Patrick Bade
Paris and Modernity, Part II: 1905 - 1925

Patrick Bade | Paris and Modernity, Part II: 1905 - 1925

- Well, welcome back to Paris. Not literally, of course, ‘cause, as you can see, I’m sitting in London. But I’m going to take you on a guided tour of what was the must-see exhibition in Paris earlier this year. You can see the title is “Lu Paris de la Modernite,” the Paris of Modernity, 1905 to 1925. And this was a very exciting period for early modernism. When I was a student at the Courtauld, that’s in the early 1970s, my teacher Alan Bowness used to say, “Everything in modern culture of any importance of the 20th century had happened in this 20-year period, and everything that happened afterwards was really just a rehash or a development of things that started up at this time.” Of course, when he said that, that was 50 years ago. So there’s been a lot that’s happened since then. Most notably, of course, the internet. Now, I really, really loved this show. And I went to the show six times, and every time I felt I learned something new. And what I liked best about it was the way it brought together different disciplines. It’s something you probably noticed that I try to do very often in my lectures. In this exhibition, we had fine arts, we had painting and sculpture, we had decorative arts, we had fashion, we had the performing arts, and we had technology, giving us a wonderfully rounded, many-faceted view of the period. Now you could say that the exhibition was-

• [Moderator] Could I just… Patrick, could I just interrupt for one moment? I’m sorry. We’re getting some participants wondering if you can change it to the full-screen presentation view so the pictures are larger?

• Oh, yes, of course. That’s right, yeah, thank you. Yes, that’s my fault for not doing that.

• [Moderator] Thank you.

• Let me see. So slideshow from current slide. Yes, that’s better now. Sorry about that. So as I said, the exhibition could be described as, inverted commas, woke. I know for many people that is a term of abuse, but I want to use it here very positively in the sense that this exhibition deals with themes that are currently very fashionable of gender and race. It puts great emphasis on the contribution of women. I mean, if this had been a show of 20 years ago, women would have hardly probably appeared in it. There’s also a great emphasis on the importance of the influence of African art for the French avant-garde, and of the impact of Afro-American performers like Josephine Baker, who you see on the right-hand side, and also the theme of gender fluidity. It’s back in the news, people getting very hot under the collar in ways I don’t really quite understand about gender these days. But you’ve got an image there of man, in fact, Barbette, who was a very popular transvestite acrobat and performer in Paris in the 1920s. Now the dates 1905 to 1925, it’s a period that’s bookended by two very celebrated exhibitions. The Salon d'Automne of 1905 that launched the Fauves movement, which was the first big avant-garde art movement of the 20th century in Paris, and its end in 1925, Exposition des Arts Decoratifs that gives its name to the Art Deco style. Now, although it’s a wonderful exhibition, I said I enjoyed it so much, but there were obviously gaps that must be, I suppose, in any exhibition like this. And I regretted very much that the painting you see on the right-hand side was not in the show. This is Matisse’s portrait of his wife in a fashionable hat.

That was the most outrageous, the most discussed, the most disputed painting of the 1905 Salon d'Automne. So it would’ve been great if they could have borrowed that. I can’t remember which American museum it’s in now. Somebody will tell me, I’m sure, in the chat at the end. But in a way, compensation for the absence of that painting was the presence of these little sculptures you see on the left-hand side by an artist that you’ve probably never heard of called Albert Marque. These little sculptures were shown in the middle of the room surrounded by these wild expressionists. I think you have to say Fauvism is really French expressionism. And the critic Louis Vauxcelles breathed a sigh of relief when he saw these charming little sculptures. And he said, “Oh, it’s like Donatello amongst the wild beasts.” And the young artists, Matisse, de Vlaminck, Derain, and so on, they thought, “Mm, you know, that’s quite cool being called wild beasts,” and they were happy to adopt that name. So Albert Marque did not go on to have an important career as a sculptor. He had an important career as a doll maker. So anybody who collects dolls will know his name. The most highly sought-after French dolls of the early 20th century, like the one you see, insert left-hand side, that is by Albert Marque. Now that very provocative painting was the first avant-garde purchase by Gertrude and Leo Stein, who had arrived in Paris a couple of years earlier. So that’s 1905. And then the same year, they came across Picasso. And the following year, 1906, Picasso painted this famous portrait of Gertrude Stein. And the black and white photograph shows the interior of the Steins’ Paris apartment. And you can see that very provocatively Gertrude placed her Picasso portrait above Matisse’s portrait of his wife. And she, I think, quite deliberately set off what was to be a kind of lifelong friendship and rivalry between Picasso and Matisse.

