Early Twentieth-century Paris Research Articles

Chagall’s Green and Yellow Jews: Painting Race in Russia and Post-Dreyfus France

In early twentieth century Paris, the Russian Jewish artist Marc Chagall began a series painting Eastern European Jews in hues of green, yellow, and red. The paintings were based upon Chagall’s childhood memories, as well as his personal encounters with Jews in the shtetl. They were also portraits of a universal social type. I argue that Chagall’s experiences as a Jew in both France and Russia influenced this series. He repeatedly depicted archetypes of the Jew such as Rabbis and klezmers. Yet he visibly altered these archetypes via non-naturalist hues of green, yellow, and red. This play on skin color served to both signify and destabilize perceptions of racial differences that underscored French and Russian society at the time. These perceptions included a range of Jewish phenotypes, and, particularly in France, took their most extreme form in the dichotomy between blackness and whiteness. Chagall’s multicolored images of Jews illuminate the roles of both the individual and the collective imagination in shaping these perceptions of race. As such, these paintings offer a compelling view of racial identity as existing somewhere between the psychic and the social. That is, they reveal racial identities as phantasms—illusions that, despite their immaterial nature, are linked to the social sphere. In emphasizing this phantasmatic aspect of race, they offered a form of political resistance to the racial politics that, coursing through post-Dreyfus France and Russia, would have widespread and devastating consequences on Jews and other dispersed populations throughout Europe in the decades to come. In more general terms, this analysis of Chagall’s paintings of Jews demonstrates the power of art and visual culture as a means of both producing and reconfiguring notions of identity within political and social spheres.

‘I have only One Country, it is the World’: Madame Cama, Anticolonialism, and Indian-Russian Revolutionary Networks in Paris, 1907–17

Abstract In September 1912, the Russian author Maxim Gorky wrote to the Paris-based Indian revolutionary Madame Cama and asked her to write an article on Indian women and their role in the Indian freedom struggle. Their correspondence highlights several issues: Cama’s central role among Indian and anticolonial nationalists from across the world in early twentieth-century Paris; the inspiration from the 1905 Russian Revolution and alliances between exiled Indian and Russian revolutionaries; the role of women in revolutionary movements. Focusing on Indian-Russian networks in early twentieth century Paris, this article examines Cama’s thoughts on feminism and socialism, and the inspiration from Russian revolutionaries in Cama’s anticolonial activities.

Hot stuff. Anatomy of the sex market at the dawn of the twentieth century

Abstract Drawing on a rich legal dossier on a violation of obscenity laws (the Trafford affair), this article studies the formation of a sex market in early twentieth-century Paris. Books and erotic photographs, contraceptives, sex toys and remedies for increasing sexual potency: the diversity of these products relating to sexual practices is clearly revealed by the case. The dossier demonstrates how this commercial enterprise drew on the benefits of industrialization, mass media and globalization for building its client-base and developing a transnational dimension. It also allows us to understand the strategies deployed to keep the sale of these objects clandestine, in a context where they were increasingly overseen by the authorities, revealing innovative forms of commercial exchange, based on an epistolary transvestism.

The Market as “Artist”: The French Origins of the Obsession with Provenance in Historical African Art

ABSTRACTProvenance has become crucially important in the Western market for historical African sculpture, and as a consequence individual African artists have been erased in favor of an emphasis on the dealer's or collector's discriminating “eye.” This article proposes an explanation for why this erasure has occurred by looking at the development of the market for historical African art in early twentieth century Paris. Though commonly portrayed as an invention of artists of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, the aesthetic category of “primitive art” was in fact just as much a creation of the newly emergent commercial structure that ensured the livelihood of those artists: the dealers, critics, curators and collectors who created an “art world” independent of the old state-sponsored academic framework. This article analyzes the influential role this distinctive market formation has played in shaping Western perceptions of historical African sculpture by investigating the interwoven careers of four key figures: the collector André Level, the curator Henri Clouzot, and the dealers Paul Guillaume and Charles Ratton.

