of which was also drawn and signed by Gris (plate 18). This was a period when the Germans and the French were frequently rattling their sabers over Morocco and other contested issues, threatening a war that finally came in 1914. On the cover, the chancellor of the German Empire is shown gesticulating at a podium, the olive branches of peace held aggressively aloft; yet exposing the deeper truth, toy cannons litter the podium and one long cannon shaft vulgarly emerges through the podium to threaten the audience. A quote from the German chancellor, Prince von Bülow, completes the association of images: “Instead of shells, we will, henceforth, only use olive branches, which we will throw upon the world. That is why we have need of many cannons.”14 This image, which reveals the deep desire for war and its inverted presentation as peace as well as acknowledging the military buildup in Germany, forms the context for the more well-known cartoon within. Both cartoons constitute antiwar statements, emphasizing the hypocrisy of Europe’s leaders and of ordinary warmongers exempt from the actual fighting. To represent Gris as unwittingly playing into the hands of an editor requires that we be ignorant of his work for the same issue’s cover, which no reader of the time would have been. In fact, the antiwar sentiments expressed in the cartoons are consonant with each other and continuous with Gris’s own refusal to fight in the war when it came six years later, as well as with pacifist statements he made at that time. Another Gris cartoon from a special issue of L’assiette entitled “Boucherie: Aux armes de Castile” (“Butchery: under the arms of castille”; November 20, 1909) depicts the execution of the famous Spanish anarchist educator Francisco Ferrer (figure 64). Ferrer, the founder of the first coeducational institution in Spain, l’Escuela Moderna (the Modern School), was accused by the Spanish government of single-handedly fomenting a terrible riot that took place in Barcelona in 1907 and came to be known as “Tragic Week.”15 The riot took place—at a time when Ferrer himself was in London—in response to severe repression of protests against unequal treatment of Barcelona’s citizenry by the Madrid government. Although Ferrer certainly did espouse libertarian ideas, people throughout Europe saw Ferrer’s execution as continuous with Spain’s bloody reputation during the Inquisition; protest marches took place in all the European capitals, and the one in Paris included many of Gris’s and Picasso’s friends. Picasso was reportedly afraid to join the march for fear of arrest and forcible return to Spain, where he too was in default of military service; I have been unable to discover what Gris did on that day.16 But Gris did boldly sign his name to this cartoon exalting Ferrer as a martyr to freedom. The dignified old man stands calmly before the execution wall, and is quoted as transcendently forgiving the conscripts who must carry out the order, saying “Aim well, my children.” The

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officer gives the command, the row of soldiers fires together—compositionally echoing Francisco Goya’s Third of May, 1808 (1814)—and the smoke from their guns rises to coalesce as an image of Liberty with her torch of Truth. Thus, the very act of brutality by the state, designed to discourage the anarchist movement, gives rise to fresh feelings of injustice and commitment to freedom from repression. This is not a cartoon whose political position depends upon the caption at

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Figure 64 Juan Gris, “On a beau bien viser, la Liberté est toujours hors d’atteinte” (They have beautiful aim, [but] Liberty is always out of reach), L’assiette au beurre, November 20, 1909.

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Figure 65 Juan Gris, “—Ah! ah! . . . vous vous permettez d’établir votre innocence après quinze mois d’instruction! . . . Allez, mais qu’on ne vous y reprenne plus!” (—Oh! . . . so you dare to establish your innocence after 15 months of inquiry! Get out of here, and don’t let us catch you again!), L’assiette au beurre, no.391, September 26, 1908.

all. Given the infamy of the event, Gris’s audience would have been keenly alert to the meaning of this graphic. In another cartoon published in L’assiette au beurre in 1908 (figure 65), a police official kicks a poor man out of his office with the memorable invective, “Oh! . . . so you dare to establish your innocence after 15 months of inquiry! Get out of here, and don’t let us catch you again!” This drawing stays within the boundaries of symbolist convention: rapidly receding space to a high horizon line blocked off by the policeman in the background, strong silhouettes, distorted figural form. Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard were doubtless the models for this kind of drawing that differs so much from his smooth-edged, conventional illustrations done in Spain two years earlier. But its criticism of class difference and the self-serving logic of the police put such visual devices to a different use. Gris’s political position is equally clear in a special issue of August 29, 1908— “La Turquie Regénérée” (“Turkey regenerated”)—on which he collaborated, contributing about half of the drawings, with anarchist activist Charles Malato. More than merely criticizing Turkey, Gris uses this opportunity to devastating effect to represent that nation considered by the French to be the very epitome of ignorance, despotism, and backwardness,17 as sponsoring attitudes and deeds

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Figure 66 Juan Gris, Éducation, L’assiette au beurre, no. 387, August 29, 1908.

that were in fact French actions currently under bitter debate in Paris. As Elizabeth Childs has detailed in her discussion of coded displacement in satire under censorship, this sort of surrogate theme for political critique of the French government was common during earlier periods, as in the case of Daumier, Nadar, and their contemporaries displacing Louis Napoleon onto the Haitian emperor Soulouque during the Second Empire.18 Childs notes: While appearing to comply with laws that forbade political critique, satirists and their publishers could, on occasion, cast their political expression in a coded argot that slipped through the official nets of censorship. The very concept of freedom of the press, a key legacy of the age of revolution, was thus perpetuated not only by political theorizing, where one might expect to find it, but through public artistic practice, where by official decree it was supposed to be absent. The integrity of such work, at once defying the laws governing its production while appearing to follow the rules, is not compromised. On the contrary, it draws its significance not only from the deeply felt political belief of the artists, but also from the implicit and self-conscious critique of the political mechanisms that attempt regulation. 19

Censorship in the pre–World War I period was less strict than in the early Second Empire, though not as liberal as in the period following the amnesty of the 1880s. During the avant-guerre, government repression was still a worry for publishers and artists, as witness the imprisonment of Aristide Delannoy and Victor Méric (“Flax”) in May 1908 for a satire and text in Les Hommes du Jour that the government held to be an “insult” to the military. Delannoy was so badly treated in jail that he died shortly after his release following a well-publicized protest.20 Gris’s series constitutes a paradigmatic example of the anarchist technique of satire by inversion. The entire issue drips with irony as Turkey is described

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Figure 67 Juan Gris, “Ainsi que chaque pays que se respecte . . .” (Like all self-respecting countries), L’assiette au beurre, no. 387, August 29, 1908.

in glowing schoolbook terms, belied in each case by the action depicted. For example, one cartoon shows a schoolroom scene with the innocuous-sounding caption, “Instruction will be free and obligatory. Children will be taught respect for the law and the glorious deeds of our ancestors” (see figure 66).21 The “glorious deed,” however, is a beheading; the children look on in dismay. The drawing has gone far beyond his earlier work: crude and stark, with the back wall parallel to the picture plane, cut-off forms lock the podium into place, while the blackboard is used to great effect as the only diagonal shape and the only suggested movement in an otherwise relentlessly static, nearly geometrical, construction expressive of the rigid Ottoman state. Yet August 1908 was the midpoint of a heated five-month debate in the Chamber of Deputies over capital punishment in France, so Gris, in criticizing Turkey, is even more pointedly criticizing the supporters of the guillotine, taking the abolitionist position on the issue (France finally abolished capital punishment in 1981). Another cartoon from this special issue (figure 67) depicts a well-fed Turk— the ventru or potbelly is a French echo—looking on at a building crew. The caption reads, “Like all self-respecting countries, Turkey divides its population into

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Figure 68 Juan Gris, “La Liberté” (Liberty), L’assiette au beurre, no. 387, August 29, 1908.

two classes: 1) those who work and 2) those who watch work.”22 Here Turkey is compared to “civilized” countries where such capitalist structures are quite as firmly in place; though both workers and bourgeois have Turkish elements in their clothing, one notices that they are constructing a building fully Western in its drab regularity. The grid that Gris uses to create this appropriately oppressive static space is repeated in another cartoon in the literal form of a cage in which Liberty, in chains and in rags, is held captive (figure 68). Angry figures scream and jeer at the sorry prisoner, as the caption, proceeding by inversion, tells us that “Liberty, the one, the true, will be carried from Europe and presented to the people who will acclaim her.”23 Liberty, already tattered and torn, has lost her freedom and the worship of a people who understand its value to civilization before she

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ever arrives in Turkey. Malato, in his essay “The Turkish Revolution,” recounted aspects of the history of Turkey and its Ottoman rulers and, like Gris, made ironic comparisons to France. Citing a period of liberalization in the nineteenth century, he concluded, “We cannot know if this liberalism would have gone as far as that of our French Ministers who demonstrated their solicitude for workers by shooting them down.” His anarchist contempt for parliamentary democracy is clear in his comments on a list of reforms instituted by a leader of the Young Turks, “which put Turkey at the intellectual stage of the other European peoples”: Liberty of the press, abolition of torture and compulsory labor, regularization of taxes, civil penalties for Muslims and Christians, limitation of absolutism by a deliberative assembly elected by universal suffrage, etc., these famous political liberties, in a word, that in Western countries do not prevent workers starving and being overworked or being shot if they object. 24

In numerous ways, Gris’s drawings pushed expression to new limits, as he flattened space, geometrized form, and treated figures—especially faces and hands—with the utmost crudity and simplification. He carried this as far as he ever did in the most powerful drawing in this special issue, a cartoon posturing as a comment on Turkey’s imperialist ambitions in Africa (figure 34). Ever since the Greek War of Independence of the 1820s, the French considered the Turks the most ruthlessly cruel of races, and here the Turks are shown bayoneting the African babies they would pretend to rule. But the Turks never invaded subSaharan Africa—the French did. Here, Gris evoked details of the scandals of 1905–1906 over the documented behavior of French officials and army in the Congo.25 By dressing French colonial soldiers in Turkish uniforms, he criticized the French government in the severest terms. One hardly needs the caption to send the anarchist message home: “Guided by a need for expansion proper to every civilized nation, the Turks will go into the savage lands to bring civilized ways.”26 By casting a people the French popularly considered to be cruel and backward in the mold not of French ideals but of grisly actualities, Gris parodied the foundation of French colonial philosophy with its “civilizing mission” and turned the trope of the savage back on the complacent French. In doing so, Gris operated fully within the satirical tradition, purposely or not evoking Daumier’s precedent in the 1850s that criticized France’s despotic emperor via a racist black stereotype in the form of Haiti’s emperor, Soulouque. Childs points out that, in addition to Soulouque’s appearance in various cartoons as “uncivilized” and “animalistic,” the choice of a black surrogate also coincided with the oppositional discourse of scatology . . . at work in caricature of the July Monarchy: casting Louis Napoleon in blackface may also be seen as a variation of the ruler “dirtying” or blackening himself, another form of self-degradation in the argot of the period. 27

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In this case, though, the “blackened” French in the guise of Turkish soldiers ironically earn our contempt for their oppression of actual Africans. No modulation of form or recession of space allows the viewer to escape the linear gestures of the machinelike soldiers as they brutally intersect with the soft forms of the children. The soldiers’ death’s-head faces are reduced to a stark simplicity, especially the prominent one in the upper center. Clearly this cartoon expresses antimilitarist anticolonialism even without its caption. This most powerful of Gris’s political cartoons is not only critical of imperialism and the French government, which hushed up the Congo scandals, it is possibly the starkest cartoon published in Paris in the prewar period. In one after the other of these cartoons, Gris satirizes—in a manner Bakhtin would have fully appreciated—the official propaganda of the Third Republic: its “civilizing mission,” civilized ways, capitalist division of labor, and above all symbolism of Liberty herself, all exposing the hypocrisy of a regime elected to uphold the traditions of the French Revolution. Malato shares his strategy. Stylistically, Gris specifically relies on formal devices that he will use in developing his cubism in the following years. The cartoons also demonstrate that Gris was absorbing proto-cubist lessons from the work of Picasso, Henri Le Fauconnier, Georges Braque, and other Cézannistes in 1908, though it is not hinted at in his painting until two years later. But already we can see important elements of Gris’s mature style: flatness, planarity, linearity, geometrization, repetition of lines, extreme contrast, and complementarity of abstraction and realism. All are developed in the laboratory of political satire, and all continue in his cubism.

Anarchism and Collage: Juan Gris, Picasso, and Mallarmé

Interpretative debate about cubist collage has often centered on the role newsprint plays within these works. As the influence of Clement Greenberg’s exclusive focus within the frame of the collage waned, debate expanded in the 1980s beyond the formalist role of newsprint to consider the significance of the press in larger French culture, from the wordplay and the punning of headlines to the politics of the front page, the commercial valences of the newspaper, and reactions in the literary world against its vulgarity.28 Because the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s work was reissued in Paris in 1912, his writing had renewed importance for modernists of the avant-guerre, especially cubists and neosymbolists, as Albert Gleizes himself acknowledged.29 Mallarmé’s own attitudes to newsprint and the press have therefore become central to interpretations of collage. To compare the collages of Picasso and Gris in light of these debates, I will reconsider Mallarmé’s own relationship to the anarchist movement after looking at aspects of Gris’s cubism. Gris’s graphics of 1908, with their radical primitivism and restriction of

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Figure 70

Juan Gris, Self-Portrait, No. 1, 1909–1910. Charcoal on cream laid paper, 48 x 31.6 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation.

Juan Gris, The Eggs, 1911. Oil on canvas, 57 x 38 cm. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

recessive space, contrast interestingly with his few surviving drawings and paintings from before 1911, for example, the more realist and subtly Cézanniste Self-Portrait (1910; figure 69). A delicate experiment with small areas of planarity, the beautiful head was softly modeled and only tentatively geometrized while effectively conveying its abstraction. Clearly Gris felt a radical difference of subject and aim between his cartoons and a work like this, but just as clearly his cartoons represent a more “advanced” experimentation with primitivism and boldly abstracting style. This dichotomy remained true the following year with a work like The Eggs (figure 70), with its bottle of wine, cup, and dish of eggs on a white tablecloth against a background of flowered wallpaper: the very formula of a Cézanne still life. While Gris’s painting was more rigidly geometrized than a comparable Cézanne—for example, Mont St Victoire (1902–1904; figure 49), the Cézanne

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Figure 71 Juan Gris, Still Life with Oil Lamp, 1912. Oil on canvas, 48 x 33 cm. Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo.

achieved a much greater ambiguity of space and form, an ambiguity germane to the cubism of Picasso and Braque of 1908 and after, as in Braque’s Houses at L’Estaque (1908; plate 13), Picasso’s Factory at Horta de Ebro (1909; figure 53) or his Nude (1910; plate 12). Gris, of course, is studying Cézanne through Picasso’s and Braque’s Cézannism of 1908 and 1909 in The Eggs and rapidly developing an equally sophisticated counterpart to the work of several cubists in 1911. For the next few years, Gris studied Picasso’s and Braque’s work at a slight historical remove, carefully adapting aspects of their work and forging them into his own cubist style, drawing frequently on his arsenal of cartoon techniques.

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Figure 72

Figure 73

Juan Gris, Man in a Café, 1912. Oil on canvas, 127.6 x 88.3 cm. The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Juan Gris, Le Lavabo (The Washstand), 1912. Oil and collage on canvas, 125 x 90 cm. Private collection, Paris.

In Still Life with Oil Lamp, of 1912 (figure 71), Gris established a rigid grid in which he embeds his still life objects, obscuring the tablecloth and background wall. The parallel diagonal lines and suppression of incidental detail take something of their confidence from his earlier graphics, which this work resembles in this regard more than it resembles the cubism of Picasso or Braque, who never produced visions so unrelentingly regular and systematic. He developed his idea in numerous paintings of 1912, such as Man in a Café and The Washstand (figures 72 and 73), where he created an abstraction by the use of parallel lines that impose a grid over quite recognizable objects. In The Washstand, the flowered curtain, the washbasin, and water jug with their checkerboard decoration; the bottle of cologne with its label; and the comb are immediately visible. One peeks through the obfuscating vertical and horizontal lines and translucent planes to see undistorted mundane objects illustrated with

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a cartoonist’s clarity.30 The mirror in this work goes one step further: it is an actual one glued onto the canvas, offering a reflection of the viewer. In Man in a Café, the dandified figure, with his top hat, cane, and heeled shoes, is as much a cartoon caricature as a cubist abstraction of form. And Gris did not forget the power of the silhouette, as is evident in The Figure in a Café (1914), with his hat and turned-up coat collar reading Le Matin (plate 19). Such tricks of juxtaposition—of cubist geometrization and obfuscation on the one hand and cartoon illustration on the other—developed out of Gris’s unique and uniquely powerful graphic style, invented for visual and political punch. Highly effective in his cartoons, they constitute one of the keys to the difference between his cubism and that of Picasso and Braque. Like Van Dongen (see chapter 1), there is a strong and significant continuity between Gris’s cartoon style and his abstract paintings. But unlike Van Dongen—whose painting developed simultaneously with his cartoons and continued to be generated by his anarchist ideals and attitudes to at least 1909—Gris self-consciously drained the content in his later paintings and collages of political import; he avoided such anarchisant subjects as prostitutes and street scenes, frequent in his cartoons,31 and depoliticized his radical style. Gris’s cartoon images of politically charged public events, such as the Congo scandals or the execution of Francisco Ferrer, contrast pointedly and purposely with his repeated images of domestic interiors and privatized environments: a washstand; still lifes at home, as in Breakfast (1914) with its packet of coffee and coffee pot (plate 20), and views out of Gris’s own windows, as in Still Life before an Open Window: Place Ravignan (1915). How, then, does Gris’s modernism differ from Picasso’s? For, according to some anarchist rhetoric of the day and a wide range of indignant art criticism, both might be deemed leftist by virtue of their innovative styles. As discussed in chapter 2, the influence of anarchist ideas is felt in various ways throughout Picasso’s work of the prewar period, beginning with his images of beggars and street scenes during his early years in the anarchist milieu of Barcelona, through the Blue Period’s starving unemployed, to his Rose Period’s hungry and neglected street entertainers.32 Picasso consistently and purposely inverted and subverted subjects and themes of the academic and classical tradition, which gives his art that extra power to offend: not only the Madonna and Child (plate 10), but the nude (plates 9 and 12), the landscape (figure 53), the portrait (plate 11), even the Spinario.33 Thus Picasso’s work operated in a tension with recognizable genres of tradition; he looked backward even as he moved forward. Gris, alternatively, sought out themes of modern life and was proud to have been the first to introduce a siphon into modern art, for example, in his Siphon et bouteilles (Siphon and bottles; 1910).34 Siphons, watches,35 mirrored washstands: Gris’s subjects are the toys of a modern world and as such are a celebration in tune with the flagrant modernity of his cubist style, with its incorporation of advertising and newsprint. Though he shared the latter two techniques, style and content in Gris’s work operate less in a relation of tension or contradiction,

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as with Picasso, than of resolution. As Apollinaire wrote in Les peintres cubistes, “This is the man who has meditated on everything that is modern.”36 Gris never entirely abandoned his socially critical position, as I will discuss below. But he just as surely developed a carefully privatistic version of modernism that left his brief anarchism behind. The operation to depoliticize his art is most visible in Gris’s collages, returning us to the questions of interpretation broached at the beginning of the chapter. As discussed in the introduction, Bakhtin’s ideas can help us understand Gris’s and Picasso’s collages precisely in relation to that aspect of discourse some scholars dismissed so confidently (and in the name of Bakhtin) as “reflectionist”: newsprint. Bakhtin’s contrast of dominant discourse with counterdiscourse—alternative forms of art and literature—has been seen by literary historian Richard Terdiman reflected in nineteenth-century France, when intellectuals and artists whom we celebrate as the avant-garde rejected the dominant discourse of bourgeois culture.37 Bakhtin’s theory precisely opens up a concept of such countercultural artistic agency, from Rabelais to Dostoevsky.38 Exploring this culture and its literary counterdiscourses, Terdiman notes that “the forms of society’s work, family structure, gender roles, property distribution, education and political organization all live within the signs of which every text is made.”39 He examines “both the constitution of certain dominant strains of nineteenthcentury discourse and a number of the principal discursive systems by which writers and artists sought to project an alternative, liberating newness against the absorptive capacity of those established discourses.”40 Such a counterdiscourse is evident throughout Picasso’s prewar work, as his artistic maneuvers increasingly expressed contempt for bourgeois culture.41 Following his move to Paris, he made an important shift from a politics of subject matter—as in the Blue Period—to a politics of form, through his studied and ideologically informed rejection of academic styles. As I argued in chapter 2, during his Africanizing period of 1907, he conflated aspects of African masks with recognizable Venus motifs, as in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, turning the traditional allegory of beauty in a work like Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (c. 1506) into something alien. In doing so, Picasso could conjure with the politics of anticolonialism at a charged moment of political debate over France’s colony in the Congo (also protested by Gris), even as he embraced primitivist tropes dependent on popularized race and gender fantasies. Likewise, his Mother and Child became an altered icon in his hands, at once evoking such religious works as Raphael’s Madonnas and attacking all they had come to stand for, in tepid repetition, by the early twentieth century. Transforming the conventional formula for a Madonna and Child—with its infant contained within the mother’s silhouette, her blue robe of heaven and radiating halo—such antitraditional maneuvers function in subversive relation to the culture of high art, supporting institutions, and religious ideology.42 Picasso’s later cubism, in such works as Nude, further systematically subverts representational codes of the nineteenth-century academic

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art on which he was raised. Its lack of tactile form, arbitrary distribution of light and shadow, suppression of color, abstract linear rhythms, and bewildering lack of recognizable detail not only successfully resist absorption into the polymorphous world of bourgeois taste, they openly satirize that taste. Viewing newsprint as a dominant discourse in fin de siècle France suggests a way of recognizing the life of newsprint as a cultural force operational both in Picasso’s collages and in the culture at large. The growth of literacy and the press played an important role in the transformation of France into a democracy. Censorship gave the government the ability to control what was published, but this interfered little with the enormous diversity of views across the range of daily papers and weekly journals of opinion.43 Newspaper circulation increased some 4,000 percent between 1830 and 1880.44 Political parties had their official journals and myriad other newspapers openly voiced their political stripes. Several mainstream papers, including Le Matin, Le Temps, Le Figaro and Le Journal, variously supported government policies but were highly politicized for all their seemingly greater neutrality. Art and other forms of cultural criticism were no less politicized than the daily papers. Terdiman argues that after 1880 there was a ubiquitous merging of the political with the commercial, and the newspaper was perhaps the first purposely perishable consumer commodity.45 He notes that the secret system that developed in the nineteenth-century governing the sale of four kinds of space within the mass commercial newspaper perverted the public’s distinctions between the different modes of discourse based on their location within the paper.46 The cheapest was the annonce, something like a classified ad that always was found on the last of the newspaper’s four pages. The next was the réclame, a larger ad on page 3, equally frank in proclaiming its commercial status. The paid fait divers item appeared on page 2, where “the disguised colonization of ‘objective’ informational discourse by the commercial began.” But the greatest deception occurred on the front page: “Editorial publicity” on page 1 completely disguised its status as advertisement. It could consist of a recommendation, within a nominally factual chronique, of a stock share, or of a particular recent book within a literary compte-rendu . From within the world of journalism, this system induced a generalized cynicism concerning the interchangeability of facts, opinions, and money. Villemessant, the notorious editor of Le Figaro during the Second Empire, declared that he was satisfied with an issue of his paper only when every single line within it had been bought and paid for in some way. 47

The layout of the paper thus controlled its discourse, contributing to a fragmentation and neutralization of information. With politics, the arts and the commercial overlapping throughout, the “message” of the mass-circulation newspaper is overtly mixed. Their juxtaposition neutralizes what could otherwise be their cumulative and interconnected logic: they systematically “rationalize disjunction;

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Figure 74 Pablo Picasso, Bouteille, verre et journal sur une table (Bottle, glass and newspaper on a table), fall–winter 1912. Charcoal, gouache and pasted papers on paper, 62 x 48 cm. Musée nationale d’art moderne–Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

they are organized as disorganization.”48 Terdiman argues that for nineteenthcentury writers, newsprint came to stand for the commercialized and dishonest discourse of the bourgeoisie, against which such writers as Charles Baudelaire and Mallarmé staked their identities.49 Mallarmé himself has been the subject of much debate within cubism studies. Christine Poggi, like Terdiman, has argued that the commodification of culture represented by the daily paper led Mallarmé to reject everything to do with it; Picasso, she argues, rejected Mallarmé’s aestheticist strategy, though both sought

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to counter bourgeois commodification.50 David Cottington takes an opposing view of Picasso, claiming that his collages are indicative of a general retreat into an apolitical aestheticism on the part of the entire cubist avant-garde in the face of increasingly hegemonic nationalist discourse in France after the supposed demise of the anarchist movement.51 Rosalind Krauss, though rejecting Cottington’s Marxist basis, finds this theory appealing for her own aestheticism.52 Recently several literary scholars have exposed a central problem with all of these interpretations: they are based on a misunderstanding of Mallarmé himself. Somewhat like Picasso, Mallarmé was widely and inappropriately cast, even by some of his peers, as an ivory-tower aesthete with a distaste for that mass-produced commodity, the newspaper.53 Bringing art-historical discourse up to date with a spate of newer scholarship on Mallarmé, which fully distinguishes his aesthetic from Baudelaire’s, Anna S. Arnar and Linda Goddard reveal the poet as an avant-gardist deeply engaged with new forms of print culture—including posters and the newspaper—resulting in his experimental typography. Further, Goddard convincingly positions Picasso as far from rejecting Mallarmé; rather, Picasso takes Mallarmé’s ideas into the realm of image-making. In her discussion, Goddard affirms Robert Rosenblum’s suggestion that Picasso evokes Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard” in the truncated newspaper headline reading “UN COUP DE THÉ[ÂTRE]” in his collage Bouteille, verre et journal sur une table (Bottle, glass and journal on a table; 1912; figure 74).54 This radically experimental poem was first published in 1897, at the same time as his Divigations containing the key essays in which Mallarmé discussed the newspaper. Both works were well-known to Apollinaire, Salmon, and Max Jacob, the three poets to whom Picasso was closest. Discussing this collage with a related work, Bouteille, tasse, journal (Bottle, cup, newspaper), Goddard observes: Picasso has cut into the headlines and subtitles of the front page in order to open up multiple readings, interrupting the flow of the line to allow connections to be made between words on a vertical axis. Similarly, Mallarmé’s poem, printed on double pages, can be read horizontally, across the divide, as well as “vertically” within the individual pages. 55

Damian Catani has revealed that Mallarmé envisioned “a form of ideal or ‘counter-journalism’” with the capacity to communicate significant thoughts to a mass audience; this “democratic” journalism appears in his prose poems and critical articles, and, according to Goddard, most explicitly in “Le livre, instrument spirituel” [The book, spiritual instrument] (1895), where, contrary to common perception, Mallarmé does not so much contrast the book with the newspaper as condemn the arbitrary and monotonous layout that afflicts them both, encouraging a conventional and unimaginative approach to reading. 56

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His friends Paul Valéry and Georges Rodenbach both witnessed Mallarmé’s delight in newspaper and poster typography, specifically “large letters that assert themselves and get into our eyes, the italics that flow in their melodiousness, the minuscule ones that orchestrate the ensemble and accompany like a chorus.”57 Considering Mallarmé’s La musique et les lettres (1895), Goddard concludes that he “explicitly described the newspaper as a form of poetry. . . . If there is any distinction between the newspaper article and verse, it is not inherent in their differing formats, but occasioned, he implies, by the journalist’s failure to exploit the spontaneity of his medium.”58 As Arnar demonstrates, “rather than calling for aesthetic retreat from the domain of mass media, Mallarmé sought to analyze the mechanisms of its success as a way to imagine a means of reclaiming this public for advanced art and poetry.”59 This appreciation for new commercial forms of modernity now suggests a different meaning for Mallarmé’s famous line that poetry could be found everywhere “except in posters and on the fourth page of newspapers,” the advertisement page.60 I would add that Apollinaire, an enthusiast of Mallarmé’s symbolism from the 1890s on and a key figure in the neosymbolist movement after the turn of the century, offered his own gloss on Mallarmé’s statement in his poem “Zone” (1912), evoking a walk around Paris with its new forms of print launched from walls and kiosks: You read the brochures the catalogues the posters which sing aloud That’s the poetry this morning and for prose there are the newspapers 61

Like Mallarmé, Apollinaire and Picasso were both prepared to take the concept of vers libre (free verse), introduced in France by the symbolists, and push it in even more radical directions, as when Apollinaire decided at the last moment to omit punctuation from his new book of poems, Alcools (1913), which opened with “Zone.” These two were no more aware of Mallarmé’s legacy in the prewar period than the larger avant-garde culture in which they moved. Salmon edited the neosymbolist flagship journal Vers et Prose (1905–1914).62 Roger Allard and Ardengo Soffici both compared Picasso’s cubism to the poetry of Mallarmé; while Allard evoked “Mallarmism” to criticize Picasso, Soffici praised the parallel to Mallarmé’s “elliptical syntax and grammatical transpositions.”63 The cubist Jean Metzinger developed literary interests with visual ones, publishing what Jacob called “Mallarméan” poetry, and Gleizes later noted that by 1912, “cubism refreshed people’s memories of Mallarmé, and the Symbolists were once again in vogue.”64 Mark Antliff has demonstrated that Gleizes at this time embraced Mallarméan symbolism as part of a larger critique of the right-wing politics of the Action Française and that his involvement with the Ligue Celtique refutes Cottington’s correlation of cubism with an aestheticist retreat from the political.65 Apollinaire and Picasso, themselves steeped since the 1890s in anarchist aesthetics, would also have been attuned to Mallarmé’s own involvement with the anarchist movement. In the 1890s, many in Mallarmé’s circle who attended his

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Tuesday gatherings were anarchist supporters or sympathizers, including Paul Adam, Adolphe Retté, Stuart Merrill, Pierre Quillard, Henri de Régnier, Laurent Tailhade, and Félix Fénéon.66 McGuinness has explored the importance of the “bravura pronouncements about anarchism from a range of writers” close to Mallarmé. Regarding the symbolists, he points out: One of the critical casualties of focusing too closely on the supposed hermeticism and involution of their poetic work has been our understanding of the busy social and political contexts in which they worked and to which they contributed. One might even suggest a symbiotic relationship between Symbolism’s increasing hermeticism on the poetic front and its increasing radicalism on the political front. It represents a hiving off, or an atomization, of the literary in relation to the political, the two appearing to become autonomous from each other even as they continue to develop within the same movement and, often, in the work of the same authors. 67

This “symbiotic relationship” of “increasing hermeticism on the poetic front and its increasing radicalism on the political front” is fully operative in Picasso’s collages and precisely the element that Gris tried to jettison. McGuinness adds, “It is certainly no coincidence that the producers of the hermetic poésie pure were also the producers of more theories, articles of faith, polemics, broadsides and counter-broadsides than any other movement of their century.”68 Mallarmé’s name was on the subscription list of La Révolte, founded by Petr Kropotkin and edited by Jean Grave, with whom Mallarmé had a friendly correspondence. The list was seized by the police in 1894 in the lead-up to the infamous trial of suspected anarchists, the Procès des Trente (Trial of the thirty) following the bombing of the Café Terminus by Émile Henry on February 13.69 The celebrated poet appeared in the trial as a character witness for his friend the writer and anarchist activist Fénéon, who confessed late in his life that he was actually the author of another of the anarchist bombings of this period at the fashionable Hotel Foyot restaurant.70 Fénéon was arrested on April 26 and charged with possession of eleven detonators and a vial of mercury, bombmaking ingredients identical to those used by Émile Henry, whom he had befriended.71 Asked about Fénéon’s arrest by a reporter from Le Soir, Mallarmé expressed surprise but revealed that he himself had also been subject to a search of his home; he expressed a view of anarchist aesthetics common among the symbolists when he responded that “M. Fénéon is one of our most distinguished young writers and a remarkable art critic, extremely sharp in his judgments. . . . Certainly, for Fénéon, there were no better detonators than his articles.” He added, “And I think that one cannot arm oneself more effectively than with literature.”72 Mallarmé’s statement at the trial supported his friend’s character: I know Félix Fénéon. He is beloved by all. I have pledged him my friendship because he is a gentle and an upright man, and a very fine intellect. We have met in my home, on evenings when I gather friends together to chat. There is no one who has not enjoyed meeting him. I have never, nor has

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any of my guests, heard Fénéon discuss a subject alien to art. I know he is above using anything, other than literature, to express his thought. I have gladly responded to a summons not so much because of the real fondness I feel for him as in the interests of truth. 73

We already know that Mallarmé did not consider the subject of anarchism “alien to art.” He was not only an avant-garde experimenter engaged with new forms of modernity, he behaved like a comrade at a moment of political urgency. As it is quite unlikely that he was aware of Fénéon’s clandestine activism, which even the court could not prove, his statement of support may be taken to be honest, unambiguous, and very effective. Symbolist support of anarchist ideas survived Mallarmé’s death in 1898 as key figures of the anarchist/symbolist milieu worked on into the avant-guerre period, though ranging in their ability to continue to embrace new forms of art. Fénéon’s close friend Paul Signac specifically lent politically inflected credence to the avant-gardism of the cubists in March 1912, despite the cubists’ stated desire to distance themselves from both impressionism and neoimpressionism: Each of these young people has his personal technique. In that way, each contributes to our acquisition of freedom. Long live independence! Long live the liberators! The cubists are our salon’s raison d’être. I am very happy, as chairman, to welcome them into our midst. 74

And Gustave Kahn, an anarchist and early vers libriste, ridiculed the angry tones of cubism’s critics, coolly observing that “it is bad form to welcome with insults artists seeking something new,” asserting that “art lives on movement and not on stagnation.”75 Kahn revealed a close acquaintance with the early development of the cubists: I believe that the cubist painters have talent. Let me add that more people would be of that opinion if the cubist painters would provide a bridge or two between them and the public, that is, if, on the favorable occasion of a joint exhibition, they would show their starting point. There are paintings, pastels, and drawings done by them, conceived before their current research, that would demonstrate, to impartial people, their talent and the logic of their evolution.