It would’ve been nice, also, to have the Picasso portrait of Gertrude Stein in the show, but that was not possible because running along the same time, there was an exhibition devoted to Gertrude Stein and Picasso’s relationship. And that was showing at the Musee du Luxembourg. Another important absentee from the show was this painting, which, I suppose, is the single most important painting of this period. Think single most influential. It’s Picasso’s “Demoiselles d'Avignon” that was painted in his Montmartre studio at the Bateau-Lavoir, 1907. It was not exhibited publicly for several years, but a whole procession of artists went to Picasso’s studio and saw this. And it had the impact of an earthquake, really, on the Paris art scene. You see him looking a bit lugubrious sitting in his studio in the Bateau-Lavoir. It was notoriously cold and uncomfortable. You can see there is a stove there to warm the studio, and you can also see his collection of African sculptures. And so, as I said, this is a theme of this show. The importance of Africa and of Afro-Americans is suddenly around this time. Picasso was not alone. In fact, he was being with Matisse who showed him his first African sculptures. But Derain was very interested, and there were German artists at the same period who suddenly became very influenced by African, what used to be called tribal art and its very different approach to reality. We had in the show a display of the kind of African sculptures that avant-garde French artists were collecting at this period and that they were learning from.

And this, of course, is a very famous photograph by Man Ray of his lover Kiki de Montparnasse. It’s called “Black and White.” And he compares her face with that of an African mask. And another important event right at the end of the period, of course, 1925, the same year as the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, was the arrival in Paris of Josephine Baker with a troupe of black American performers at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. Now you may find this famous image, this poster, “La Revue Negre,” as it was called, disturbing. I have a West Indian neighbour and we talked about this, and she said it took her a while to really accept Josephine Baker and her image ‘cause she felt it was playing up too much to negative caricatural stereotypes. But in fact, Paris fell in love with Josephine Baker. Here she is. And it was not a short-term thing. It was, you know, till the very end of her life in the 1970s, she was a goddess and she had Paris at her feet. And in the show they had something, I wonder whether it would even be possible in America in a similar exhibition, that had film of her dancing, semi-nude, bare-breasted. What you see on the left-hand side, I took that photograph from the moving image on the screen of Josephine dancing. The great writer Colette commented on Josephine’s nudity, saying it was something that just seemed so natural, so innocent, that she was proud of her body, she was happy in her skin, and she felt there was nothing salacious, nothing sleazy at all about her nude dancing. It was a celebration of her body. And she had a tremendous impact in the 1920s. Many, many artists had depicted her.

And she was, in a way, the human physical embodiment of the Art Deco style. She had, you could say, an Art Deco body. It was very streamlined, very smooth. And she’s certainly an icon of the Art Deco period. Van Dongen on the left-hand side, Jean Dunand on the right-hand side. Oh, yes, I wanted to play you her voice. So this is the song most associated with her, “J'ai Deux Amours,” “I Have Two Loves, My Country and Paris.” In fact, I think Paris was much more her love. Her own country never really gave her any kind of credit, never accepted her. When she back went back to America from her European triumphs, she got a very, very chilly reception indeed. So I think she was extremely glad to get back again to Paris. So this sets off a huge fashion for everything African or Afro-American. This is an illustration from a book called , “Naughty Paris.” It’s actually written by Georges Simenon, more famous for creating the character of Maigret. You can see the words . He said, “I’m not talking to you about that erotic allure,” 'cause that’s obviously, for him, a given. And it became very fashionable to have interracial relationships, to have a black lover, either for a man or a woman. And one of the people who really led the way with this was Nancy Cunard, the heiress of the Cunard ocean liner fortune. And she was, today, I suppose… She was a trendsetter. Today you’d call her an influencer, both in her style of dressing, her use of costume jewellery and clunky bracelets, and also in flaunting her black lover, a jazz musician called Henry Crowder. You see them on the right-hand side. And here are more. Josephine Baker really opened up the way for many black American performers who came to Paris. And they loved it there because it was so much more tolerant than their native country.

So this is Bricktop, Ada Bricktop Smith, top left, Sidney Bechet, clarinettist, Adelaide Hall, and Elisabeth Welch, were just four of the African American performers who were really taken to the hearts of Paris. Now, Fauvism was an explosion, an exciting moment, but it was short-lived. And it was really knocked for six by two years later by the “Demoiselles d'Avignon.” And following that, as I mentioned last week, between 1909 and the First World War, Picasso and his friend Braque developed Cubism. This is an early Cubist picture of 1909, just after Picasso moved into that studio I showed you last week on the Boulevard de Clichy. But as I said, many artists were going to visit Picasso’s studio, and very quickly jumped on the bandwagon of Cubism. These two artists, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, they really formulated it. They turned it into a kind of doctrine and published a manifesto called “Du Cubisme.” And there you can see an exhibition, a poster for an exhibition of their works on the right-hand side. This was in the show, big work by Metzinger called “The Blue Bird.” It’s his colourful, I would say, decorative version of Cubism. The analytical first phase of Cubism where things are broken up. You can recognise up the top, you can see the dome of the Sacre-Coeur. 1909, the year that Cubism really took off, the Italian poet and intellectual Marinetti published “The Futurist Manifesto.” He was very concerned that in this exciting period of modernism, that Italy was being left behind, Italy was overwhelmed by its glorious past. You can’t turn around in Italy without falling over an ancient monument. And he felt that it was particularly important for young Italians to break with the past and to embrace modernity. And so he published his… He wanted to create a movement. In a way, it was a bit like creating a boy band or something like that 'cause he didn’t actually have any artists for his movement.