Between Instinct and Intelligence: Harnessing Police Dog Agency in Early Twentieth-Century Paris

AbstractThis article analyzes the introduction of police dogs in early twentieth-century Paris, which formed part of the transnational extension of police powers and their specialization. Within a context of widespread fears of crime and new and contested understandings of animal psychology, police officers, journalists, and canophiles promoted the dogs as inexpensive yet effective agents who could help the police contain the threat posed by criminals. This article responds to a growing number of studies on nonhuman agency by examining how humans in a particular place and time conceptualized and harnessed animal abilities. I argue that while nonhuman agency is an illuminating and important analytical tool, there is a danger that it might become monolithic and static. With these concerns in mind, I show how examining historical actors' conceptualizations of animal abilities takes us closer to the historical stakes and complexities of mobilizing purposeful and capable animals, and provides a better understanding of the constraints within which animals act. Attitudes toward police dogs were entwined with broader discussions of human and animal intelligence. Concerns that dogs' abilities and intelligence were contingent and potentially reversible qualities resembled contemporary biomedical fears that base instincts, desires, and impulses could overwhelm human intelligence and morality, resulting in individual and collective degeneration. To many, it seemed that police dogs' intelligence had not tamed their aggressive instincts, and these worries partly explain the demise of the first wave of police dogs in Paris after World War I.

Gay Paree: the origins of lesbian and gay commercial culture in the French Third Republic

AbstractThis article examines the emergence of commercial establishments catering primarily if not exclusively to lesbians and/or gay men in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Paris. Lesbian restaurants came first, developing as an offshoot of a highly evolved prostitutional subculture in Montmartre. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the neighborhood boasted gay as well as lesbian bars, and there was considerable contact and crossover between the two queer clienteles. Montmartre’s bars have left traces in police archives, journalism, literature, and the visual arts, making it possible to map and describe them. I also use fiscal and judicial archives for the first time to paint a fuller picture of these businesses, and I follow the owners through vital, notarial, and criminal records, tracing a group portrait of these pioneering lesbian and gay entrepreneurs. While their contribution has been unrecognized, their businesses, no less than the better-known bohemian cabarets and giant dance halls, helped transform Montmartre into Gay Paree, the capital of delinquent pleasure.RésuméCet article décrit l’émergence d’établissements commerciaux destinés surtout sinon exclusivement aux homosexuel(le)s à Paris à la fin du XIXe et au début du XXe siècle. Des restaurants lesbiens paraissent d’abord, liés à l’importante sous-culture de la prostitution à Montmartre. Des bars masculins s’y ajoutent dès la première décennie du XXe siècle alors qu’il y a beaucoup de contacts et de croisements entre les deux clientèles lesbienne et gaie. Les bars de Montmartre laissent des traces dans les archives de la police, le journalisme, la littérature et les arts visuels, nous permettant de les localiser et de les décrire. Je consulte aussi les archives fiscales et judiciaires pour la première fois pour fournir des précisions sur ces commerces, et je retrace les propriétaires dans les registres d’état civil, les archives des notaires et les archives criminelles afin de dresser un portrait de ces entrepreneurs originaux. Même si leur contribution n’a pas été reconnue jusqu’ici, leurs bars interlopes ont contribué, au même titre que les cabarets artistiques et les grandes salles de spectacle, à la création du Montmartre du plaisir et du crime.