Theorizing that “every new action is also a reaction against some system in force,” Kahn sympathized with their revolt against the past. Identifying Cézanne as the “link to the train of tradition,” his art theory valorized cubism as part of his vision of how culture is formed: Merely as a result of the fact that Impressionism has, for fifty years, produced so many masterpieces and beautiful works, and especially because it has reached the culminating point of its research, a reaction was inevitable. That reaction has offered various aspects. Some of them, in the direction of academic painting, are misguided.

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In the direction of free art, or, to put it better, of pure art, cubism is the most logical of these latter forms of reaction.

He concluded with a generosity that emphasizes the importance of an ongoing newness in avant-gardism, assuring those who are upset by the work that “the cubists do not erase what has preceded them: they add to it.” Signac and Kahn’s endorsement of the cubists as “liberators” at the Salon des Indépendants not only echoed leftist readings of cubist avant-gardism by critics like Apollinaire and Élie Faure, it was also a stunning rebuke to the radical socialist Henri Guilbeaux and his circle, who had championed the neoimpressionists while condemning cubism as a mere hoax designed solely to attract attention and assure commercial success for its practitioners.76 Their anarchistbased defense of cubism challenges Cottington’s assumption that the anarchist movement was wholly subsumed within anarchosyndicalism after 1906, and that avant-gardism by this time was devoid of leftist connotations for the cubists and their literary allies.77 And it was not only an older generation of anarchist artists who supported cubism. Self-styled anarchists associated with the journal L’action d’art (1913) openly embraced the cubists; their ideological allegiance to Mallarmé, combined with their politicized defense of avant-gardism, won the approval of key members among Picasso’s circle, the salon cubists, and the neosymbolist milieu.78 Synthesizing the anarchist individualism of Max Stirner with Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power and Bergson’s theory of creative intuition, L’action d’art’s editor André Colomer celebrated Mallarmé’s vers libre as a literary and individualist revolt against academic adherence to the Alexandrine (the traditional francophone poetic form based on a twelve-syllable line with one or two caesuras). The “art action” collective endorsed the Salon des Indépendants as the only jury-free venue, allowing artists to exhibit their work without interference from the state. This evidence should obviate any clear-cut bifurcation between the rhetoric of avant-gardism and political activism during the avant-guerre. And it adds a significant, and specifically political, dimension to Picasso’s allusion to the anarchist avant-garde culture of the previous generation in pasting “UN COUP DE THÉ” into his collage (figure 74). Every pun has a primary and a secondary meaning. If, as for many interpreters of Bouteille, verre et journal sur une table, the headline evokes Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de Dés,” the newsprint’s primary meaning is evident to any French reader: “UN COUP DE THÉ[ÂTRE].” This headline from Le Journal is a familiar phrase meaning a striking change, unexpected event or theatrical hit; as the words still attached below it read “La Bulgarie, la Serbie, le Monténégro sign[ent],” the readily understandable context is that the headline refers to a striking event in the “theater of war,” the signing of a treaty. Picasso cleverly combined an allusion to Mallarmé’s radical poem, which plays with variations of typeface sizes exactly like these, with his own restructuring of artistic repre-

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sentation without losing the atmosphere of agitating public issues that helped define their mutual opposition to the hegemonic discourse of bourgeois culture. Equally, we can consider Picasso’s Bottle of Suze of 1912 (plate 21 and figure 75) in light of the continuing intellectual environment of anarchism among the Parisian avant-garde and the culturally specific role of newsprint—at once manipulative and excitingly modern—that Picasso appropriated for his work. Newsprint in this collage, all from the November 18, 1912, edition of Le Journal, covers large areas of its surface.79 Reading the newsprint in this work renders an enormous amount of volatile information: gruesome facts of the First Balkan War, with a sensationalizing degree of grisly description; a huge anarchist and socialist demonstration in Paris, complete with antiwar speeches by prominent members of various international socialist parties; and part of a serial novel by Abel Hermant satirizing upper-class libertines.80 Whether Picasso, through newsprint, consciously introduced subjects of political import in his collages has been a controversial topic; in this light, Pierre Daix recounted an interesting story concerning Bottle of Suze in a symposium on cubism at the Museum of Modern Art. Daix (who first met Picasso through the French Communist Party) had asked the artist whether he had incorporated the column reporting the mass demonstration on purpose; Picasso replied, “Of course I did it on purpose, because it was an important event involving a hundred thousand people. . . . Oh Figure 75 Le Journal, front page, November 18, 1912.

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yes, I found that in the newspaper, and it was my way of showing I was against the war.”81 In Bottle of Suze, Picasso incorporated these articles from Le Journal into an image of a bottle, glass, and newspaper on a café table within a systematic disorganization of the elements of conventional illusionism. Picasso structured the collage through juxtaposition in a way that reconceptualizes and transforms both the pictorial system and the daily paper. The newsprint surrounds the signified glass and bottle, while its information saturates the conceptual field, evoking a series of associations from the ghastly preview of a pan-European conflict, to the powerful resistance to war at home, to the escapist frivolities of the class that will benefit.82 The mass-circulation daily exhibits a rationalized disorder resulting from its commercial motive: no narrative binds the newspaper’s information together. Yet in the collage, Picasso created the potential for a narrative by juxtaposing this satirical novel on a libertine aristocracy with grisly stories from the Balkan War and reports of a mobilized left-wing. Moreover, he did it in a cubist style whose assumed “anti-aesthetic,” “anti-French” disorderliness was aligned to anarchism in the critical press.83 Picasso subverted the layout of the massdistribution dailies, wherein the political implications of a column reporting a pacifist rally may be defused by its submersion in a patchwork of commodified information, from the sensationalist, to the trivial, to the commercial. By retrieving columns from different parts of the newspaper, Picasso reunited reports that now echo more meaningfully, critiquing—from an anarchist perspective—the discourse that would disjoin them. In short, unlike the commodified newspaper discussed by Terdiman, these scraps of “discarded newsprint” bear an intertextual relation to one another and re-establish a matrix of meaning, indeed, an anarchist analysis of power relations. This reorganization constitutes a counterdiscourse, subverting the original ideological formation of the newsprint, and does so furthermore in the setting of a café, that locus of friendship, argument, sedition, and police surveillance that “sustained the political, cultural and social ferment of fin-de-siècle and belle époque Paris.”84 At the same time, Picasso broke down visual conventions of pictorial representation that embody for the vast French public “order” and “unity,” celebrating the seemingly random and disorderly, what critics called the “ugly,” the “primitive,” the “anti-aesthetic.” What for the bourgeoisie is a disorderly work, for the leftist avant-gardist is a work whose unity resides in the very subversion of the conventions of academic illusionism and the illusions paraded in bourgeois newsprint. Other aspects of his collages suggest Picasso’s exploration in his art of the anarchist culture surrounding him. Félix Fénéon was admired by Apollinaire and many others for his fait divers (news items) written for Le Matin in 1906, constituting the extraordinary series of nouvelles en trois lignes (“novellas,” or “news, in three lines”): fragments of stories that suggest, but never complete, humble yet sensational narratives of a tragic society in the tradition of Vidocq and its popular legacy in the Fantômas detective stories Picasso and his friends

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avidly read.85 The anarchist Fénéon utilized the three-line format to register his disdain for a society ruled by capital; his nouvelles documented and ironized a society riven by poverty and lacking moral compass. Here is an example: Mme Fournier, M. Vouin, M. Septeuil, of Sucy, Tripleval, Septeuil, hanged themselves: neurasthenia, cancer, unemployment.

And another: Eugène Périchot, of Pailles, near Saint-Maixent, entertained at his home Mme Lemartrier. Eugène Dupuis came to fetch her. They killed him. Love. 86

In Re-Ordering the Universe, I discussed a number of collages as incorporating newsprint stories suggestive of the private as opposed to the public realm, tending less toward evocations of world events than toward a strain of black humor evident throughout Picasso’s earlier work and rife among his circle of writers.87 Apollinaire (alias “Guillaume Macabre” in his youth) shared this interest and was well equipped to see a parallel between Fénéon’s Nouvelles en trois lignes and Picasso’s headline “Un Chauffeur tue [sa] Femme” (A chauffeur [or more likely slang for a break-and-enter specialist] kills his wife).88 In Bottle and Glass (December 1912), we read about a vagabond in Fontainebleau who “accuses himself of murder.” Stories of assassinations, murders, suicides, vagabonds, strikers, and vandals repeat themselves in both Picasso’s collages and Fénéon’s wittily crafted nouvelles—not notably sympathetically in either instance—accumulating in both to project a portrait of a society cracking at the seams. Coextensively, Picasso’s collages reject the commodification of art in important ways. The ephemeral materials of which they are made not only disdain the condition of salability; they flamboyantly mock the concept of “fine” art and craftsmanship.89 To literally incorporate newsprint itself—the very figure of commodification and impermanence—into a work of high art is to subvert the notion of bourgeois collectability, to fly in the face of the conservatives’ noisy lament over the absence of métier (craft) in contemporary art.90 Some scholars have asked what the collages looked like when they were “pristine.”91 The assumption behind this term is that formal qualities of balance, harmony, beauty, and craftsmanship are value-neutral criteria of judgment, transhistorically applicable. Such readings deny the subversive choices Picasso made in incorporating ephemeral newsprint, advertisements, the cheapest wallpaper, sticky bottle labels, and tattered bits of popular song-sheets: all the detritus of an industrial and commercial culture increasingly dominant in Paris and more than usually visible to an outsider. Newsprint in strong light turns brown in a single afternoon, thus Picasso necessarily envisaged its decay, its temporality, as part of the meaning of these works. Such purposely anti-“beautiful,” anti-investment-value, cacophonous works speaking of the tragedies and trivia of the day could not have had a

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“pristine” moment relevant to its meaning in 1912, since the term implies that the artist was working in a craft tradition wherein permanence of materials ensures its lasting value: precisely that which Picasso potently subverts in his choice of materials. Indeed, neither Cottington nor Michael FitzGerald raises the issue of the problematic materials of collage in their arguments implicating Picasso’s relations to the art-dealer system as a retreat from public issues or proof of his distance from politics. In fact, though Kahnweiler accepted collages within the terms of his contract with Picasso after December 18, 1912, the only two sold before the war went to Alfred Flechtheim, Kahnweiler’s representative in Germany. Tellingly, the avant-garde investment group Peau de l’Ours bought only traditional media.92 Given the fact that Picasso’s politicized version of collage was the one that Gris inherited when he began to concentrate on papiers-collés in the summer and fall of 1914, on the eve of war, a comparison of the two artists is quite telling. Like Bottle of Suze, Gris’s Figure in a Café (1914; plate 19) is also a café scene: a figure sits at a table drinking a beer and reading the news. In the Gris, however, the “news” is not an intrusion from the political world but a carefully selected fragment from a different source than the masthead, pasted carefully underneath. It plays on the concept of illusion versus reality so wittily juggled in the work itself, with its industrial artificial wood grain paper—both “real” and carefully faked—and its literal newsprint; the headline reads, “There will be no more faking of works of art.” Gris pasted a headline in The Table (1914; plate 22) announcing “The True and the False,” which accomplishes the same witty act of artistic self-reference. Truth and falsity are invoked in a profoundly playful image in which texture as a property has become completely independent of the objects depicted: the wood grain representing the texture and material of the table floats away from the table’s charcoal outline, its cut shape used instead to describe the transparent glass and bottle above; at the same time a cartoon key opens the drawer of the wooden table, which the absence of wood grain has left starkly and absurdly white, revealing the “truth” of the primed canvas beneath. Gris played here with “truth” and “falsehood” on several levels: all art is illusion, even when it abandons traditional three-dimensional illusionism to arrive at a deeper truth. In a collage such as Guitar, Sheet-Music and Wineglass (1912; figure 76), Picasso likewise has invited interpretation on questions of artistic syntax, with his allusions to varying modes of visual discourse (a thoroughly conceptual guitar juxtaposed to a drawing of a glass in his earlier cubist style); and this collage plays too with an analogy between the abstraction of music and the abstraction of the work itself. Thus the “battle” announced in the headline at the bottom may metaphorically evoke artistic games comparable to Gris’s. But that is its secondary meaning: the “battle” also inescapably refers to war. All the beauty, wit, and sheer subversiveness of the work are forced to coexist with the concrete

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Figure 76 Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet-Music and Wineglass, November 1912. Pasted papers, gouache, and charcoal on paper, 48 x 36.5 cm. Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

reality of the newsprint’s primary reference. In the Musician’s Table (1914; plate 23), Gris brilliantly played with illusionism and abstraction, utilizing to the full his cartoonlike illustrational style to contrast with the cubist exploration of space. In fact, it is Gris’s very use of illustrative realism—for instance the clarity of the mildly distorted graphite violin—that allows such an extreme reduction of spatial structure to planes of color and pattern, revealed through the violin’s transparency. The black plane of the table top, the separate plane of its wood grain texture, the faked sheet of music, all occupy distinct and incompatible positions in space. The resulting combination of visual confusion and revelation serves a meditation on the nature of creativity, suggested by the partly emptied bottle of liquor (that venerable muse), the demotic presence of the daily paper and the violin and sheet music, empty and waiting for the composer’s inspiration. The comparison between music and Gris’s own

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investigations into cubist transformation of reality is both a conscious echo of similar works by Picasso and Braque and a significant claim to originality in its departure from their treatments of the theme. This time Gris’s little headline informs us that “Explorers in disaccord accuse each other of having explored nothing.” The metaphorical comment on his friendly rivalry with Picasso and others again refers inwardly to the creative process and to the dialogue between a small group of artists and himself, carefully defusing the explosive political potential Picasso manipulated so cleverly. Indeed, in Breakfast (1914; plate 20), Gris playfully won this artistic contest by pasting his own name under the headline in Le Journal’s morning news, read over the breakfast table in the privacy of his own home. Thus the deliberation of their approaches to collage spoke as much to Gris’s careful avoidance of the political as to Picasso’s purposeful deployment of anarchist themes—war, pacifism, armaments profiteering, strike-breaking—at a moment of international crisis.93 Picasso, by summoning the theme of state-sponsored militarism into his collages, invoked contemporary anarchist debate, an act paralleled by his systematic destruction of officially sanctioned artistic conventions in the works themselves. Through his manipulation of such public events in his collages, he negotiated his relation to the ideological views of pacifists, socialists, and anarchists opposed to the impending war. Picasso placed himself through such content in a public—thus political—space. Even when Gris occasionally did include pasted newspaper references to political controversies, such as the debate over the three-year draft which appeared in three works of 1914, including Bottle of Rum and Newspaper, the allusion is barely legible, muffled rather than amplified, private rather than public.94 This makes a marked contrast to Picasso’s legible headline, “M. Millerand, Minister of War, Blasts Antimilitarism” in Still Life: Bottle and Glass on Table (December 1912; see figure 43).95 That Gris knew perfectly well the potential of such newsprint allusions is subtly visible in numerous works made during the war, when he, for example, carefully painted in the visible headline, “Official Communiqués,” on the fictional newspaper in Still Life with Checked Tablecloth (1915; figure 77). He did this at a time when he wrote to Raynal, “I don’t even like reading the newspapers because I am so impressed and terrified by what is happening.”96 I take his comment to Kahnweiler in August 1914—that the war “does not concern me either by virtue of my nationality, character, or ideas”97—as a statement of his pacifism. He stood against the war, refusing the social pressure to join the army that led friends and acquaintances to obey the call-up, describing the war’s beginning to Kahnweiler as “the nightmare through which we are passing.”98 Though, like Picasso, Apollinaire, and Marcoussis, he was from a neutral country, this did not prevent the latter two, from neutral Poland, from joining the fight.99 Gris wrote to his close friend Maurice Raynal, who was at the front in 1916, “I can’t understand as you do this urge to massacre, to exterminate. . . . This state of mind

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Figure 77 Juan Gris, Still Life with Checked Tablecloth, 1915. Oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm. Private collection.

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never suited either you or me, and we had no such inclinations. Ever since war broke out, all the civilians I come in contact with have their minds warped by events. There’s not one of them intact; all have broken down under the pressure of war.”100 When Gris used a masthead like Le Socialiste, as in The Sun-Blind (1914), he conjured with the official pacifist position of the socialists before the war.101 His works of this period reveal dark, shuttered interiors, when public spaces were taken over by combatants openly hostile to able-bodied civilians, as in Louis Rémy Sabattier’s Café de la Paix in Wartime (1917; figure 78).102 And it is hard not to see Gris in a work like Still Life with Newspaper (1916; plate 24), commenting on his own immovable pacifism in this gloomy painting with its one bright and bitter spot of citron intersecting with the lighted masthead of the newspaper, The Intransigent. But it is a quiet sort of comment if it is one at all, and perfectly in tune with the private, inward-turned world of his cubist art, never playing on the world stage of the public events evoked by Picasso at an earlier and safer time. The distance that Gris traveled from his cartoons to his paintings tells us of his political evolution and charts a very different trajectory from the engagé paths of the other artists in this book. And it tells us that, especially when it comes to politics and the avant-garde, style and content are symbiotic; they cannot be disjoined. Gris represents, therefore, an interesting example of an artist whose leftist politics, inspiring the expressive power of his cartoons, nourished his subsequent painting but who wanted to shed his avantgarde art of those politics at a time when they were most intensely unacceptable. Gris kept a very low profile during the war, when cubism was popularly viewed

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Figure 78. Louis Rémy Sabattier, Café de la Paix in Wartime, 1917, in L’Illustration, January 26, 1918.

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as bôche, the wartime slur for “German.” If it is true that modernism informed by anarchist theory failed to achieve a social revolution—a question I take up in the last chapter—it is equally true that artists in Gris’s position could not escape a politicized view of modernism. Art criticism, flourishing in more than two hundred and fifty journals available in Paris between 1881 and 1914, articulated an enormous range of politicized aesthetic positions.103 Whether politically left- or right-wing, and whether hostile to or supportive of modernism, art critics more often than not viewed avantgardism in the prewar period as invested in a political attitude toward the status quo by virtue of style alone. But readings of this sort occurred on the most superficial level; those critics more engaged and informed invariably addressed both style and content in their evaluation of a given artist. Quite obviously, politicized style was not necessarily the intent of all modernists; one thinks immediately of right-wing modernists such as Roger de la Fresnaye, with his patriotic cubist Artillery (1911). And we cannot assume even from an extreme radicalism of form a political posture; compare the pure abstraction of the anarchist Kupka with its close visual counterpart by the thoroughly bourgeois and “apolitical” Robert Delaunay. Artists could not control the political effects of working in an abstract style in this period, and Gris was far from alone in shifting his position in wartime France, as Kenneth Silver has detailed.104 But artists who saw themselves as anarchists, however briefly, could self-consciously play with and against this expectation shared fully with their critics. McGuinness points out its parallel in the symbolist movement: Avant-garde writers and their conservative detractors shared the discourse of violence and terror: the former joyously claiming it, the latter using it as an idiom of condemnation. . . . It is ironic to think of them, for all their enmity, as speaking the same language, engaged, despite themselves, in an ongoing process of mutual comprehension. 105

Supporters of avant-garde art already began to shift their critical language during the war itself. To take cubism as an example, Gris’s friend, the poet and critic Pierre Reverdy, wrote in purely formalist terms about Gris’s work, ignoring both his antimilitarist cartoons and the cultural references in his collages, and aligning his rectilinear cubism to the nationalist “return to order” aesthetics that signified a wartime retreat from any association of cubism with social subversion and antistatism.106 And Kahnweiler wrote his influential book, The Rise of Cubism, in 1915 while residing in neutral Switzerland, championing Picasso’s and Braque’s cubism in light of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.107 To do this was explicitly to reject the actual philosophical premises of prewar cubism, whose practitioners had embraced the anti-Kantian precepts of Henri Bergson, William James, and Henri Poincaré, as he undoubtedly knew well. But Kahnweiler’s tract harmonizes with the promotion of Kant’s call for a “United States of Europe” as a solution to European conflict on the part of his fellow pacifists and exiled

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German socialists.108 As such, he rebuts xenophobic attacks on Kantian thought as German in wartime France, purposely recontextualizing cubism in an internationalist European culture. In subsequent years, his Neo-Kantian terminology— with its reference to the so-called analytical and synthetic phases of cubism’s development—was adopted by dealers, critics, and art historians as signifiers devoid of political or historical meaning. Tragically, the war not only killed and damaged a generation of artists and writers, but it also eclipsed the political hopes and enthusiasms of key modernists, leading ironically to a willful cultural amnesia—often perpetuated by the artists themselves—about the antiwar themes and aims of the prewar avant-garde that has made an ahistorical “autonomy” reading of modernism in the visual arts possible.

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18 Juan Gris, “Bruits de Guerre et Bruits de Paix” (Noises of war and noises of peace), cover, L’assiette au beurre, no. 392, October 3, 1908.

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Juan Gris, Figure in a Café, 1914. Oil and pasted papers on canvas, 99 x 72 cm. Acquavella Galleries, Inc., New York.

Juan Gris, Breakfast, 1914. Pasted papers, crayon, and oil on canvas, 80.9 x 59.7 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

21 Pablo Picasso, Bottle of Suze, 1912. Pasted papers, gouache, and charcoal on paper, 65.4 x 50.2 cm. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Reproduction on the cover of the 1947 Washington University in St. Louis Art Gallery Bulletin.)

22 Juan Gris, The Table, spring 1914. Gouache, crayon, varnish, and printed papers, mounted on canvas, 59.7 x 44.5 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, A. E. Gallatin Collection.

23 Juan Gris, Musician’s Table, 1914. Fusain, graphite, and colored pencil on papier collé on canvas, 81 x 59.5 cm. Private collection, New York.

24 Juan Gris, Still Life with Newspaper (Fruit Dish, Glass, and Lemon), 1916. Oil on canvas, 73.66 x 60.325 cm. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

25 František Kupka, Disques de Newton, Étude pour la Fugue à deux couleurs (Disks of Newton, study for fugue in two colors), 1911–1912. Oil on canvas, 49.5 x 65 cm. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

26 František Kupka, “L’argent” (Money), cover, L’assiette au beurre, no. 41, January 11, 1902. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

27 František Kupka, Conte de pistils et d’étamines (Story of pistils and stamens), 1919–1920. Oil on canvas, 110 x 92 cm. Národní Galerie, Prague. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

28  (opposite) František Kupka, L’Archaïque (The archaic), 1910. Oil on canvas, 110 x 90 cm. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

29 František Kupka, L’eau ou la Baigneuse (Water or the bather), 1906–1909. Oil on canvas, 63 x 80 cm. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

30 František Kupka, Amorpha, Fugue à deux couleurs (Amorpha, fugue in two colors), 1912. Oil on canvas, 211 x 220 cm. Národní Galerie, Prague. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

31 František Kupka, La Petite fille au ballon (Girl with a ball), 1908. Oil on canvas, 114 x 70 cm. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

32 František Kupka, La Colorée, c. 1919–1920. Oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift of Mrs. Andrew P. Fuller. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

5

Abstracting Anarchism FrantiŠek Kupka and the Project of Modernism

Yes, collective ideas are the ones that shape the social environment, which, in its turn, determines the plastic arts. But works of art seize ideas, clothe them with forms and with colors, with a three-dimensional aspect of which the effect is more accentuated, more captivating, more radical than that of a purely abstract idea. —František Kupka, La création dans les arts plastiques

František Kupka, who may have been the most controversial modernist of this period, was an avowed anarchist artist. Among the artists considered in this book, he is the only one who systematically worked out his aesthetic ideas in writing (in his book La création dans les arts plastiques, 1912) and who made the most strenuous attempt to combine his anarchist beliefs with his intellectual interests in science, political theory, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, spiritualism, and aesthetics. The combination in his art is stunning. Kupka also viewed nature and society in terms of sexuality; this gendered vision played a central role in his art, from his early symbolism and illustrational satire to his avant-garde abstractions. For him, the female embodied the life principle of the universe and was therefore invested both in his vision—at once mystical and political—of the triumph of the life principle in a harmonious world and in his critique of the current degenerate state of capitalist society. The anarchism that underlay this vision and that first inspired his large published body of vitriolic caricatures led to an art theory that obligated his art to a project of liberation, in turn leading to his nonobjective paintings. The distance between his massproduced cartoons—aimed propagandistically at a working-class audience—and his modernist paintings chart Kupka’s attempt to propagate his anarchist convictions first through didactic imagery and then through avant-garde abstractions designed to transform the political and spiritual consciousness of his audience. This chapter will consider how Kupka’s art and art theories mingle anarchism,

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science, philosophy, and Theosophy; the ways Kupka viewed nature and society in terms of sexuality; and how centrally this gendered notion of creativity and “creative evolution” figured in his art. Kupka may serve as one of the best instances of Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, as he thoughtfully experimented with media, styles, and subjects while pointedly addressing differing audiences, from his early satire to his abstract art. Indeed, Kupka may be said to have tried to invent a new audience for the future. Although Kupka’s art was largely neglected in his lifetime, his nonobjective paintings from 1910 onward are now widely known, and scholarship by Meda Mladek, Margit Rowell, Virginia Spate, Robert Welsh, Linda Henderson, and others has unravelled many of the philosophical, Theosophical, and scientific theories that underlie their abstract forms.1 In 1989, Spate considered Kupka’s illustrations for the writings of the anarchist theorist and activist Elisée Reclus, pointing to the important conjunction of anarchism, spiritualism, and eroticism in his later abstractions devoted to the theme of procreation. More recently, Marie-Pierre Salé has explored Kupka’s relations to Reclus more extensively.2 Here, I explore more fully the theoretical dimensions of Kupka’s anarchism, which structured his life and entire body of work. Kupka followed Petr Kropotkin’s and Élisée Reclus’s anarchist communism, which informed his conceptions of anarchist utopia and capitalist dystopia and was manifested in themes of generation and degeneration. Both anarchist thinkers were scientists—indeed, both were influential practicing geographers—whose political theories were based on their knowledge of and faith in science; Kupka too was well read in contemporary science. Reclus further incorporated in his thought aspects of the vitalist philosophy of Henri Bergson, who viewed his intuitive method as fully scientific. Far from dismissing science, Bergson sought to identify intuition as a potential means by which the sciences could discern a durational reality that eluded traditional scientific methods. In his Creative Evolution and Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson pointed to the second law of thermodynamics and the development of infinitesimal calculus as two instances in which science had adapted its methods to intuitive insight.3 Their combined influence is central to Kupka’s art and writing; he was further engaged with spiritualism—an interest he shared with Bergson himself—and was a devotee of Theosophy. Kupka’s profound interests in science, philosophy, and Theosophy reinforce the particulars of his convictions as an anarchist artist and inform the large understudied body of his early, socially critical work in political cartoons and book illustrations as well as his development of abstraction. Kupka’s anarchism—with its dedication to sexual liberation—was the means through which he united the seemingly unrelated, eccentric, or even contradictory aspects of his oeuvre. By his own testimony, Kupka combined vegetarianism, nudism, and sun worship into daily practices that—far from being unrelated to his art—he claimed enhanced his vision as a painter.4 This vision developed from works like Méditation (1899) to Disques de Newton, Étude pour la Fugue à deux couleurs (Disks

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of Newton, study for fugue in two colors; 1911–1912; figure 79 and plate 25). He wrote in the manuscript notes for his treatise Creation in the Plastic Arts, begun in 1910–1911: I have discovered for myself the sensations of splendid sensitivity to color, aroused exclusively by hygienic care. After my morning shower, I exercise, summer and winter, entirely naked in the garden . . . my entire body penetrated by the fragrances and the rays of light. Thus I experience magnificent moments, bathed by hues flowing from the titanic keyboard of color. 5

Figure 79 František Kupka, Meditation: When Mountain and Valley Are One, 1899. Oil on canvas, from Kupka, Album, c. 1907. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Spate, in her foundational book of 1979 on Orphism, concluded that Kupka “seems to have swung between idealism and vitalism, the spiritual and the material, the mystic and the scientific.”6 Yet Henderson and others have since shown how science in this period—which rejected atomic theories of matter in favor of a universe populated by energy waves, ether, and x-rays—affirmed the mystic’s conviction that the highest realities are invisible; many scientists of the time were unapologetically involved in the occult themselves. Kupka’s anarchism, with its complex spiritual and material theories, can help us understand how such beliefs functioned not as contradictions for Kupka but as interrelated realities. In the quotation above, Kupka expressed a view of the world as composed of rhythms of synaesthetic energy. His “hygienic” practices, such as vegetarianism and sun- and air-bathing in the nude, were aimed at the preparation of his body to be “bathed in hues,” regenerated by a “keyboard of color,” putting the artist directly in touch with those universal forces of life emanating from the sun. Kupka went on to describe the artist as “a sensitive and fragile being whose existence is concentrated in images of his interior life and who economizes his vital energy finally to exhale it in his work,”7 a sure indication of the generative forces at work in artistic creation. Kupka’s anarchism led him to develop not only an aesthetic corollary to the regenerative power of light, but also a vision of the degenerative physical and social decline resulting from the suppression of the unfolding harmony of the universe. The fact that he inscribed this dual vision in images of the female body reveals his sexualized notion of creativity. No component of this interlocked view is removable; there is, therefore, no contradiction in Kupka’s view between idealism and vitalism, the spiritual

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and the material, the mystic and the scientific, nor between the spiritual and the political, as odd as that may at first sound. I will show how these things worked together.

