Nancy Cunard (Littérature française) (French Edition)

But I switched off all that curatorial chatter, and just stood in awe of these wonderful, beautiful, transcendent works of art.

No reproductions can do justice to the shiny vibrancy of the real thing in the flesh. Go and see them for yourself. It must have taken an immense amount of effort by the four co-curators to bring together such an epic collection of objects and art works and to bring order, coherence and meaning to the multiple stories behind them. If you are a feminist I can see how this exhibition of feminist artists lovingly assembled by feminist curators with scores of texts by feminist scholars would thunderingly confirm all your feminist beliefs.

Most of the people the exhibition is targeted at will, I suspect, have heard of Virginia Woolf before, and will know she had a lesbian affair with Vita Sackville-West. My position, after forty years of studying twentieth century art, literature and history, is that the Century of Catastrophes is too diverse and complex to be reduced to any one narrative or interpretation. For example, this is an exhibition, at bottom, about European and American white women, often very wealthy women Nancy Cunard, Natalie Barney. You could be forgiven for not realising there were things called the First World War and the Russian Revolution during the period the exhibition covers.

In fact, now I think about it, jazz is a crashingly obvious and central element of Modernism, from Stravinsky to Eliot, and is depicted in countless modernist art works. The curators make a powerful and persuasive case that Modernism was characterised above all by new thinking about love, eroticism, desire and relationships, much of which promoted the liberation of women and trans people and gays.

And the entire intellectual world was galvanised by the radicalism of the Russian Revolution. Too much was happening. No wonder the art from this period is so excited and effervescent. That there are numerous ways of looking at this period of cultural history. For example, arguably the most important aspect of the era was the collapse of the old European empires — the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires. The entire art of the period could be interpreted in terms of the breakdown of the ideologies, laws and customs which supported them, of which conventions about relations between the sexes are just a small sub-set.

Vide Nancy Cunard, Natalie Barney and the numerous other rich American women who populate the s lesbian room. This exhibition is an impressive and stimulating attempt to write one particular story about early twentieth century art. But it is only one interpretation among a sea of alternative stories.

They mean art and literature which is over a hundred years old. Eventually this stuff is going to be years old. At what point will someone have to come up with a better name? Surrealism is not a new or better means of expression, not even a metaphysic of poetry; it is a means of total liberation of the mind. Surrealist declaration, January , quoted page Born in , Ruth Brandon will turn 75 this year. This big book pages is a long, detailed and very accessible account of the origins, rise and spread of the Surrealist movement, from its sources in the Great War, through into the s and s when it was, arguably, the dominant art movement in Western Europe.

All these and many more. The book is full of stories of scandalous behaviour, passionate affairs, casual sex, drug addiction, madness and suicide, in the best bohemian manner. It was only towards the end of the s that the Surreal painters came to prominence — in Breton wrote Surrealism and painting to reflect this. It was only with the arrival of Salvador Dali in their midst in that the visual arts side of the movement began to vie with the writing and then, during the s, to dominate it.

Most of the Surrealist writings have disappeared, a lot was designed to be ephemeral anyway, a lot was never translated into English. None of that is here. For this reason, and because the influence of Surrealism becomes considerably more diffuse in the s, with a bewildering cast of hangers-on, increasingly diverse artists and writers all showing its burgeoning influence — I felt the first half of the book was the most compelling.

I was also thrilled by the riveting account of Dadaism in Zurich and Berlin which, for the first time, really explained the origin and history of that movement to me, making it real in terms of the people and personalities involved. I made brief notes on the first four chapters or so, before my review began to feel too long. This new alliance — I say new, because until now scenery and costumes were linked only by factitious bonds — has given rise, in Parade, to a kind of surrealism, which I consider to be the point of departure for a whole series of manifestations of the New Spirit that is making itself felt today and that will certainly appeal to our best minds.

We may expect it to bring about profound changes in our arts and manners through universal joyfulness, for it is only natural, after all, that they keep pace with scientific and industrial progress.

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Brandon deals with their theories about literature and art as they emerge from the personalities, but is thankfully lacking in the jargon-heavy theoretical interpretations of an art scholar like the feminist, Whitney Chadwick. He was invalided out in with a shrapnel wound to the head, but died suddenly of the Spanish flu which swept the world in The next chapter focuses on the life and early career of Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was invited to stay in the vacant apartment of business millionaire Walter Arensberg, who became a lifelong patron and sponsor.