So he published his manifesto to attract attention and to attract artists to his new movement. Not in Italian, and not in an Italian newspaper. He knew that everybody who was interested in modernity in Italy would be looking towards Paris and would be reading French. So he decided to publish the manifesto of Cubism on the front page of “Le Figaro.” There you see it, and it’s in French. And immediately a whole group of these artists said, “Yes, yes, yes, this is what we want.” It was Boccioni, Carra, Balla, Severini, and so on. And he decided, “Yes, we’re going to launch our movement in Paris with an exhibition in Paris in 1911.” Now Severini, who was already in Paris, looked at the work of these budding Futurist artists and he said, “No, no, no, no, no. If they exhibit work like this in Paris, we’ll be just laughed to scorn. You know, Paris is way beyond this.” So Marinetti organised a trip, which he paid for. There he is in the centre with the artists of the Futurist movement. And he brought them to Paris. Severini knew all the avant-garde artists. He knew Picasso, he knew Leger, he knew Delaunay, and so on. So they all went on a tour of the studios in Paris and the penny dropped. Aha, this is what we need to express modernity, simultaneity, speed, action. It’s the Cubist style. So this is a Severini painting of 1911 which shows a public dance hall in Paris. And this is, you can see, the Futurist using Cubist fragmentation to express speed, energy, modernity. And so speed, energy, modernity, progress, technology, these are big themes of the period.

And for me, one of the most delightful rooms in the exhibition was a room that contained cutting-edge machines from the decade before the First World War. An aeroplane, a racing car, a bicycle, and art, like Duchamp. The Duchamp piece on the left-hand side, that is inspired by all of this. So how about this natty little car for racing around Paris? This is a Peugeot of 1913. And this, somehow it seems so modern. This is a foldable bicycle dating from 1912. And in the show was… These innovations, this new technology is reflected in the art, pictures such as this one by Robert Delaunay, which is entitled “Hommage a Bleriot.” Bleriot, in 1909, caused an international sensation by being the first person to fly in a motorised vehicle across the channel from France landing in England. There’s a wonderful photograph, and he had the most spectacular moustache. You’d think he hardly needed the wings of his aeroplane. He could’ve flown with the moustache. Now, last week we were firmly based in north Paris in streets along the foot of Montmartre. But for reasons I haven’t fully worked out, I think had something to do with rent. The fact that Montmartre was being developed, the slopes of Montmartre, it was becoming more fashionable, it was becoming more expensive. Anyway, there was a mass migration of artists from the north of Paris to the Left Bank to Montparnasse. So from around 1905, 1906, up until the Second World War, this is where it’s happening in Paris. This is where the so-called Ecole de Paris developed. And the famous cafes and restaurants, as La Rotonde, they’re still there. You can visit these places. I was absolutely outraged, the height of the thing. I’m afraid they completely lost my sympathy when they tried to burn down La Rotonde because it’s patronised by Moreau. I thought, “Don’t they know, don’t they remember that it was also patronised by Picasso, Modigliani, Max Jacob. And these are photographs of Montparnasse. Bottom-right there is Modigliani, Picasso, Max Jacob.

You can see, above that is Picasso with Moise Kisling. And top left is Max Jacob and Picasso. Now Ecole de Paris. Ecole de Paris is in some ways a misnomer, the School of Paris, 'cause hardly any of the major figures of the Ecole de Paris were Parisian or even French. It was a very, very cosmopolitan, very international movement. Attracted artists from all over the world. There was Diego Rivera from Mexico, there’s Foujita from Japan, Modigliani, of course, from Italy. It had a very, very high proportion of Jewish artists at the Ecole de Paris, from Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and so on. So Modigliani of course was Jewish, but he was from Italy. He wasn’t Ashkenazi like Soutine, Chagall, Kisling, and so on. So here is Chagall. He arrived in Paris in 1910. Now I said that each time I went to this exhibition, I learned something new, and I had lots of surprises and lots of revelations. And perhaps the first one was seeing these two pictures placed together. Of course both very, very familiar pictures. I’ve seen them separately in different exhibitions, and I’ve shown them in lectures on many occasions. The painting on the right-hand side is one the first pictures that Chagall did when he came to Paris. You might not recognise it as Chagall. It looks very full. It’s very expressionist. And it shows his small studio apartment in Montparnasse. But seeing it next to the portrait of his fiance, his beautiful, faithful fiancee, Bella. He left her in 1910, she waited patiently for him, and he went back to Russia in 1914 and married her. That was the beginning of a very long, happy marriage. But I’d never noticed, why did I not see it? That that portrait of Bella is hanging on the wall of his Montparnasse apartment. Another surprise for me was to see work by Jeanne Hebuterne. She was the lover of Modigliani right at the end of his life.