K u p ka a n d P o l i t i c a l S at i r e

Kupka—a Czech artist trained in Prague and Vienna who moved to Paris in 18968—embraced a mystical vision of the artist and the world that coexisted with a deeply critical view of bourgeois society and the political status quo. While at the Vienna Academy from 1891–1894, Kupka read widely in literature, philosophy, and social sciences and was therefore well-read in radical critiques of capital and likely familiar with Karl Marx’s and Georg Simmel’s writings in addition to those of anarchist theorists.9 Simmel was a prominent sociologist on the Left whose critique of the psychological impact of the money economy on human behavior was indebted to Bergson’s analysis of the negative effect of rationality on human perception. According to Simmel, money not only served to reduce all qualitative phenomena to a quantifiable and standardized value, it also served to dull the empathetic and emotive capacities of the capitalist himself, whose calculations produced a psychic state of cool, intellectual detachment, indifferent to the brutal realities of the modern metropolis.10 For Kupka, society was structured to privilege not just the wealthy but money itself, as can be seen in his cover for a special issue of the anarchist weekly L’assiette au beurre (1902; plate 26), in which his caricatures frequently appeared.11 The drawing encapsulates the opposition between capital and labor in the grotesque figure of Money. Suggestive of the Devil, who holds the angry worker in his clawed and bejeweled hand, Money crowns himself, his belly swollen with golden coins, his navel a keyhole to his disproportionate wealth. In a reference both to Dante’s Inferno and Eugène Delacroix’s Barque of Dante (1822), the damned swim in the bloody waters below, trying to climb out onto the letters of Money’s name. Kupka’s style is consummately naturalist (revealing his excellent academic training) yet extraordinarily inventive. His distortions of space and scale create nightmarishly convincing evocations of unequal power relations and the radical imbalances between nature and society that result. An important aspect of the early work that compares significantly with a later abstraction such as Disks of Newton (plate 25) is the repeated, intersecting circles in both works. More than a mere compositional device, the blood-soaked sun and distended belly in Money are both distorted natural forms that violate their true life-giving functions. Kupka viewed the sun as the generator of life and circular forms as the product of what he called the “germinative dynamism” pervading the material world12; but the orb here is tainted by the blood of workers in which Money stands up to his knees. Stomachs help sustain life, but this stomach is unnaturally distended, engorged with the wealth produced by the

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Figure 80 František Kupka, “Liberté” (Liberty), L’assiette au beurre, no. 41, January 11, 1902. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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dead and dying. The evident perversion of the natural order in the human and planetary realms is Kupka’s vision of capitalist dystopia. His vision of anarchist utopia, alternatively, envisaged a balance of human relations and respect for the earth, resulting in spiritual harmony with the universe, as in his illustrations for the anarchist theorist Elisée Reclus (discussed below). He evoked the generative power of the sun in Disks of Newton in an attempt to bring these harmonies into the realm of painting. As Spate has shown, this painting is an image of spinning prismatic colors merging into white light, a light Theosophists like Kupka saw as a symbol of the primordial unity of creation.13 Money’s golden treasure, gleaming within his crystal belly, merely reflects the ambient light, whereas the luminous orb in the Disks emanates life-sustaining radiance, clearly revealing the positive to Money’s negative force. The contrast between reflective light and the radiating light of living things has a parallel in Kupka’s treatise, where he contrasted the art of realist illusionism, fabricated by artists who are “courtesanparasites” to the wealthy, with the “vital energy” of true art, created by artists who inevitably find themselves on “the lowest rung of the social ladder.”14 Kupka’s conception of the contemporary dystopia to be overcome is summarized in his cartoons in the special issue on money. In “Liberty” (figure 80), men,

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Figure 81 František Kupka, “Panneau décoratif ” (Decorative panel), no. 41, L’assiette au beurre, January 11, 1902. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 82 Anonymous, postcard supporting free love circulated by L’anarchie, c. 1905

women, and children trudge to the smoking factories in the distance, watched over by a huge enthroned figure of Money who is protectively ringed by the military, their cannon pointing at the workers. With Money enthroned, this image makes clearer the figure’s echo of Daumier’s Gargantua, in whose spirit Kupka and the culture of satire continued.15 A more complex association of Kupka’s social criticism emerges in a double-page “Panneau décoratif ” (Decorative panel; figure 81). Moving from left to right, a prostitute bargains with customers, a man reaches for his wallet at the sight of a woman, an old crone sells cupids, artists and their families starve, a man commits suicide, and a woman in a bridal gown is dragged reluctantly to the altar. This damning critique of bourgeois society links the amassing of wealth with the exploitation and/or neglect of the things that for Kupka really matter—art, love, and economic justice—in favor of monetary transactions, or crypto-monetary transactions, such as marriage. The natural order, too, is affected, as the golden belly of Money, metaphorically eclipsing the red sun in Kupka’s cover for L’assiette, dominates all with its yellow rings in the “Decorative Panel,” where everything is done for money . . . or lack of it. An unnoticed chapter in Kupka’s career was his involvement with the journal L’anarchie, which supported naturism and free love in opposition to the marriage contract. Postcards circulated by the journal propagandized this position; for example, one illustrated here (figure 82) compares marriage on the left side to prostitution on the right, both in contrast to the couple in the center enjoying a relationship of freedom and equality. Kupka supported these positions, drawing a naturist image of a nude woman claiming her body for herself to illustrate L’affranchie (the liberated woman) for a song sheet published by La Muse Rouge, available through L’anarchie. Aristide Bruant included “L’affranchie,” slang for a female advocate of free love, in his L’argot au XXe siécle: Dictionnaire françaisargot. Kupka also embraced a Proudhonian emphasis on the pater familias and the nuclear family as the “natural” social unit (as opposed to the alternative

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Figure 83 František Kupka, “Fraternité” (Fraternity), L’assiette au beurre, no. 41, January 11, 1902. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 84 František Kupka, “Les sauveurs” (The saviors), L’assiette au beurre, no. 41, January 11, 1902. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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anarchist position of Libertad—L’anarchie’s founder—who countered marriage with polygamy, lived with a pair of anarchist sisters, and celebrated homosexuality as a challenge to the bourgeois social order).16 In “Fraternité” (figure 83), Money throws a yoke to a working man so that he can join the human toil of pulling Money’s rich chariot. The theme of enslavement and the resulting threat to the family is evoked in the frail mother, on her knees begging for work for her husband, and contrasted with the small child, whose nudity bespeaks the harmony with nature for which Kupka longed but which he saw thwarted by the structural injustices allegorized in this series. Both procreation and erotic love are abased under capitalism, as is evident in “Les Sauveurs” (The saviors; figure 84), which depicts a young woman at the end of her escape route, forced to choose between prostitution and death. Echoing popular illustrations, her hatbox indicates her status as a working-class milliner. As Hollis Clayson has demonstrated, milliners were commonly identified as potential prostitutes in the popular imagination.17 Grossly underpaid, the single women employed as milliners were considered fair game by their male clients, a relationship treated in numerous cartoons of the period (figure 85). Unlike the cartoons in which the milliners often collude with male flirtation, Kupka’s image underscores the poverty that would drive a milliner into prostitution; at the end of the pier, she attracts Money despite herself, and turns in his direction in response to her desperate economic situation. Money approaches with a smile. Figure 85 Victor Morland, “Scenes of Parisian Life,” La Vie Amusante, 1878–1879, and Le Monde comique, 1879–1880.

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Figure 86 František Kupka, L’argent (Money), 1899. Oil on canvas, 81 x 81 cm. Národní Galerie, Prague. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

In the final cartoon in this series, Science triumphs over Money, whose head is nailed to Athena’s shield, and people are free to pursue knowledge and mutual aid and to form stable and loving bonds. Money’s orb is now red with his own blood, and a healthy sun—anarchism’s “New Dawn”—rises beyond a doorway marked “Humanitas.” This manifesto of Kupka’s anarchist analysis of bourgeois society is repeated in numerous other cartoons and prefigured in a major painting of 1899, L’argent (Money; figure 86). This work appears to be his original invention of the grotesque figure of Money, backed by monstrous lackeys and proposing to a nude woman, who embodies not only Kupka’s notion of the “natural” but also those allegorical tropes of the academic tradition: Truth and Beauty. Thus Kupka moved from painting to cartoons in this series, ultimately reaching a far larger audience. In 1900, he wrote to his friend the Czech poet Josef S. Machar that he would devote himself in future mainly to lithography and graphics as these media are more “democratic.”18

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K u p ka , R e c l u s ’ s A n a r c h i s t G e o g r a p h y, a n d t h e O r i g i n s o f C r e at i v i t y

Kupka also illustrated books, reiterating his ideas in images such as the section title pages for a major work of anarchist theory published in 1905–1908, Élisée Reclus’s L’homme et la terre (Man and the earth; see figures 87–91).19 As a close associate of Reclus, the anarchist theorist and “human geographer,” Kupka was more than thoroughly familiar with Reclus’s thought; he studied sociology, ethnography, the natural sciences, history, philosophy, and political theory to reinforce his understanding of Reclus’s project, a six-volume history of human cultures and their changing relationships to the earth and to each other across time. Reclus, an internationally respected scientist, had an openly political aim in his book, which was to look at the development of institutions and the allocation of natural resources in every corner of the globe throughout history, arguing for more equal distribution of wealth as a cure for social ills and for the evolution of society toward a happier future.20 The anarchism implicit in his geography is made explicit in a large body of writing that made Reclus equally famous as an anarchist theorist throughout Europe. As he said to the Dutch anarchist Domela Nieuwenhuis, “Yes, I am a geographer, but above all I am an anarchist.”21 In his anarchist writings, he spelled out his central notion of “evolution,” borrowed from Charles Darwin and encompassing not merely the physical but also spiritual and social realms. As a scientist, Reclus was engaged with contemporary debates on evolution, including Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution, and was steeped in Bergson’s role in this debate in Creative Evolution. Reclus’s well-known formulation asserting that “the Human being is nature becoming conscious of itself ” is revealed as Bergsonian in light of Reclus’s own subsequent gloss: “Issue of generations without number, other humans or anthropoids, animals, plants, primary organisms, the human being recalls through its structure all that its ancestors have experienced throughout the prodigious durée of the ages.”22 (Kupka would take Reclus’s Bergsonism much further.) For Reclus, economic inequality was the “most powerful instrument of oppression.”23 Yet the revolution that would correct this inequality could not alone solve the world’s problems because the development of people’s moral and intellectual faculties, through science, needed time to evolve. Kupka encapsulated this thesis in two of the section title pages for L’homme et la terre—“La révolution” (The revolution; figure 87) and “L’état moderne” (The modern state; figure 88). The Revolution of 1789 celebrated in the first is seen only to have led to the plutocratic modern state in the second, dominated by politicians whose allegiance to capital is symbolized by the golden calf, prominently displayed on a podium and propping up the politician in a posture of impassioned sincerity. Thus Reclus foresaw a series of revolutions, each one allowing for a further evolution of society, until finally humanity would be ready for a genuine enlightened stateless

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Figure 87  (above) František Kupka, “La révolution” (The revolution), illustration for Élisée Reclus, L’homme et la terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–1908). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 88  (below) František Kupka, “L’état moderne” (The modern state), illustration for Élisée Reclus, L’homme et la terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–1908). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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society. Reclus’s society would involve not only voluntary egalitarianism and mutual aid but a resulting harmony with nature. In the 1860s, Reclus wrote, “A secret harmony exists between the earth and the people whom it nourishes, and when imprudent societies let themselves violate this harmony, they always end up regretting it.”24 Though not a mystic like Kupka, Reclus also extended this social and natural harmony to universal proportions: It is the study of the Earth which explains to us the events of History and this, in turn, leads us to a more profound study of the planet and towards a more conscious solidarity of our individual self—at the one time so small and yet so great—with the immense universe. 25

The route to aiding this slow evolution was science, by which Reclus meant the study of the natural and human worlds for the purpose of understanding and of furthering the brotherhood of humankind; indeed, Reclus spoke of “achieving” science as a liberating plateau of true knowledge, writing in 1889 (and building on Kropotkin’s concept of “mutual aid”): “We know that if our descendants are to achieve science and liberty, they will owe it to . . . constant collaboration, to this mutual aid from which brotherhood grows little by little.”26 The immediate task at hand, such as Reclus undertook in Man and the Earth, was to undo prejudice and ignorance fostered by the bourgeois indoctrination that constituted the present social and educational system. The creation of a countereducational system, which he called “integral education,” would prepare people for a classless society free from racism, colonialism, and the institutionalized fear and superstition known by the word “religion,” whose current function was the “reinforcement of the authority of the bourgeois order” and was to be radically distinguished from true spirituality.27 The concept of social evolution explains why, for Reclus, propaganda was the most important activity for the revolutionary, including the revolutionary artist, who was especially important to the theorist’s larger purpose. A key question for Reclus was the origin of art among early humans, and here his anarchist philosophy rings through clearly. He imagined the ideal social conditions of the earliest image-making: Industrial advances of all kinds that were made during the prehistoric period, certainly surpass by far in importance all those that history, properly called, records, [and] must have naturally solicited the passion, the artistic joy of the worker, and consequently given birth to art, the necessary companion of free work [ travail libre ]. 28

He asserted that this condition of travail libre, “in these first ages,” was achieved only in a classless society, in which each individual performed all social functions for him or herself, one of which was art-making: Where the classes were not at all yet separated, where the large social body had only partially

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differentiated its functions, art probably did not yet have special adepts living outside the community. Each was his own decorator, each his own artist, the same as, for all those needs of existence, each was his own supplier, and in danger his own champion. 29

Reclus rather imaginatively summoned a scenario in which the first images were made, resulting directly from both life experience and the need or desire to communicate that experience to others: When the primitive found himself on the look-out in the bush, waiting for prey in order to pierce it with his arrows or crawling through grass and branches in order to surprise resting game, sometimes he must have seen striking pictures [ tableaux ] that strongly engraved themselves in his memory: the powerful feline cautiously extending its claws and showing its fangs ready to bite; the elephant encircling a tree with its trunk and uprooting it from the ground; the stag proudly raising its huge antlers in the clearings of the forest. When he would daydream that evening, close to the wood fire with its quick gleams, these strong impressions freshly appeared, and, in order to remember them or to show the others, he reproduced them through drawing. 30

A piece of flint would suffice, Reclus noted, to engrave such a scene on the handle of a weapon, whose value was infinitely augmented. Reclus explained, “But this price was completely moral in this epoch. Art, sincere and disinterested, was by virtue of that great art.” By comparison, the contemporary art market was an immoral trade in art that ignored its true social value. In a flight of identification with the artist of this prehistoric period, Reclus argued that this putative artist only worked for his own joy and for that of those near him, “sculpting figurines for the woman he loved and hanging from the post of his hut the effigy of an ancestor or a guardian animal.”31 Again comparing this artist to those of his own day, he noted the altered conditions for artists and the resulting rationalizations for their social position: “Thus art issued from the same conditions of life and had nothing of ‘supermen’ for creators, as contemporary artists willfully imagine themselves, a little too puffed up in their own value. The innovators were the initiates of nature, not mortals of distinct origin, relating to a ‘supra-terrestrial’ world.”32 In short, it was material conditions of life for early humans that initiated art-making, not religious inspiration. And it was material conditions of geology and climate, which Reclus described meticulously, that accounted for the disappearance of the majority of prehistoric art, which he assumes was quite abundant. For Reclus, an atheist still perhaps reacting against his father’s passionate Protestantism,33 early religion itself was born of material conditions. Dire physical climates and events gave rise to the worship of those forces out of human control, developing into oppressive caste structures; its opposite developed conditions conducive to freedom: Certainly it is the tribes or populations who, living in a milieu favorable to peace and well-being,

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were relatively little concerned about the mysteries of life and of death and, jealous of their liberty, did not let a caste of priests set themselves above them, but they were no less constituted as “religious animals,” as all their other fellow humans. 34

Reclus believed that this was true not only of the origins of religion in the prehistoric period but of all religious feeling in all people of all times: At its base, all religions . . . have analogous origins and develop a parallel course. Each human being, pulled into the general whirlwind of life and nonetheless desirous of safeguarding, of developing, his individual power, searches for a prop in the exterior world to reassure himself when fears assail him, to distance the dangers that menace him, to realize the wishes that obsess him.

Emphasizing fear as the motivator, he cleverly brought Christian thought to his aid: That fright would be the initial sentiment, as the sacred and classic books say—“fear of God is the beginning of wisdom”—or that it would be, in a broader way, the desire for improvement, the search for happiness, as Feuerbach demonstrates, the human being wants to attach himself to all that which, outside of him, appears to his imagination an efficacious means of protection, and which he so renders by the ardor of his passion. This is really the primordial principle of religion, always the same.

This motivation—religion as desire—also led to the much larger character of peoples and, to bring it into his own period, nations: “The belief of the individual, of the group, of tribes or of the nation afterwards take on the special character that the primeval geographic environment and the historical milieu, secondary and complex, impose on it.” Reclus pithily concluded, in the present tense: “Whatever we want, an ideal power imagined by us must grant it: it creates itself to satisfy us.”35 His text fully supported his friend Mikhail Bakunin’s God and the State, a more developed and eloquent statement of an atheist position, which propagated its own brilliant social and political analysis of the role of religion in history and contemporary society.36 Kupka was as deeply engaged as Reclus with the question of the birth of art and religion. In La création dans les arts plastiques, Kupka revealed how profoundly he was influenced by the text he illustrated, yet he went beyond Reclus’s materialism in his interpretation of the information Reclus presented on early culture. The opening lines of his book read: “To tell the truth, the sole aim to which this book aspires, is to be the certain friend of those who see in art, not a simple pretext to satisfy a naive pride, but the fundamental problem of the means through which the ideals of humanity seek to express themselves.”37 He viewed the tools and imagery of the Magdalenian period (the last culture of the Upper Paleolithic, known for its cave paintings), the Inuit, and Siberian Chukchi

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(Tchouktches), as made not merely by early humans but by the earliest artists, who even shared physical and gender characteristics, the type de l’homme-artiste, or “man-artist type.”38 Like Kupka himself, these artists’ “vital energy” was “exhaled” into their work: the signs of an important natural process. It is worth considering his full passage on this question: If one must define in a few words the man-artist type, one must say that he is a sensitive and fragile being whose existence is concentrated in images of his interior life and who economizes his vital energy [énergie vitale] finally to exhale it in his work. It is a disequilibrium between the outside [world] and the inside that tends to relegate the artist to the lower rungs of the social ladder. To escape this situation, he often finds refuge among his confreres, in a closed community [ un cénacle fermé ]. 39

Kupka quickly ranged from these cultures to his own to develop his theory of the nature of artistic creativity, in his view literally “natural.” The outward appearance of art changes over time, but its meaning and its processes do not, unless distorted by social disharmony and domination. He contemptuously observed that, in the past, “the theme, fixed in advance, was dictated to [artists] despotically.”40 His anarchist thought was evident in the key distinction between “true artists,” described above, and “false” ones, who celebrate worldly power in all ages: At the other extreme, those who do not flee a too arid reality for the exclusivity of a coterie seek asylum in the entourage of the powerful of this world where they play the role of prostitutes and parasites. The artist who sculpts the exploits of an Ashurbanipal, an Ashurnazirpal or a Ramses was without any doubt a representative of the same type as the painters and sculptors who celebrate our contemporary plutocrats and senior army officials. 41

In fact, Kupka opened his book by stating the fundamental relationship between art and society. If artists are a force of nature, their art is aimed at the creation of knowledge for the benefit of all: The accomplishments of science exercise, nowadays, an undeniable influence on artists, many of whom are in all respects—consciously or without realizing it—the disciples of the newest thinkers. Actors of the modern tragedy, compelled to learn of things and beings by means of analytic study, artists strive to penetrate authentic essence. . . . Still today, artists set sail for the land of dreams where reality is, if not transubstantiated, at least spiritualized, bathed in a poetic magic, with a charm that one can find nowhere else. They fly far away from this too-gray world, carrying along in their flight the spectator who himself demands no more from a work of art. 42

The artist thus transposes into his work both the newest scientific thinking of his age and timeless dreams of the soul, playing a crucial role in the destiny of

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humankind. The importance of the visual artist’s work parallels other forms of articulated expression: “the utterance of the artist offers us a sort of text to decipher, a lecture made of plastic and chromatic elements, combined to form structures that our glance perceives as paintings or sculptures.”43 And he emphasized that the artist does this for the sake of the spectator, his fellow human being: So as to share his dream with the spectator, the visual artist expresses his ideas, his impressions, his sentiments and his states of soul in transposing them in his painted or sculpted compositions, which put into the work combinations of points, lines, expanses, volumes, colors, lights and shadows—assemblages susceptible to infinite variations. 44

Making a distinction between the realist and “idealist or spiritual” artist, Kupka clearly favored the latter type; his generative language revealed the deep affiliation of physical and spiritual creativity and came full circle with his view of the distinct roles played by creative men and women: “these want to impregnate matter with a supra sensible idea of an unknown, an idea continuously reborn in the poetic and religious daydreams of all times.”45 In his chapter “The Motif,” he delineated three forms of motif that attract artists: 1) the realist; 2) the subjective impression; and 3) the “soul of things.” In his view, the most important artists were those who, “approaching the motif with completely scientific baggage, are led to wish only to perceive the vital mechanism—the ‘soul’ of things—to wish to penetrate, beyond the surface, down to the essence of the creative force.”46 In his tract, Kupka sought the origin of this type de l’homme-artiste in the birth of early cultures, basing his evidence on information in L’homme et la terre, among other sources. In seeking the origins of art, Kupka began to mystify Reclus’s drier text, embracing primitivist tropes in the process: The first samples of painting and sculpture appeared in the most remote epochs, obeying the same principle that still governs artistic forms now. These are the prints left in matter, the deliberate marks that reveal the desire to adorn or the need to express that which agitates the “soul” of these distant ancestors of artists today. The pictorial signs, engraved ideograms, for one reason or another, in a mammoth bone or on the wall of a cavern, are the same made in our own days by the Chukchi of Siberia, the Eskimos and other primitive peoples, not yet out of the childhood of history.

The first such marks led to the birth of the decorative: “these strokes intertwine, engendering angles, curves, circles in an expressly rhythmic language,” leading eventually to figuration. “The aim then becomes to signify, to seize a thought, to exteriorize what would be nothing more than a movement of the soul, the expression of which the creators try hard to render clear and readable.” Gradually the “representation of objects, animals and people, vehicles of the idea, seize better and better the appearances of the real.”47

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K u p ka , B e r gs o n , a n d t h e O r i g i n s o f C r e at i v i t y

While Kupka followed Reclus’s largely materialist account of early art, acknowledging the invention of art in response to practical necessities, he was more deeply motivated to work out a Bergsonian theory for the invention of art.48 Bergson’s complex concept of “creative evolution” is central to a consideration of the Bergsonian aspects of Kupka’s social theory and the unique role of the artist in furthering its development. For Bergson, the universe was composed of durational activity—a vital impulse or élan vital—typified by greater or lesser degrees of freedom.49 Vibratory molecular matter, the lowest element in this cosmic hierarchy, is made of actions that are almost wholly predetermined and therefore scientifically predictable, while in the case of living organisms, this relative lack of freedom is manifest in terms of unreflective instinctual activity.50 In this philosopher’s cosmology, freedom of activity was part and parcel of creativity writ large, the élan vital permeating all living things. At the human level, Bergson argued that actions also manifest varying degrees of freedom, depending on whether our acts are instinctual, pragmatic (or intellectual), or the product of intuition. Intuition for Bergson was a faculty of willed empathy whose presence defines the artist, but which is discernable to others only through an effort of will. Any human activity not the product of individual free will, whether inspired by habit or coercion, adds nothing to our creative development. By contrast, intuition not only allows humans to grasp the cosmic élan vital around us and within us but also gives birth to actions that actually contribute to the élan vital’s ongoing development. Artistic expression is the most developed form of a life force permeating all living things. “Life, like conscious activity, is invention, is unceasing creation,” he wrote in Creative Evolution, and it is through artistic expression that our personality “shoots, grows, and ripens without ceasing.”51 Bergson, like Kupka after him, claimed that the “vital energy” native to artistic creation was an evolutionary force fundamental to life itself. Bergson’s dismissal of all human activity not the product of free will recalls Kupka’s condemnation of “false” artists whose art framed “themes, fixed in advance” and “dictated” to artists by their autocratic patrons. Bergson and Kupka both argued that art was the product of the élan vital and could be numbered among its organic manifestations. Thus the creation of art for Bergson is integral to evolution, which is the central meaning of his term, “creative evolution.” Here Bergson entered the debate over the interpretation of Darwin’s thought. According to Richard Lehan: Intuitive intelligence is thus the highest form of cognitive power as well as the force which drives man ahead of it. When the weight of this force carries the totality of the past to the moment, we have memory—and the creation of both the universe and the self in Bergson is inseparable from the functioning of intuition and memory. Thus, for Bergson, mind both directs and accesses life.

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With this idea he undid the notions of mechanism and teleology, undercut both Enlightenment and Darwinian assumptions, gave weight to the modernist belief that art is the highest function of our activity, and helped establish the modernist belief that the universe is inseparable from mind and that the self is created out of memory. 52

Darwin’s findings had also been reinterpreted by Kropotkin in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, in which he opposed Herbert Spencer’s individualist theory of the “survival of the fittest” (echoing Sir Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s line, “nature, red in tooth and claw,” itself a commonly held Victorian view of the natural world and much quoted in subsequent Darwinian debates). Kropotkin’s theory—as with Spencer, based on Darwin’s observations—emphasized cooperation among individual members of a species, ensuring the survival of the species rather than merely the individual. This was his model for human society in the future: voluntary cooperation among individuals for the betterment of all. Reclus engaged this debate with his own theory of evolution as purely social, while Bergson developed his complex theory of creative evolution. Kupka, following all three thinkers, clearly positioned himself even closer to Bergson than did Reclus. The Bergsonism evident in Reclus’s engagement with Creative Evolution is deeply woven into Kupka’s book. Drawing on both Bergson’s Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution, Kupka conjured with the philosopher’s ideas on memory, intuition, durée, vitalism, art as an abstraction of intuition, and the organic nature of art.53 Kupka made a specifically Bergsonian argument regarding the latter theme: “Art expresses itself in composing its own organism. The work of art possesses a specific organic structure, entirely different from that which is found in nature.” Rejecting both photography and realism, the nature of art for Kupka completely differed from the objective image of the natural world: “Art, such as we understand it, resides integrally in the subjective givens, in the complex of ideas and states of soul.”54 Like Reclus, Kupka discussed society in his overview of human development, and in so doing clarified his own position on abstraction. He emphasized that it is social experience that gives rise to and shapes visual art: Yes, collective ideas are the ones that shape the social environment, which, in its turn, determines the visual arts. But works of art seize ideas, clothe them with forms and with colors, with a three-dimensional aspect of which the effect is more accentuated, more captivating, more radical than that of a purely abstract notion. 55

It is ironic that the general understanding of Kupka’s art was subsequently reduced to a post–World War I concept of the abstract, precisely emptied of the ideas that inspired him and that played a crucial role in his later development of “abstract” art (I will return to this in the conclusion). A further thread in this constellation of ideas—Theosophy—should also be mentioned here, as Kupka, who joined the movement in Vienna in 1893–1894, found its mix of philosophy

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and spiritualism compatible with both his anarchism and his Bergsonism.56 Robert Welsh has explored the importance of Theosophy for Kupka, especially “the reciprocal interaction between the “descent of spirit into matter,” called involution, and the “ascent of spirit beyond matter,” called evolution.”57 This suggests Kupka’s further conflation of anarchist, Bergsonian, and Theosophical thought with Reclus’s idea of evolution paralleling in the earthly realm the spiritualization of Theosophical evolution; for Kupka this would reinforce his cosmic interpretation of Reclus’s ideas. These shared convictions brought Reclus and Kupka close in the years just before Reclus’s death in 1905; they even shared convictions about the virtues of nudism, as Reclus in his seventies was also noted for the practice of daily nude air-baths in his back garden in Brussels.58

L’ h o m m e e t l a t e r r e ( Ma n a n d t h e Ea r t h )

Kupka’s illustrations for Reclus’s work L’homme et la terre reinforced his ideas visually, interpreting them in both political and cosmic ways. In his heading for the chapter “Culture and Property,” Kupka emphasized Reclus’s analysis of the origin of social ills in the unequal distribution of wealth by showing a contemporary scene of desperately poor workers collecting their pay from a faceless distributor, protected by impregnable walls both realistically observed and fully symbolic of the social order. Reclus’s environmentalism was reinforced in Kupka’s illustration for “The New World and Oceania,” where Kupka depicted a Native American, cast in the role of the “natural” and noble savage, contemplating the depressing urbanization and industrialization of once-sacred land. In his vision of the history of humanity, Kupka attempted to illustrate the flow of time as organic, with generations of humankind sweeping through the universe in progressive movement towards an ultimate harmonious unity. Mladek, Spate, and others have demonstrated the extent to which Kupka’s illustrations for Reclus initiated forms and motifs that return in his later work, such as the couple embedded in the cosmic arabesque in the “Rythme de l’histoire’—‘Vague”, an image that underlies his seemingly nonobjective Creation series of 1912 and after, as in Conte de pistils et d’étamines II ou III (Story of pistils and stamens II or III; 1919–1920; figure 89 and plate 27).59 Both Reclus—as a scientist—and Kupka based their ideas on the most recent wave theory, with its oscillations and thermal energy; wave theory reinforced the notion of invisible reality already central to Kupka’s spiritualist view of life, as Henderson has demonstrated.60 The language of the newest science and Bergsonism is evident in the writings of both men, supporting their avant-garde position on every level. Referring to the idea this drawing illustrated, Reclus wrote: Men and peoples “make a turn and then disappear,” but they go on to return in an ever vaster circle. From the beginnings of recorded time, the amplitude of the oscillations has never ceased

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to grow, and the thousands of small local rhythms have gradually merged in a more ample rhythm: the more general oscillations of nations succeed the tiny movements of the life of cities, then comes the great world-wide oscillation which makes the entire earth and its peoples vibrate in a single movement. And while the expansions and contractions swell in size, another palpitation develops in the opposite direction; it takes each individual as centre and regulates his life more harmoniously with the greater circles of the cities, nations, and world. 61

In “Progrès” (Progress; figure 90) an enormous intellectual and chronological distance, represented by our ancestor-ape picking up a rock as a tool and an enlightened worker inviting us to join a utopian future, is collapsed in an image whose sweep of time is enacted by a diagonal arc connecting the beginning and endpoint of human culture, or rather the first beginning to a new beginning. This dynamic arc reappears in numerous other illustrations for Reclus and in many later works of the artist. Although Reclus in his writing welcomed a new spirituality with the new society he envisioned, Kupka may have taken Reclus’s ideas further in incorporating the idea of an anarchist utopia with the Theosophical notion of universal harmony, as in his final, “new dawn,” image for Reclus, “Progrès. (Fin)” (Progress. [End] (1908; figure 91), which depicts joyously reborn

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Figure 89 František Kupka, “Rythme de l’histoire—Vague” (Rhythm of history—wave), illustration for Élisée Reclus, L’homme et la terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–1908). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 90 František Kupka, “Progrès” (Progress), illustration for Élisée Reclus, L’homme et la terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–1908). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 91 František Kupka, “Progrès. (Fin)” (Progress. [End]), final illustration for Élisée Reclus, L’homme et la terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–1908). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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humanity in perfect freedom, their nudity a sign of their unity with nature and the spiraling heavens a sign of their unity with the cosmos. The nuclear family unit suggests the regeneration of humankind and represents Kupka’s notion of a “healthy” form of sexuality and procreation. That generation of life on both microcosmic and macrocosmic levels was associated with circles and spirals for Kupka is evident in his work before 1905, discussed above, and returns again in abstract form in his later works.

G e n e r at i o n a n d D e g e n e r at i o n

It is already evident in the cartoons and illustrations that for Kupka symptoms of the decadence of contemporary society (and most of history) included the destruction of working-class families and the prostitution of working-class women, whose female generative powers were symbolic of the source of life. Bergson too reinforced Kupka’s central focus on this theme in Creative Evolution. Mark Antliff has discussed Bergson’s “identification of biological reproduction with creative activity in nature”: Organic form may be “closed off by nature herself” but this “tendency to individuate” is everywhere matched by “the tendency to reproduction.” It is through reproduction that biological organisms imitate duration, for “life, like conscious activity, is invention, is unceasing creation.” 62

An enormous part of Kupka’s work opposes the prostitute as degenerative in a capitalist dystopia, to the créatrice or creatrix as regenerative in a future anarchist utopia, in harmony with the material and spiritual universe. Thus while Kupka’s cartoons from the the turn of the century clearly track the sources of prostitution in the capitalist corruption of society at all levels, his avant-garde paintings of prostitutes of 1907–1910 purposely evoke biological models of degeneration in the physiognomic features of the prostitute familiar from contemporary medical and criminological treatises: large jaw, fleshy ear lobe, low forehead, and so forth. A Gigolette (1909) reveals this clearly when compared with “Anomalies of the face and the ear in prostitutes” in Pauline Tarnowsky’s Étude anthropométrique: sur les prostituées et les voleuses (Anthropometric study of prostitutes and female thieves, 1899; figures 92 and 93).63 Kupka employed these signals of biological degeneration to evoke the larger causal social degeneration. He seemed to believe that degeneration, once begun, became a matter of biology; but, unlike the physiognomists and criminologists who sought to naturalize and essentialize crime as a product of biological rather than social forces, Kupka viewed such degeneration as a historical and social effect with biological consequences. In L’archaïque (The archaic; 1910; plate 28) the prostitutes’ physiognomies are presented in their urban setting, exaggerat-

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Figure 92 František Kupka, Une Gigolette (A prostitute), 1909. Pastel on cardboard, 47 x 32 cm. Collection KrystynaGmurzynska-Bscher, Cologne. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 93 Anomalies of the Face and the Ear in Prostitutes, from Pauline Tarnowsky, Étude anthropométrique: sur les prostituées et les voleuses (Anthropometric Study of Prostitutes and Female Thieves) (Paris: Progrès Médical; Lecrosnier et Babé, 1889).

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edly and disturbingly keyed in jarring colors as unnatural as their commodified sexuality. Devoid of the life-affirming rays of the sun, they inhabit the nocturnal world of an artificially lit street. Kupka emphasized in a letter to L’opinion, responding to an enquête entitled “Painters and the ‘Struggle for Bread,’” that he saw these figures as wholly dignified: Leaving in the evening after my labor in the Puteaux studio, I met the

gigolettes [prostitutes]. Don’t be alarmed, I judged them worthy of the gaze of an artist. They had coiffures that the sculptors of the treasure house of Aphrodite [Delphi] would not have disdained to immortalize on their friezes. 64

The reference to archaic Greek art both in the title and the position of the figures suggests the venerable character of the prostitute’s profession and, following Reclus, the roots of any degeneration in the larger history of the human race. In fact, for Kupka, such degenerative physiognomy was not restricted to women; it is equally evident in her male counterpart, the pimp (figure 94), who inhabits the same nocturnal environment as the prostitutes who work for him, joined together in the commerce of sexuality. In their depictions of the prostitute, other anarchist artists, such as Picasso and Van Dongen, stressed syphilis and absinthe addiction as consequences of prostitutes’ plight. In Picasso’s Absinthe Drinker (1901; figure 95) a prostitute sits alone in public, at a café table at night, drinking the narcotic absinthe; each of these details alone departs from respectability and reveals that she is on the lookout for customers. Her hands, prominently displayed in the composition, evidence the crippled appearance that is one of the early symptoms of syphilis. As discussed in chapter 2, Van Dongen’s cartoon series The Prostitutes (figures 17–19), published in L’assiette au beurre in 1901, tells a narrative beginning with the poverty that sends a young mother into prostitution, then shows her hapless child as a grown woman engaged in the sexual trade that killed her mother, and then destroys her as well. This generational inheritance, for Van Dongen, is clearly socially and economically driven, and ends in the same death waiting for Picasso’s Absinthe Drinker. Like Van Dongen, Kupka uses such prostitute imagery, already fully developed in anarchist circles, to propagate against capital, not against the prostitute herself.