Hence his massive importance through to the present day. It was in this tiny bar-cum-theatre that this disparate group staged their epoch-making anarchic performances, shouting nonsense poetry through megaphones or to the accompaniment of a big bass drum, wearing cardboard costumes, playing random instruments, packing the performances with schoolboy pranks and silliness.

Anti-art, anti-reason and logic, anti-bourgeois, Dada was deliberately anti everything which had led to the stupid, slaughterous war. It was during this street violence that the the well-known Communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were murdered by right wing militias in January The philosophy of Dada appeared here and Berlin Dada was founded by John Heartfeld, the inventor of photomontage, and the satirical painter George Grosz.

Brandon gives a hilarious account of the anticipation on both sides as they waited for the Great God of Dada to make his pilgrimage to Paris — only to be seriously disillusioned by the short, dark, nervous figure who actually materialised, and the respectful relationship which followed but never blossomed into real friendship. It turned out that Dada was a product of the unique war-time conditions in Zurich, of a mood of hysteria amid the bloodshed.

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Post-war Paris on the contrary, quickly returned to being a battlefield of avant-garde sophisticates, determined not to be impressed by anything. Brandon pinpoints this as the crux: But the Paris contingent thought it should lead somewhere. Breton liked questionnaires — he wanted to be scientific and factual about his investigations of the unconscious mind: The rest of the book continues in the same vein: This is the text which contains the notorious line that the most Surrealistic act conceivable would be to run out into the street with a loaded gun and start firing at passersby p.

Aragon had begged him not to include criticism of the Party, to which he was becoming passionately attached. Breton did so anyway, and the one-time musketeers never spoke again. Dali not only crystallised his own peculiar style of painting in the early s but helped to cement a Surrealist visual identity, the one posterity now remembers it by.

And the stories about their bizarre sex lives! According to Dali, gay Lorca was in love with him and tried to sodomise him on two occasions. The closest Lorca could get to having sex with Dali, who he was obsessed with, was by hiring a flat-chested and therefore boyish woman, who he had sex with while Dali watched.

The final chapter relates the contrasting fortunes of Dali and Breton, who were both compelled to spend the Second World War in New York. He decided he wanted to put his movement at the service of the Party and the proletariat at precisely the moment — the late s — when Stalin was cementing his grip on the Soviet Union, expelling Trotsky in and introducing the doctrine of Socialist Realism in It of course varied from one Surrealist writer and painter to another, and also varied with individuals over time.

Compared to the fratricidal stresses they were having to negotiate and the fraught power politics back in Moscow, the Surrealists must have seemed like spoilt schoolboys. But reading this book about often quite hysterical artists made me realise that a surprising number of Continental artists and writers were afflicted by suicidal thoughts between the wars.

Is It a Solution? Later on, the writer Jacques Rigaut said: The chief defect of the novel of ideas is that you must write about people who have ideas to express—which excludes all but about. Living with monsters becomes rather tiresome in the long run. Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the novel of the second?

And so on to infinity, like those advertisments of Quaker Oats where there is a Quaker holding a box of oats, on which is a picture of another Quaker holding another box of oats, on which etc.

Reason, feeling, instinct, the life of the body—Blake managed to include and harmonize everything. Barbarism is being lopsided. You can be a barbarian of the intellect as well as of the body. A barbarian of the soul and the feelings as well as of sensuality. Not an angel or a devil.

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A man's a creature on a tight-rope, walking delicately, equilibrated, with mind and consciousness and spirit at one end of his balancing pole and body and instinct and all that's unconscious and earthy and mysterious at the other. Which is damnably difficult. Arithmetic held a wild saturnalian kermesse.

The music came to an end in an orgy of mathematical merry-making. Spandrell looked exultantly at his guest. His own doubts had vanished. How could one fail to believe in something which was there, which manifestly existed? The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions. Majesty alternating with a joke, for example, in the first movement of the B flat major quartet.

Comedy suddenly hinting at prodigious and tragic solemnities in the scherzo of the C sharp minor quartet. Those incredible Diabelli variations, for example.