The Migrating Look: Visual Economies of Queer Desire inThe Book of Salt

Monique Truong’s 2003 The Book of Salt crosses the lives of three queer migrants to early twentieth-century Paris: Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and their Vietnamese cook, Binh. Highlighting the role of perception in subject-formation, the novel tracks how the play between the look and the gaze registers its characters’ experiences of embodiment. Truong makes imaginative use of details from the biographical and scholarly literature on Stein and Toklas: their fondness for photographers, reporters, and admirers who treat them as celebrities; the pet names and gendered divisions of space and labor that mark their butch/femme relationship. However, the novel also features three fictional characters whose stories reframe received images of Stein and Toklas: Binh, the novel’s first-person narrator and an imaginative composite of two “Indo-Chinese” cooks that worked for them; his first lover, Jean Bleriot, a French chef whose appearance in Binh’s Vietnamese workplace prompts his desire and eventual expulsion; and Binh’s lover in Paris, Marcus Lattimore, a mixed-race iridologist who passes as white at Stein’s and Toklas’s salon and who initiates an affair with Binh to gain information about the writer (Toklas 186). Recontextualizing Stein’s salon from within Binh’s backstory, the novel engages “the dominant culture” to “expose and critique” its conventions from the perspective of subjects “whose experience of identity is fractured and split” by colonial rule (Munoz 31). The result is a narrative fragmented by Binh’s “queer hybridity”—a space “of productivity where identity’s fragmentary nature is accepted and negotiated” (Munoz 77–79). Displaying deep knowledge of the material and psychical consequences of French colonial rule in Vietnam and framing its narrative by imagining that a brief affair with Ho Chi Minh convinced Binh to stay in Paris, The Book of Salt enacts what David Eng calls a “historical catachresis” that “shifts our attention from the problem of the real” lives of historical personages (that is, from the question of whether Ho Chi Minh or any of Stein’s and Toklas’s cooks slept with men) “to the politics of our lack of

Debussy's Cakewalk. Race, Modernism and Music in Early Twentieth-Century Paris

Between November, 1902 and January, 1903, Paris experienced its first tastes of the danced cakewalk through the performances of two American touring ensembles: “Les Elks” and their troupe of black and white dancers appeared in the revue Les joyeux nègres at the Nouveau Cirque, while the “Florida Creole Girls”—seven African-American women—performed the cakewalk at the Casino de Paris. Within a matter of weeks the dance became the latest sensation of the capital, as reported in Paris qui chante of January, 1903, although not without serious dissension. It was upon this field of social and cultural contestation that Debussy entered into the world of syncopated Americanism with Golliwogg’s Cake-Walk from the Children’s Corner (1908). This was followed by The Little Nigar (1909), the theme of which he reused in Le boîte à joujoux (1913); Minstrels from the first book of Préludes (1910), which more subtly draws upon cakewalk rhythms; and “General Lavine”-Eccentric from the second book (1910-1913), for which he uses the tempo designation “Dans le style et le mouvement d’un cake-walk.” While the literature about Debussy and fin-de-siècle music does reference this music and his indebtedness to the cakewalk and ragtime, it has largely failed to position him within the prevailing discourse surrounding the dance, which includes the film Le cake-walk infernal by Georges Méliès (1903). This paper proposes to explore the four aforementioned works by Debussy from the perspective of the contemporary debate over the cakewalk in French culture and society. Rather than attributing to the composer a particular subject position regarding blacks and their culture through his appropriation of the cakewalk, we will explore what it meant for Debussy to align himself with those elements of Parisian society that embraced the dance form and its music. However, as we shall see in the case of Debussy and his Parisian milieu, the modernist adoption of the cakewalk was fraught with problematic constructions of race, which cannot be ignored.

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde and Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde and Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters

How to Be a French Jew: Ottoman Immigrant Authors in Early Twentieth-Century Paris

This article challenges the assumption that participants in the Judeo-French literary renaissance of the 1930s were exclusively French-born Ashkenazi Jews by focusing on the contributions of new Sephardic immigrants from the Ottoman Empire. Although many immigrants were intent on assimilating into French society, authors such as Abraham Navon and Joseph Benrubi used their literature to encourage the community to find ways to negotiate between ancestral tradition and the new host culture. Close readings of Navon’s and Benrubi’s work reveal a hybrid French–Sephardic identity formed by juxtaposing Judeo-Spanish language and ritual with French secular life. By following these literary models, new immigrants could integrate into French society without denying their heritage.