Figure 94 František Kupka, Le “Mec”(Le Confident) (The pimp), 1910. Oil on canvas, 104 x 68 cm. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 95

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Pablo Picasso, Absinthe Drinker, 1901. Oil on cardboard, 65.5 x 50.8 cm. Private collection. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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Throughout this period, Kupka was equally preoccupied with alternative images of women as generative and creative, and not in the merely childbearing sense. Themes of “free love,” liberated sexuality, and naturism were all part of a contemporary anarchist feminism of which Kupka’s thought and Reclus’s is emblematic and with which his art was crucially concerned, expanding to embrace the earth and the universe as a whole. In The Bather (1906–1909; plate 29) the contrast could hardly be greater between the dark yet garishly colored, oppressive, and ritualized world of the prostitute—trading in the body-as-commodity— and this idyllic naturist setting, with a nude woman swimming in clear water, fully in tune with nature and saturated by the rays of the sun. Though The Bather is a painting of his wife—who shared his naturist convictions—in their backyard pond,65 the subject is no mere evocation of a real event but speaks of the potential harmony between the human and nature. Her behavior is meant to appear as natural and eternal as the prostitute’s is socially driven and culture-specific: the prostitute’s profile pose may be ancient but her dress is exaggeratedly au courant. Kupka’s cartoons and illustrations expressed his conviction that if the modern world could free itself from the anti-life forces of capitalism—indelibly marking the experience of modernity as industrial “progress”—a society in harmony with natural forces could emerge. These natural forces were the “subjects” of many of Kupka’s later nonobjective works, whose forms are meant to hasten the change of consciousness necessary for a new world through their evocation of cosmic generation. This for Kupka was the project that drove his work from its didactic beginnings to pure abstraction, going beyond his dystopic exposés to conjure with the transformative power of art itself as the appropriate nonmaterial, nonfigurative medium for the spiritual transformation of the beholder and an art appropriate to a future society free of conflict. As we know, Kupka’s succès de scandale of 1912, Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors, descends from his Girl with a Ball of 1908, based on a series of more than fifty intervening drawings (plates 30 and 31; figure 96).66 In the earlier naturist painting, Kupka’s young step-daughter plays outdoors with a ball. Her position is static, but the brilliant light lends a vibratory shimmer to the child’s flesh and to the flowers, grasses, and trees of the landscape in which she is immersed. In her hand she holds a ball, decorated with the colors of the sun and patterned with interlocking circles. In the series of drawings abstracting this painting, Kupka combined his interests in science, Theosophy, and anarchism, transforming the themes of his initial naturist painting into pure nonobjectivity. In the earlier drawings the figure of the girl remains visible, with indications of movements that expand the concept of the interlocking circles into the motions themselves, based on the most recent scientific chronophotographs by Jules-Étienne Marey.67 Indeed, we are told that Kupka tried to replicate what he saw as the mystical revelation of movement and its fugitive registration on the photographic plate in his own garden, with himself running nude before the camera lens,68 an anecdote redolent of the more than merely visual influence of chronophotography on the

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Figure 96 František Kupka, drawing for Girl with a Ball, 1908–1909. Pencil on paper, 20.6 x 13.3 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

artist. Later drawings in the series develop into much more abstract swirls, with the initial theme of innocent unity with nature dematerialized into an evocation of the underlying rhythms of life. In the culminating work, Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors (1912)—which is nearly seven feet square—these traces of motion were monumentalized into a dynamic composition with interlocking circles behind, used as a sign for the generative power of life on macrocosmic and microcosmic levels. The interlocking circles are equally meant to evoke in the viewer the vibrations, or oscillations, of the artist’s “thought-forms,” to use the Theosophical term of Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbetter. Their book, Les Formes-pensées (Thought-forms, 1905), deeply influenced Wassily Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the spiritual in art, 1912), which Kupka likely read. Kupka made notes on Mme. Helen Blavatsky’s Doctrine secrète (Secret doctrine), and in his treatise wrote that there is: a correspondence between the general activity of the whole universe and the psychic and mental activity of man, . . . [hence the] perception of form itself, the will towards clear exteriorization, is an apprehension of the universal will. There, the artist is raised to the divine in ordering rhythm,

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Figure 97 František Kupka, Étude de femme enlevant sa chemise (Study of woman undressing), 1904–1906. Ink wash on paper, 37.5 x 34.8 cm. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

proportions, logical and organic relationships for himself, becoming conscious of his means of expression, of the ends towards which he puts the whole process into movement. 69

The beholder’s task is to contemplate and respond to these forms, to allow oneself to be changed by their generative energy. And, to return to anarchist theory, the task is for that change to bring humans into harmony with each other, with the earth, and with the cosmos, whose oscillations Reclus also evoked. Kupka invested the artist with the obligation to help the world evolve; the artist inherited these special powers, which are thus as much a form of biological destiny as women’s power to procreate. Many of Kupka’s later works, though thoroughly abstract, took up the theme of creativity and generation more overtly. A study of 1904 of a woman undressing, with all its suggestive eroticism, began a series of works in the prewar period that resulted in La Colorée (1919–1920; figure 97 and plate 32). The generative relation between the human and the cosmic is literally enacted in this painting, with the inverted female nude virtually absorbed into the energy and glory of the sun: a homage to the mystery of life and thoroughly consonant with his illustration of “Rythme de l’histoire—Vague” (Rhythm of history—wave; figure 89) for Reclus’s project. One primary aim of this work was to create in the viewer, subtly yet powerfully, a reverence for life and for women, which forms one of the most important functions of art and propaganda in encouraging the moral and intellectual evolution necessary for a liberated society. He monumentalized the theme of the biological role for women in the cosmic order in contrast to the male artist who, through art, plays an active role in re-establishing that “natural”

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order in an “unnatural” world dominated by capital. Thus the female body can represent this ideal state, as in La Colorée, or the decline of the era in which Kupka lived, as in The Archaic, but the transition from commercial servitude to sexual liberation can only be achieved through the creative transformation of human consciousness, attuned to the male artist’s anarchist message. It is important to know that Kupka also explored the dystopian version of his utopian theme—as he had in “Money”—in a cartoon for his special issue on religions in L’assiette au beurre (1904; figure 98).70 On the cover the hands of the priest, that intercessor on behalf of God, squeezes gold coins from the mouth of the pious worker. Although Kupka in this series accuses all religions of superstition and corruption, he singles out the Catholic Church for the bitterest critique. In his “Dieu du Vatican” (God of the Vatican; figure 99), a nude woman in the identical position to the underlying figure in La Colorée is tortured by a priest beneath the crucifix, while a fellow priest eagerly flays her male counterpart; Christ looks heavenward in horror at what is perpetrated in his name. The obverse hatred of sexuality and distortion of female procreative powers, which Kupka saw as institutionalized in the Church, were never far from his mystical contemplation of their positive force in the universe. When human society comes into harmony with these universal forces, science and liberty as well as spiritual enlightenment will have been “achieved.” Figure 98 František Kupka, “Réligions,” cover, L’assiette au beurre, May 7, 1904. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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Figure 99 František Kupka, “Dieu du Vatican” (God of the Vatican), L’assiette au beurre, May 7, 1904. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /ADAGP, Paris.

Making himself a “new man,” opening himself as an artist to all the accumulating scientific knowledge and ideas of the day, Kupka attempted both to see through and to transcend every negative influence of modernity, and this is why he continued to mine his earlier imagery for his abstract works. The relation between his utopian and dystopian images is thus direct, and should help us see that Kupka’s turn from the period of his narrative cartoons and anarchist book illustrations to his nonobjective art was not a retreat from the political issues for which he struggled in his early years. Rather, it was an intensification of those issues, an act of faith, and an attempt to fulfill the anarchist goal of economic justice, sexual equality, and universal harmony. Driven by a deeply politicized view of the gendered nature of life, Kupka combined his knowledge of science, Theosophy, and anarchist theory to develop an aesthetic of transformative mod-

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ernism. The discourses with which Kupka thus grappled in his art played out as choices of imagery, medium (oil on canvas versus mass-produced cartoons), venue, and audience (avant-garde salons versus the popular press). He left behind the workers and intellectual anarchists to whom his cartoons and illustrations were addressed in favor of a virtual audience of viewers who themselves would possess or develop “true” artistic sensibilities and would be able to grasp the revolutionary import of his abstractions. Kupka’s eyes were therefore on the future, since he abandoned propaganda in favor of the grandiose hope of helping regenerate the process of evolution, without which revolutions end in further cycles of oppression. Kupka came to dedicate himself fully to his conception of the artist, who is not only a product of evolution, but an agent of evolutionary change and the harbinger of a future anarchist society. From the modernist period to the twenty-first century, Kupka’s anarchism, which drove his move from illustration to abstraction, was forgotten and replaced by other, more formalist explanations. His art failed at that time either to radicalize an audience for his later production or to inspire the social transformation that would have realized his true aims. When an artist’s anticapitalist ideas are separated from the art, we are left with an easily commodifiable form. This is perfectly emblematized by the recent sale in Prague of one of his lightbased abstractions, The Blue of 1913, for close to three million dollars. As with so many visionary modernists, Kupka’s abstract works were cashed in by Money, and added to His golden store. Kupka’s revolutionary act must be restored to an understanding of his art, both in order to appreciate his true project and so that anarchist modernism can be revealed as central to the prehistory of our own period.

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A Politics of Form

Neither all abstraction nor all modernism can be read as political, much less leftist or anarchist. What I have charted is a historicized account of particular artists and writers in Paris who operated in a culture where the embrace or violation of tradition was freighted for cultural arbiters with political promise or social threat. When I began the research on politically controversial themes in more or less conventional salon painting and on the culture of print satire for the present book, I was surprised by the enormous extent to which this was true. As outlined in the first chapter, critics of paintings exhibited in the Salon des artistes français (and some in the Salon national des Beaux-Arts) depicted subjects fiercely critical of the government but were nonetheless routinely discussed in terms respectful of their naturalist treatments of form, composition, and color. Critics of avant-garde works, alternatively, often conjured with the language of political outrage to describe the seemingly mundane subjects of portraits, landscapes and still lifes. To understand the reception of modernist art in this culture calls on us to recognize the terms of political debate and the importance of visual culture and the visual arts to that debate. If, as I believe, artists generally know what they are doing—particularly when they violate inherited norms of representation—then some of these avant-garde works are purposely provocative acts in relation to that culture’s status quo: a politics of form, among other motivations. Generalizing this into a principle defining all modernism would be misconceived, though that is precisely what many critics of the day did, as this book reveals. This made modernism a tricky project indeed for an artist like the largely “apolitical” Matisse, who wished to avoid controversy, or an artist like Roger de la Fresnaye, who wanted to create a form of cubism celebrating French nationalist ideals. But this sometimes-blanket response to abstract art as a metaphor for revolution was a field day for artists who agreed with their critics—pro or con—that their art celebrated values threatening to the power and concept of the state. The opposite criticism came into play if an artist’s naturalist depiction of themes of social injustice or political

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protest was deemed to have strayed into a degree of realism that challenged the viewer’s capacity to achieve the “proper” aesthetic distance from the subject. If, in other words, it was insufficiently abstract. All this hinges on the interplay of form and subject matter, a careful calibration that was in flux throughout the period and open to constant debate. Where an artist crossed the line in either direction is a very interesting question (explored most fully in chapter 3 in terms of the pervasive notion of the primitive and related critique of modernist primitivism). The unfolding interplay of such contradictory forces is central to understanding the development and reception of modernist art in prewar France, especially on the part of artists who embraced socially critical and anarchist ideas. The dynamic of their art and its reception in a resistant bourgeois culture bids fair to invert perceptions of modernism in Anglo-American literature as conservative and even reactionary (as related to such major figures as the mature Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot or T. E. Hulme1), a field that often dominates discussions of modernism writ large. Because the history I explored here features some of the most important artists of the Parisian avant-garde, it cannot be ignored if we wish to understand modernism as a European-wide movement in all media, where political motivations are manifested across the whole political spectrum. Another important corrective of this study relates to ongoing assumptions about the nature of anarchism, a term still redolent of bomb throwers and “propaganda of the deed.”2 In the artistic realm, Vlaminck and Picasso emerge as creative destroyers (“a picture is a sum of destructions”3) motivated, at least initially, by social criticism, though neither was a political activist in any sense. But Kupka’s case reveals the fuller range of anarchist thought. Anarchists across a large number of ideological positions addressed themselves to current social ills in the name of a society without authority: an ideal based on respect for the individual and communitarian notions of self-governance.4 Kupka believed, along with his friend Élisée Reclus, that political structures as well as people’s minds needed to change in order to create this society; he constructively shaped his modernist art with the aim of helping in this project, in the process abandoning his role as a political cartoonist and becoming the first radical abstractionist. His extreme form of abstraction shares this innovative intersection of anarchism and Christian mysticism with two of the other creators of nonobjective art in the early twentieth century: Kandinsky and Malevich.5 These artists envisioned their creations as able to generate a profound change in their viewers’ perception and were no more meditating on the “autonomous” materials of their craft in a detached, value-neutral manner than Picasso in his Demoiselles d’Avignon. But whereas Picasso calibrated the balance of subject and abstract form to address contemporary controversies such as colonial exploitation and poverty, Kupka moved beyond such topical politics to develop an idealized aesthetic structured to help generate a future anarchist society. These “pure” abstractionists moved beyond Picasso’s motivation of outraging an actual bourgeois audience to the frontiers of the creation of a new, even a virtual, audience.

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Elsewhere I have considered how and why such profound cultural amnesia developed to obscure the history I have charted here.6 The First World War had an enormous impact on the avant-garde in its entirety.7 Key journals that had supported the rich culture of anarchist satire either ceased publication—L’assiette au beurre folded in 1912—or changed course by supporting the war, as in the case of Les temps nouveaux, whose last issue appeared on August 8, 1914, five days after the mobilization of France.8 The latter’s editor, Jean Grave, followed Kropotkin in reversing their antimilitarist positions, shocking their followers by calling on them to fight on behalf of “civilization” against the German invaders; this, along with the assassination on July 31, 1914 of the leading socialist antimilitarist Jean Jaurès, effectively split the antiwar movement into a relatively small group of pacifists and a mass of soldiers.9 The mechanized slaughter on a historically unprecedented industrial scale, the deaths at the front (or from injuries received there) of many prominent avant-gardists, and the capitulation of the Left to the so-called union sacrée (sacred union) led many of the war’s survivors to abandon their prewar optimism, including their belief in the ability of anarchism to inspire the overthrow of capitalism or their faith in any number of progressive, spiritualist movements that had heralded a coming transformation during the years leading up to August 1914.10 The suddenly hegemonic nationalist discourse of the war and reconstruction periods additionally led to self-censorship, if not also to aesthetic disorientation as in the case of Picasso, fluctuating between an extreme and despairing form of abstraction and a newfound classicizing naturalism redolent of the French tradition, the latter arguably protective coloring for a noncombatant foreigner.11 Purely formalist critical language first arose during the war itself—from the pen of Pierre Reverdy, a friend of the cubists who had written earlier from within cubism’s richer discourse—and was falsely affirmed in the 1920s by such key players as Picasso in numerous subsequent interviews. During the war itself, this formalism frequently operated as a bulwark with which allies of the avant-garde sought to defend its cosmopolitan constituency against the nationalism and jingoistic militarism propagated by governments throughout Europe. As discussed in chapter 4, the prominent art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler—who, as a German national, was forced to leave France and, as a pacifist, resided in neutral Switzerland throughout the war—developed his formalist and neo-Kantian interpretation of cubist aesthetics at a time when Kant was being vilified by French nationalists and exiled socialists in Switzerland were utilizing his philosophy to justify their wartime pacifism.12 In like fashion, during the war Clive Bell was a pacifist who deployed his formalist theory of “significant form” as a celebration of individual freedom in the face of the carnage of the war and the curtailment of individual rights and freedoms by the state.13 In the postwar era such formalist language lived on while the politicized context that gave birth to it was willfully forgotten. The subsequent denial of the political and anarchist valences integral to modernism’s development before 1914 by many of its prac-

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titioners served as a protective lie and perhaps a way of rethinking modernism’s continuing value to postwar culture. As a result, the perceived status of cubism or fauvism as a barometer of political radicalism dissipated, though the correlation of avant-gardism with the politics of the Left lived on in France with the postwar rebirth of anarchism, the growth of the French Communist Party, and the rise of Dada and surrealism.14 The result was that prewar forms of radical opposition to the bourgeois values of the early Third Republic were served up as pabulum to postwar consumerism.

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introduction 1 . “J’ai fourni régulièrement des dessins à des journaux, de 1895 à 1910. Cela m’amenait à beaucoup interroger la rue. Je devais inventer aussi la légende, créer toute une situation, saisir la réalité en somme. Il y avait, dans mes dessins, même un esprit de revendication . . . A cette époque, l’influence des journaux sur l’art est incontestable. Grâce à eux, la peinture a été libérée plus rapidement de l’académisme. D’abord, on ne peut pas comparer la tenue des journaux d’alors avec celle des journaux actuels. La presse avait un esprit avancé et les dessins n’étaient pas faits comme maintenant, mais avec amour” (cited in Dora Vallier, Jacques Villon, Oeuvres de 1897 à 1956, 37). Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this book are the author’s own. 2 . A commonplace of historical and art historical writing has asserted the decline of anarchism in France around 1905–1906. Following Jean Maitron in his massive Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France (1880–1914), scholars such as David Cottington cite the breakup that year of the leftist parliamentary alliance, le bloc des gauches, and the rise of the syndicalist movement as evidence of anarchism’s waning appeal on both political and intellectual fronts. The history I chart here contradicts the disappearance of anarchism in France in the avant-guerre period. See Antliff, Inventing Bergson; Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe; and Sonn, Anarchism. On the continuation of anarchism in the interwar period in France, see Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945; Papanikolas, Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada; and Sonn, Violence and the Avant-Garde: Anarchism in Interwar France. The avant-guerre was once commonly called the Belle Époque, a reference to the emergence of dance halls and public forms of popular entertainment; my study reinforces how amnesiac such a term is in failing to acknowledge the social problems resulting from the wide disparity of wealth in the years leading up to World War I. The term “avant-

garde” means “advance guard,” a military term first adopted by Saint-Simonians in the 1820s for new artists helping to create a new society and later by critics to describe experimental forms of modernism (see Bürger, “Avant-Garde”; and Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde). 3 . I address this issue in the conclusion; see also Leighten, editor’s statement, in “Revising Cubism,” a special issue of Art Journal. 4 . Cubism and Abstract Art by Alfred Barr (on the jacket of the original 1936 edition). 5 . The critic Louis Vauxcelles, seeing a realist sculpture in a room with the work of Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, and their colleagues at the Salon d’Automne of 1905, remarked that it was “Donatello among the wild beasts [fauves],” spawning the name “fauvism” (Vauxcelles, “Le Salon d’Automne”). He also mentioned “cubes” in Braque’s Houses at L’Estaque at his exhibition of 1908 at Kahnweiler’s gallery, spawning a new movement subsequently dubbed “cubism”; see discussion in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 48–49; and Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, 56–59. Mark Antliff and I attempt to rewrite the cubist movement from this broader perspective in Cubism and Culture. 6 . Orphism was one of Apollinaire’s most inventive constructions, a “movement” that didn’t exist; see Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 453–59, 477–523, especially the commentaries. 7 . See Antliff, “Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism”; and Debray and Lucbert, La Section d’or. 8 . The relation of modern art to politics has long been a subject of debate, though largely in fields outside art history; see Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics for key texts of Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, as well as an afterword by Fredric Jameson. More recently, debate has centered on the issue of “modernism” versus “avant-gardism”; see most notably Williams, The Politics of Modernism;

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Notes to Pages 3–9 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde and The Decline of Modernism; and Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts.” See also the discussion of “autonomy,” pp.8–10. 9 . Translated in Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, 293–94. 10 . See Stirner, The Ego and Its Own; Kropotkin, Mutual Aid. 11 . See Maitron’s list of anarchist periodicals pubished between 1880 and 1920, Le mouvement anarchiste en France, 2:211–89. 12 . Kropotkin, Paroles d’un révolté, 278. 13 . These journals occupied the extreme individualist end of the anarchist spectrum; see Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France; and Antliff, “Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism.” 14 . Proudhon, Du principe de l’art et de sa destination sociale, cited in Reszler, L’esthéthique anarchiste, 17–18. 15 . Bakunin, L’Empire knauto-germanique et la révolution sociale, cited in Reszler, L’esthéthique anarchiste, 39. 16 . Translated in Kropotkin, Selections from His Writings, 145 (original emphasis). 17 . Translated in Baldwin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 278. 18 . Reszler, “Peter Kropotkin and His Vision of Anarchist Aesthetics.” 19 . Pelloutier, L’art et la révolte (conference pamphlet; Paris: 1896). 20 . Cited in Roslak, “The Politics of Aesthetic Harmony,” 384. Signac also published “Impressionistes et Révolutionnaires” (1891), in which he developed his view of the relations between art and anarchism: “Ce serait donc une erreur, dans laquelle sont tombés trop souvent les révolutionnaires les mieux intentionnés, comme Proudhon, que d’exiger systématiquement une tendance sociale précise dans les oeuvres d’art, car cette tendance se retrouvera beaucoup plus forte et éloquente chez les purs esthètes, révolutionnaires par tempérament, qui s’éloignant des sentiers battus, peignent ce qu’ils voient, comme ils le sentent, et donnent inconsciemment, très souvent, un solide coup de pioche au vieil édifice social qui craque et s’effrite vermoulu ainsi qu’une ancienne cathédrale désaffectée.” 21 . Quillard, “L’anarchie par la littérature” (1892), translated in Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform, 129. 22 . Although popularly conceived as entirely unsystematic, anarchist critiques of contemporary society were firmly built on Karl Marx’s critique of capital, which they accepted as correct (see chapter 5). Where they chiefly differed from Marxism was in their rejection of the state in any form and in their valorizing of individualism, whether independently or within a community. See Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, 640ff. On Marxist aesthetics and importance for art, see Solomon, Marxism and Art; and Arvon, Marxist Esthetics. 23 . Rubin, Realism and Social Vision in Courbet & Proudhon; Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France; Herbert, The Artist and

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Social Reform; Herbert and Herbert, “Artists and Anarchism”; and Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde. 24 . See Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France; and Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform. 25 . Mallarmé’s aesthetic is of special importance in both this history and its interpretation; see chapter 4 for an extended discussion of his involvement with anarchism. For evidence of the early-twentieth-century history of anarchism and art, see Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism and Anarchy and Art; Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson; “Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism”; “Sculptural Nominalism/Anarchist Vortex”; and “Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s Guerre sociale”; Antliff and Leighten, Cubism and Culture; Berg, Avantgarde und Anarchismus; Berghaus, Futurism and Politics; Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe; Long, “Occultism, Anarchism, and Abstraction”; Papanikolas, Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada; Sonn, Sex, Violence and the Avant-Garde; and Spate, “‘L’Homme est la nature prenant conscience d’elle-même.’” 26 . Whelehan, “Political Violence and Morality in Anarchist Theory and Practice”; Woodcock, Anarchism. 27 . An idea of the enormous extent of these publications can be glimpsed from the list of periodicals in Maitron, Le mouvement anarchiste en France, 2:214–84. 28 . Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism, 66–67. 29 . Frascina, “Institutions, Culture, and America’s ‘Cold War Years.’” 30 . See Greenberg, Art and Culture, especially his key essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” originally published in Partisan Review in 1939. Scholars like Rosalind Krauss have argued with Greenberg while continuing to embrace ultimately formalist interpretations of modernism; see her The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths and The Picasso Papers. 31 . Bürger, in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, 26–27 and later articles “Autonomy” and “Avant-Garde,” makes an important exception to viewing all of modernism as paralyzed in its historical position, articulating a clear distinction between “modernist autonomy” and a radically politically motivated “avant-garde” practice aimed at overthrowing the social status quo. While this distinction is important, Bürger’s resulting definition of avant-garde is not grounded in the art critical discourse of the modernist period, which used these terms more interchangeably; he further incorrectly asserts that this kind of politically engaged avant-gardism was only operative in Italian futurism, Dadaism and surrealism. 32 . Mathews, Passionate Discontent, 7, 20. 33 . See my lengthy discussion in chapter 4, pp. 129–135. 34 . See Halperin, Félix Fénéon; Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform; and Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France. 35 . See Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader,

Notes to Pages 9–17 for a wide range of criticism of the cubist movement by both supporters and detractors between 1906 and 1914. 36 . Antliff, Anarchy and Art, 71–96; Heibel, “‘They Danced on Volcanoes’”; Long, “Occultism, Anarchism, and Abstraction”; and Spate, “‘L’homme est la nature prenant conscience d’elle-même.’” 37. Barsky, “Bakhtin as Anarchist?” The literature on Bakhtin is now vast, and many scholars have considered the importance of his ideas in a variety of social science and humanities disciplines; most influential for this book have been Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, and Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse. In the field of art history and visual culture, most attention has been paid to Bakhtin’s work on the carnivalesque; see, for example, Connolly, Modern Art and the Grotesque; and Nina AthanassoglouKallmyer, “Ugliness.” For discussions of Bakhtin and heteroglossia, see, for example, Childs, Daumier and Exoticism, 18–21; Frascina, “Realism and Ideology”; Leighten, “Cubist Anachronisms”; and Cottington, Cubism and its Histories, 213–17. On Bakhtin’s theories and the visual arts, see Haynes, “Bakhtin and the Visual Arts”; and Gardiner, “Bahktin and the Metaphorics of Perception.” 38 . No note can cite all the important literature on this question, from Saussure, Barthes, and Foucault to Derrida and Spivak. I will say here only that Foucault himself, whose brilliant work did much to persuade us of the truth that later generations can never completely understand the motives and meanings of an earlier historical period, nonetheless spent a grueling ten years in the archives researching Discipline and Punish. As a historian, evidently, the effort must be made—even while acknowledging its impossibility—for its importance in understanding how the past shaped our own time. Foucault also struggled against the totalizing Althusserian view of the complete inescapability of ideological state apparatuses, holding out for the individual act against the state that may inspire others, based on which Frank Lentriccia decided he was more of an anarchist than a Marxist; see Lentriccia, Ariel and the Police, chap. 1. 39 . Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. 40 . Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 273. 41 . Ibid., 271. 42 . Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 291. 43 . For various discussions—and interpretations—of the significance of these shifts in relation to art market strategies, see Antliff, “Cubism, Futurism and Anarchism”; Jensen, “The Avant-Garde and the Trade in Art”; Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe; Gee, Dealers, Critics, and Collectors of Modern Painting; and Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War and Cubism and its Histories. 44 . Translated in Baldwin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 278. 45 . See also Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France; Rezsler, L’esthétique anarchiste; Halperin, Félix Fénéon; Hutton, Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground; and Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in

Fin-de-Siècle France. See Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 14–15, 39–42, 49–50, for a discussion of anarchist aesthetic theories at the turn of the century, particularly as they informed Picasso’s self-conception as an artist. 46 . The idea behind Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, was precisely to reveal cubism as viewed both negatively and positively. A good example of such a dialogue is explored by Mark Antliff in “Cubism, Celtism, and the Body Politic,” a detailed study of the debate between the Action Française and the Ligue Celtique (whose most notable artistsupporter was the cubist Albert Gleizes), which encoded the clash of politicized aesthetic positions based on conceptions of France’s racial essence. Weiss explores an enormous range of criticism of cubism in The Popular Culture of Modern Art, though he goes out of his way to dismiss politics as part of the discourse or subdiscourse of either the art or the art criticism. 47 . A good example is Jules Adler’s La Grève au Creusot (The strike at Le Creusot) (plate 1). This celebration of the nine thousand workers who went on strike against the Schneider empire in May and September 1899 was necessarily critical of the government and the status quo but was appreciatively discussed in the pages of La Gazette des Beaux-Arts; see my discussion in chapter 1, pp. 23–25. 48 . Robin, “Les Arts,” Les Hommes du Jour, May 15, 1909, n.p. [6]; Guilbeaux, “Paul Signac et les Indépendants,” Les Hommes du Jour, April 22, 1911, 1–3; Coriolès, “A Propos de l’Internationalisme en Art,” Le gaulois, January 3, 1910, 2; Péladan, “Le Salon d’Automne,” La revue hebdomadaire, October 1911, 405–16; d’Aoust, “La Peinture Cubiste, Futuriste . . . et au-delà,” Livres et art, March 1912, 153–56. The tradition for this rhetoric was already well established in the symbolist period, for example, in the attack on vers libre by Charles Recolin—a defender of “le vieux bon sens français”—in his L’anarchie littéraire and in the anarchist vers libriste Gustave Kahn’s pronouncement that “in shattering a fragment of the artistic façade [the artist] touches the social façade” (Premiers poèmes, 24, translated in Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform, 54). 49 . Kupka, La création dans les arts plastiques, was written in 1910–1912; a lost version of the manuscript was translated into Czech and published in Prague in 1923, but it was not published in French until 1989; see Rowell, “Note Explicative,” in František Kupka, 1871–1957: A Retrospective, 267–84.

chapter 1 1 . The bibliography on the art of the post-1900 mainstream salons is not large. A number of works that survey salon painters of the nineteenth century extend into the twentieth, and there is now a growing interest in this field. See Adamson and Norris, Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-garde; Genet-Delacroix, Art et État sous la IIIe République; Green, Art in France, 1900–1940; Ritzenthaler, L’école des beaux-arts du XIXe siècle;

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N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 7–2 6 Ritzenthaler, Peinture et société, 1870–1914; and Vaisse, La Troisième République et les peintres. See also Levin, Republican Art and Ideology in Late Nineteenth-Century France; Mainardi, The End of the Salon; Triomphe des mairies; and Weisberg, The Realist Tradition. In addition to art reviews in a vast array of daily papers, a large number of specialized periodicals flourished during the avant-guerre; see Desbiolles, Les Revues d’Art à Paris, 1905–1940. 2 . For concise analyses of these institutional issues, see Brauer, “L’Art révolutionnaire,” chap. 2; and Green, Art in France, 39–42. See also Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 244–48. 3 . Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde, 49–63. 4 . See Distel, “Portrait of Paul Signac,” 40–50; Ward, Pissarro, Neo-impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde, 49–63. 5 . For the literature on these shifts in markets in relation to the development of modernism, see Gee, Dealers, Critics and Collectors of Modern Painting; Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War; FitzGerald, Making Modernism; Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe; and Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde. 6 . See Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, chaps. 1 and 3, esp. pp. 13–47 and 74–95. 7 . Baxandall made an important contribution to Picasso studies when he observed that the absence of Picasso’s name from the lists of exhibitors at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne was the most significant fact we have regarding his relation to the art market; see Patterns of Intention, 53–55. 8 . The main issue that distinguishes l’art social from anarchist art is the latter’s foundation in individualism; whether anarchoindividualist or anarchocommunist, the independence and self-expression of the artist was paramount. On the Saint-Simonian origins and character of l’art social, see McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness, and “A Revolutionary Aesthetic?” 9 . Jean Danguy was a student of Gustave Moreau, Gustave Boulanger, and Jules Lefebvre; Édouard-Bernard Debat-Ponsan (1874–1913) was a student of Alexandre Cabanel. 10 . Adler (1865–1952) was a student of William Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury (see Weisberg, The Realist Tradition, 222, 265; Barbedette, Le peintre Jules Adler). Hors concours conveyed the honor of being allowed to exhibit any work, exempt from jury deliberation, which was conferred on artists whose work had won a medal. Medals were awarded annually by the jury, the Gold Medal being the most prestigious. 11 . Thomson persuasively interprets this painting in light of the presence of Léopold and Charles Morice’s monument of “La République,” unveiled in 1880; he points out that the weary workers have turned their backs on Marianne as they trudge dispiritedly home (The Troubled Republic, 111–13). 12 . Victor Marec (1862–1920) was a student of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Jean-Paul Laurens.

