FABULOUS TIMES, PLACES AND PEOPLE

PARIS IN THE 20s and 30s: Background, People, Places, Personalities, Pleasure, Style, Fashion, Arts, Poetry, Music and Adventure.

 

LES ANNEES FOLLES

BACKGROUND

Photo: Josephine Baker.

The First World War devastated many of the assumptions of the nineteenth century. Many in Europe had thought technology would lead to an ever more stable and prosperous mankind. The Great War showed it could kill and maim millions. The art and music of that period must be seen in the context of this radical shift in perspective. Things weren't just going to get better and better, old assumptions were turned over and hey... if the world's in a mess - maybe you should just say to hell with it, and have a big party. During the first quarter of the 20th century Paris became the magnet for a growing international colony of young artists, poets and musicians. The American poet Ezra Pound described it as the centre of the world, and the place for those who had "cast off the sanctified stupidities and timidities" and were looking for radical new directions.

Photo: The lady pays the bill: illustration by Lorenzi in Fantasio, 15th Jan 1923

By the time of the First World War Montparnasse, which had taken over from Montmartre as the centre for artists' studios, cafés and bars, was the meeting place for a wide cross-section of new thinkers and experimenters. There was a huge exchange of ideas between these artists, composers, poets and writers, who met and discussed their work in the many cafés and nightclubs for which Montparnasse had became famous. At the same time various artistic movements and influences came and went, overlapping and cross-fertilising along the way. The most significant of the movements these young artists came to absorb was Cubism. Developed in Paris by the artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Cubism and its legacy changed the face of the arts forever. Representing its subjects in terms of geometrical figures - cones, cubes and spheres - with sober colouring, and in such a way that every aspect of the object could be seen, it also later incorporated collage techniques and stencilling using brighter colours. Cubism's influence steadily infiltrated the worlds of poetry, music and film for many years. Concurrent with Cubism, and pre-figuring many of the radical movements of these years, came the influence of Italian Futurism, expounded by the eccentric Filippo Marinetti. The first exhibition of Futurist works in Paris took place in 1912 and heralded a violent departure from traditional artistic values, glorifying the beauty and sleekness of the machine. Not only were the techniques of artistic representation changing, but the actual objects described were being revolutionised too. Cubism having more or less run its course, by 1918 the post-Cubist movement Purism had produced its manifesto, Aprés Cubisme, calling for clear and simple forms and strong basic shapes. The following year Dada took Paris by storm claiming new subjects to be described by the arts: "machinery, massacre, sky-scrapers, urinals, sexual orgies, revolution …" and through its more political stance ridiculed important governmental figures and institutions as a reaction to the meaningless horror of war. By 1924, with the publication of the Manifeste du Surréalisme Dada in turn was giving way to the Surrealist movement - "Its tyranny had made it intolerable". The writer André Breton, one of Surrealism's leading figures, described it as "pure psychic automatism" producing art works that were a true expression of the subconscious mind. All the arts felt its influence in some way. Not everybody chose to tread these new experimental paths though. In Montparnasse the École de Paris while adopting some modernist tendencies kept to more traditional forms and subjects, including the portraits, nudes and still-lives which Dada and "machine-art" had turned its back on. The artists Amadeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall and Constantin Brancusi were its chief exponents.

 

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