Cross-undressing in Colette: Performance, gender and music-hall labour practice

Colette’s 1913 memoir, L’Envers du music-hall, documents the behind-the-scenes lives of music-hall performers, contrasting their staged glamour to their private indigence. Generally read as an admiring but uncomplaining depiction of performers’ heroism in early twentieth-century Paris, the text – I argue – deploys mute practices of spectation that ultimately indict the stage’s exploitive labour practice. Such tensions culminate in a rehearsal scene in which an actress, stripping down after long hours of effort, no longer resembles the royal mistress she portrays. Comparing her instead to a young, revolutionary drummer-boy, the text positions her to step offstage, sound the call to revolt, and summon her fellow performers to strike. In ironising the topos of the stripper disrobing for the pleasure of the male gaze, such cross-undressing joins other textual strategies in ‘laying bare’ the polemical energy straining this ‘uncomplaining’ memoir.

Paris portraits: artists, friends, and lovers

The art of portraiture reached a pinnacle of expressive achievement in early twentieth-century Paris. Liberated by the advent of photography, artists were able to reimagine the nature of human portrayal, producing kinds of portraits - Fauve, Cubist, Dada, Surrealist, and Expressionist - unlike any seen before.This remarkable book focuses on a rich variety of these portraits, presenting paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by such artists as Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Duchamp, Brancusi, Lipchitz, Gris, Rivera, Modigliani, Dubuffet, Laurencin, and Soutine. A major essay explores the fascinating network of personal and aesthetic relationships that existed at the time, as artists depicted themselves and their friends, collectors, critics, spouses, and romantic partners.

The ballets of Maurice Ravel: creation and interpretation

Maurice Ravel, as composer and scenario writer, collaborated with some of the greatest ballet directors, choreographers, designers and dancers of his time, including Diaghilev, Ida Rubinstein, Benois and Nijinsky. In this book, the first study dedicated to Ravel’s ballets, Deborah Mawer explores these relationships and argues that ballet music should not be regarded in isolation from its associated arts. Indeed, Ravel’s views on ballet and other stage works privilege a synthesized aesthetic. The first chapter establishes a historical and critical context for Ravel’s scores, engaging en route with multimedia theory. Six main ballets from Daphnis et Chloe through to Bolero are considered holistically alongside themes such as childhood fantasy, waltzing and neoclassicism. Each work is examined in terms of its evolution, premiere, critical reception and reinterpretation through to the present; new findings result from primary-source research, undertaken especially in Paris. The final chapter discusses the reasons for Ravel’s collaborations and the strengths and weaknesses of his interpersonal relations. Mawer emphasizes the importance of the performative dimension in realizing Ravel’s achievement, and proposes that the composer’s large-scale oeuvre can, in a sense, be viewed as a balletic undertaking. In so doing, this book adds significantly to current research interest in artistic production and interplay in early twentieth-century Paris.

Variations on the Dance of the Seven Veils

Early twentieth-century Paris saw an embarrassment of half-naked women dancing with seven veils and papier-mâché heads: ‘Salomania’ had gripped the capital. By 1913 Salome was a regular feature on music hall show-bills, besides the balletic and operatic stage. This study focuses on three variations on Salome's notorious Dance of the Seven Veils, performed by Loie Fuller (1907), Ida Rubinstein (1909) and Maud Allan (from 1906) on music by Florent Schmitt, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov and Richard Strauss respectively. Such an investigation provides a peculiar line through the cultural and aesthetic determinants of early twentieth-century theatrical dance. In this context music takes on new narrative significance, offering ways of configuring the Dance above and beyond its mere visual surface.