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13 . Gustave René Pierre (sometimes listed as Pierre Gustave; 1875–?) was a student of Moreau, Jean-Jacques Henner, and Fernand Cormon. 14 . Rais, “Le Salon de 1900”; the work is illustrated on p. 361. 15 . Louis Roger (1874–1953) was another student of Laurens and Benjamin Constant; I was unable to find information on M. Thomassin. 16 . Weisberg notes that Adler’s Les las is indebted to Zola’s novel L’assommoir (The Realist Tradition, 265). 17 . Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 104. 18 . Ibid., 40. 19 . Ils nous sême nos libertés. 20 . Rais, “Le Salon de 1900,” 62: “accord du paysage et des ‘fabriques,’ du décor et du drame, de l’individu et de la foule, du geste et de la voix, du contemporain et de l’héroïque. En troupe résolue, au rythme des chants de révolte, les mineurs défilent devant l’usine. L’homme s’est dressé en face de la cheminée; la classe s’est organisée devant la machine; sous les ténèbres que déroule la fumée, la foi des drapeaux a reconquis le soleil.” 21 . For the nationalist and republican “official aesthetic” of the government, see Genet-Delacroix, “Esthétique officielle et art national sous la Troisième République,” and Art et État sous la IIIe République. 22 . Rais, “Le Salon de 1900,” 62: “la synthèse d’art la plus complète qu’on ait ici tentée, en ce pauvre dernier Salon du Siècle anxieux.” 23 . Frantz, Le Salon de 1900, 32–34: “Sur un sombre horizon de collines noires, de cheminées dont les pesantes fumées assombrissent l’atmosphère, une troupe d’hommes et de femmes s’avance en chantant avec de grandes bannières déployées. Au milieu de tous ces vêtements noirs, seuls les drapeaux apportent un peu de couleur. L’harmonie générale de ce tableau suffirait à  nous documenter sur toute la tristesse de cette scène, à  nous montrer l’angoisse de la faim qui se lit sur tous les visages crispés d’exaspération. “Mais, si le peintre a parfaitement dégagé le côté héroïque, dramatique même de cette scène, ne pouvons-nous pas nous demander si cette représentation de l’ouvrier répond tout à  fait à  la plasticité de toute oeuvre d’art, et si l’interprétation que M. Adler lui a donnée n’est pas un peu trop réaliste.” 24 . Barthes, “The Reality Effect.” 25 . Jean Grave, the intellectual leader of anarchism-communism in France and the editor of Les temps nouveaux, discussed Naudin as a compagnon in his memoir; see Grave, Quarante ans de propagande anarchiste, 460–61. 26 . Naudin (1876–1946) remains obscure. See Cornu, Bernard Naudin, which contains basic biographical information; Poncetton, Catalogue des Eaux-Fortes de Bernard Naudin; and Berthail, Bernard Naudin: catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre gravé. None of these authors bother to observe or explain the political nature of Naudin’s subject matter in a large number of his etchings through at least 1910: revolutionary soldiers, beggars, executions—including that of anarchist martyr Francisco

Notes to Pages 26–3 4 Ferrer (1909)—and the persecution of unregistered prostitutes. From 1904 to 1909, he published political cartoons in L’assiette au beurre, Le témoin, and Cri de Paris—all radically leftist journals—and from 1905 to 1910, he published a series of etchings entitled Les Affligés (Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale), which were exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants. According to Nancy Troy, he later worked for Paul Poiret; see Couture Culture, 38–40. By the time of the war, Naudin had become a patriot and a sergeant, doing drawings of life in the trenches; see Croquis de campagne de Bernard Naudin. 27 . See chapter 2 for a full discussion of the Congo scandals of 1905–1906 in Paris. 28 . Hannoosh, “Caricature,” 345. 29 . Childs, Daumier and Exoticism, 34. Nineteen of Daumier’s lithographs were censored under the July Monarchy; see pp. 46–48, 192–93. On censorship in this period, see also Childs, “The Body Impolitic: Censorship and the Caricature of Honoré Daumier.” 30 . See, for example, Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France, 153–80, on Maurin and Toulouse-Lautrec; Newman, Félix Vallotton, 21–31; and Jean-Louis Forain. 31 . Including Toulouse-Lautrec, Vallotton, and Pierre Bonnard, all associated with anarchism. See Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France, 18–19, 40–43, and on Toulouse-Lautrec, 154 and 175–76; on Bonnard, see Hyman, Bonnard, 26–30. 32 . See Dardel, “Les temps nouveaux,” 1895–1914. 33 . In 1900, Kupka wrote his friend Josef Machar that he planned to devote himself to graphic art because it was more “democratic” (Vachtova, Frank Kupka, Pioneer of Abstract Art, 41). In 1906, Kupka moved to Puteaux and thereafter devoted himself to painting instead (see chapter 5). Van Dongen thought similarly for a time; see discussion, pp. 41–42. 34 . Steinlen pubished a postcard for the Comité d’Entente Internationale pour le Désarmament Universel (Committee of International Entente for Universal Disarmament) with the golden calf, representing the rule of capital, rising above a sea of dead, and a quote from Louis Blanc: “C’est avec les pauvre que les riches font la guerre” (It is with the poor that the rich make war). Vallotton’s postcard, another image of an infinity of corpses, for the same organization quoted Erasmus: “Un seul meurtre fait un scélérat, des milliers de meurtres font un héros” (A single murder makes a criminal, thousands of murders make a hero). 35 . This is also central to the literature on Daumier, as well as the larger historiography of caricature; see Childs, Daumier and Exoticism, 16. 36 . Dixmier, L’Assiette au Beurre, Revue satirique illustré, 279; Shikes, “Five Artists in the Service of Politics in the pages of L’Assiette au Beurre,” 163. 37 . See Grave, Quarante ans de propagande anarchiste, 438–39; and Dardel, “Catalogue des dessins et publications illustrés du journal anarchiste ‘Les Temps Nouveaux,’ 1895–1914,” 54–57.

38 . For instance, by Jacques Villon, Van Dongen, and Gris, in the Centre Georges Pompidou, Cabinet Graphique, and Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes. 39 . Vallier, Jacques Villon, 37: “J’ai fourni régulièrement des dessins à des journaux, de 1895 à 1910. Cela m’amenait à beaucoup interroger la rue. Je devais inventer aussi la légende, créer toute une situation, saisir la réalité en somme. Il y avait, dans mes dessins, même un esprit de revendication. . . . D’abord, on ne peut pas comparer la tenue des journaux d’alors avec celle des journaux actuels. La presse avait un esprit avancé et les dessins n’étaient pas faits comme maintenant, mais avec amour.” 40 . Ibid: “A cette époque, l’influence des journaux sur l’art est incontestable. Grâce à eux, la peinture a été libérée plus rapidement de l’académisme.” 41 . L’assiette au beurre’s editors did occasionally offer cartoons published in the journal for sale in limited runs on better-quality paper, sometimes for fundraising purposes, suggesting that such profits accrued to the journal rather than to the artists. This contrasts with, on the one hand, the large number of artists exhibiting in the Salon des Humoristes and the Salon des Peintres-Graveurs français, and, on the other, the precious editions of modernist prints and books published by such entrepreneurs as Ambroise Vollard. See Johnson, Ambroise Vollard, Editeur. 42 . Jean-Louis Forain, cited in Lethève, La Caricature sous la IIIe République, 42. 43 . See my discussion in the introduction, pp. 8–10. 44 . See Dixmier, L’Assiette au Beurre, Revue satirique illustré. 45 . See Shikes, “Five Artists in the Service of Politics in the Pages of L’Assiette au beurre,” 163. 46 . Quoted in Appelbaum, French Satirical Drawings from L’Assiette au Beurre, vi. See also Shikes, who cites the testimony of Grandjouan (“Five Artists in the Service of Politics in the Pages of L’Assiette au beurre,” 163). 47 . See Dardel, “Catalogue des dessins et publications illustrés du journal anarchiste ‘Les Temps Nouveaux,’ 1895–1914.” See also Grave’s own memoir, Quarante ans de propagande anarchiste (the original manuscript of his Mouvement libertaire sous la Troisième République, discovered and edited by Maitron); Patsouras, “Jean Grave”; and Patsouras, The Anarchism of Jean Grave. 48 . Patsouras, “Jean Grave,” 171, 438ff, 540, 547. 49 . According to Elisabeth and Michel Dixmier, d’Ostoya’s full name was Baron Ostoya-Sochinsky. Before coming to Paris he had had a military career in Turkey, Poland, and the Foreign Legion; he died sometime after 1936 (L’Assiette au Beurre, Revue satirique illustré, 327). In addition to his numerous drawings for L’assiette au beurre, he published drawings in Le rire and L’action, concentrating on themes of Germany, Russia, Spain, the army, and anticolonialism. Salmon discussed his friendship with d’Ostoya in his memoir, Souvenirs sans fin, première époque (1903–1908).

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Notes to Pages 3 4–4 3 50 . Laurent Tailhade, “La Police,” L’assiette au beurre, May 23, 1903, 1886: “Ces brutes que vous payez pour défendre la vie humaine, pour garder vos logis, vos personnes, des meurtriers et des larrons—puisque vous n’avez pas le coeur de le faire vous-même—impuissantes à vous garder et trop lâches pour vous défendre, n’ont en réalité d’autre besogne que de molester les humbles et d’assassiner les indépendants.” 51 . André Salmon and d’Ostoya, “Petite Garnison,” L’assiette au beurre, June 18, 1904, 2802: “Les journaux: les derniers Conseils de Guerre prouvent que les officiers s’amusent à  martyriser les hommes.” Salmon’s contribution was a poem parodying the German army. 52 . Auguste Roubille was a cartoonist who also contributed to Le rire, Le sourire, Cri de Paris, Cocorico, and Fantasio, as well as exhibiting paintings in the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne. 53 . Discussed in chapter 2. 54 . “Pensées d’un Ventru,” L’assiette au beurre, January 21, 1905, 199: “Si d’ignobles bandits sont du soir au matin plongés dans le crime . . . il faut bien admettre que quotidiennement des milliers de héroes travaillent pour la gloire de la France.— Quant à  l’ouvrier, s’il est quelquefois ignoble . . . il est souvent sublime.” 55 . Anatole France, “A bas l’alliance russe!,” L’assiette au beurre, July 1, 1905, 210: “C’est un signe des temps nouveaux, camarades, que les balles qui frappèrent les ouvriers russes au bord de la Néva aient sifflé à  toutes les oreilles humaines. . . . Mais ce n’est pas l’alliance avec la Russie, c’est tout le contraire, c’est l’alliance avec le Tzar que notre gouvernement républicain, à  tendences monarchiques, nous a imposée.” 56 . Anatole France, “A bas l’alliance russe!,” L’assiette au beurre, July 1, 1905, 217: “L’alliance russe fut, dans la pensée de la France, une garantie contre la Triplice[.] Mais la gouvernement russe n’y vit jamais qu’une source inépuisable d’emprunts[.] C’est avec l’épargne française qu’il nourrit les entreprises insensées en orient[.] Puissent les folies et les crimes du Tzarisme, dont nos gouvernants et nos financiers se [firent?] les complices, ne pas précipiter notre pays dans une effroyable catastrophe financière! Bourgeois économi[e]s, désormais méfier vous du rouble!” 57 . Gustave Geffroy, “A bas l’alliance russe!,” L’assiette au beurre, July 1, 1905, 215: “L’alliance avec le peuple russe, certes oui [.] Mais non avec le Tsarisme[.] C’est une monstruosité, ce lien de la nation française, qui a fait la Révolution, qui a donné l’espoir aux opprimés du monde entier, avec un pouvoir brutal, sanglant, aveugle et sourd, qui pend, fusille, emprisonne et déporte, sans lois et sans jugements, qui maintient des millions d’hommes sous la terreur et le silence. . . . “Alliés de la vraie Russie, nous n’avons plus qu’à  vouloir ardemment la fin du Tsarisme, la victoire de la Révolution[.]” Geffroy was a socialist and important critic and supporter of the impressionists and symbolists (see Paradise, Gustave Geffroy and the Criticism of Painting).

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58 . Aristide Delannoy à Courrières en 1906, 4–5. This is also evident in Delannoy’s police file in the Archives de la Préfecture de Police, now on deposit in the Archives Nationales, Paris. 59 . Aristide Delannoy: Un Crayon de Combat, 66–67; Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France, 254–57; and Antliff, “‘Their Country’”; Antliff, “Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s Guerre sociale.” The other artist was the anarchist neoimpressionist Maximilien Luce, imprisoned in 1894 and “charged with painting pictures of workers and giving lithographs of them to anarchist publications” (Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 285). Halperin cites a police agent gloating that “the arrest of Luce has planted terror in the hearts of all the illustrators, sculptors and painters of Montmartre; even the most moderate of the anarchists talk of fleeing” (285, 395). On d’Amade, see Porch, The Conquest of Morocco, 168ff. The army was especially nervous because of the growing effectiveness of the antimilitarist campaign following the government’s use of the army to break strikes (nineteen dead and seven hundred wounded between 1906 and 1908); see Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France, 254 and discussion in this chapter, pp. 51–54. 60 . Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France, 257; Jules Grandjouan, 31–32; and Grandjouan, Jules Grandjouan: Créateur de l’affiche politique illustrée en France. 61 . See Halicka, Hier, souvenirs, 39ff; Lafranchis, Marcoussis, sa vie, son oeuvre, catalogue complet. 62 . Markous, “Moralité,” L’assiette au beurre, March 25, 1911, 848: “Fatiguée de ce long cortège, Marianne est par terre. Est-ce du Rand ou Durand qui va lui donner le coup de grâce?” 63 . Mayeur and Rebérioux, The Third Republic from its Origins to the Great War, 262–63, 264–65. Clemenceau was a close friend of Claude Monet and Gustave Geffroy. 64 . I thank Elizabeth Childs for pointing this out. 65 . Capra, “Biography,” 2; Hopmans, “The Van Dongen Mystery,” 87; illustrated in Van Dongen, edited by Bondil and Bouhours, 86 (fig. 45); Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts, 254. 66 . Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 71–72; Capra, “Biography,” 5. 67 . Melas-Kyriazi, Van Dongen et le fauvisme, 51; Hopmans, “The Van Dongen Mystery,” 85; Capra, “Biography,” 5. Hopmans cites this letter in the correspondence between Van Dongen and H.C. vaan Hanswijk Pennink, Netherland Institute for Art History, The Hague (“The Van Dongen Mystery,” 112). 68 . “Les prostituées,” L’assiette au beurre, Oct 26, 1901. 69 . Ibid.: “Elle finit par gagner des vingt francs . . . qu’elle dépense.” 70 . L’assiette au beurre, June 20, 1901: “J’suis ni musician, ni chanteur . . . je suis crève-faim.” 71 . See Sonn, “Language, Crime, and Class,” chap. 4 in Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France. 72 . Van Dongen, “Europe et Macédoine,”

Notes to Pages 4 3–50 Boîte Van Dongen, Estampes et Photographies, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris: “Où seront les morts, les aigles s’y assembleront!” 73 . Van Dongen, “Liste des expositions,” Van Dongen, le peintre, 1877–1968, 237–47; The Van Dongen Nobody Knows, 59. 74 . Félix Fénéon, “Van Dongen,” Kees van Dongen, Galerie Vollard, n.p.: “restituent les aspects grouillants des rues pauvres et des rues chaudes de Rotterdam, la convulsive agitation des industries et les filles de Roode Zand et de Zandstraat aux prises avec les marins. Beaucoup des oeuvres de cette catégorie sont des dessins à l’encre de Chine que l’aquarelle bariole violemment ou colorie de nuances tendres.” 75 . Hopmans, “The Van Dongen Mystery,” 109. 76 . Marius-Ary Leblond, preface to Exposition van Dongen: “On l’éprouve surtout devant plusieurs de ses nus, à la fois très parisiens, même baudelairiens, et très sauvages, primitifs, océaniens, par la ligne simpliste et la polychromie distribuée. Il recherche et décompose les harmonies de la peau rosée où il découvre des acidités vertes, des rouges de mandarine sanguine, des jaunes phosphoreux, des lilas vineux, des bleuités électriques . . . . “Ce procédé, analogue dans sa complexité plus subtile à celui des Africains teignant de bleu une jambe, de blanc l’autre jambe, de jaune un bras et de vert l’autre bras de leurs statuettes, est parfaitement adapté à la représentation dans la peinture contemporaine des êtres et effets de cirques, sous les éclairages acétyléniens en projections successives, telles que des feux tournants de phares d’“attractions”; il semble même avoir été déterminé par leur observation quotidienne. . . . On goûte là en peinture, une joie analogue à celle qu’inspirent les sculptures javanaises ou cambodgiennes. . . . Ailleurs, des clowns sont vus en jouets, réalisant des expressions humaines dans leurs visages de poupées de bois. Tel autre—un portrait d’acteur hollandais—Modjesco soprano singer, module sa silhouette chantante et insexuée dans une barbarie de safran et de grenade: ici, la peinture condense en art l’affiche; le personnage est lui-même une affiche, hurlant en rouge. . . . ce sont les idoles européennes, ces femmes de notre civilisation comestiquée et théâtreuse. . . . Une douceur naturelle y est fascinante autant que les plus violentes interprétations de visages d’actrices, et assoupissante. . . . Et l’impression d’une grande innocence d’âme, fraîche, septentrionale se communique par delà ces recherches virtuoses d’un art moderniste où les violences ont de la placidité naturelle comme dans les débauches des Flamands.” Marius Le Blond (Georges Athénas) and Saint-Georges de Bouhélier founded the Collège d’esthéthique moderne in January 1901; Le Blond, in “Collège d’esthéthique moderne,” La revue naturiste, called for the transformation of art from “a luxury for the privileged” into a “joy for all” (p. 27); see Hopmans, “The Van Dongen Mystery,” 89–90. 77 . See The Van Dongen Nobody Knows, 238; and Hopmans, “The Van Dongen Mystery,” 107. 78 . Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe; Sonn,

Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France; Cate and Gill, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen. 79 . Picasso makes a similar anticlerical maneuver in subverting a Madonna image (see chapter 4, p. 27). 80 . Schneider, Matisse, 233. On anarchist sexual liberationism between the wars, see Sonn, Sex, Violence, and the Avant-Garde. 81 . Jean Selz “Vlaminck, Maurice de,” Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T090001 (accessed July 25, 2010). 82 . Jane Lee, “Derain, André,” Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline. com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T022279 (accessed July 25, 2010). 83 . On fauvism, see Oppler, Fauvism Re-Examined; The “Wild Beasts”: Fauvism and its Affinities; and Le Fauvisme, ou “l’épreuve du feu.” James Herbert took up the question of the politics of fauvism only to dismiss it, looking instead to the ways various fauvists engaged in market practices and at how their paintings “constituted a powerful tool for constructing a hegemonic manner of viewing the world” (Fauve Painting: The Making of Cultural Politics, 55). Regarding Vlaminck, he denies the artist’s stated anarchism and parallel devotion to “feeling” in his art in favor of a complicit Vlaminck, whose stylistic innovations instead correlate with “bourgeois individualism” and whose expressionism is substituted by a politically emptied form of “neo-naturalism,” Herbert’s ahistorical neologism for all forms of fauve painting (46–55). As the anarchist movement reveals, not all individualism is “bourgeois.” 84 . See Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform; Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France; Hutton, Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground; and Ward, Pissarro, NeoImpressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde. 85 . The question of Matisse and his politics remains unsettled, though Spurling has discussed his relationship to anarchism (The Unknown Matisse, 208–9, 291–93, 328); she quotes Claude Duthuit to the effect that circa 1900–1902, when he was close to anarchists Maximilien Luce and Mécislas Golberg, “Along with a great many other artists, Matisse contributed funds he could ill afford to support prisoners and their families at a time when anarchists were under constant pressure from the French police. Each year he had a secret rendezvous with an anonymous contact to whom he handed over five francs for political escapees” (209). Mark Antliff documents Matisse’s donation of works of art for a raffle in support of the anarchist Aristide Delannoy’s destitute family in 1911 (“Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s Guerre sociale,” 154). See Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics, for a consideration of Matisse and colonialism. 86 . See the introduction, pp. 8–10. 87 . Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 233. 88 . The literature on this period and on the Dreyfus Affair is enormous and well known; here I will simply point the reader to Mayeur and Rébérioux, The Third Republic from its Origins to the

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Notes to Pages 50–58 Great War, 1871–1914. 89 . See Kleeblatt, The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice; and Nord, Impressionists and Politics, 100–7. The Ligue Internationale pour la défense du Soldat, for whom Kupka’s propaganda postcard was made, was an antimilitarist group that flourished around 1902–1903, later merging into the Association Internationale Antimilitariste; see Paul Miller, From Revolutionaries to Citizens, 38–40. 90 . “When they send you to the border to defend the coffers of the capitalists against other workers, abused as you are yourselves, you will not march. All war is criminal. At the mobilization order, you will answer with an immediate strike and with insurrection” (Maitron, Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France, 349–50). 91 . Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès, 351. 92 . Ibid., 382–83, 442. 93 . See Grossi, Le pacifisme européen, 1889–1914; and Miller, From Revolutionaries to Citizens: Antimilitarism in France, 1870–1914. 94 . Kahnweiler, My Galleries and Painters, 23. 95 . Discussed at length in Vlaminck’s memoir, Tournant dangereux. 96 . Ibid., 74ff. 97 . Ibid., 63–65. 98 . Oppler, Fauvism Re-Examined, 194–95. 99 . Vlaminck, Tournant dangereux, 61. 100 . Ibid., 62: “—Les grévistes! Ce sont de sales gens. S’ils font des histoires, faut tirer dessus!” 101 . Ibid., 62–63. 102 . Ibid., 57–58: “Je n’étais ni bon ni mauvais soldat: je n’étais pas soldat. Je ne prenais pas du tout mon rôle au sérieux.” 103 .  Vlaminck, “L’Entente,” Le Libertaire, December 16–23, 1900, 2–3: “Et cependant la vérité est flagrante: C’est l’ouvrier toujours anxieux de ne pas crever de faim, quoique crevant de travail, c’est le chemineau sans foyer, le miséreux qui se trouve oblige [sic] de subir trois années de service militaire pour défendre la propriété des autres, ceux qui possèdent: les Riches! les riches qui croient que leur argent leur appartient loyalement, les riches qui ont un honneur, une probité, une patrie, une religion, les riches qui font la charité, oh ironie!. . . . “Pourquoi l’entente n’existe-t-elle pas? . . . La faute en est au nombre énorme de déshérités qui ne veulent pas s’avouer l’état dans lequel ils végètent et succombent indifférents; ils ne veulent pas comprendre le non sens inepte et mauvais qu’est leur chauvinisme alcoolique qu’ils hurlent en des cris de ‘Vive l’Armée!,’ ne se rendant pas compte qu’ils soutiennent ainsi le capital, et que l’ennemi pour eux n’est ni l’Allemand, ni le juif, mais au contraire les possèdants de quelque nationalité et de quelque religion qu’ils soient.” 104 . Vlaminck, “Le Chemin,” Le Libertaire, July 13–20, 1901, 2–3: “L’anarchie, c’est l’aspiration de tout être vers un absolu de justice qui condamne la soumission et la lâcheté, l’ignominie de l’esprit de commandement formant de pareils chiens couchants appelés ‘soldats.’” 105 . Vlaminck, Tournant dangereux, 74ff. 106 . Vlaminck, Dangerous Corner, 11–12.

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107 . Oppler, Fauvism Re-Examined, 45. 108 . Derain, Lettres à Vlaminck, 48. Oppler dates this comment to January 1902 (Fauvism Re-Examined, 187). 109 . Derain, Lettres à Vlaminck, 121: “Je suis aux grèves. Vois-tu un Derain, jugulaire au menton, maintenir les grévistes. Suprême ironie!” 110 . Ibid., 132–33: “Il arrive des régiments tous les jours et les officiers excitent les hommes contre les grévistes. . . . Les mineurs crèvent la faim et ils s’aperçoivent que c’est pour la peau. Tout cela devient très, très vilain, quoique l’on n’en parle pas dans les journaux.” Oppler dates this letter to autumn 1903 (Fauvism Re-Examined, 188). 111 .  “La Grève,” special issue, L’assiette au beurre, May 1905, 86: “Tiens, cette gueule d’exploité! . . . Mais nom de Dieu, c’est la mienne!” 112 . Ibid., 93: “Dire que dans deux ans, one sera peut-être à leur place.” 113 . Derain’s regiment was the 195th infantry regiment; the main figure’s uniform and the one of the central soldier behind him—who looks very much like Derain himself—is “soldat du 8e régiment d’infanterie. Grande tenue (1900)” “soldier of the 8th Infantry Regiment. Full-dress uniform (1900)” and the two outside soldiers are “Hussard du 10e régiment. Grande tenue (1895),” reproduced in La Belle Époque des uniformes, 1880–1900, p. 90–92 (nos. 12 and 22). The painting was based on a photograph of Derain and friends. See André Derain, Le peintre du “trouble moderne” (exhibition catalog), 436ff; on Derain’s unhappiness in the army, see p. 436. 114 . Kleeblatt, The Dreyfus Affair, 257. 115 . Bachelard, Derain, Un fauve pas ordinaire, 18. 116 . Duthuit, The Fauvist Painters, 27 and 29. 117 . Charles, “Le Dauphiné au Salon d’Automne,” Le Petit Dauphinois, October 25, 1905, repr. in Un certain Derain, 42; see also Benjamin, “Fauves in the Landscape of Criticism.” 118 . For example, Gauguin’s Soyez amoureuse vous serez heureuses (Be in love and you will be happy; 1889); Seurat’s Porte-en-Bessin, High Tide (1888); and Derain’s carved panels for a bed (1906–1907; illustrated in The “Wild Beasts,” 107).

chapter 2 1 . Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 53–55. 2 . Gee, Dealers, Critics and Collectors of Modern Painting. 3 . See Cottington, “What the Papers Say”; Jensen, “The Avant-Garde and the Trade in Art”; and FitzGerald, “Skin Games” and Making Modernism. 4 . See Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde, for a subtle consideration of this issue in relation to neoimpressionism. 5 . Doug Cress, “Racism Sparks Hints of Barcelona Boycott Over Museum Mummy,” New York Times, February 5, 1992. I thank Tracy Meyers for bringing this article to my attention. 6 . See Antliff and Leighten, “Primitive,” for a

Notes to Pages 59–62 fuller discussion of this concept in colonial and modernist discourse. For extended discussions of primitivism, see Clifford, The Predicament of Culture; Monroe, “Surface Tensions”; Myers, The Empire of Things; Myers, “‘Primitivism,’ Anthropology, and the Category of ‘Primitive Art’”; Perry, “Primitivism and the ‘Modern’”; Phillips and Steiner, Unpacking Culture; Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places; Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution; and Torgovnick, Gone Primitive. 7 . Miller has analyzed this paradigm in more general terms: “Africa has been made to bear a double burden, of monstrousness and nobility. . . . The gesture of reaching out to the most unknown part of the world and bringing it back as language . . . ultimately brings Europe face to face with nothing but itself, with the problems its own discourse imposes” (Blank Darkness, 5). 8 . The political valences of primitivism and colonialism have received a great deal of attention in recent years in numerous humanities fields. As works I have found most useful, in addition to those in the previous two notes, I would cite Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire; Fabian, Time and the Other; Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions; Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country; Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression; and Steiner, African Art in Transit. 9 . In an early version of this chapter (Leighten, “The White Peril and l’art nègre” [1990]), I developed a complex view of Picasso’s primitivism and its problematic cultural resonances, focusing on Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. That article, somewhat like the painting, was subjected to reductive readings that would equate its argument with an uncritical celebration of the work as a simple sign of political protest against French policies in the Congo. Such a critique fails to correspond to my multivalent reading of Picasso’s primitivism; its proponents have themselves sometimes gone on to posit reductive readings of the work, readings that would identify the Demoiselles with a direct manifestation of Picasso’s fears of syphilis (Rubin, “The Genesis of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”) or anthropological notions of degeneracy (Lomas, “A Canon of Deformity: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Physical Anthropology”). Rubin’s frequent dismissals of scholarship on the political milieu of the prewar period were based methodologically on a strictly biographical approach to Picasso’s art, thus he condemned the work of scholars as diverse as Carol Duncan, Michael Leja, and Hal Foster all on the same basis (see Duncan, “The MoMA’s Hot Mamas”; Leja, “‘Le Vieux Marcheur’ and ‘Les Deux Risques’”; and Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art”). In Rubin’s hands, Picasso’s work emerges as a compulsive and solipsistic enterprise. Premised on the conviction that all meaning in a work of art is generated by the maker, with no awareness of the hermeneutic governing the relation of present to past in historical scholarship (see Belsey, Critical Practice, 37–47), this notion accounts for Rubin’s false distinction between private motivations

and the broader historical matrix in which such motivations are inscribed. Lomas made an important contribution in focusing on the association of prostitution, criminality, and degeneration in relation to Picasso’s primitivism; he claims that “the audacious departure from a classical canon of the body in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon relies on and brings into play what were, in effect, highly denigratory stereotypes of cultural otherness” (“A Canon of Deformity,” 425, 427). Criticizing my essay for a “contrasting, rosier picture of Picasso’s primitivism,” he ignored its arguments concerning the political context of colonialism, the problematic negative aspects of modernist primitivism, and Picasso’s “anticlassicism” (442). Whereas I view Picasso’s anticlassicism as an assault on established cultural norms of classical beauty, Lomas denies its avantgardism, making a direct correlation between Picasso’s primitivism and contemporaneous anthropological and criminological representations of degeneracy. His “anthropological” reading of anticlassicism fails to account for the stylistic dimension of Picasso’s departure from academic norms, making it difficult to distinguish from premodernist representations of degenerate Africans from Herbert Ward to Jean-Léon Gérôme. 10 . See Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 78–84. See also Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Painting; Laude, La Peinture française (1905–1914) et “l’art nègre”; Rubin, “From Narrative to ‘Iconic’ in Picasso”; Rubin,“Picasso”; Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art”; Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson”; Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies”; Herding, Pablo Picasso, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”; and Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art. 11 . See Paudrat, “From Africa,” for a discussion of what was available in Paris year by year. 12 . See Donne, “African Art and Paris Studios, 1905–20,” for a discussion of the exclusively colonial origins of the African art Picasso was able to see. For a brilliant study of the denial of history and “coevalness” to the “primitive,” see Fabian, Time and the Other. 13 . For the French views of Africa and traditions of primitivism, see Miller, Blank Darkness; and Connelly, The Sleep of Reason. For Gauguin and primitivism, see Varnedoe, “Gauguin” and Childs, Vanishing Paradise, chaps. 3 and 4. 14 . Boyd, The Paris Exposition of 1900, 449–50. I thank Jody Blake for bringing this reference to my attention. 15 . A good example is the enormous book by Louis Brunet, député de la Réunion, and Louis Giethlen, Dahomey et Dépendances: Exposition Universelle de 1900—Les Colonies françaises, which accompanied the Dahomean exhibition, detailing Dahomey’s history and its current—that is, French—organization, administration, ethnography, production, agriculture, and commerce, all in the most glowingly propagandistic terms. 16 . For example, Baudin, Fetichism and Fetich Worshippers. See Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans, 258ff; Miller, Blank Darkness; Connelly,

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N o t e s t o P a g e s 6 2– 6 8 “The Origins and Development of Primitivism”; and Schneider, An Empire for the Masses. A good history of imperial procedures in this period is Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire. 17 . Général Duboc, L’épopée coloniale en Afrique Occidentale Française, 395; Fage, A History of West Africa, 175. For Dahomey and French West Africa, see Webster and Boahen, History of West Africa: The Revolutionary Years; and Cornevin, Histoire du Dahomey. Dahomey, which was ruled from the central city of Abomey, had a truly urban social structure by the eighteenth century, another misunderstood aspect of the African culture that modernists distorted in their admiration for its presumed primitiveness; see Thompson, Flash of the Spirit; and Fried, The Notion of the Tribe. Diop discusses the extent to which this was true for all of Africa (Precolonial Black Africa, 72–75). 18 . See Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, chap. 2. 19 . See Champion-Vincent, “L’image du Dahomey dans la presse française”; Fage, A History of West Africa, 199–200; Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans; and Schneider, An Empire for the Masses, 97–109. 20 . Répin, “Voyage du Dahomey,” Tour du Monde, 1863. 21 . Plate in Forbes, Dahomey and the Dahomans. 22 . This engraving was reproduced, at the beginning of the French conquest, in Le Journal Illustré on March 9, 1890, and in Le Petit Parisien a week later, neither with any indication that the image was nearly thirty years old; see Schneider, An Empire for the Masses, 97–109. 23 . Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans, 258. 24 . See Suret-Canale, Afrique noire, 34–36; and Loutfi, Littérature et Colonialisme, 119. 25 . On the Belgian Congo, see Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of Belgian Africa; and Anstey, King Leopold’s Legacy. 26 . Doyle, The Crime of the Congo, 8. 27 . Translated in Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 86. 28 . Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 55–58. 29 . As one witness, Guy Burrows, wrote in 1903: “As the State established its authority . . . a regular system of recruiting was instituted, each district being called upon to furnish a certain number of conscripts. . . . The commissaires de district have orders to see that their quotas are promptly forthcoming, and each naturally enough delegates the duty of recruiting to his chefs de zone who, in their turn, call upon the more subordinate chefs de poste to levy upon the local chiefs for the men required. The native chieftain usually makes his selection from the worthless and recalcitrant slaves of the village, who, when they reach the station, are promptly placed in the chain, or ‘collier national’ as the Belgians call it, so that they cannot escape” (The Curse of Central Africa, 22, 174–75). Burrows, a former district commissioner of the Congo Free State, exposed many abuses of Léopold’s rule; though he presents such evils in a heated