She came from a very posh bourgeois family. Of course, they were absolutely scandalised that she was in a relationship with this bohemian artist of ill repute and notoriously loose morals. But it was a passionate, passionate love affair. A very tragic one because, by this time, he was dying, partly from tuberculosis but exacerbated by his lifestyle, substance abuse, drinking, and so on. They had a child together and she was pregnant with his second child when he died in 1920. And she was so distraught that two days later she threw herself out of a fifth-story window, killing herself and her unborn child. So these two paintings here were both in the exhibition. It’s Modigliani on the left-hand side. But I’d never seen a painting before by Hebuterne. And I think it’s really good. I like it a lot enormously, the painting on the right-hand side. So I think, of course, not just in this exhibition, but around the world, at the moment, women, there’s a viewed show at Britain at the moment of British women artists from the 17th century to the 20th century. So this is a very current theme of interest, to rediscover female talent. Here is the brooding, melancholy Jules Pascin. I told you a little bit about him last week. He was Bulgarian Jewish. He spent most of his career in Paris. He was dubbed the Prince of Montparnasse because he was famous for his profligate generosity. He would arrive in a cafe and it was drinks on him all round. And he was a very big tipper. The waiters loved him. When he died, the day of his funeral, apparently all the waiters of Montparnasse left their jobs to follow his coffin to his funeral. The painting on the left, which was in the show, is one of the countless images he made of his favourite model, Lucy Krogh.

I think I told you something about that last week, that he was in a menage a trois with his wife, the artist Hermine David, and his model, Lucy Krogh. As I said, the exhibition does have gaps. And for me, an important gap was that Hermine David, the wife of Jules Pascin, was only represented in the exhibition by this photograph of her. She’s the one with the cigarette and the pet dog. And she’s sitting with her best friend Kiki de Montparnasse. If Pascin was called the Prince of Montparnasse, she was dubbed the Queen of Montparnasse. She was multi-talented. She probably was painted more than any other woman of the 20th century in Paris. She posed for all the artists of the Ecole de Paris. She was quite a good chanteuse, I’m going to play her voice in a minute, and I think she was a good artist. So I’m going to make up for a couple of exhibitions. First of all, I want to show you some of Hermine David. This is in my Paris flat, and it shows the Sacre-Coeur from the other side of the hill, from the north of Paris, from Saint-Ouen. And this gorgeous painting, actually more gorgeous than it looks in this image. So it really sparkles with sunlight. This belongs to Ron, who’s going to be talking to you again next Sunday. Which he and I are both really very keen on Hermine David. And he has heard on the grapevine that there is finally going to be a big Hermine David show at the l'Orangerie. So anybody who is keen on her work and would like to buy one, you better get in there quickly before that show. This also belongs to me. This is Hermine David, and it shows Passy, a suburb the west of Paris. And I love it. Her paintings are always full of very quirky details, like this lady in her kitchen with her pots and pans. And I wonder if anybody could explain this detail to me in this painting. Very, very curious. It seems to be an elderly Orthodox Jew sitting on the shoulders of a French waiter, wearing the typical uniform of a French waiter, and playing ball with a presumably rather elderly lady, from her dress, because her dress is not the clothing of 1920s, when this was painted. It’s really pre-First World War clothing.

They’re playing ball across the street. So what? Does this have a meaning? Or was it just some curious thing that Hermine David happened to see? So back to Kiki de Montparnasse. As I said, she posed for many, many artists. Here are two of the most famous images of her. Pablo Gargallo on the left-hand side, and Man Ray. That photograph last year sold for a world-record sum. The most expensive photograph ever sold at auction. Ironic, really considering that she herself died in utter poverty and misery. But here is a photograph of her sitting in a cafe, actually, for once, drinking coffee rather than anything stronger. And here’s a painting by her. I think that was a gap in the exhibition. You know, she’s such an important character for this period, particularly for Montparnasse. So I’m going to… And I think this is actually a very good painting. I mean, you can see she’s clearly looked at Matisse. It’s got a rather Matisse-y quality to it. And she was a very good singer. So I want to give her a voice. So a voice, both as an artist and this is her voice singing. A very pretty voice that probably reminds you somewhat of Edith Piaf. So, yes, women figure quite largely in this exhibition. We have two self-portraits of Marie Laurencin. A very early one in a style somewhat similar to the Nabis, and then a more characteristic later one on the right-hand side. And this. This amazing piece, I don’t know quite how to describe it, really, that Sonia Delaunay made in combination with the poet Blaise Cendrars. It’s a very characteristic piece of the time. It celebrates a train journey across Siberia. And it’s this idea of simultaneity and of combining words and colours, abstract colours. Those of you listening from England or from London, you can see this piece 'cause it’s actually on show at the moment in the exhibition of expressionism at Tate Modern.

