YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS PELICAN HISTORY OF ART ART IN FRANCE 1900-1940 CHRISTOPHER GREEN YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS PELICAN HISTORY OF ARE FOUNDING EDITOR: NIKOLAUS PEVSNER CHRISTOPHER GREEN ART IN FRANCE 1900-1940 Christopher Green Art in France igoo-ig^o Yale University Pxess New Haven and^onaïto To the research students who have worked with me at the Courtauld Institute Copyright © 2000 Chrisopher Green All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (Beyond that permitted by Sections 107 and 108 fo the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviews for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Ehrhardt by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound by CS Graphics, Singapore Designed by Beatrix McIntyre Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Green, Christopher, 1943 June 11 Art in France: 1900-1940 / Christopher Green. p. cm. - (Yale University Press Pelican history of art) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-08401-3 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Art, French. 2. Art, Modern - 20th century - France. I. Title. II. Series. N6848.G73 2000 7O9/-44/O9O4i - dc2i 99-089522 Title page illustration: Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910. Oil on canvas, 204 x 298 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller Contents Acknowledgements viii Preface ix PART ONE: ART MADE HISTORY Introduction t i. Monuments to the Third Republic: The Great Exhibitions of 1900, 1923 and 1937 Before and After 1900 4 Before and After 1925 5 Before and After 1937 8 Art in France, 1900-40: French and Transatlantic Perspectives 12 2. Modern Movements in France, 1900—40 Making Fauvism 15 Making Cubism 19 Making Dada 26 Making Surrealism 28 Modern Movements and ‘Abstract Art’, 1912-40 32 Avant-gardes, Dominant Values and Histories 34 PART two: lives in art Introduction 39 3. Framing Lives Democracy, Diversity and Direction: Officials and Institutions 39 Different Artists, Different Markets 43 Fixing and Unfixing Categories: Painters, Sculptors and Others 47 Poets and Professionals: Writing on Art 50 Winning for Modernism: The Dealers and Collectors 53 4. Celebrated Lives The Conditions of Success 60 Crossing Boundaries: Foreign Artists in France, 1900-40 61 Crossing Boundaries: Women Artists in France, 1900-40 65 Being a Modern Master: Matisse and Picasso, Brancusi, Mondrian, Giacometti and Others 68 Being Marcel Duchamp: A Singular Double Life 77 PART three: making art Introduction 82 5. Representing Nature; Seeing Art Expression and Decoration: From ‘Art Nouveau’ Bing to Matisse 82 Likeness and Deformation, Analysis and Synthesis: From Matisse into Cubism 91 ‘Pure Painting’ and the Table au-objet: Cubists, Orphists and Matisse as Cubist 99 The Idea in the Work: Kupka and Mondrian 104 Art and ‘Evolution’ no VI · CONTENTS 6. The Languages and Objects of Art Metamorphosis and the Semiotics of Cubism 112 Metaphor and Metamorphosis: Surrealists and Cubists 115 Allegory and Myth: From De Chirico to Guernica 126 Words and Things: From Duchamp’s Large Glass to the ‘Surrealist Object’ 128 Art and ‘Revolution’ 138 PART four: representing modernity Introduction 141 7. The Experience of Modernity and the ‘New Spirit’ Representing Modern Ideas: Abstraction, Science and Bergsonism 141 Representing Modern Experience: Photography and Painting, Futurists and Simultanists 147 Representing War and Peace: Léger and the Purist ‘New Spirit’, 1913-28 152 The Palais de la Découverte: Representing Science and Technology at the Exhibition of 1937 158 8. Modern Spaces; Modern Objects; Modern People Domestic Modernity: From the Maison Cubiste to the Pavilion de 1’Esprit Nouveau; from Collage to Léger’s Manufactured Objects 161 Modernity and Gender: Working Women and Independent Women; Wives and Mothers 165 Representing Modern Society: Class, Political Engagement and the ‘Realism’ Debate in the 1930s; Worlds of Work and Leisure 173 PART five: history, tradition and the french nation Introduction 185 9. Modernism and the Re-invention of Tradition, igoo-18 ‘One must become classical again by way of nature’: From Denis and Maillol to Matisse 187 The Challenge of Tradition: The Presence of the Past in the Work of the Cubists and of Derain, 1907-14 196 Being Modern and Traditional in Wartime, 1914-18 201 10. From Peace to Crisis: Traditions in Conflict, 1918-40 France, Foreigners and ‘the Art of the Occident’ 206 The Unity in Diversity of France: The ‘Call to Order’ in Paris and the Regions, 1918-30 209 ‘Greater France’ at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition; Matisse and Orientalism 217 The Cult of the Past, the ‘Ecole Française’ and the ‘Métèques’: Humanism and Xenophobia, 1924-40 222 From Modern Master to Refugee: Chagall, 1938-41 230 PART six: resisting modernity; resisting civilisation Introduction 233 ii. Primitivising the Modern, 1 goo-18 The ‘Naïve’, the ‘Sincere’ and the ‘Savage’ : From Rousseau in the ‘Cage des Fauves’ to the Demoiselles d’Avignon 235 Being ‘Primitive’ in Early Twentieth-Century Paris: Henri Rousseau, ‘le Douanier’; Constantin Brancusi, ‘This Peasant from the Danube’ 244 Against Modernity, Against Logic: ‘Primitive Mentality’ and Bergsonian Intuition 251 CONTENTS · VII i2. Counter-Cultural Art, igi8~40 Change and Contradiction; The Provocations of Brancusi, Duchamp and Picabia 254 Releasing Images: Surrealist Strategies of Liberation 260 The World as Myth: Psychoanalysis and Other Surrealist Preoccupations 270 De-civilising Culture: From Magic to Bassesse 278 The Visual Art of Opposition: Picasso and Guernica, Surrealism and Politics, Collage and War 285 Notes 291 Select Bibliography 306 Index 312 Photographic Acknowledgements 322 Acknowledgements Art in France, igoo-iQ4O has a personal history for me Sanda Miller, Jennifer Mundy, Gavin Parkinson, Alexandra which goes back three decades and more to my earliest Parigoris, Cathy Putz, Penelope Rook, Julian Stallabrass, engagement with French art in the twentieth century. Michael Stone-Richards, John Welchman, Sarah Wilson Across those decades I have accumulated more debts than and Jonathan Wood. The book is dedicated to the students can possibly be recalled here; but my gratitude to all who who have worked with me: not only those I have named, but have helped me over many years remains warm and undi­ those others, working on art outside France, who have minished. The book itself was drafted in the twelve months helped me keep alert to new possibilities. between October 1997 and September 1998. I could not Three of those named above were also among the friends have written it without that period of concentrated looking, and colleagues who helped me manage the passage from reading, thinking and writing. My first and most fundamen­ draft to final text by reading the book in its early drafts. A tal debt is to the Leverhulme Trust, which made this possi­ writer’s hope is that their text will be so absorbing that, for ble with the award of a Senior Research Fellowship. anyone reading it, time will simply disappear. This is, of Confidence, bordering on foolhardiness, is needed to set course, an illusion: the hours and days given by those who out on a project like this. I am not self-sufficient enough to read my drafts were, I know well enough, very real; and I have that kind of confidence without the backing of others know too the pressures that can make freeing even the who I respect. The unstinting support and warm encour­ briefest periods so difficult. Mark Antliff and Patricia agement I have had from Dawn Ades, Eric Fernie, John Leighten read drafts of the later parts of the book, and made Golding, John Milner and Michael Podro has been essential. key suggestions, which have led to changes of considerable So too has been that of many colleagues in the Courtauld importance; Sanda Miller read the earlier parts in a very raw Institute, those who teach with me in the ‘Modern Section’ state, and, as only a friend could, rammed home the impor­ most consistently of all. At certain points in the develop­ tance of accessible prose; Fay Brauer and John Milner read ment and writing of the book, crucial contributions have the book in its entirety and gave me the sharpest point-by- been made by my friends Christian Derouet, Hélène point critiques which were of enormous value; my colleagues Lassalle and Alan G.Wilkinson. I especially want to record at the Courtauld, Margaret Garlake and Sarah Wilson, also here my gratitude for Hélène Lassalle’s speedy response to read the book in its entirety, and both, from their very differ­ my request to help find a photographer to record a mural in ent perspectives, made me aware of gaps to be filled, errors the Sorbonne. The photographer she found, Jacques to be avoided and, judgements in need of reconsideration. Faujour, deserves my special thanks too for the dispatch and Yale University Press has provided the guidance, tactful quality of his work in difficult circumstances. Another editing and unruffled professionalism which is now so much friend who supplied a much-needed photograph, and to what I expect from them that I am in danger of taking it for whom I am extremely grateful, was Liliane Caffin Madaule. granted. It was John Nicoll who suggested that I write the I do not believe that lone scholarship, the usual research book for the Pelican series, when I first brought him the idea mode in the Humanities, can produce a book of this kind. of a book on art in France between 1900 and 1940. The Certainly, I could not have written many sections, or devel­ knowledge that he was behind the project throughout was oped key arguments, without my own research as a ‘lone immensely important to me. Sally Salvesen, the editor of the scholar’, but, besides my enormous debt to the many others Pelican series, has kept an expert eye on the project from its who have produced significant research in the field, I owe early synoptic stages to the end; her confidence in it has also a major debt to the students who have worked with me. kept me going. Sally Nicholls has collected together the Where I have drawn directly from their work, I have made photographs for the book and cleared the reproduction specific acknowledgements in the body of the book to those rights with great patience and resourcefulness. And Beatrix students as well as to other specialists, but here I would like McIntyre has edited the text and designed the book with to underline my debt to the research students of the judicious skill, retaining her humour and good nature Courtauld Institute by naming names. All of the following throughout, whatever the pressures. have been my teachers in the field: Fiona Bradley, Fay Over many years, Charlotte, Abigail and Toby have made Brauer, Sophie Bowness, David Cottington, Penelope even the most challenging things (this book included) seem Curtis, Simon Dell, Patrick Elliott, John Finlay, Matthew possible. Theirs has been the biggest contribution of all. I Gale, Romy Golan, Memory Holloway, Valerie Holman, sometimes wonder how they have had the forbearance, quite William Jeffett, Julia Kelly, Elizabeth Legge, David Lomas, apart from the generosity of spirit, to give me so much.