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and occasionally exaggerated form, his book is considered reliable; see Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 77. 30 . Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 79; Burrows, The Curse of Central Africa, 92–93. 31 . Webster and Boahen, History of West Africa, 271. 32 . Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 104. 33 . Anstey, King Leopold’s Legacy, 4–5; Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 136. 34 . Congo Independent State, “Report of the Commission of Inquiry,” 135–285. 35 . Cited in Anstey, King Leopold’s Legacy, 7. 36 . L’assiette au beurre, January 4, 1902: “Cher ami, ici l’on a raconté que vous vendiez des nègres, quelle infamie! Dans tous les cas, d’ici au 14 Juillet, ne faites que de simple échanges et je vous garantis que vous le serez. Agréez, etc.” Translated in Appelbaum, French Satirical Drawings from L’Assiette au Beurre, 10. This cartoon is the more interesting since Caran d’Ache was generally conservative, but was here moved to attack the government. 37 . L’assiette au beurre, January 21, 1905: “Quant à l’ouvrier, s’il est quelquefois ignoble . . . il est souvent sublime.” 38 . “La Turquie regénérée,” special issue, L’assiette au beurre, August 29, 1908: “Guidés par un besoin d’expansion propre à toute nation civilisée, les Turcs iront dans les pays sauvages, porter les precédés de civilisation.” 39 . L’assiette au beurre, September 17, 1904 (text by André Salmon): “Ignorants de votre bonheur, / Pour que Cabourg et Cie prospèrent, / A coups de pied dans le derrière / Travaillez, Belges de couleur! / Ne vous plaignez plus, pauvres hères, / Le caoutchouc va remonter. / Inscrivez donc sur vos bannières: / Le Roi, la Loi, la Liberté.” 40 . “Religions,” special issue, L’assiette au beurre, May 7, 1904. 41 . Les temps nouveaux XI, September 30, 1905. 42 . “Religions,” special issue, L’assiette au beurre, May 7, 1904: “Dieux Nègres: ils sont obéissants comme des Saint-Guirec dont notre catholique Bretagne est pourvue. Pour que son Dieu s’occupe de lui, il le lui fait sentir à sa façon.” In fact, nails were driven into power images precisely to get the god’s attention, after which an oath was attached to the new nail (I thank Emily Hanna, curator of the Arts of Africa and the Americas at the Birmingham Museum of Art, for discussion on this subject). 43 . See chapter 4, p. 27. 44 . La Domaine de la Couronne, cited in Anstey, King Leopold’s Legacy, 8. 45 . “Les Bourreaux des Noirs” [The torturers of blacks], special issue, L’assiette au beurre, March 11, 1905, accompanied by an excerpt from the press. 46 . Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness in 1898– 1899, published serially in Blackwood’s Magazine; it first appeared in a separate volume in 1902. 47 . L’assiette au beurre, March 11, 1905: “Le Bouillon de Tête:—Vous aimeriez peut-être mieux

N o t e s t o P a g e s 6 8 –7 3 du veau? . . . Mais c’est bien assez bon pour des cochons comme vous!” 48 . “Les Bourreaux des Noirs,” special issue, L’assiette au beurre, March 11, 1905. 49 . Le Temps, September 23, 1905, translated in Suret-Canale, Afrique noire, 35. 50 . Gide, Voyage au Congo. Gide dedicated his book “To the Memory of Joseph Conrad.” 51 . Opinions on this vary. See Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 214ff; and Anstey, King Leopold’s Legacy, whose whole book addresses this question. 52 . See Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory; see also Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, “The French Colonial Party”; and Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962. 53 . On anticolonialism, see Henri Brunschwig, Mythes et réalités de l’impérialisme colonial français, 173–84; Ageron, L’Anticolonialisme en France de 1871 à 1914; and R. Jeaugeon, “Les sociétés d’exploitation au Congo et l’opinion française de 1890 à 1906.” 54 . See Jaurès’s speeches in the Chambre des Députés, Journal officiel, March and December 24, 1895. 55 . Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès, 202–3. 56 . See ibid., 348. 57 . See Challaye and Mille, Les Deux Congos; and Challaye, Le Congo français. 58 . Challaye, Le Congo français, 313, translated in Suret-Canale, Afrique noir, 127. 59 . Louis, Le Colonialisme, 109, translated in Suret-Canale, Afrique noir,125. 60 . Vigné d’Octon, Les Crimes coloniaux de la IIIe République, 8, translated in Suret-Canale, Afrique noir, 139. 61 . See “Abus financiers dans les colonies,” “Au Congo; les considérations d’un arrêt du Conseil d’état,” and “Projet de statuts d’une union internationale pour la protection et la défense des indigènes (adoptés par le comité dans sa séance du 4 février 1908).” 62 . Jarry, Quillard, Mme. Rachilde, Alfred Vallette (editor of La Mercure de France) and André-Ferdinand Hérold together rented a summer house in Corbeil on the banks of the Seine in 1898—which they called “la Phalanstère”—where Jarry composed his first Almanach du Père Ubu; see Dubbelboer, “‘Ubusing’ Culture: Alfred Jarry’s Subversive Poetics in the Almanachs du Père Ubu,” 51–52. Quillard remained close to Jarry, reviewing his novel Le Surmâle in La revue blanche in July 1902 (“De l’imagination et de l’expression chez M. Alfred Jarry”). 63 . “Discours de M. Barot-Forlière,” Les illégalités et les crimes du Congo, 46: “il ne faut pas trop accuser les hommes, mais qu’il faut surtout accuser notre système colonial (Approbation).” 64 . “Discours de Paul Viollet,” Les illégalités et les crimes du Congo, 9: “La puissance guerrière des nations occidentales venait, grâce à des inventions destructives, de faire de gigantesques progrès, lorsqu’une moitié du monde, jusque là ignorée, fut ouverte à notre petite Europe. Tous ceux qui

n’avaient point nos armes, sauvages ou civilisés, furent asservis, furent broyés. Un genre de conquête tout nouveau se créa: la colonie.” 65 . “Ordre du jour, Les illégalités et les crimes du Congo, 70: “L’assemblée, profondément émue par l’exposé des illégalités et par le récit des iniquités et des crimes dont plusieurs colonies sont le théâtre, Adjure le gouvernement de faire respecter dans toute l’étendue du domaine colonial les principes fondamentaux de la Justice et du Droit, de déférer aux tribunaux tous crimes commis contre les indigènes en pays colonisés, en pays protégés et en pays explorés.” 66 . “Discourse de Pierre Quillard,” Les illégalités et les crimes du Congo, 54–57: “Tout à l’heure on nous disait qu’il y a dans la presse française une indifférence pour les choses coloniales, une indifférence pour les crimes qui se commettent au Congo ou ailleurs. Il n’y a pas d’indifférence, il y a quelque chose de pire, il y a l’apologie, il y a la glorification de ces crimes.” 67 . John Richardson in a maverick gesture asserted in A Life of Picasso, vol. 1, 362, that Picasso never met Jarry, citing Hélène Parmelin, who met Picasso forty years later. This claim runs counter to the record in the primary literature but has found traction in some subsequent scholarship; in conversation with me during the Picasso and Braque Symposium at the Museum of Modern Art, November 10–13, 1989, Richardson nonetheless granted that Jarry was “enormously” influential on the artist. Shattuck, The Banquet Years, and Johnson, “Picasso’s ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’ and the Theater of the Absurd,” first made the case for the importance of Jarry for Picasso. 68 . Dubbelboer, “‘Ubusing’ Culture,” 20–22. 69 . Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 295 and 300. 70 . On these artists’ relations to anarchism, see Hyman, Bonnard, 26–30; Félix Vallotton dans les collections des musées d’art et d’histoire de Genève; on Toulouse-Lautrec and Charles Maurin, see Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France, 143–80. 71 . See Décaudin, Crises des valeurs symbolistes, 249–54. On the importance of anarchism for these writers, see Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 53–73. On Jarry’s relations to the various artistic circles in Paris, see Dubbelboer, “‘Ubusing’ Culture,” chap. 1. 72 . Dubbelboer, “‘Ubusing’ Culture,” 59. On November 27, 1901, the Quat’z’Arts premiered an abbreviated version of Jarry’s Ubu Roi as a marionette play (45). For Vollard’s own reminiscences, see his Souvenirs d’un marchand de tableaux, 105–20. 73 . Apollinaire, Le flâneur des deux rives suivi de Contemporain pittoresques, 75–76; see also his Journal intime. 74 . Dubbelboer, “‘Ubusing’ Culture,” 60–61. Picasso’s exhibition was held at Galerie Vollard from June 24 to July 14. Picasso was a fan of Fagus’s poetry; see Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 52–53. 75 . Salmon, Souvenirs sans fin, première époque

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N o t e s t o P a g e s 7 3 –7 9 (1903–1908), 148: “J’ai vu Jarry, je l’ai écouté, je l’ai suivi.” See also pp. 150–55 and Salmon, Souvenirs sans fin, deuxième époque (1908–1920), 283; Jacob, Chronique des temps héroïques, 48–49; Olivier, Loving Picasso, 202. 76 . Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 63–69 and 135–39. 77 . Jarry, “Ubu Colonial,” Almanach illustré du Père Ubu, trans. in Jarry, Selected Works, 53–54. 78 . Translated in Jarry, Selected Works, 59. 79 . Kahn, Premiers poèmes, 24, translated in Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform, 54. 80 . Two of Gauguin’s closest friends—the symbolist writer and art critic Charles Morice and the sculptor Paco Durio—form a direct line between Gauguin and Picasso. Morice wrote a rave review of Picasso’s exhibition at the Galerie Berthe Weill in 1902, following which he arranged to meet Picasso. On his first trip to Paris in 1900, Picasso himself became friends with Durio; in 1901 he saw his first paintings by Gauguin at the house of his friend and at Galerie Vollard, where he also had his exhibition. Durio attests that Picasso owned a copy of Gauguin’s book, Noa Noa. Morice’s review appeared in Mercure de France in December 1902 (44 [156]: 804–5). Gauguin’s Noa Noa, interspersed with poems by Morice, first appeared in La revue blanche (“Noa-Noa, voyage de Tahiti,” La revue blanche, October 15, 1897); Rodolphe Rapetti, “Gauguin, Paul,” Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http:// www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/ grove/art/T031013 (accessed July 30, 2010). There is a large literature on Gauguin and his retreat to Oceania, which I will not review here (see Childs, Vanishing Paradise, chap. 4). Gauguin’s own affiliations with the anarchist movement—though not necessarily more than sympathetic himself— would bear further research. His own grandmother, the writer and socialist activist Flora Tristan, was a friend of Proudhon, a militant feminist and advocate of free love in the 1830s and ’40s, serving for Gauguin as an antiauthoritarian and anticlerical model; see Strumingher, The Odyssey of Flora Tristan. As a member of the Parisian symbolists, he would have known most of the anarchist writers and artists of the 1890s, including Jarry. 81 . Flam perceptively observed the fact that appropriation of African art allowed Picasso and the fauves to escape their own “history and inherited cultural traditions” (“Matisse and the Fauves,” 212); but the resonances of such acts among these artists varied in the meanings replacing those foundations. See also Lee, “L’enchanteur pourrissant,” for Derain’s more generalized primitivism in the service of his symboliste religious themes. 82 . See Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 78–84. 83 . See Paudrat, “From Africa,” 137–41. Rubin, “Picasso,” 248, and Flam, “Matisse and the Fauves,” 216–17, concur in this date, though Flam later suggested, if I read him correctly in Matisse: The Man and His Art, that Matisse’s first purchase was in spring of that year (173–74).

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84 . “Opinions sur l’art nègre,” 26: “L’art nègre? Connais pas!” His response to a survey on artists’ opinions of African art in the journal L’action in 1920, this was not the only ironic or obfuscating statement of Picasso’s to be taken literally by scholars and critics; see Leighten, “The Dreams and Lies of Picasso,” 50–55. 85 . Vlaminck, Portraits avant décès, 106. 86 . The impetus in this case probably came from the exhibition of the Osuna reliefs in the Louvre in the spring of 1906; see Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 79–81. Oceanic art certainly had an enormous impact and was frequently referred to in the primary literature along with African art, and Picasso collected examples from the South Seas (see figure 44). It could be fruitful to look into the colonial resonances of Oceania in this period; for example, the Melanesian island group of New Caledonia (“Kanak” refers to that colony’s native inhabitants) served as a French penal colony from 1864 to 1922 for criminals and political prisoners, especially Communards (see Forster, “French Penal Policy and the Origins of the French Presence in New Caledonia”; and Toth, Beyond Papillon). Nonetheless, the scandals in central Africa largely eclipsed other colonial news, including Oceania, Indochina, and the Caribbean, in the large range of contemporary newspapers in these years. 87 . See Connelly, “The Origins and Development of Primitivism,”164, 237. 88 . Ibid., 260–61, 266–69. The most influential promulgator of racial theory in nineteenth-century France was Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau in his fourvolume Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the inequality of the human races; 1853–1855); see Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution; and Miller, Blank Darkness. 89 . Salmon, La Jeune peinture française (Paris: Société des Trente, 1912), translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 359–60. 90 . Salmon, “Pablo Picasso,” translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 154. 91 . Salmon, La Jeune peinture française, 361–62. 92 . Apollinaire, “The Beginnings of Cubism,” Le Temps, October 14, 1912, translated in Breunig, Apollinaire on Art, 259–61. 93 . Malraux, La Tête d’obsidienne, 10–11. 94 . The term “unconscious” was current among the Zurich Dadaists circa 1916; see Richter, Dada. 95 . For further considerations of gender in relation to this painting, see Green, Picasso’s ‘Les demoiselles d’Avignon,’ especially Garb, “‘To Kill the Nineteenth Century.’” 96 . Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies.” 97 . See Nye, Crime, Madness, & Politics in Modern France; Pick, Faces of Degeneration; and Sekula, “The Body and the Archive.” 98 . Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” 243. 99 . See Leja’s discussion of the “medical inspector” in “‘Le Vieux Marcheur’ and ‘Les Deux Risques,’” 75–76; see also Rubin, “The Genesis of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” 42ff. 100 . Praz, The Romantic Agony. 101 . Trilling argued in Sincerity and Authenticity

Notes to Pages 79–86 that the idea of “authenticity” has governed much of modernist art, which rejects received canons of beauty and order because these are implicated in other received structures of social order and dominance that the adversarial artist aspires to subvert; he points out that “authenticity is implicitly a polemical concept, fulfilling its nature by dealing aggressively with received and habitual opinion, aesthetic opinions in the first instance, social and political opinion in the next. One topic of its polemic, which has reference to both aesthetic and social opinion, is the error of the view that beauty is the highest quality to which art may aspire” (94). 102 . Though no critics specifically discussed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in the contemporary press—it was only visible in Picasso’s studio—cubism was immediately equated with anarchism (see the introduction, pp. 12–13, and chapter 3, pp. 106–10). 103 . Guilbeaux, “Exposition Pablo Picasso,” Les Hommes du Jour, January 7, 1911, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 94. 104 . Lecomte, “La Crise de la Peinture française,” L’Art et les Artistes, October 1911, 32: “le public, bientôt excédé de la vulgarité, de la violence et de la sauvagerie, de la déformation et de la laideur, de l’ébauche grossière.” 105 . “L’art noir,” La vie, September 21, 1912, 393: “Quelques artistes se sont groupés pour étudier l’âme sauvage dans ses pacifistes manifestations; leur but consiste à acquérir une connaissance approfondie de l’art nègre.’” 106 . Ibid.: “qui intéressera au plus haut point les artistes et les érudits.” 107 . Ibid.: “C’est là que les vit M. Henri Matisse. Ce peintre, de coloris équatorial et féru de stylisation cruelle, en acquit pour décorer son atelier. Après lui, l’Espagnol Picasso au dessin rigoriste en acheta. . . . Chez Vollard où les exotiques se retrouvent devant les fresques de Gauguin et les dieux de l’île des Pâques, le beau peintre Vlaminck échangea maints de ses puissants paysages contre des statues barbares. C’est là aussi que s’en procura M. Derain: il s’en inspire non seulement dans ses tableaux d’une synthèse hiéroglyphique, mais encore dans ses meubles sculptés. “Au Musée Guimet, au Musée Cernuschi sont recueillis les chefs-d’oeuvre des Jaunes. Que chacun travaille à ce que Paris possède bientôt son Musée d’art noir!” 108 . Apollinaire, “Exoticism and Ethnography,” Paris-Journal, September 12, 1912, translated in Breunig, 243–46. 109 . “L’art nègre à Paris,” La vie, October 30, 1912, 141 (reprinted from L’action française): “Telle est la dernière en date des fantaisies esthétiques contemporaines. Dans l’échelle des perversions du goût, elle paraît devoir être la dernière. Au-dessous des fétiches nègres, il n’y a rien. Prenons cette occasion de rappeler que l’indulgence professée pour les mosaïques byzantines et les magots des basiliques, pour les figures de rennes tracées dans les cavernes et pour les barbouillages d’enfants

de l’école primaire, devait mener là. L’amour du primitif, en art comme en politique, va au nègre.” 110 . Ibid.: “Nous n’avons jamais songé à recommander l’art noir comme un modèle canonique, mais ses chefs-d’oeuvre peuvent être de précieuses indications pour tous artistes intelligents, pour ceux qui ne cherchent pas simplement mais impurement à imiter comme ces traditionalismes qui veulent restaurer tous les classicismes. On saisit, à les étudier, la spontanéité de l’aspiration chez des humains.” 111 . At the Picasso/Braque seminar at the Museum of Modern Art, November 10–13, 1989, John Richardson’s estimate of the number of people who had access to Picasso’s studio in this period was approximately fifty. 112 . Barasch, “The Mask in European Art.” 113 . For a compelling discussion of Conrad’s relation to this process, see McNelly [Kearns], “Nature, Women, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.” 114 . Salmon, La Jeune peinture française, 361; Penrose, Picasso, 133–34; Cabanne, Pablo Picasso, 119. See also Cousins and Seckel’s superb “Chronology of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”

chapter 3 1 . Gleizes and Metzinger, Du ‘Cubisme,’ translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader. 418–37. 2 . See Antliff and Leighten, “Primitive,” for a consideration of the theoretical valences of this term and its applicability in the field of art history and modernism studies; see also chap. 2, notes 6 and 8. 3 . I first pointed out the inappropriateness of these terms in my editor’s statement for “Revising Cubism” (special issue, Art Journal). Such language has been foundational for discussions of cubism. See, for example, Golding, Cubism: A History and An Analysis, 1907–1914; Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art; Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign”; and Rubin, Picasso and Braque. For specific problems related to the term “classicism” as it was variously understood in this period, see Antliff, “Cubism, Celtism, and the Body Politic”; and Hargrove and McWilliam, Nationalism and French Visual Culture. 4 . For instance, in “The New Painting,” Les Soirées de Paris, April–May 1912, Apollinaire wrote, “One could give the following definition of art: creation of new illusions. Indeed, everything we feel is only illusion, and the function of the artist is to modify the illusions of the public in accordance with his own creation. . . . It is the function of Art, its social role, to create this illusion . . . [which] seems quite natural to me, since works of art are the most dynamic products of a period from a plastic point of view. This dynamism imposes itself on human beings and becomes, through them, the plastic standard of a period. Thus, those who ridicule the new painters are ridiculing their own faces, for the humanity of the future will form its

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Notes to Pages 86–96 image of the humanity of today on the basis of the representations that the most vital, that is, the newest, artists will have left of it” (224–25). 5 . For citations, see Burgess, “The Wild Men of Paris,” 28; and André Salmon, “Histoire anecdotique du cubisme,” translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 360. On cubism and Bergsonism, see Antliff, Inventing Bergson. 6 . Green, Camera Work: A Critical Anthology, 340. The installation photograph was published in Camera Work’s January 1915 issue; the collage is currently in the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 7 . Published in Burgess, “The Wild Men of Paris,” 407; Rubin, “Picasso,” 310. 8 . Rubin, “Modernist Primitivism,” 18–20; Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson.” 9 . See also Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art, 120–24, who draws on later Kahnweiler (his “Negro Art and Cubism,” Horizon, December 1948); Kahnweiler in turn asserts the importance of Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1908), a widely influential text articulating a theory of the psychological basis for an “urge to abstraction” shared by “primitives” and modernists alike. 10 . See Raynal, “Conception et Vision,” Gil Blas, August 29, 1912, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 318–20. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler also based his account of cubism on his own embrace of Kant, but since he wrote in Switzerland during the First World War, his Der Weg zum Kubismus (The rise of cubism) postdates the prewar period that saw the development of cubism. See Antliff and Leighten, Cubism and Culture, 203–5, for a discussion of the wartime context in which Kahnweiler constructed his interpretation of the movement, and chapter 4, pp. 143–44. 11 . For a discussion of theories of primitivism and its relation to modernist art, see Antliff and Leighten, “Primitive” and Cubism and Culture, 24– 53. In “Primitive” we outline key texts in cultural theory, anthropology, and cultural geography that have contributed to an understanding of the concept in the field of art history. On children’s art and modernism, see Jonathan Fineberg, The Innocent Eye. 12 . Burgess, “Purple Cow: Reflections on a Mythic Beast Who’s Quite Remarkable, at Least,” The Lark, no. 1, May 1,1895: “I never saw a purple cow, I never hope to see one; but I can tell you, anyhow, I’d rather see than be one!” 13 . This article was first brought to light by Fry in “Cubism 1907–1908.” 14 . See my discussion in chapter 2. 15 . Burgess, “The Wild Men of Paris,” 28. 16 . On the difference between these two key concepts in European history, see Connelly, The Sleep of Reason. 17 . Derain, quoted in Burgess, “The Wild Men of Paris,” 33. 18 . Braque, quoted ibid., 32. 19 . Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism, 162–74, and “The Primitive of Everyone Else’s Way.” 20 . Smith, “Joachim Gasquet, Virgil and

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Cézanne’s Landscape”; Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence. 21 . The gypsy figures repeatedly as a European “other,” manifested broadly in modernist primitivism from Manet (Gypsy with Cigarette, 1862) and Matisse (The Gypsy, 1906) to D. H. Lawrence, “The Virgin and the Gypsy” (1926). See Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians. 22 . Roger Allard, “Sur Quelques Peintres,” Les Marches du Sud-Ouest, June 1911, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 113–22. On Rousseau, see Henri Rousseau, and Green, “The Great and the Small,” chap. 4 in Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo. 23 . Apollinaire, “Le Douanier,” Les Soirées de Paris, January 15, 1914, translated in Apollinaire on Art, 339–54. 24 . Salmon, “Histoire anecdotique du cubisme,” 358–59. 25 . Ibid., 360. 26 . On the influence of Poincaré, see Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, 36–37, 71–73, 81–85. 27 . Vauxcelles, “Exposition Braque. Chez Kahnweiler, 28 rue Vignon,” Gil Blas, November 14, 1908, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 48–49. 28 . Estienne, “Des Tendances de la peinture moderne: Entretien avec M. L. Vauxcelles,” Les Nouvelles, July 20, 1909, 4, translated in Roger Benjamin, “Fauvism in the Landscape of Criticism,” 254. 29 . Benjamin, “Fauvism in the Landscape of Criticism.” 30 . See discussion of the French colony of New Caledonia in chapter 2, n. 86. 31 . Salmon, Souvenirs sans fin, Deuxième époque (1908–1920), 278; Carr, Anarchism in France: The Case of Octave Mirbeau, 147–48; Parry, The Bonnot Gang, 44–45; Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 70–71; and Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, 80–84. On Liabeuf, see Antliff, “‘Their Country’: Henri Gaudier’s Anarchist AntiMilitarism, 1910–1914.” 32 . Carr, Anarchism in France: The Case of Octave Mirbeau, 146–47; Werth, “Exposition Picasso,” La Phalange, June 20, 1910, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 64–68. 33 . Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe. 34 . Werth, “Exposition Picasso,” 64. Werth alludes to a letter written by Cézanne to Émile Bernard on April 15, 1904, in which he advised: “Render nature with the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone, arranged in perspective so that each side of an object or of a plane is directed toward a central point” (translated in Doran, Conversations with Cézanne, 29; Bernard originally published the letter in “Paul Cézanne,” L’occident, July 1904, 24). For caution about the context for such statements, see Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism, 125–32 and Stevens, “Bernard as a Critic.” 35 . Werth, “Exposition Picasso,” 64. 36 . See Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, 16, 37, 97–99. 37 . Henri Guilbeaux, “Exposition Pablo Picasso.”

Notes to Pages 98–105 Picasso’s exhibition at Vollard’s ran from December 1910 to February 1911 and, according to Salmon (“Courrier des arts”), included works from 1900 to 1910, though it is not known exactly which works were shown (see Rubin in Picasso and Braque, 368, 371). For Guilbeaux, see Nancy Sloan Goldberg, En L’Honneur de la juste parole and “From Whitman to Mussolini”; and Dictionnaire de Biographie Française (Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1989), s.v. “Guilbeaux, Henri.” 38 . Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, 85–87. 39 . Guilbeaux, “Paul Signac et les Indépendants.” 40 . See Connelly, The Sleep of Reason, 164 and 237. 41 . Salmon, “Georges Braque,” Paris-Journal, October 13, 1911, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 168–69. 42 . Hourcade, “Enquête sur le Cubisme,” L’action, February 25, [March 10?], March 17, and March 24, 1912, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 237–48; Henriquez-Phillipe, “Le Cubisme devant les Artistes,” Les Annales politiques et littéraires, July–December 1912, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 438–52. 43 . Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism, chaps. 6–8. 44 . Bénézit, E., Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs, s.v. “Léandre, Charles Lucien.” 45 . Henriquez-Philippe, “Le Cubisme devant les Artistes,” 439. 46 . Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs, s.v. “Benoni-Auran, Benoît.” 47 . Hourcade, “Enquête sur le Cubisme,” 240–41. 48 . Ernest-Henri Dubois (1863–1931) was a sculptor who became a Sociétaire des artistes Français in 1893 and Officier de la Légion d’honneur in 1900 (Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs, s.v. “Dubois, Ernest Henri”). 49 . Henriquez-Philippe, “Le Cubisme devant les Artistes,” 442. 50 . Vauxcelles, “La ‘jeune peinture française,’” Gil Blas, October 12 and December 3, 1912, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 377–80; see also Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, 78. 51 . Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs, s.vv. “Merson, Luc Olivier,” “Robida, Albert.” 52 . Henriquez-Philippe, “Le Cubisme devant les Artistes,” 442–43. 53 . Ibid., 444, referencing Marcel Réja, L’Art chez les fous (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1907) and Gaston Quénioux, Manuel de dessin à l’usage de l’enseignement primaire (Paris: Hachette, 1910). 54 . See Antliff and Leighten, “Primitive,” 217–33. 55 . The building was destroyed in 1974; the mural, lined with canvas, is now in the Musée d’Orsay.

56 . Henriquez-Philippe, “Le Cubisme devant les Artistes,” 438. On cubism and the grotesque, see Antliff and Leighten, Cubism and Culture, 24–63; Connelly, The Sleep of Reason, 79–110; and Leighten, “The White Peril and L’art nègre.” 57 . “Evolution de l’ Art: vers l’Amorphisme,” Les Hommes du Jour, May 3, 1913, 10, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 530–34. 58 . Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, 87–89, discusses the possible attribution to Picabia of this parody, partly based on its reprinting without commentary in Alfred Stieglitz’s special issue of Camera Work devoted to Picabia ( June 1913); though remaining doubtful, Weiss suggests that if Picabia was author or coauthor of the piece, it is “an exercise in self-send-up, anticipating a characteristic strategy of Dada as it would be practiced by Picabia and his circle after the war” (87). Alternatively, if by Picabia or indeed others sympathetic with the cubist movement, it could be a parody of a parody, ridiculing the uncomprehending critics of cubism and related hoaxers. It remains possible, however, that an anonymous and clever critic in tune with the general hostility to cubism in the pages of Les Hommes du Jour attempts here to expose the absurdity of the cubist painters and their chief defender Apollinaire. 59 . Hourcade, “La Tendance de la Peinture Contemporaine,” La Revue de France et des pays français (February 1912), 35–41, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 218–19. Félix Tobeen was the pseudonym of Félix Elie Bonnet (1880–1938). 60 . Ibid., 220. On cubism and regionalism, see Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, 151–52, and “The Maison Cubiste and the Meaning of Modernism in Pre-1914 France,” in Architecture and Cubism, 17–40; Antliff, “Cubism, Celtism and the Body Politic”; and Green, “With and Against Nature: Picasso, Braque and the Geography of Cubist Landscape,” chap. 5 in Picasso. On the concept of the timeless peasant, see Fabian, Time and the Other; Herbert, “Peasants and ‘Primitivism,’” chap. 3 in From Millet to Léger; Golan “Rusticizing the Modern,” chap. 2 in Modernity and Nostalgia; and Antliff and Leighten, “Primitive.” 61 . Soffici, “Picasso e Braque,” La Voce (Florence), August 24, 1911, 635–37, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 128–44. 62 . See Adamson, “Ardengo Soffici and the Religion of Art”; see also Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence. 63 . Soffici, “Picasso e Braque,” 133, 135. 64 . See Dainotto, Europe (In Theory). 65 . Sabartés, Picasso, 308. 66 . Estienne, “Des Tendances de la peinture moderne: Entretien avec M. L. Vauxcelles,” 254. 67 . Hourcade, “Le Mouvement pictoral: vers une école française de peinture,” La Revue de France et des pays français, June 1912, 254–58, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 297–305. 68 . Rivière, “Sur la tendance actuelle de la peinture,” Revue d’Europe et d’Amérique (Paris), March 1, 1912, 384–406, translated in Antliff and

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Notes to Pages 105–112 Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 249–68; on Rivière’s criticism and politics, see Cottington, “Cubism, Law and Order,” and Cubism and Its Histories, 68–73. 69 . Rivière, “Sur la tendance actuelle de la peinture,” 252. 70 . Ibid., 252–53. 71 . Urbain Gohier (Urbain Degoulet-Gohier; 1862–1951), adopted by his namesake, was the natural son of Gustave Hervé, antimilitarist leader and editor of La guerre sociale (1906–1915). Gohier was a very well-known journalist and editor for a range of journals during his long career, including Le Soleil (1884–1897), L’Aurore (1897–1898; the leading Dreyfusard journal), Cri de Paris (1903– 1904), Le Matin (1906), L’Intransigeant (1907), and finally, La Libre Parole (1909), Edmond Drumont’s virulently antisemitic journal affiliated with the extreme right wing. During the Dreyfus Affair, while editor-in-chief of L’Aurore (which published the famous Zola article “J’Accuse”), he was an ardent Dreyfusard and criticized the government, the army, the church, and moneyed interests. By 1911, Gohier seemed to leftists a right-wing maverick rather than the socialist revolutionary he once was, but he continued to publish in a great variety of venues, including the centrist Le Figaro, Le Gaulois, and the anarchist Le Libertaire. See Méric, “Urbain Gohier,” and Dictionnaire de Biographie Française (Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1989), s.v. “Gohier, Urbain.” 72 . Gohier, “Notre Peinture,” Le Journal, October 10, 1911, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 160–62. 73 . Mourey, review of the Salon d’automne, Le Journal, September 30, 1912, 2. 74 . “M. Lampué s’indigne contre le Salon d’Automne,” Le Journal, October 5, 1912, 1; and Lampué, “Lettre ouverte à  M. Berard, soussecretaire d’État aux Beaux-Arts,” Mercure de France, October 16, 1912, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 355–56. For Paul Signac, one of the founders of the Salon des Indépendants in 1884, a distinction between ownership by the national government or by the City of Paris was important, freeing the independents from fear of state censorship (see Ward, Pissarro, NeoImpressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde, 55–56, 187–88). Lampué does not acknowledge this distinction. On the relation of the salons to government exhibition venues, see discussion in chapter 1, pp. 17–18. 75 . Entries to the so-called Cubist Room No. 11 at the October 1912 Salon d’Automne included František Kupka, Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors; Picabia, The Spring (La Source) and Dances at the Spring I; Metzinger, Dancer in a Café; Gleizes, Man on a Balcony; Léger, Woman in Blue; and Le Fauconnier, Mountaineers Attacked by Bears; Amedeo Modigliani and Elie Nadelman exhibited sculpture. 76 . Lampué, “Lettre ouverte à M. Berard, soussecretaire d’État aux Beaux-Arts,” 355–56. 77 . Nye, Crime, Madness, & Politics in Modern France, 196–202. 78 . See discussion in chapter 2.

