The aristocratic avant-garde: Le Comte Étienne de Beaumont and “Les Soirées de Paris”

Abstract

Aristocratic patronage of the historical avant-garde remains a relatively understudied phenomenon, if only because the aristocracy seemed the avant-garde’s natural enemy and what the avant-garde sought to supplant. This article examines the 1924 “Les Soirees de Paris,” a five-week-long series of commissioned ballets, plays, and performances financed by Le Comte Etienne de Beaumont. Paying close attention to the social divide in Tzara’s Mouchoir de Nuages, this article seeks to show the fraught relationship between the aristocracy and the Parisian avant-garde. Beaumont’s intervention into the Parisian cultural field was an attempt to derail the growing influence of the market but also had a more positive motivation in attempting to showcase the “best” of “new” French art. If Beaumont was bitingly satirized in Raymond Radiguet’s Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel, this “last Maecenas of the arts” was a more complex figure who deserves closer examination for the role that he played in bringing together a series of artists—Cocteau, Picasso, Satie, and Tzara—in a lavishly produced series of original works.