I’m not quite sure why, but in Paris it was shown horizontally, as you see it here, and in London it’s shown vertically. Another woman artist who is being rediscovered, and Wendy is a big fan, as I am, this is Chana Orloff. And before you all rush to your computers saying I’m mispronouncing her name, no, I know she would’ve been born when she was born in Ukraine, she would’ve born Hana Orloff, but she became French, she lived all her life in France, and she pronounced her name Chana, and that’s how her grandchildren pronounced her name. I think she’s a wonderful, wonderful artist. I really adore her work. And I strongly recommend, when you next go to Paris, that you book a visit to her studio. This is it in Montparnasse. And you can do this. You can only visit it in small private groups and you can do it through the Jewish Museum in Paris. And you are taken around by one or other of her two grandchildren, her granddaughter or her grandson. They only speak French, so you really need to understand a bit of French to do this tour. But it’s very, very moving, very moving, and I so strongly recommend it. She’s such a wonderful portraitist. This is Marevna. She had a quite a big reputation at the time. She is today probably mainly remembered for the decorative paintings that she made for the Theatre des Champs-Elysees that I’m going to be talking about in a minute. On the right, this photograph of Marevna on the left, and on the right, her depiction, it’s supposed to be of Nijinsky and Karsavina. I don’t think I would recognise them from that image. So a big emphasis, as I said, on women artists. Tamara de Lempicka is represented by two paintings. Here in the exhibition is this self-portrait showing herself skiing. I mean, she was very much… She wanted to present herself in both these self-portraits.

The one on the right-hand side is actually not in the exhibition. As a new woman, a new woman who’s active, she’s not corseted, she’s not restricted to the home, she’s out there on the ski slopes or driving a green Bugatti. Very cool. The fact she did have a car, that was already very daring, of course, in the 1920s. Only quite wealthy women and very independently-minded women would’ve had a car in the 1920s. She didn’t have a Bugatti, she had a little Peugeot, but she used it and she’d drive down. Here she is on the right-hand side, is a photograph of her painting her feckless husband, Tadeusz Lempicki. He dumped her for a younger woman. And she got her revenge by not finishing this portrait and exhibiting it with a title , which has a double meaning. It could be either unfinished portrait of a man, or portrait of an unfinished or inadequate man. But, you know, she was a pretty feisty type, and she used to use her car. She’d drive down to the Bois de Boulogne on a sunny day to pick up lovers of either sex, as she was bisexual. And one day she was driving back from the Bois de Boulogne and presumably had not found a companion. And she was stopped by a very handsome traffic policeman. And she looked him up and down and she thought, "Phwoar, he’s got a good body.” So while he was presumably booking her for a traffic ticket or whatever, she propositioned him and she said, “I’m painting a picture of Adam and Eve. Would you like to come back to my studio and pose?” And so he went back to her studio, he undressed. She was very impressed by how neatly and methodically he took off his clothes and folded them and piled them up, placing his gun on top of the folded uniform. So as I said, gender was a big… It’s a big theme of this period, not just in Paris. It was very much in Berlin.

You could almost say that homosexuality was an invention of this period. Of course it’s always existed, but something that is now out there and acknowledged and really quite fashionable, especially in Paris. And so this is a room where you have various images of same-sex relationships. And another big theme everywhere in the 1920s is this kind of gender-bending fashion that lots of songs of the period, of course, of confused men looking at a slender preacher walking down the street, not sure whether they’re looking at a male or a female. And the straight up and down, it was so different, of course, from the corseted look at the turn of the century, which exaggerated female curves. So here are two images that are in the show, Foujita, of women clearly in some kind of sexual relationship. It must be 10 years ago, I was invited to give a series of lectures in Saudi Arabia, and I just published the book on Tamara de Lempicka, and they said, “Oh, can you do a lecture on Tamara?” I was very nervous about this. I thought, “God, Saudi Arabia? Is this a good idea?” And I had a wonderful Lebanese hostess who kept me on the straight and narrow, so to speak. And every night before I gave my lecture, I would go through all the images with her and she would say, “No, this one comes out, that can stay in.” And I was quite… I was expecting this painting image of lesbians wearing nothing but lipstick would have to come out. And she said, “No, no, fine. They won’t have a problem with that.” But of course, the Adam and Eve, where you have a male and a female nude, that had to come out. That could not be shown in Saudi Arabia. So it was a great culture for what I took was a much, much greater tolerance for same-sex relationships in Paris than there was, say, in America or Britain.