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79 . See Voignier, Répertoire des photographes de France au dix-neuvième siècle Français; Le Pelley Fonteny, Adolphe & Georges Giraudon. 80 . See Leighten, “Picasso’s Collages and the Threat of War, 1912–14,” and Re-Ordering the Universe, 98–101. For an expanded treatment of this question and of Lampué himself, see Brauer, “L’Art révolutionnaire,” chap. 4. On the latter question, see Cottington, Cubism and the Shadow of War; and Brauer, “Commercial Spies and Cultural Invaders.” 81 . “Débats parlementaires.” For discussions on this subject, see Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 99–101, and Brauer, “L’Art révolutionnaire,” chap. 4. 82 . Hourcade, “Enquête sur le Cubisme.” Signac lauded the cubists as exemplary of the libertarian ideals that motivated him and his fellow neoimpressionists to found the Salon des Indépendants, the only juryless salon (see Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde, 49–63; and Distel, “Portrait of Paul Signac”). His reply to Hourcade, “as chairman,” was: “Each of these young people has his personal technique. In that way, each contributes to our acquisition of freedom. Long live independence! Long live the liberators! The cubists are our salon’s raison d’être. I am very happy, as chairman, to welcome them into our midst” (241). Kahn, an early supporter of neoimpressionism, also upheld the principle of freedom of expression, claiming that “art lives on movement and not stagnation” before describing the Cubist reaction against impressionism as yet another stage in art’s “successive evolutions” (Hourcade, “Enquête sur le Cubisme,” 241–43). See also Salmon, La Jeune peinture française; Apollinaire, “Les Peintres cubistes,” translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 477–523; Werth, “Exposition Picasso”; and Hourcade, “La Tendance de la Peinture Contemporaine.” For hostile leftists, see Gohier, “Notre Peinture”; Vauxcelles, “Exposition Braque” (and in numerous articles in Gil Blas, discussed in Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art); and Guilbeaux, “Exposition Pablo Picasso” and “Le Cubisme et MM. Urbain Gohier et Apollinaire,” Les Hommes du Jour, November 11, 1911, translated in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 163–67. 83 . Cottington, “Cubism, Law and Order.”

chapter 4 1 . This issue is also pressing for Kupka; see chapter 5. 2 . Kahnweiler, Juan Gris, 15–16. 3 . Rosenthal, Juan Gris, 12. 4 . McCully, “Los Comienzos de Juan Gris como Dibujante”; Rosenblum, “Cubism as Pop Art,” 123–24. Shikes, “Five Artists in the Service of Politics,” 178, makes a similar observation and rightly insists on Gris’s political engagement; but he argues that to the extent that cubist elements appear in Gris’s cartoons, their expressive power

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 1 2– 1 2 7 diminishes. 5 . Green, Juan Gris, 122. 6 . Halicka, “Quand Juan Gris travaillait à L’assiette au beurre”: “Comme ces camarades, la haine de la société avait poussé ce jeune révolté à substituer au vitriol et à la dynamite l’acide de ses dessins et la violence de ses légendes. . . . Il prit vite une place de premier plan servant ainsi à la fois l’art et la révolution” (1, 3). 7 . George, Juan Gris: “Cet athée, ce révolutionnaire, cet insoumis de l’armée espagnole” (6). 8 . Gaya Nuño, Juan Gris, 55; Leighten, ReOrdering the Universe, 22, 70. 9 . Gaya Nuño, Juan Gris, 58; Gris wrote to Kahnweiler at the outbreak of war: “But where shall I go? And How? The trains have been requisitioned for mobilization. Paris? It’s risky. Spain? You know it might be unpleasant for me” (Kahnweiler, Letters of Juan Gris, 7). On Picasso, see Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 22, 70, 110–11. 10 . Gris to Kahnweiler, August 16, 1914, in Kahnweiler, Letters of Juan Gris (1913–1927), 8. 11 . Gaya Nuño, Juan Gris, 259. 12 . See Christie’s sales catalogs, London, dated April 1, 1977, where one is noted, and December 2, 1980, where two are illustrated. 13 . “—Autrefois, jeune home, j’ai été un pacifiste. Mais, l’âge est venu, et j’ai compris qu’il fallait défendre l’honneur du pays . . .—Avec ma peau? . . .—Parbleu! Ce n’est pas avec la mienne!” See Rosenthal, Juan Gris, 12. 14 . M. de Bulow—“En guise d’obus, nous n’emploierons plus, désormais, que des rameaux d’olivier que nous lancerons sur le monde. C’est pourquoi nous avons besoin de beaucoup de canons.” Cover, “Bruits de Guerre et Bruits de Paix,” L’assiette au beurre, October 3, 1908. 15 . See Ullman, The Tragic Week. 16 . Cabanne, Pablo Picasso, 134–35; Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 108–11. 17 . These attitudes primarily originated during the Greek War of Independence; see AthanassoglouKallmyer, French Images from the Greek War of Independence. 18 . See Childs, “The Body Impolitic.” 19 . Ibid., 149. 20 . Aristide Delannoy: Un Crayon de Combat, 66–67; Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France, 254–57; Antliff, “‘Their Country’”; Antliff, “Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s Guerre sociale.” See also discussion in chapter 1, pp. 38–39. 21 . Gris, “La Turquie regénérée,” L’assiette au beurre, August 29, 1908: “L’instruction sera gratuite et obligatoire. On enseignera aux enfants le respect de la loi et les faits glorieux des ancêtres.” 22 . Gris, “La Turquie regénérée,” L’assiette au beurre, August 29, 1908: “Ainsi que chaque pays que se respecte, la Turquie divisera ses populations en deux classes: 1) ceux qui travaillent, et 2) ceux qui regardent travailler.” 23 . Gris, “La Turquie regénérée,” L’assiette au beurre, August 29, 1908: “La Liberté, la seule, la vraie, sera amenée d’Europe et présentée au peuple

qui l’acclamera.” 24 . Malato, “La Révolution Turque,” L’assiette au beurre, August 29, 1908: “Nous ne pouvons savoir si ce liberalism serait allé aussi loin que celui de nos ministres français qui démontrent leur solicitude aux travailleurs en les fusillant”; “qui missent la Turquie au niveau intellectual des autres peuples européens: liberté de la presse, abolition de la torture et des corvées, régularisation des impôts, pénalité civile des musulmans et des chrétiens, limitation de l’absolutisme par une assemblée délibérante élue au suffrage universel, etc., ces fameuses libertés politiques, en un mot, qui dans les pays occidentaux n’empêchent pas les prolétaires de crever de faim et de surtravail ou d’être fusillés s’ils bougent!” 25 . See chap. 2. 26 . Gris, “La Turquie regénérée,” L’assiette au beurre, August 29, 1908: “Guidés par un besoin d’expansion propre à toute nation civilisée, les Turques iront dans les pays sauvages porter les procédés de civilisation.” 27 . Childs, “The Body Impolitic,” 177. 28 . See Greenberg, “Collage”; Krauss, “RePresenting Picasso”; Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign”; Krauss, The Picasso Papers,chap. 1; Rosenblum, “Picasso and the Typography of Cubism”; Leighten, “Picasso’s Collages and the Threat of War”; Cottington, “What the Papers Say”; Poggi, “Mallarmé, Picasso, and the Newspaper as Commodity.” 29 . Gleizes, “Les débuts du cubisme.” Numerous other writers of the period discuss the relation of the cubists to the contemporaneous neosymbolists and to “Mallarmisme”; see Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 62, 121. 30 . Rosenblum points out a number of additional works in which this sort of juxtaposition is operative: The Smoker (1913), The Bullfighter (1913), and Anis del Mono (1914) (Rosenblum, “Cubism as Pop Art,” 123–24, figs. 131–33). He notes that “Gris, in fact, seemed to enjoy even more than Picasso the brusque, yet humorous clash between the rudimentary modules of an emphatically modern, mechanized vocabulary and the old-fashioned styles of nineteenth-century illustration.” 31 . For a complete listing of Gris’s cartoons, see Tinterow, Juan Gris. 32 . I dealt with this subject substantively in ReOrdering the Universe, chaps. 1 and 2. 33 . Petit nu assis (Small seated nude). See Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 94. 34 . In fact, he was wrong about this; see Rosenblum, “Cubism as Pop Art,” 120. 35 . See Gris’s The Watch (1912). 36 . Apollinaire, “Les peintres cubistes,” 504. 37 . Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, chap. 2. 38 . Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. 39 .  Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, 17. 40 . Ibid., 13 (original emphasis). 41 . I dealt extensively with this aspect of Picasso’s work in Re-Ordering the Universe. Temma Kaplan, in Red City, Blue Period, further explored Picasso’s relation to leftist discourse, weighing the

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N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 2 7– 1 3 2 valences of popular politics and popular culture in Barcelona from the late nineteenth century to the Spanish Civil War. 42 . I discussed Mother and Child, Woman with Drapery, and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, all of 1907, in Re-Ordering the Universe, 84–94. 43 . Childs, “The Body Impolitic”; and Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in NineteenthCentury France. 44 . From about fifty thousand to some six million; see also Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française; Ferenczi, L’invention du journalisme en France; and Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, vol. 2. 45 . Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, 120. Terdiman discusses the feigned “transparency” of the daily newspaper, whose messages have become “so deeply internalized within us that the origins of their utterance, and of the practices of reading and perception they have taught us, appear diffused through the social formation.” Their “discursive patterns have become essential to our modern construction of the world. Indeed, at times the ‘world’ and the ‘news’ might almost seem to have merged for us” (118). In “Afterword: Reading the News,” Terdiman emphasized that his concern in Discourse/Counter-Discourse was with the dominant culture of newsprint, acknowledging that there was also abundant counterdiscourse within the world of journalism in the form of alternative publications, including women’s journals, anarchist journals, satire, etc. (370–71). 46 . Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, 123. 47 . Ibid., 125 (original emphasis). 48 . Ibid., 127. Terdiman also quotes from Walter Benjamin’s Charles Baudelaire: “If it were the intention of the press to have the reader assimilate the information it supplies as part of his own experience, it would not achieve its purpose. But its intention is just the opposite, and it is achieved: to isolate what happens from the realm in which it could affect the experience of the reader. . . . Lack of connection between individual news items . . . contribute[s] as much to this as does the make-up of the pages and the paper’s style” (112). 49 . For example, Baudelaire in “Mon coeur mis à nu”: “I don’t understand how an uncorrupted hand could touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust” (translated in Terdiman, Discourse/CounterDiscourse, 117). Terdiman devotes two chapters to what he calls Mallarmé’s “absolute counterdiscourse” (261–343). 50 . Poggi, “Mallarmé, Picasso, and the Newspaper as Commodity.” For Peter Bürger, Mallarmé also stands for an absolute autonomy of art (“Critique of Autonomy,” 177). 51 . Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, 73–80; and Cubism and Its Histories, 27–28. 52 . In Zelevansky, Picasso and Braque, 88. 53 . Arnar, “‘A Modern Popular Poem’”; Goddard, “Mallarmé, Picasso and the Aesthetic of the Newspaper”; and McGuinness, “Mallarmé and the Poetics of Explosion.” 54 . Rosenblum, “Picasso and the Typography

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of Cubism”; Goddard, “Mallarmé, Picasso and the Aesthetic of the Newspaper,” 295. 55 . Goddard, “Mallarmé, Picasso and the Aesthetic of the Newspaper,” 295. 56 . Catani, The Poet in Society; Goddard, “Mallarmé, Picasso and the Aesthetic of the Newspaper,” 295–96. 57 . Rodenbach, “Mallarmé vu par Rodenbach,” Journal de Bruxelles, Februrary 10, 1890. Translated in Goddard, “Mallarmé, Picasso and the Aesthetic of the Newspaper,” 297. 58 . Ibid., 298. 59 . Arnar, “‘A Modern Popular Poem,’” 305. 60 . Huret, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1891), cited in Goddard, “Mallarmé, Picasso and the Aesthetic of the Newspaper,” 297. 61 . Michel Décaudin has outlined the importance of Mallarmé for Apollinaire’s poetry and aesthetics, including specifically “Un coup de dés”; see Décaudin, La crise des valeurs symbolistes, 484–91. “Tu lis les prospectus les catalogues les affiches qui chantent tout haut / Voilà la poésie ce matin et pour la prose il y a les journaux.” “Zone” was written in 1912 and published in Alcools in 1913. 62 . Antliff, Inventing Bergson, 16–38; Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, 73–80; Cornell, The Post-Symbolist Period, 69–77. 63 . Allard, “Sur Quelques Peintres,” 115, 118; Soffici, “Picasso and Braque,” 137. 64 . For example, “La féerie” (The fairy) appeared in the literary revue Île sonnante in April 1910. See A Cubism Reader, 60–62; see also Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, 154–55. 65 . Antliff, “Cubism, Celtism, and the Body Politic.” 66 . Lloyd, Mallarmé, 211–13; see also Sonn, “Literary Anarchism: The Politicization of Aesthetes,” 181–210, and “Literary Anarchism: The Aestheticization of Politics,” 211–36, both in Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France. On Quillard, see chap. 2. 67 . McGuinness, “Mallarmé and the Poetics of Explosion,” 801–2. 68 . Ibid., 799. The author goes on to analyze the ways Mallarmé inserts allusions and echoes of bombs in his writing, particularly his Divigations: “the individual texts of which often appeared in magazines full of topical, political or cultural writing” and “show sustained engagement with the relationship between the quotidian, the political and the aesthetic” (798–99). 69 . “Listes d’Anarchistes” (F712506), Archives Nationales, Paris; Lloyd, Mallarmé, 211. 70 . Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 275–77, 292; see also Lay, “Beau geste!”; and McGuinness, “Mallarmé and the Poetics of Explosion.” 71 . Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 269–81. 72 . “Arrestation d’un employé du ministère de la guerre: chez Paul Verlaine; chez M. Mallarmé,” Le Soir, April 27, 1894; see Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 281–82; Arnar, “‘A Modern Popular Poem,’” 323n3. 73 . Translated in Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 292.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 3 2– 1 3 7 The author notes that “this text, copied from Mallarmé’s original manuscript, is more accurate than the newspaper versions” (395n28). 74 . Paul Signac, quoted in Hourcade, “Enquête sur le Cubisme,” 241. 75 . Gustave Kahn, quoted in Hourcade, “Enquête sur le Cubisme,” 241–43. 76 . See Élie Faure’s prefaces to the exhibitions of the Société normande de peinture moderne of 1909–1910 (56–59) and 1912 (306–11) and Guilbeaux, “Exposition Pablo Picasso” (94–96) and “Le cubisme et MM. Urbain Gohier et Apollinaire” (163–67). 77 . Cottington depends in this assertion on Maitron, Histoire du mouvement anarchiste. The notion of an aestheticist retreat constitutes a repeated metanarrative in Cottington’s interpretations of the evolution of the cubist movement; see Cubism in the Shadow of War, 73–80, and Cubism and Its Histories, 27–28. 78 . Antliff, Inventing Bergson, 135–56, has examined the interaction between the Action d’art collective and cubists, futurists, and their literary allies; see also his “Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism” and “Broadside,” as well as the commentary on the latter in Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 524–29. 79 . I first discussed the importance of understanding Picasso’s collages in light of the anarchist and antimilitarist movements in Leighten, “Picasso’s Collages and the Threat of War.” This image is from a 1947 reproduction of Bottle of Suze, at half its current age and with its color closer to the original, made when the work was purchased by H. W. Janson for the Washington University in St. Louis collection; I am enormously grateful to Marilyn Aronberg Lavin for this reproduction. 80 . Boggs, Picasso & Things, 113. Even while denying its interpretive relevance to the work, Boggs has retrieved the author of this novel, La Véritable Madame Bradier. 81 . See Zelevansky, Picasso and Braque, 75–76. Ironically, Daix interpreted this as proof that “Picasso did not intend to create a manifesto proclaiming his political ideas. Rather, it was something that played a private role at one moment or another in his art.” He concludes that “on the issue of the Great War, he was isolated.” That is, Daix suggests that there were no other pacifist avant-gardists; hence, Picasso’s pacifism is unimportant for his art. He completely misses Picasso’s relation to the larger antiwar community with whom Picasso states here he identified; see Grossi, Le pacifisme européen, 1889–1914 and Miller, From Revolutionaries to Citizens: Antimilitarism in France, 1870–1914. In addition, a number of Picasso’s friends were in fact pacifists, for instance, Juan Gris, as I argue here, and Salmon, who nonetheless fought in the war and later wrote Le Drapeau noir (1927) detailing his generation’s intense conflict over the issue. 82 . In several other collages from this period, for example, Bottle on a Table (December 1912), Picasso incorporates and structures the work to emphasize

stock reports and dire economic predictions in light of the failure of current peace talks and, in so doing, compositionally highlighting a headline: “Ce qu’il faut lire” (what one must read). 83 . My research has shown that “anarchist”—as for the terms “ugly,” and “primitive” detailed in chapter 3—was a term of disapprobation used frequently by contemporary French critics against all forms of modernism. The terms “anti-aesthetic, even anti-French,” for cubism emerged in the debate in the Chamber of Deputies in December 1912 on whether to ban foreign artists from exhibitions in the national palaces. See discussion in chap. 3, 108–9; Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 98–101; and Antliff and Leighten, A Cubism Reader, 395–409. 84 . See Haine, “‘Café Friend.’” In other works, Picasso conjures with the ideological space of another Parisian commercial institution, the department store, in relation to the commodified female; see Francis Frascina’s discussion of Still Life “Au Bon Marché” (1913) in “Realism and Ideology.” 85 . Fénéon, Novels in Three Lines; Vidocq, Memoirs of Vidocq. On the Fantômas, see Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 285; and Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, 43–44. Weiss sees these news items, like the collages they parallel, as drained of actual social import and fails to mention Fénéon’s anarchist perspective on the events he ironizes. 86 . Fénéon, Novels in Three Lines, xxiv, 40. 87 . Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 134–42. 88 . Newspaper and Violin, December 1912. 89 . Crow, in “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” points to the political relevance of such antibourgeois subversions as the introduction of mass-produced materials and artisanal techniques into “high” art: “As such surfaces soon degrade, peel, flake, and fade, as newsprint and handbills turn brown and brittle, so collage disrupts the false harmonies of oil painting by reproducing the disposability of the late-capitalist commodity. The principle of collage construction itself collapses the distinction between high and low by transforming the totalizing creative practice of traditional painting into a fragmented consumption of already existing manufactured images” (246). According to Joanne Kosuda-Warner, curator at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, the wallpaper Picasso used in Guitar, Sheetmusic and Wineglass (1912) and in four related works (Daix and Rosselet, Le Cubisme de Picasso, catalog numbers 506, 519, 523, and its painted imitation in 569) was of the absolutely cheapest variety available in France, constituting white or off-white paper with only one color of ink for both lozenge and flower patterns; it was most likely to be used in servant’s quarters and working class homes and cafés. Thus the current ochre color is not discolored ink but aged paper. (Kosuda-Warner was interviewed by Catherine Raymond, a student in my seminar on cubism at University of Delaware, 1985). 90 . See Parigoris, “Les construction cubistes dans ‘Les Soirées de Paris.’”

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N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 3 7– 1 4 8 91 . For example, see John Elderfield and Kirk Varnedoe in Zelevansky, Picasso and Braque, 118–19, 125–27. 92 . See FitzGerald, Making Modernism; and Gee, Dealers, Critics and Collectors of Modern Painting, 44. 93 . Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, chap. 5 (on Braque’s collage practice, see 125 and 141). See also Braque: The Papiers Collés. 94 . See Kachur, “Gris, Cubismo y Collage.” 95 . See Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 127. Millerand, once a leading socialist, was now minister of war, berating the antimilitarists in the Chamber of Deputies for resisting passage of the law increasing the draft to three years of service. 96 . Gris to Raynal, December 20, 1914, translated in Kahnweiler, Letters of Juan Gris, 20. 97 . Gris to Kahnweiler, August 16, 1914, in ibid., 8. 98 . Gris to Kahnweiler, August 16, 1914, in ibid., 8–9. 99 . See Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 143–45; and Silver, Esprit de Corps, who details the impact of the war and its patriotic rhetoric on the avant-garde, including Picasso and Gris. 100 . Gris to Raynal, October 17, 1916, in Kahnweiler, Letters of Juan Gris, 42. 101 . Silver discusses this work as a response to the outbreak of war in “Juan Gris y su Arte en la Gran Guerra.” 102 . Published in L’Illustration, January 26, 1918. On the war and the wartime xenophobic and censorial atmosphere, see Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, chap. 6; and Brauer, “Commercial Spies and Cultural Invaders.” 103 . Lethève points out the freer atmosphere regarding censorship following the amnesty for communards in 1880 (La Caricature sous la IIIe République, 35–36). 104 . Silver, Esprit de Corps. 105 . McGuinness, “Mallarmé and the Poetics of Explosion,” 803. 106 . Beginning with “Sur le Cubisme,” in the first issue of his wartime journal, Nord-Sud, March 1917. 107 . Kahnweiler, Der Weg zum Kubismus (written in 1915 but not published until 1920); see Antliff and Leighten, Cubism and Culture, 203–5. 108 . There was also a rich and diverse debate among French intellectuals during the war. See Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect, who devotes a chapter to the controversy over Kant, (106–41); she concludes: “Republicans saw in Kant’s rationalism and respect for the moral autonomy of the individual the foundations of humanitarian republicanism and the fundamental ideals of the Third Republic, and they perceived in Perpetual Peace the foundations of postwar stability. Antirepublican intellectuals linked Kant to the Revolution and the Third Republic, denouncing all three. Consequently, when French intellectuals debated whether Kant could be held culpable for the Great War, they also debated the merits (or faults) of republicanism. Thus the debate over Kant, an apparently picayune matter, was in fact of great cultural and political importance, and the camps that emerged in the debate over Kant and

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Kultur revealed that the critical divisions between intellectuals evident during the Dreyfus Affair had by no means disappeared in the patriotic glow of the union sacrée” (141).

chapter 5 1 . See Spate, Orphism; Welsh, “Sacred Geometry,” in The Spiritual in Art, 63–87; Henderson, “X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality”; Henderson, “Kupka, les rayons X et le monde des ondes électromagnétiques”; Henderson, “Modern Art and the Invisible”; Mladek, “Central European Influences”; Rowell, “František Kupka”; and Wünsche, “František Kupka.” 2 . Spate, “‘L’Homme est la nature prenant conscience d’elle-même’”; Marie-Pierre Salé, “Reclus et Kupka, ‘L’ Homme est la nature prenant conscience d’elle-même.’” 3 . See Bergson, Creative Evolution, 256. When Bergson became president of the Society for Psychical Research in 1913, he argued that scientists could come to accept phenomena such as telepathy were they to adapt their methods of investigation to this intuitive “inversion” of “the habitual direction of the work of thought” (Introduction to Metaphysics, 41). For his presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research (London, May 28, 1913), see Bergson, Mind Energy, 75–103. 4 . See Vachtová, Frank Kupka; and Mladek, “Central European Influences,” 25, for a discussion of Kupka’s relation to eastern European and German naturist movements. While in Vienna, Kupka had become a disciple of the German painter and natural philosopher Karl Diefenbach, who advocated Körperkultur (“physical fitness”), nudism, and vegetarianism. 5 . Kupka, La création dans les arts plastiques, 90 and 94, translated in Mladek, “Central European Influences,” 25–26. 6 . Spate, Orphism, 157. 7 . Kupka, La création dans les arts plastiques: “un être sensitive et fragile dont l’existence se concentre dans les images de sa vie intérieur et qui économise son énergie vitale afin de l’exhaler sans son oeuvre” (48). 8 . For biographical information on Kupka, see Spate, Orphism; Mladek, “Central European Influences”; and Vachtová, Kupka. 9 . František Kupka, 1871–1957, ou l’invention d’une abstraction, 355. Simmel’s The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), in which he meditated on the impact of urban society on the individual, was well known at the time; his Philosophie des Geldes (1900) was immediately translated into French, though Kupka also read German. 10 . Antliff, Inventing Bergson, 171–72; Schwartz, “Bergson and the Politics of Vitalism,” 297; Frisby, Georg Simmel. 11 . Kupka, “L’argent,” L’assiette au beurre, January 11, 1902. Kupka also published illustrations in Les temps nouveaux, La Cravache, Le Combat and other anarchist journals.

Notes to Pages 14 8–159 12 . Kupka, La création dans les arts plastiques, 114: “dynamism germinatif.” 13 . Spate, Orphism, 126–28. 14 . Kupka, La création dans les arts plastiques, 48–49: “courtisans-écornifleurs,” “énergie vitale,” “rangs inférieurs de l’échelle sociale.” 15 . See Childs, “Big Trouble.” 16 . Maitron, Le mouvement anarchiste en France, vol. 1, Des origines à 1914, 423 and articles in L’anarchie (1905–1914); Kupka’s L’affranchie, advertising La Muse Rouge, appeared in L’anarchie, February 22, 1906, 4. See Bruant, L’argot au XXe siècle: Dictionnaire français-argot (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1905). See also discussion in Parry, The Bonnot Gang, 24–25. For a discussion of sexual liberationism in the related anarchist Action d’art group, see Antliff, “Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism”; for a general discussion of anarchism and sexuality, see Sonn, Sex, Violence and the Avant-Garde. A large collection of Kupka’s erotic drawings in a “totally explicit academic-naturalistic style,” dated between 1895 and 1905, are in the Národní Galerie, Prague (see Spate, Orphism, 119–20, 353n56). 17 . Clayson, Painted Love, 116–51. 18 . Vachtová, Frank Kupka, 41. 19 . Reclus, L’homme et la terre, illustrated by František Kupka, whose drawings were engraved by Delâtre. At about this time, editorial changes at L’assiette au beurre led to Kupka’s break with the journal; he wrote to his Czech friend the social satirist and influential poet Josef S. Machar on April 24, 1905: “The new owner wants only drawings which will not disturb the reader’s digestion—I am too revolutionary.” In 1909, he received a prize from the Prague Academy that enabled him to stop working for money and devote himself full-time to his increasingly abstract art (Mladek, “Chronology,” 107). 20 . Reclus’s own writings are vast, and the bibliography on his life and thought equally so, especially at the turn of the century. For Reclus’s biography and ideas from the perspective on the one hand of Reclus as an anarchist theoretician and, on the other, of Reclus as a scientist, see Clark, The Dialectical Social Geography of Élisée Reclus; Dunbar, Elisée Reclus; and Fleming, The Geography of Freedom. 21 . Cited in Fleming, The Geography of Freedom, 20. 22 . Reclus, L’homme et la terre: “Ne peut-on dire également que l’Homme est la nature prenant conscience d’elle-même? . . . Issu de générations sans nombre, autres hommes ou anthropoïdes, animaux, plantes, organismes primaires, l’homme se remémoire par sa structure tout ce que ses ancêtres ont vécu pendant la prodigieuse durée des âges” (vol. 1, 14). At the lycée Henri IV in 1890, Bergson himself taught Reclus’s nephew Élie Faure, who later read Bergson’s work avidly; see Courtois and Morel, Élie Faure: Biographie, 36–37. 23 . Reclus in Le travailleur (first published as a leaflet in April 1877 and republished in the first issue the following month) did not see the state as the source of all evil, contrary to most anarchists:

“it was economic inequality that was isolated as ‘the most powerful instrument of oppression’” (Fleming, The Geography of Freedom, 102). 24 . Reclus, “Du Sentiment de la nature dans les sociétés modernes,” La Revue des deux mondes, May 15, 1866, 379, translated in Fleming, The Geography of Freedom, 113. 25 . Reclus, L’homme et la terre, vol. 1, p. iv., translated in Spate, Orphism, 104. 26 . Reclus, preface to Léon Mechnikoff, La Civilisation et les Grands Fleuves historiques, Paris, 1889, xxvii, translated in Fleming, The Geography of Freedom, 118; with the term “mutual aid” he refers to Petr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. 27 . Fleming, The Geography of Freedom, 190, 129–30. 28 . Reclus, L’homme et la terre: “Les progrés industriels de toute espèce qui se sont accomplis pendant la période préhistorique, dépassent certainement de beaucoup en importance tous ceux qu’enregistra l’histoire proprement dite, devait naturellement solliciter la passion, la joie artistique de l’ouvrier, et part conséquent faire naître l’art, compagnon nécessaire du travail libre” (vol.1, 218). 29 . Ibid.: “En ces premiers âges, où les classes n’étaient point encore séparées, où le grand corps social n’avait que partiellement différencié ses organs, l’art n’avait probablement pas encore ses adeptes spéciaux vivant en dehors de la communauté. Chacun était son propre décorateur, chacun son propre artiste, de meme que, pour tous les besoins de l’existence, chacun était son propre fournisseur, et dans le danger son propre champion.” 30 . Ibid.: “Quand le primitif se trouvait aux aguets dans la brousse, attendant une proie pour la percer de ses flèches ou qu’il rampait à travers les herbes et les branches pour surprendre le gibier au repos, que de fois il dut voir des tableaux saisissants qui se gravèrent fortement dans sa mémoire: le puissant félin avançant prudemment la griffe et montrant ses crocs prêts à la morsure; le pachyderme entourant un arbre de sa trompe et le déracinant du sol; le cerf dressant orgueilleusement sa haute ramure dans les clairières de la forêt. Quand il rêvait le soir, auprès des tisons aux lueurs soudaines, ces fortes impressions apparaissaient de nouveau, et, pour se les remémorer ou pour les figurer à d’autres, ils les reproduisait par le dessin” (vol. 1, 218–19). 31 . Ibid.: “Mais ce prix était tout moral à cette époque. L’art, sincère et désintéressé, était par cela même le grand art. . . . [L’artiste] sculptait des figurines pour la femme qu’il aimait et suspendait au poteau de la cabane l’effigie de l’aïeul ou de l’animal tutélaires” (vol. 1, 219). 32 . Ibid.: “Ainsi l’art était issu des conditions mêmes de la vie et n’avait point des «sur-hommes» pour créateurs, comme se l’imaginent volontiers des artistes contemporains, un peu trop gonflés eux-mêmes de leur propre valeur. Les initiateurs furent des initiés de la nature, non des mortels d’origine distincte, appartenant à un monde «supraterrestre».” Here Reclus cites Patrick Geddes, Every

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Notes to Pages 159–161 man his own art critic at the Manchester Exhibition, 1887, John Heywood, London, 1887, 40; Geddes was an influential Scots writer of the period, whose application of his anarchist principles to town and environmental planning has had lasting influence. 33 . Fleming, The Geography of Freedom, 28–30. 34 . Reclus, L’homme et la terre: “Certainement il est des tribus ou populations qui, vivant dans un milieu favorable de paix et de bien-être, on été relativement peu soucieuses des mystères de la vie et de la mort et, jalouses de leur liberté, n’ont pas laissé se constituer au-dessus d’elles une caste de prêtres, mais elles n’en étaient pas moins composées d’«animaux religieux», comme tous leurs autres congénères humains” (vol.1, 288). 35 . Ibid.: “Au fond, toutes les religions . . . ont des origines analogues et se développent suivant une marche parallèle. Chaque être humain, entraîné dans le tourbillon général de la vie et désireux néanmoins de sauvegarder, de développer sa force individuelle, cherche un soutien dans le monde extérieur pour se rassurer quand les craintes l’assaillent, écarter les dangers qui le menacent, réaliser les voeux qui le travaillent. “Que la frayeur soit le sentiment initial, comme le disent les livres sacrés et classiques—«la crainte de Dieu est le commencement de la sagesse»—ou que ce soit, d’une façon plus large, le désir du mieux, la recherche du bonheur, ainsi que le démontre Feuerbach, l’homme veut se rattacher à tout ce qui, en dehors de lui, paraît à son imagination un moyen de protection efficace, et qu’il rend tel par l’ardeur de sa passion. Tel est bien le principe originel de la religion, toujours le même. “La croyance de l’individu, du groupe, de la peuplade ou de la nation prend ensuite de caractère spécial que lui imposent la milieu géographique primitif et le milieu historique, secondaire et complexe. . . . Ce que nous voulons, une puissance idéale imaginée par nous doit l’accorder: elle se crée pour nous satisfaire” (vol.1, 292). 36 . The manuscript for Dieu et l’État was discovered posthumously by Elisée Reclus and Carlo Cafiero; in their introduction to the first edition (1882), they wrote: “Rightly addressing himself only to his honest opponents, Bakunin demonstrates to them the emptiness of their belief in that divine authority on which all temporal authorities are founded; he proves to them the purely human genesis of all governments; finally, without stopping to discuss those bases of the State already condemned by public morality, such as physical superiority, violence, nobility, wealth, he does justice to the theory which would entrust science with the government of societies.” And they conclude, “States are breaking up to give place to a new order, in which, as Bakunin was fond of saying, ‘human justice will be substituted for divine justice’” (translated in Bakunin, God and the State). 37 . Kupka, La création dans les arts plastiques: “A vrai dire, le seul but auquel ce livre aspire, c’est d’être l’ami sûr de ceux qui voient dans l’art, non pas un simple prétexte à satisfaire un orgueil naïf, mais le problème capital des moyens à travers lesquels les idéaux de l’humanité trouvent à

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s’exprimer” (39). Linda Henderson generously provided me with copies of Kupka’s manuscripts of c. 1910–1913, referred to as Notes in Spate, Orphism. “Manuscript IV” constitutes the complete manuscript of the later book. Also see Rowell, “František Kupka,” note 19 in František Kupka, 1871–1957: A Retrospective, outlining the history of this text. A lost version was translated into Czech and published in Prague by the Cercle d’art Mánes in 1923, then translated back into French in 1989 as La création dans les arts plastiques (see her “Note explicative,” 267–84). In the French edition, Karl Flinker, “Avant-propos,” asserts that Kupka’s manuscript was written 1911–1913 in French, translated into Czech and published for the first time in 1923 (p. 8). Philippe Dagan, in his preface, expands these dates to 1910–1913 (11–37), while Isabel Wünsche, in “František Kupka: Creation in Nature and Art,” indicates that it was written between 1907 and 1913, based on the correspondence between Kupka and Arthur Rössler at the Wiener Stadtbibliothek, Vienna (65). 38 . Kupka, La création dans les arts plastiques, 48–49. 39 . Ibid.: “Si on devait définir en quelques mots le type de l’homme-artiste, on pourrait dire qu’il est un être sensitive et fragile dont l’existence se concentre dans les images de sa vie intérieur et qui économise son énergie vitale afin de l’exhaler dans son oeuvre. C’est un déséquilibre entre le dehors et le dedans qui tend à reléguer l’artiste aux rangs inférieurs de l’échelle sociale. Pour échapper à cette situation, il se réfugie souvent auprés de ses confreres, dans un cénacle fermé” (48). The idea of un cénacle fermé seems to justify his participation in the Puteaux cubist circle and their exhibitions. 40 . Ibid.: “le thème, fixé à l’avance, leur était dicté despotiquement” (47–48). 41 . Ibid.: “A l’autre extrême, ceux qui ne fuient pas la réalité trop aride pour l’exclusivisme d’une coterie cherchent asile dans l’entourage des puissant de ce monde où ils jouent le rôle de courtisansécornifleurs. L’artiste qui sculpta les hauts faits d’un Assurbanipal, d’un Assurnazirpal ou d’un Ramsès était sans nul doute un représentant du même type que les peintres et sculpteurs qui célèbrent nos actuels ploutocrates et maréchaux” (48–49). Ashurbanipal was king of Assyria, 668–c. 627 bce; Ashurnazirpal II was king of Assyria, 883–859 bce; Ramses probably refers to Ramses II, who ruled Egypt in the thirteenth century bce (19th Dynasty): Kupka has named some of the most famous art historical monuments of the ancient world. 42 . Ibid.: “Les accomplissments de la science exercent, de nos jours, une influence indéniable sur les artistes dont beaucoup sont à bien des égards— consciemment ou sans le savoir—les disciples des penseurs les plus nouveaux. Acteurs de la tragédie moderne, contraints d’appréhender les choses et les êtres par le moyen d’un examen analytique, les artistes s’efforcent d’en pénétrer l’essence authentique. . . . “Aujourd’hui encore, les artistes font voile vers la terre des rêves où la réalité est, sinon transsubstantiée, du moins spiritualisée, baignée d’une

Notes to Pages 161–171 magie poétique, d’un charme qu’on ne retrouve nulle part ailleurs. Ils s’envoient loin de ce monde trop gris, entraînant dans leur fuite le spectateur qui lui non plus ne demande pas autre chose à l’oeuvre d’art” (43). 43 . Ibid.: “L’énoncé de l’artiste nous offre en quelque sorte un texte à déchiffrer, une lecture faite d’éléments plastiques et chromatiques, réunis pour former des structures que notre regard perçoit comme tableaux ou sculptures” (44). 44 . Ibid.: “Afin de faire partager son rêve au spectateur, l’artiste plasticien exprime ses idées, ses impressions, ses sentiments et ses états d’âme en les transposant dans des compositions peintes ou sculptées qui mettent en oeuvre des combinaisons de points, de lignes, d’étendues, de volumes, de couleurs, de lumières et d’ombres—assemblages susceptibles de variations infinies” (43–44). 45 . Ibid.: “Nous touchons là à la différance fondamentale qui sépare l’art que l’on nomme réaliste ou profane de celui qui peut être qualifié d’idéaliste ou spirituel. Celui-là vise à représenter les pensées et les sensations propres au monde connu; celui-ci veut imprégner la matière de l’idée suprasensible d’un unconnu, idée sans cesse renaissante dans les rêveries poétiques et religieuses de tous les temps” (44–45). 46 . Ibid.: “Enfin, d’autres encore, abordant le motif avec tout un bagage scientifique, sont amenés à vouloir n’en saisir que le mécanisme vital— l’«âme» des choses—à vouloir pénétrer, au-delà de la surface, jusqu’à l’essence de la force créatrice” (76). 47 . Ibid.: “Les premiers échantillons de peinture et de sculpture, apparus aux époques les plus reculées, obéissent au même principe qui régit maintenant encore les formes artistiques. Ce sont des empreintes laissées dans la matière, des marques délibérées qui décèlent ou le désir d’orner ou le besoin d’exprimer ce qui agitait l’«âme» de ces lointains ancêtres des artistes d’aujourd’hui. Les signes picturaux, les idéogrammes gravés, pour une raison ou une autre, dans un os de mammouth ou sur la paroi d’une caverne sont cela même que font de nos jours les Tchouktches de Sibérie, les Esquimaux et d’autres peuples primitifs, non encore sortis de l’enfance de l’histoire. . . . ces traits s’entrecroisent, engendrant des angles, des courbes, des cercles au langage expressément rythmique. . . . Le but devient alors de signifier, de saisir une pensée, d’extérioriser ne serait-ce qu’un mouvement de l’âme dont les créateurs s’efforcent véritablement de rendre l’expression claire et lisible. . . . La représentation des objets, animaux et personnes, véhicules de l’idée, saisit de mieux en mieux les apparences du réel” (45). 48 . For example, Kupka, La création dans les arts plastiques, 47. Kupka’s aesthetics and Bergson’s thought was observed by Spate (Orphism, 87, 103, 113, 123–24), but not its importance for his political thought. 49 . For an extended discussion of the centrality of Henri Bergson’s thought to modernist art movements in Paris, see Antliff, Inventing Bergson. 50 . Ibid., 101.