FAUVISM AND CULTURAL NATIONALISM

This essay argues that early twentieth-century Paris, as the most artistically avant-garde metropolitan centre of its time, enabled a group of artists and writers from British colonies to define their own national identity. Their nationalism was not primarily political but cultural. The Scottish Colourist J. D. Fergusson, the Canadian life-writer and painter Emily Carr and the Australian artist Margaret Preston all encountered in Paris the work of the Fauvists, and through it they came to recognize the stylistic particularity of the indigenous art of their own homelands. Through the agency of the Fauvist inflection of Post-Impressionism, they were enabled to perceive the 'native', Celtic, indigenous Canadian or Aboriginal, as a powerful aesthetic, rather than as a primitive and outmoded convention. A specific focus for artistic iconoclasm, and the breaking down of the traditional genre boundaries of academicians, was the influential philosophy of Henri Bergson. To investigate his ideas in relation to the arts, John Middleton Murry created the influential journal Rhythm , with Fergusson as its art editor and, soon after it began, with Katherine Mansfield as assistant editor and contributor. Though the magazine had no explicit political affiliations, its stance was implicitly anticolonial; its watchword was taken from the Irish cultural nationalist J. M. Synge: 'Before art can be human it must learn to be brutal.' It looked for contributors, both artists and writers, who eschewed realism in favour of a pared-down aesthetic that could stimulate an intuitive response in the perceiver. Its impact was felt in New Zealand, Australia and Canada; what Carr wrote after her training in Paris expresses the paradox of discovering the local through the international: 'I was glad I had been to France. More than ever I was convinced that the old way of seeing was inadequate.'

Pulp surrealism: insolent popular culture in early twentieth-century Paris

In addition to its more well known literary and artistic origins, the French surrealist movement drew inspiration from currents of psychological anxiety and rebellion running through a shadowy side of mass culture, specifically in fantastic popular fiction and sensationalistic journalism. The provocative nature of this insolent mass culture resonated with the intellectual and political preoccupations of the surrealists, as Robin Walz demonstrates in this fascinating study. Pulp Surrealism weaves an interpretative history of the intersection between mass print culture and surrealism, re-evaluating both our understanding of mass culture in early twentieth-century Paris and the revolutionary aims of the surrealist movement. Pulp Surrealism presents four case studies, each exploring the out-of the-way and impertinent elements which inspired the surrealists. Walz discusses Louis Aragon's Le paysan de Paris, one of the great surrealist novels of Paris. He goes on to consider the popular series of Fantomes crime novels; the Parisan press coverage of the arrest, trial, and execution of mass-murderer Landru; and the surrealist inquiry 'Is Suicide a Solution?' , which Walz juxtaposes with reprints of actual suicide faits divers (sensationalist newspaper blurbs). Although surrealist interest in sensationalist popular culture eventually waned, this exploration of mass print culture as one of the cultural milieux from which surrealism emerged ultimately calls into question assumptions about the avant-garde origins of modernism itself.

Andrew Thomson. Vincent d'Indy and His World. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1996. xv, 220 pp. ISBN 0-19-816220-0 (hardcover)

Andrew Thomson. Vincent d'Indy and His World. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1996. xv, 220 pp. ISBN 0-19-816220-0 (hardcover). Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Volume 20, numéro 2, 2000, p. 1-155) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Aspects of early twentieth century Paris through Australian eyes

(1995). Aspects of early twentieth century Paris through Australian eyes. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 19, No. 44, pp. 13-21.

Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute

First published in 1959, Surrealism remains the most readable introduction to the French surrealist poets Apollinaire, Breton, Aragon, Eluard, and Reverdy. Providing a much-needed overview of the movement, Balakian places the surrealists in the context of early twentieth-century Paris and describes their reactions to symbolist poetry, World War I, and developments in science and industry, psychology, philosophy, and painting. Her coherent history of the movement is enhanced by her firsthand knowledge of the intellectual climate in which some of these poets worked and her interviews with Reverdy and Breton. In a new introduction, Balakian discusses the influence of surrealism on contemporary poetry. This volume includes photographs of the poets and reproductions of paintings by Ernst, Dali, Tanguy, and others.