Of course, same-sex relationships between men were illegal, criminal, criminalised till the 1960s. It’s said that female same-sex relationships were not criminalised because Queen Victoria refused to sign the act saying such thing could not be possible, but it certainly was possible and very possible and very out. In Paris, there were plenty of restaurants, nightclubs, where lesbians could mingle. And gay women came to Paris from all over the world. This is Suzy Solidor. She was very much a sort of gay icon of the period. And that’s a portrait of her by Tamara de Lempicka. And this, this is a photograph by Man Ray, it’s in the show, of a performer called Barbette. His real name was… What was his real name? Vander Clyde Broadway was his real name. And he would perform dressed as a woman, very convincingly looking like a woman, but then right at the end of his performance he’d rip off his clothes and show that he was very male and rather, rather muscular. And he was one of the most popular performers in Paris in the 1920s and the early '30s. Fashion, there’s quite a large part of the show devoted to fashion. This comparison shows you the revolution in fashion that happened 1908 to '09. It’s associated with the designer Paul Poiret, who gets rid of corsets. You’d think, oh, how wonderfully liberating for women. They could free themselves from these.

Must have been… Can you imagine having to live life wearing the corsets that the woman is wearing on the left-hand side? You know, with tiny, tiny, pulled-in waist and all the kind of upholstery and padding. Insanitary, uncomfortable, horrible, really? So you’d think, yes, what a liberation to have this much more streamlined shape that you see on the right-hand side. These are Poiret designs of 1909. Although, not every woman welcomed with this because it meant that now you had to diet and you had to exercise to keep a fashionable silhouette. So these are clothes by Poiret that were in the show. And performing arts. You could say there were two tremendous events in the performing arts that had a great impact way beyond the actual performances. They impacted fashion and they impacted the wider art scene. The first was the arrival of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1909, and the second was the La Revue Negre of 1925 that I’ve already mentioned. So this is a portrait by Jacques-Emile Blanche of Tamara Karsavina in “The Firebird” with the Stravinsky ballet of 1910 that was presented by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. And so this is in the show. And you can see that she’s wearing the costume that was designed for her by Leon Bakst, which is on the right-hand side. Leon Bakst, the same year, 1910, his designs for the ballet “Scheherazade” had an extraordinary impact, as I said, way beyond the world of ballet, on interior design. Of course, the ballet is about an orgy and a massacre and a harem. And it was said from 1910 to 1914, if you want to be a fashionable , look like a set for an orgiastic ballet with piles of cushions and shrieking exotic colours.

And also these are Bakst designs for that ballet that, again, they went hand in hand, actually, with Poiret’s fashion revolution. You can say that Bakst and Poiret, between them, really dominated the… Here are Paquin designs in “Robes Style Bakst realisees par Paquin.” So the Madam Paquin is producing fashionable clothes that could be from a Russian ballet. And there’s a little doll by Albert Marque, who we started off with, with the doll dressed in the style of Bakst’s “Scheherazade” designs. These photographs are of, these are in the show, or were in the show, are of a scandal. The final moments of the ballet “L'Apres-midi d'un faune,” “The Afternoon of a Faun.” Diaghilev’s genius, well, there were two particular aspects of his genius. One was recognising talent in other people and knowing how to bring it out. He was like a water diviner in the way he could sense what people could do, and he enabled them to do it. And his other genius was for publicity. And he was one of the first people to understand that no publicity is bad publicity and that nothing is better to promote yourself than scandal. And one of the biggest Russian ballet scandals was for “The Afternoon of the Faun,” which was the first modern ballet that really broke with the traditions of ballet going back to the 17th century. Nijinsky invented a completely new type of movement. And the ballet, “The Afternoon of the Faun” it’s about a half goat, half man who sexually harasses some nymphs, he chases after them, He’s trying to rape them, they escape.

