The Spirit of Montmartre: cabarets, humor, and the avant-garde, 1875-1905

Abstract

With the Chat Noir cabaret (1881-1897) and the Quat' z 'Arts cabaret (1893-1910) as its main focus and concentrating on individuals who participated in the group activities of the Hydropathes (1878-1881) and the Incoherents (1882- 1896), this collection of five essays documents and explores the development of the Montmartre cabaret from 1875 to 1905. Montmartre is revealed as the primary promoter, catalyst, and, often, site for the collaboration of artists, writers, composers, and performers in the production of illustrated journals, books, dramatic pieces, music, puppet shows, and the protocinema invention of shadow theatre. The contributors reveal the essence of Montmartre's artistic, intellectual environment and analyze its inextricable relations with an important, multidisciplinary body of avant-garde, fin-de-siecle art, literature, and music. Although this activity forms an essential part of the cultural context surrounding the more historically comprehensible masterpieces of writers such as Stephane Mallarme, Emile Zola, and J. K. Huysmans, and of composers such as Claude Debussy and Erik Satie, and of artworks made in the traditional media of painting and sculpture by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, it has been overshadowed by the mass of critical attention given to these other figures and movements. These essays highlight the basic aspects of this avant-garde activity: its reliance on humor a la Rabelais, its antiserious approach to art, its use of nontraditional media, and its often ephemeral, multidisciplinary, and conceptual nature - characteristics that mark 20th-century art such as that of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, and performance art. It is the story of one of the earliest, authentically original avant-garde group phenomenons.