51 . Bergson, Creative Evolution, 6; see also Antliff, Inventing Bergson, 103–4. 52 . Lehan, “Bergson and the Discourse of the Moderns,” 311. 53 . Bergson, Matter and Memory. See Kupka, La création dans les arts plastiques, 79, 94 (on memory), 81 (durée vs. realism),101ff (on artists and vitalism), and 102 (on art as an abstraction of “intuition”). 54 . Kupka, La création dans les arts plastiques: “L’art s’exprime en construisant son propre organisme. L’oeuvre d’art possède une structure organique spécifique, entièrement différente de ce qu’on trouve dans la nature. . . . L’art, tel que nous le comprenons, réside intégralement dans des données subjectives, dans des complexes d’idées et d’états d’âme” (93). 55 . Ibid.: “Oui, les idées collectives sont ce qui forme le milieu qui, à son tour, détermine les arts plastiques. Mais les oeuvres d’art saisissent les idées, les revêtent de formes et de couleurs—d’un aspect plastique dont l’action est plus accusée, plus prenante, plus radicale que celle d’une notion purement abstraite” (58). 56 . See Mladek, “Central European Influences,” 13–37; and Wünsche, in “František Kupka.” 57 . Welsh, “Sacred Geometry,” 81. 58 . West, 1900, 131. 59 . See Spate, Orphism; Spate, “‘L’Homme est la nature prenant conscience d’elle-même’”; and Vachtová, Frank Kupka. The Creation series includes, for example, variations on this work; versions of Printemps cosmique and La Création (Creation) and La Colorée (plate 32) were all made between 1911 and 1920. 60 . Henderson, “Kupka, les rayons X et le monde des ondes électromagnétiques,” and “Modern Art and the Invisible.” 61 . Reclus, L’homme et la terre, vol. 1, 353–54; translated in Spate, Orphism, 122–23. 62 . Antliff, Inventing Bergson, 103. 63 . Tarnowsky, Étude anthropométrique sur les prostituées et les voleuses (Paris, 1889); see Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” to which this discussion is indebted. See also Callen, “Degas’ Bathers”; and Pick, Faces of Degeneration. 64 . Guasco, “Les Peintres et la ‘Lutte pour le Pain,’” L’opinion, May 3, 1913: “Sortant le soir après mon labeur à l’atelier de Puteaux, je rencontrais les gigolettes. Ne vous effrayez pas, je les jugeais dignes d’un regard d’artiste. Elles avaient les coiffures que les sculpteurs du trésor de Cnide n’auraient pas dédaigné d’éterniser sur les frises” (568–69). This letter to Guasco’s enquête has been fragmentarily cited in František Kupka, 1871–1957, ou l’invention d’une abstraction (146) and Theinhardt and Brullé, “L’organisme complexe de l’oeuvre, la quête picturale et graphique de Kupka de 1898 à 1912” (174), who give the title as “Enquête sur la vie des peintres” and date it to 1911–1912. 65 .  See Vachtová, Frank Kupka, 24; and Spate, Orphism, 98. Theinhardtová, František Kupka, 1871–1957, ou l’invention d’une abstraction, 126, identifies the source (though without reference) as a photograph not of Kupka’s wife but of his stepdaughter, who also shared their naturist practices; if

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Notes to Pages 171–180 this is true, however, he has nonetheless pointedly depicted a woman and not a girl. 66 . Spate, Orphism, 109–10; Passuth, in František Kupka, 1871–1957, ou l’invention d’une abstraction, 160. 67 . On the influence of Marey on Kupka, see Braun, Picturing Time, 282–87. See also Rowell, “Kupka, Duchamp and Marey”; Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, 103–9; Henderson, “X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality,” 326–27; and Spate, Orphism, 137. 68 . Spate, Orphism, 352. 69 . Welsh, “Sacred Geometry,” 81; Spate, Orphism, 131; Kupka, Notes, translated in Spate, Orphism, 132, 136. 70 . “Réligions,” L’assiette au beurre, May 7, 1904.

conclusion 1 . See, for example, Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man; Jameson, Fables of Aggression; Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism; Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism; Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice; Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism; and Comentale and Gasiorek, eds., T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism. 2 . Based on the assassins and terrorists of the 1890s; such assumptions continue to inform police response to protests against the rulers of the global financial system, for example, Seattle in 1999, Toronto in 2010 and the Occupy movement. 3 . “Conversation avec Picasso,” Cahiers d’Art (1935), reprinted in Ashton, Picasso on Art, 38. 4 . For example, Kropotkin, Mutual Aid. 5 . On Kandinsky, see Long, “Occultism, Anarchism, and Abstraction”; and Heibel, “‘They Danced on Volcanoes’.” On Russia, see Antliff, “True Creators,” in Anarchy and Art, 71–96; and Gurianova, “Gambling Anarchically.” 6 . Leighten, editor’s statement for “Revising Cubism,” special issue, Art Journal. 7 . See Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 143–46. For detailed histories of the impact of the war on the Parisian avant-garde, see Silver, Esprit de Corps; and Green, Cubism and Its Enemies. 8 . Reynaud-Paligot, “Les Temps Nouveaux”; the journal was briefly revived in 1919–1921. 9 . See Miller, From Revolutionaries to Citizens. 10 . On the experience of the war, see Keegan, The First World War and The Face of Battle. 11 . Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 143–45. 12 . See discussion in chapter 4, pp. 143–44; see also Antliff and Leighten, Cubism and Culture, 203–5; and Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect, 106–41. 13 . Reed, “An Aesthetic of Conscientious Objection,” in Bloomsbury Rooms, 165–211. 14 . See Papanikolas, Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada. As Papanikolas demonstrates, avantgarde anarchism lived on after the war primarily as anarchist individualism.

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Index

Académie Carrière, 48 Ache, Caran d’, 65, 190n36; “La lettre du Ministre,” 65 action, L’, 100 Action d’art group, 3, 5, 134 action d’art, L’, 5, 134 action française, L’, 81–82, 131 Adam, Paul, 132 Adler, Jules, 12, 20, 23–25, 29, 30, 183n47; La Grève au Creusot, 23–5, 183n47; Les Hâleurs, 20; Les Las, 20 Adorno, Theodor, 8, 31 African art, 14, 46, 60, 75–78, 80–83, 87–89, 91–92, 94–95, 98–100, 105, 110, 127, 192n81, 192n 84; and the grotesque, 77–78, 82, 98; Baga figure, 100; Fang mask, 60, 77, 91, 100; Grebo mask, 88; Kota reliquary, 60, 77, 87; Teke figure, 95, 100 Allard, Roger, 93, 131 alliance russe, L’, 36–38 Almereyda, Miguel (pseud. of Eugène Bonaventure de Vigo), 38 Amade, Général Albert d’, 38 anarchie, L’, 5, 51, 151, 154 anarchism and aesthetics, 2, 5–10, 12, 15, 45–50, 53–56, 74–76, 79–80, 83, 127–28, 131–38, 143–46, 158–76 anarchocommunism, 4–5, 146 anarchosyndicalism, 5, 98, 134 anticolonialism, 8, 26, 59, 61, 70–72, 74–75, 83, 121–22, 127 antimilitarism, 2, 4, 13–14, 39–40, 43–44, 49, 50–55, 73, 113, 122, 140, 143, 179, 186n59 Aoust, J. d’, 13 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 39, 40, 72–74, 78, 81, 84, 86, 93, 94, 98, 109, 127, 130–31, 134, 136–37, 140; and Henri Rousseau, 93–94; Alcools, 131; Les peintres cubistes, 127; “Zone,” 131 Architectural Record, 90 Armand, Émile, 5 art social, L’, 20, 184n8 assiette au beurre, L’, 3, 26, 28–43, 51, 53–4, 65–8, 113–22, 148–55, 170, 174, 179, 185n41 Aurore, L’, 52 autonomy of art, 8–10, 49, 144 Axa, Zo d’ (pseud. of Alphonse Gallaud), 5, 51 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 10–12, 15, 20, 26, 50, 59, 98, 111–12, 122, 127–28, 146 Bakunin, Mikhail, 4–6, 160, 202n36; God and the State, 160 Barr, Alfred, 2 Bateau-Lavoir, Le, 40, 113 Bell, Clive, 179

Benjamin, Walter, 8 Benoni-Auran, Benoît, 101–2, 109 Bergson, Henri, 87, 134, 143, 146, 148, 156, 163–65, 168; Creative Evolution, 146, 156, 163–64, 168; Introduction to Metaphysics, 146; and František Kupka, 163–65, 168; Matter and Memory, 164; and Élisée Reclus, 156 Bernard, Émile, 73, 194n34 Besant, Annie, 172 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna (Mme.), 172 Bloch, Ernst, 8 Bonnard, Pierre, 26, 40, 73, 75, 117 Bouguereau, William-Adolphe, 48 boulevard, Le, 28 Braque, Georges, 2, 14, 83, 87, 90, 92, 95–6, 99, 122, 124–26, 140, 143; Grand Nu, preliminary drawing, 90; Houses at L’Estaque, 95–96, 124 Brazza Mission, 68, 70–71 Bruant, Aristide, 28, 151 Bürger, Peter, 9–10, 31 Burgess, Gelett, 86, 88, 90–92, 97, 99, 103; “Purple Cow,” 90; “The Wild Men of Paris,” 90 Cabanel, Alexandre, 101 Cahiers d’aujourd’hui, 96 Cambiaso, Luca, 102; Study of Cubic Figures, 101–2 caricature, La, 27–28, 40 Casement, Roger, 65, 68; Casement Report, 65 cave art. See paleolithic art Cézanne, Paul, 83, 93, 95–97, 104, 123; Mont St Victoire, 93, 123–24, 133 Challaye, Félicien, 71 chambard socialiste, Le, 28 Chamber of Deputies, The, 8, 14, 70–71, 109, 119 Charivari, Le, 28 Chat noir, Le, 28 child art, 46, 86, 88–89, 92, 93, 95, 100–2, 105, 109–10 Clemenceau, Georges (prime minister), 39–40 Colomer, André, 134 Comité de Protection et de défense des Indigènes, 71–72 Confédération Générale du Travail, La, 5, 32, 50 Conrad, Joseph, 68, 80, 82–83, 90; Heart of Darkness, 68, 80, 90 Coriolès, 13 correspondant, Le, 13 Courbet, Gustave, 7, 57, 83 Cremnitz, Arthur, 74 Cri de Paris, 41 Cross, Henri-Edmond, 13, 28, 49

223

index Crow, Thomas, 31 cubism, 2, 13–14, 85–110, 122–27, 133–34, 142, 144, 177, 179–80; and collage, 111–12, 127–42 Danguy, Jean, 20; Muse of Poverty, 20 Darder, Francesc, “El Negro,” 58 Darwin, Charles, 156, 163–64 Daumier, Honoré, 27–28, 118, 121; Gargantua, 28, 151 David, Jacques-Louis, 57 Debat-Ponsan, Édouard-Bernard, 20; Humanité pleurant ses enfants, 20 Delacroix, Eugène, 24, 83, 148; Barque of Dante, 148; Le 28 Juillet, La Liberté guidant le people, 24 Delannoy, Aristide, 38, 68–70, 118; “Gaud, ancient pharmacien,” 68–70 Delaunay, Robert, 93, 143 Denis, Maurice, 73, 93 Derain, André, 2, 14, 40, 48–49, 53–56, 60, 73, 76–78, 81, 83, 87, 90–92, 95, 188n113; Bal des soldats à Suresnes, 54–55; Bathers, 91–92; Crucifixion, 54–55; Portrait of Henri Matisse, 55–56 Descaves, Lucien, 37 Dreyfus Affair, The, 28, 50–52, 54, 71, 73, 200n100 Dreyfus, Alfred, 50 Dubois, Ernest-Henri, 102 Duchamp, Marcel, 1 Duchamp-Crotti, Suzanne, 1 Duchamp-Villon, Raymond, 1 École des Beaux-Arts (École Nationale des Beaux-Arts), 13, 18, 30, 48, 52, 99, 101–2, 108 Egyptian art, 89, 91–92, 94–95, 105 endehors, L’, 5 Européen, L’, 74 Evenepoel, Henri Jacques Édouard, 54; Fête aux Invalides, 54 Fagus, Félicien, 73 Faure, Élie, 134 Faure, Sébastien, 51 fauvism, 2, 13, 40, 45–46, 48, 53, 76, 96, 180 Fénéon, Félix, 9, 28, 40, 42, 45–46, 73, 132–33, 136–37; Nouvelles en trois lignes, 136–37 Ferrer, Francisco, 116–17, 126 feuille, La, 5, 28 Figaro, Le, 128 Flechtheim, Alfred, 138 Forain, Jean-Louis, 28, 31, 73 formalism, 2, 9, 122, 143, 176, 179 France, Anatole, 36–38 Frantz, Henri, 24–25, 30 Frou-Frou, 41 futurism, 2, 13, 100 Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, 46, 48 Galerie Vollard, 42, 45, 98, 192n80 Gallaud, Alphonse. See Zo d’Axa Gaud-Toqué Affair, The, 68–70, 82 Gauguin, Paul, 56, 76, 81, 83, 98, 110, 192n80 Gaulois, Le, 13 gazette des Beaux-Arts, La, 22, 24 Geffroy, Gustave, 37–38, 93 Giorgione, 127; Sleeping Venus, 127 Géricault, Théodore, 57, 83 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 22 Gide, André, 70 Gil Blas illustré, 28, 95, 102 Giraudon Bibliothèque photographique, 108 Gleizes, Albert, 2, 85–86, 93, 95, 102, 122, 131, 183n46; Du “Cubisme,” 85–86, 95, 102; The Bathers, 102 Gohier, Urbain, 37, 52, 106–9, 196n71 Golberg, Mécislas, 74 Goya, Francisco, 116; Third of May, 1808, 116

224

Grandjouan, Jules-Félix, 12, 28–29, 31, 38–39, 53; “La Grève,” 53; “Mirage,” 53; “Question d’art,” 31 Grave, Jean, 5, 32–33, 36, 67, 132, 179 Greenberg, Clement, 8, 122 Gris, Juan, 2–3, 14–15, 28, 30, 40, 51, 64–66, 100, 108, 111–27, 132, 138–43; “—Ah! ah! . . . vous vous permettez d’établir votre innocence après quinze mois d’instruction!,” 117; “Ainsi que chaque pays que se respecte,” 119–20; “Autre fois, jeune home, j’ai été un pacifiste,” 113–15; Bottle of Rum and Newspaper, 140; “Boucherie: Aux armes de Castile,” 116; Breakfast, 126, 140; “Bruits de Guerre et Bruits de Paix,” 115–16; “Éducation,” 119; The Eggs, 123–24; Figure in a Café, 126, 138; “Guidé par un besoin,” 65, 121–22; Hommage à Picasso, 100, 108; Le Lavabo (The washstand), 125–26; “La Liberté,” 120–21; Man in a Café, 125–26; Musician’s Table, 139–40; “On a beau bien viser, la Liberté est toujours hors d’atteinte,” 116; Self-Portrait, No. 1, 123; Siphon and Bottles, 126; Still Life Before an Open Window, 126; Still Life with Checked Tablecloth, 140; Still-Life with Newspaper, 142; Still Life with Oil Lamp, 125; The Sun-Blind, 142; The Table, 138; “La Turquie Regénérée,” 117–22 guerre sociale, La, 28, 51, 71 Guilbeaux, Henri, 13, 81, 98–99, 109, 134 Gustave, Pierre-René, Oeuvre de la Bouchée de pain (fragment), 22 Halicka, Alice, 39–40, 113 Hammer, Arne, 74 Henriquez-Phillipe, 100–1 Henry, Émile, 8, 132 Hérold, André-Ferdinand, 33 Hervé, Gustave, 38, 71 Hommes du Jour, Les, 13, 38, 51, 81, 98, 103, 118 Hottentot Venus, The, 79 Hourcade, Olivier (pseud. of Olivier Bag), 100, 103–5, 109 humanité, L’, 51, 70 Iberian art, 60, 76, 79 illustration, L’, 62 indiscret, L’, 41 International Antimilitarist Association, 50 Jacob, Max, 73–74, 130–31 James, William, 143 Jarry, Alfred, 7, 71–5, 77, 79–80, 82–83, 191n62; Almanach illustré du Père Ubu, 73–75, 191n62; Les jours et les nuits, 74; Ubu colonial, 74–75, 79; Ubu roi, 50, 191n72 Jaurès, Jean, 36, 51, 70, 179 Joncières, André de, 32 Joseph, Albert. See Libertad journal, Le, 107–8, 128, 134–38, 140 journal illustré, Le, 62 Kahn, Gustave, 9, 75, 109, 133–34 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 51, 88, 95, 100, 112–13, 138, 140, 143–44, 179; The Rise of Cubism, 143–44, 179, 194n9 and 10 Kandinsky, Wassily, 9, 172, 178; Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 172 Kant, Immanuel, 88, 143–44, 179, 194n10, 200n100 Kropotkin, Petr, 4–8, 12, 32, 40, 51, 132, 146, 156, 158, 164; Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal, 40; Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution, 156, 164, 179 Kupka, František, 2, 8–9, 12, 15, 28–30, 33, 37, 40–41, 47, 50–51, 55–56, 58, 66–68, 74, 108, 113, 143, 145–56, 158, 160–76; and anarchist postcards, 30, 50, 55; L’archaïque, 168–71, 174; “L’argent” (cover, L’assiette au beurre), 148–50, 174; L’argent (oil on canvas), 155; and “À bas la Justice militaire!,” 30, 50, 55; Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors, 171–73; and Henri Bergson, 163–66;

index The Blue, 176; “Ciel chrétien aux Nègres,” 66–68, 74; La Colorée, 173–74; La création dans les arts plastiques, 145–48, 160–65, 175–76; Creation series, 165, 173–74; Conte de pistils et d’étamines II ou III, 165; “La culture and la propriété,” 165; “Dieu du Vatican,” 174; “Dieux Nègres,” 67–68, 74; Disques de Newton, Étude pour la Fugue à deux couleurs, 146–50; drawing for Girl with a Ball, 171–72; L’eau ou la Baigneuse, 171; Étude de femme enlevant sa chemise, 173; “L’état moderne,” 156; “Fraternité,” 154; Une Gigolette, 168; Leur discipline, 30, 50, 55; “Liberté,” 150–51; Le Mec, 170; Méditation, 146–48; “Le nouveau monde et Océanie,” 165; “Panneau décoratif,” 151; La Petite fille au ballon, 171–72; “Progrès,” 166; “Progrès. (Fin),” 66–68; “Les réligions,” 66–68, 74, 174; “La révolution,” 156; “Rythme de l’histoire—Vague,” 165–6; “Les sauveurs,” 154 Lacaze-Duthiers, Gérard de, 5 La Fresnaye, Roger de, 20, 143, 177 Lampué, Pierre, 108–9; Frontispiece of Byzantine Architecture, 108 Lautensack, Heinrich, 100 Leadbetter, C. W., 172 Léandre, Charles-Lucien, 101; The Model’s Mother, 101 Lecomte, Georges, 81 Leblond, Marius-Ary (pseud. of Georges Athénas and Aimé Merlo), 46, 73 Le Dantec, Félix, 51 Le Fauconnier, Henri, 2, 93, 107, 122; L’Abondance, 107 Léger, Fernand, 2, 93, 98 Léopold, King of Belgium, 64–66, 68, 70 Lhote, André, 105; Entrée du bassin à flot de Bordeaux, 105 Liabeuf, Jean-Jacques, 96 Libertad (pseud. of Albert Joseph), 5, 51, 154 libertaire, Le, 51–53 Ligue Celtique, La, 131, 183n46 Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, La, 71 Ligue Internationale pour la défense du Soldat, La, 30 Louis, Paul, 71 Louis-Napoléon (Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, President of the Second Republic and Emperor Napoleon III of France), 118, 121 Luce, Maximilien, 28, 40, 45, 186n59 Lukács, Georg, 8, 31 Machar, Josef S., 155 Maillol, Aristide, 73 Malato, Charles, 51, 65, 113, 117, 121–22 Malevich, Kasimir, 9, 178 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 7, 9, 122, 129–34, 198n60; Divigations, 130; La musique et les letters, 131; “Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard,” 130 Manyac, Pere, 73 Marches du Sud-Ouest, Les, 103 Marcoussis, Louis, 28, 39–40, 113, 140; “—Assassin! foutriquet! bandit!,” 40; “Cortège historique de la IIIe République,” 39 Marec, Victor, 22; Expulsés, 22 Marinetti, F. T., 100 Markous, Ludvik. See Marcoussis, Louis Marx, Karl, 148, 182n22 marxism, 2, 8–9, 31, 130, 182n22 matin, Le, 108, 126, 128, 136 Matisse, Henri, 2, 13, 26, 48, 55, 76, 81, 83, 90, 95–96, 105, 109, 177, 187n85; The Dance (I), 95, 105 Mauclair, Camille, 100 Maurin, Charles, 28 Mercure de France, La, 72–73 Méric, Victor (“Flax”), 38, 118 Merle, Eugène, 38 Merrill, Stuart, 132

Merson, Luc-Olivier, 102; Truth, 102 Metzinger, Jean, 2, 85–86, 90, 95, 98, 102, 107–8, 131; Du “Cubisme,” 85–86, 95, 102; Le Goûter, 107; Nude, 98, 102 Mille, Pierre, 71 Mirbeau, Octave, 9 mirliton, Le, 28 Modigliani, Amadeo, 108 Moreau, Gustave, 48 Morris, William, 6 Mourey, Gabriel, 108 Nadelman, Elie, 108 Natanson, Thadée, Alexandre and Alfred (brothers), 73 Naudin, Bernard, 12, 25–26, 29, 32, 37–38, 41, 53, 68, 184n26; “Ces messieurs s’amusent,” 68; “Émeute, les balles,” 53; L’Engagement d’avant-garde; armée du Rhin 1792, 25–26; “La Fête du 14 Juillet à Brazzaville,” 26, 68; Vive la Nation!, 26 Nechaev, Sergei, 5 neoimpressionism, 40, 98, 133, 196n82 neo-Kantianism, 144, 179 neosymbolism, 122, 131, 134 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 53, 59, 76, 134 Nieuwenhuis, Domela, 156 nouvelles, Les, 95 Oceanic art, 77–78, 94, 97, 110, 192n86 Olivier, Fernande, 73–74 opinion, L’, 170 orientalism, 103 Orphism, 2, 147 d’Ostoya (pseud. of Baron Ostoya-Sochinsky), 34, 37, 66, 185n49; “Duo de l’opérette ‘Le négrier’,” 66; “Rapports de Police” 34–35 paleolithic art (cave art), 86, 91, 95, 105–6, 109, 160 Paris-Journal, 81, 99 Parti colonial, 65, 70 Passy, Frédérick, 71 Péguy, Charles, 70–71 Péladan, Sâr, 13 Pelloutier, Fernand, 7 petit journal, Le, 63 petit Parisien, Le, 63 Philipon, Charles, 28 Picabia, Francis,98, 103, 108, 195n58 ; Dances at the Spring I, 108 Picasso, Pablo, 2–3, 8, 12–15, 18, 39–40, 47, 51, 57–61, 65– 66, 68, 72–84, 87–90, 94–98, 100, 103–5, 108, 111–13, 116, 122, 124–32, 134–40, 142–3, 170, 178–79, 189n9, 191n67, 192n80, 199n81; Absinthe Drinker, 170; Bouteille, verre et journal sur une table, 130, 134; Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table, 87; Bottle of Suze, 135–36; Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, 59, 74, 78–84, 90, 94, 127, 178; Factory at Horta de Ebro, 96–98, 124; Guitar, Sheet-Music and Wineglass, 138, 199n89; Head, 74, 77; Mother and Child, 68, 74, 127; Nude, 98, 100, 124, 127; Portrait of Kahnweiler, 88, 100; Still Life: Bottle and Glass on Table, 140; Three Women, 90 Pioupiou de l’Yonne, 38 Pissarro, Camille, 7, 28, 33 Pissarro, Lucien, 28 Poincaré, Henri, 95, 98, 143 Poincaré, Raymond (president), 38 Pressensé, Francis de, 51 primitivism, 3, 7, 13–14, 30, 32, 44, 46, 52, 58–59, 75–76, 79–80, 83–107, 109–11, 122–23, 127, 136, 162, 178, 189n9 Procès des Trente, Le, 132 progrès militaire, Le, 54 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 4–7, 50, 151

225

index

Quillard, Pierre, 7, 33, 57, 71–72, 132 Rab’lais, Le, 41 Radiguez, Maurice, 68; “Le bouillon de tête,” 68 Rais, Jules, 24, 30 Raynal, Maurice, 88, 140 Reclus, Élisée, 5, 8, 15, 33, 37, 146, 150, 156, 158–60, 162– 66, 170–71, 173, 178; and L’homme et la terre, 156–68 Redon, Odilon, 73 Régnier, Henri de, 132 Retté, Adolphe, 132 Reverdy, Pierre, 143, 179 révolte, La, 6, 32, 132 revue blanche, La, 28, 42, 73 revue d’Europe et d’Amérique, La, 105 revue de France et des Pays Français, La, 103 rire, Le, 41 Rivière, Jacques, 105–6, 109 Robida, Albert, 102 Robin, Maurice, 13 Rodenbach, Georges, 131 Roger, Louis, 23; L’accident, 23 Rouanet, Gustave, 70–71 Roubille, Auguste, 35–36, 65; “Pensées d’un Ventru,” 35–36, 65 Rousseau, Henri (Le Douanier), 93–94, 98; The Sleeping Gypsy, 93 Roussel, K[er].-X[avier]., 73 Ruskin, John, 6 Sabartés, Jaume, 105 Sabattier, Louis Rémy, 142; Café de la Paix in Wartime, 142 Salmon, André, 34, 64, 66, 72, 74, 77–78, 83, 87, 94–96, 98–99, 109, 130–31; La jeune peinture française, 78, 94–95 Salon d’Automne, 18, 20, 45, 76, 101, 107–8 Salon des Indépendants, 18, 45, 48, 93, 98, 100–1, 108, 134 Saint-Marceaux, Charles René de, 102–3; L’Algérienne, 102–3; La Tahitienne, 102–3 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 11 Schwarz, Samuel, 32 Section d’or, La, 3 Sembat, Marcel, 109 Seurat, Georges, 54, 56; La Cirque, 54 Severini, Gino, 2 Signac, Paul, 7, 12–13, 18, 28, 33, 40, 49, 57, 109, 133–34, 182n20, 196n74 and 82 Simmel, Georg, 148 socialism, 2, 7, 20, 28, 50–51, 60, 64, 70–71, 96, 108–9, 113, 134–35, 140, 142–43, 179 socialiste, Le, 142 Société des Artistes Français, 18, 22 Société des Artistes Indépendantes, 18 Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 18 Soffici, Ardengo, 104–5, 131 soir, Le, 132 Soulouque, Faustin-Elie (emperor of Haiti), 118, 121 Spencer, Herbert, 164 Stein, Gertrude, 84 Stein, Leo, 84 Steinlen, Théophile-Alexandre, 3, 20, 26, 28–29, 32–33, 37, 41, 47, 185n34; “Catastrophe d’Issy,” 33 Stieglitz, Alfred, 87 Stirner, Max, 4–5, 51, 134 symbolism, 7, 35, 122, 131–32, 145 Tailhade, Laurent, 9, 34, 51, 132, 186n50 temps, Le, 68, 128 temps nouveaux, Les, 3, 5, 28, 32–33, 41, 43–44, 51, 67, 179

226

terrorism, 5 Théâtre Française, 50 Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, 50 Theosophy, 9, 145–46, 164–65, 171, 175 Thomassin, Maurice, 23; Le Feu dans la mine, 23 Tobeen, Félix (pseud. of Félix Elie Bonnet), 85, 104; Scène de port à Ciboure, 104 Tolstoy, Leo, 6 toscanità, 104 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 26, 28, 40, 47, 54, 73, 117; Cirque Fernando, 54 Tour du Monde, 62–63 Uhde, Wilhelm, 96 Vaillant, Auguste, 8 Valéry, Paul, 131 Vallotton, Félix, 28–29, 33–34, 73, 113, 185n34; “Ah, mon gaillard!,” 34 Van Dongen, Kees, 2–3, 8, 12–15, 18, 28–30, 33, 40–48, 51, 55, 57–58, 64, 66–67, 83, 113, 126, 170; “Europe et Macédoine,” 43–44; Femme fatale, 44–48; Liverpool Light House, Rotterdam or The Hussar, 45–46; “J’suis ni musicien, ni chanteur,” 43–44; Modjesko, Soprano Singer, 45–46; “Le Péril Blanc,” 43–44, 55, 66–67; “Les Prostituées,” 42–43, 170; Rotterdam, de Zandstraat, 45; Self-Portrait, 40 Vers et Prose, 131 Vers libre, 131, 134 Vauxcelles, Louis, 95–98, 102, 105 vie, La, 81–82 Vigné d’Octon, Paul, 71 Villon, Jacques, 1, 30–32, 113 Viollet, Paul, 72 Vlaminck, Maurice de, 2, 12–15, 18, 40, 48–53, 55–57, 60, 73, 76, 78, 81, 178; and papiers révolutionnaires, 51–53; Maisons à Chatou, 49; Portrait of Derain, 53 voce, La, 104 Vollard, Ambroise, 42, 45, 72–73, 81, 98 voix du Peuple, La, 5, 28, 53 Vuillard, Édouard, 73 Wagner, Richard, 6 Werth, Léon, 96–98, 109 Willette, Adolphe, 28 Zola, Émile, 23, 51; Germinal, 23