One of them drops her shawl or her scarf and he picks it up. And in the very final moments, the exquisite music of Debussy, he lowers himself slowly onto the scarf and he mimics masturbation. He performs pelvic jerks into the scarf. Well, even in Paris, of course, that was going somewhere in 1913, and it was quite a scandal at the time. So this is the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. It’s still there. I think it’s one of the most beautiful theatres in Paris, if not the world. It was the first modern theatre or opera house. It’s constructed largely from reinforced concrete. I’m having a senior moment again. I can’t remember the name of the architect. Somebody will tell me or it will come back to me by the end. Very important architect, really the first architect to introduce reinforced concrete. And so there’s a whole section of the show, there’s a room devoted to the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. This is the interior of the theatre as it looks today. And the next Diaghilev scandal happened in 1913 in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees soon after it opened. And this was the premier of Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring,” “Le Sacre du printemps.” And in this case, it was the music that caused the scandal. Stravinsky’s score is really the musical equivalent of Picasso’s “Demoiselles d'Avignon.” It’s the cornerstone of modern music. Now, the choreography was also very radical with angular, jerky, new movements. It was by Nijinsky. But the premier of “The Rite of Spring, Nijinsky went on a tour of South America and he escaped from the dominating influence of Diaghilev, who was really completely, you know, in a rather sinister way, completely controlled him. Nijinsky, who was Diaghilev’s lover, was not basically gay or homosexual.

And on that trip, he fell in love with a young Hungarian dancer and he married her, and of course was cast into the outer darkness by Diaghilev and his choreography was dropped. And for a long time, it was thought to be completely lost. But luckily, there was a young girl, a young Jewish girl called Valentine Gross who was attending the rehearsals and she was completely obsessive about ballet. And she made very detailed drawings of all the movements. And you can see the musical quotes that go with the movements. And it was thanks to her notes and her drawings that the original choreography of "The Rite of Spring” has been reconstructed. Now you can see costumes for “The Rite of Spring.” That was the music by Debussy that caused the riot at that performance. People were shocked by the violence and the dissonance of the music. Now the First World War plays a surprisingly minor role, really, in France. When you think, there’s not a lot of French art that really deals directly with the First World War. This is actually by a Russian woman artist called Marevna that clearly is a harsh and ironic comment on the pointless death of the First World War. So there’s a small section in the show dealing with the war. One that rather fascinated me was a section dealing with dazzle camouflage. This was something that was introduced to particularly with ships to confuse German U-boats. And so avant-garde artists, Cubist artists were brought in to provide this kind of dazzle camouflage. And we’ve got a model tank and we have a helmet there on the right-hand side which have what look like cubist avant-garde decoration that actually has the practical purpose of confusing the enemy.

So the First World War, of course, has a major cultural impact. And one reaction to it was a kind of cultural anarchy that people thought, “My god, I can really sympathise with this.” And it’s the same even more, in a way, with the Second World War and the Holocaust. You think, what is Western civilization if it could lead to this completely mindless industrial slaughter of the First World War and of the Holocaust? What is it worth? And so you could say that the Dada movement was rejecting all the traditions of Western civilization. This found expression in the 1917 Diaghilev ballet “Parade” devised by Cocteau and with music by Satie and with costumes by Picasso. In the show, there’s film of the ballet and costumes. There are the costumes of Picasso. Duchamp. Aggressive, anti-culture, in a way, of Dadaism. Cocteau is a key figure, particularly in the interwar period. And he was a very young man. He was thrilled and bowled over, as everybody was, by the Russian ballet, and he took himself to Diaghilev and he said, “What can I do? I want to be involved in this. This is so exciting. What can I contribute?” And with his usual perceptiveness, Diaghilev looked Cocteau up and down. He got his measure immediately. He says, “What I want you to do, young man, is , to astonish me, to surprise me.” That’s what Cocteau did, almost professionally, you could say, for the rest of his life, was to surprise and to astonish. So in the '20s, he is very much a key figure with the composers known as Les Six. And he is the kind of household god, in a way, of the nightclub and restaurant Le Boeuf ser le Toit.

All the artists, the fashionable artists and the intelligentsia went to Le Boeuf ser le Toit and they were entertained by these two pianists, Wiener and Doucet, and they alternated between Bach and jazz and Gershwin and outrageously jazzed up versions of Chopin and Wagner. The show ends in a burst of brilliance with the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs of 1925. Really the high point of the Art Deco style. And it’s a contraction of the title of the show that we get the term Art Deco. And a very interesting cross culture with the art and fashion here that Sonia Delaunay dresses, models, wearing her dresses in the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs. We have these sumptuous barges, that were handed over to the top designers as part of the exhibition. We have wonderful colour photographs in the Petit Palais show. This is the Pavillon, de L'Hotel Particulier du Collectionneur. It was the creation of Lalique, Ruhlmann, and Edgar Brandt, three of the leading designer craftsmen of the Art Deco period. You’ve got furniture here by Ruhlmann, wrought iron by Edgar Brunt. And this is my final image of the Eiffel Tower, which has became such a symbol of modernity after its construction in 1889. And this is how it looked in 1925 with wonderful Art Deco light displays decorating it. So I’m going to go into Q&A and see what we’ve got.

Q&A and Comments:

The Matisse, it’s in San Francisco at the moment. Thank you very much indeed.

When the exhibition you’re mentioning, when was? The exhibition, I’m not sure which… You mean the exhibition I’m talking about? This was earlier this year, first half of this year. It was at the Petit Palais with the title I gave you.

And my teacher at the Courtauld was Alan Bowness who later went on to be a director of the Tate Gallery.

Q: Where did Josephine Baker live during World War II?

A: Well, that’s a very, very interesting question and there’s a rather long answer to it that I can’t give you all the information now. But she initially went, 'cause she very much threatened as the Nazis did not regard people of African origin as human beings. She could easily have landed up in a concentration camp. She fled initially to the south of France and then she became, of course, a double agent and a spy. And she went to Lisbon and was very useful, actually, as a spy in Lisbon. And then the later part of the war, she was in North Africa.

Q: How and where did she learn French?

A: Well, I suppose she learned French by speaking it when she arrived in 1925. She never lost her accent. It’s a bit like Maurice Chevalier who never lost his French accent. It was part of her persona. It was part of the… Even the songs she recorded later in life, she still has a very strong American accent. And for French people, that was part of her appeal.

Yes, it’s very interesting, isn’t it, that Nancy Cunard’s mother, Emerald, who is the lover, long-term lover, of Sir Thomas Beecham. Yes, it was daughter rebellion. I haven’t done Nancy justice in this lecture. I’m surprised nobody has pointed that out, because, yes, she was a spoiled brat in a way, but she actually really took up the cause of civil rights, and she really put a lot of effort into fighting for civil rights of black Americans.

Denise, thank you so much for your nice message. And I’ve got a long thing from you. I don’t know if I’ve got time to read this all out. The van Gelder Art Museum, Antwerp. We lived in the on the Left Bank contemporary of Tuusula Trek. Wonderful time to be there. Le Boeuf ser le Toit, it still exists, but it’s not the one, it’s a different building. It moved into a different building in the 1930s. It was a nightclub, now it’s just a restaurant, but it’s worth going to. It has a very sleek, beautiful Art Deco interior. And last time I went there for lunch, it was actually really good food and I enjoyed it. This is Bella Chateau who wrote a wonderful book describing her childhood in . And the exhibition I was talking about was at the Petit Palais.

The Centre of Paris is Ron. A few words about Man Ray’s… Oh, sorry, that’s jumping around, where’s it gone? American Roots and how he came to be in Paris? Well, there is a… I really haven’t got time, but there’s a book out, came out last year, very good, very readable, about Man Ray and his relationship with Kiki de Montparnasse. So I recommend you go to that book and you’ll find out everything you need to know.

And this is Bernard. On a recent visit to Paris, you stayed in the Montparnasse, opposite L'Atelier, where on one day you could attend a live class that claimed to be used by all the major painters. Yes, that’s a wonderful thing to do. Kiki de Montparnasse, the eponymous graphic novel has been translated to English, SelfMadeHero.

Denise. Ooh, jumping around. I think this is too long for me to read.

And Ron again reminding us there’s a major Tamara exhibition in San Francisco later this year and a Broadway musical that’s just been on, has just closed.

How did the… Well, France is such a divided country. Well, it’s terrifyingly so at the moment. So I suppose a lot of French people just completely ignored this and really would’ve disapproved of it. Yes, of course, it was certainly the equivalent of Chinese bound feet. I mean, it did terrible things to women’s health. It made childbirth very difficult, and so on. Yes, you could take them off, but there were serious bone deformations as a result of wearing corsets. Permanently deformations, as it were with the feet.

Thank you, Karen. Auguste, Paris. I knew somebody would know it. Thank you.

Oh, I can’t help you with anything technical.

Narrow waist to no corset, the modern brassiere was invented right at the beginning of tonight’s period. That’s true as well. And thank you for your very, very nice comments.

Q: Any comments on why Coco Chanel was largely ignored in the exhibition?

A: Well, yes, possibly. Well, first, Claude, there was that huge Coco Chanel exhibition going on at the same time in London. I don’t know if that had something to do with it. There could be political reasons, you know, but she had a very dodgy record during the Second World War. I’m not quite sure, actually, 'cause you’re right, she should have been in the show. She’s certainly… But, you know, as I said, in a show like this, there are always going to be gaps.

Thank you very much. I think I’ve done lectures on Diaghilev. I have done for Lockdown, but I’m always happy to do them again. It’s one of my favourite subjects. Thank you very much for all your very nice comments. I think that’s it.

Ron will be taking over next Sunday and I’ll be back again in two weeks, and I’m going to start a series of guided tours of the Louvre Museum. So see you again in two weeks time. Thank you, everybody.