The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  The Armory Show was, as Mabel Dodge had told Gertrude Stein, the brainchild of Arthur Davies, a rather tame painter who specialised in ‘unicorns and medieval maidens.’ Davies had hijacked an idea by four artists of the Pastellists Society, who had begun informal discussions about an exhibition, to be held at the Armory, showing the latest developments in American art. Davies was well acquainted with three wealthy New York wives – Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mrs Cornelius J. Sullivan. These women agreed to finance the show, and Davies, together with the artist Walt Kuhn and Walter Pach, an American painter and critic living in Paris, set off for Europe to find the most radical pictures the Continent had to offer.

  The Armory Show was in fact the third great exhibition of the prewar years to introduce the revolutionary painting being produced in Paris to other countries. The first had taken place in London in 1910 at the Grafton Galleries. Manet and the Post-Impressionists was put together by the critic Roger Fry, assisted by the artist Clive Bell. Fry’s show began with Edouard Manet (the last ‘old masterly’ painter, yet the first of the moderns), then leapt to Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin without, as the critic John Rewald has said, ‘wasting time’ on the other impressionists. In Fry’s eyes, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, at that point virtually unknown in Britain, were the immediate precursors of modern art. Fry was determined to show the differences between the impressionists and the Post-impressionists, who for him were the greater artists. He felt that the aim of the Post-impressionists was to capture ‘the emotional significance of the world that the Impressionists merely recorded.’5 Cézanne was the pivotal figure: the way he broke down his still lifes and landscapes into a patchwork of coloured lozenges, as if they were the building blocks of reality, was for Fry a precursor of cubism and abstraction. Several Parisian dealers lent to the London show, as did Paul Cassirer of Berlin. The exhibition received its share of criticism, but Fry felt encouraged enough to hold a second show two years later.

  This second effort was overshadowed by the German Sonderbund, which opened on 25 May 1912, in Cologne. This was another volcano – in John Rewald’s words, a ‘truly staggering exhibition.’ Unlike the London shows, it took for granted that people were already familiar with nineteenth-century painting and hence felt free to concentrate on the most recent movements in modern art. The Sonderbund was deliberately arranged to provoke: the rooms devoted to Cézanne were next to those displaying Van Gogh, Picasso was next to Gauguin. The exhibition also featured Pierre Bonnard, André Derain, Erich Heckel, Aleksey von Jawlensky, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Egon Schiele, Paul Signac, Maurice de Vlaminck and Edouard Vuillard. Of the 108 paintings in the show, a third had German owners; of the twenty-eight Cézannes, seventeen belonged to Germans. They were clearly more at home with the new painting than either the British or the Americans.6 When Arthur Davies received the catalogue for the Sonderbund, he was so startled that he urged Walt Kuhn to go to Cologne immediately. Kuhn’s trip brought him into contact with much more than the Sonderbund. He met Munch and persuaded him to participate in the Armory; he went to Holland in pursuit of Van Goghs; in Paris all the talk was of cubism at the Salon d’Automne and of the futurist exhibition held that year at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery. Kuhn ended his trip in London, where he was able to raid Fry’s second exhibition, which was still on.7

  The morning after Quinn’s opening speech, the attack from the press began – and didn’t let up for weeks. The cubist room attracted most laughs, and was soon rechristened the Chamber of Horrors. One painting in particular was singled out for ridicule: Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Duchamp was already in the news for ‘creating’ that year the first ‘readymade,’ a work called simply Bicycle Wheel. Duchamp’s Nude was described as ‘a lot of disused golf clubs and bags,’ ‘an orderly heap of broken violins,’ and ‘an explosion in a shingle factory.’ Parodies proliferated: for example, Food Descending a Staircase,8

  But the show also received serious critical attention. Among the New York newspapers, the Tribune, the Mail, the World, and the Times disliked the show. They all applauded the aim of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors to present new art but found the actual pictures and sculptures difficult. Only the Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Tribune liked what they saw. With critical reception weighted roughly five to two against it, and popular hilarity on a scale rarely seen, the show might have been a commercial disaster, but it was nothing of the kind. As many as ten thousand people a day streamed through the Armory, and despite the negative reviews, or perhaps because of them, the show was taken up by New York society and became a succès d’estime. Mrs Astor went every day after breakfast.9

  After New York the Armory Show travelled to Chicago and Boston, and in all 174 works were sold. In the wake of the show a number of new galleries opened up, mainly in New York. Despite the scandal surrounding the new modern art exhibitions, there were plenty of people who found something fresh, welcome, and even wonderful in the new images, and they began collecting.10

  Ironically, resistance to the newest art was most vicious in Paris, which at the same time prided itself on being the capital of the avant-garde. In practice, what was new one minute was accepted as the norm soon after. By 1913, impressionism – which had once been scandalous – was the new orthodoxy in painting; in music the controversy surrounding Wagner had long been forgotten, and his lush chords dominated the concert halls; and in literature the late-nineteenth-century symbolism of Stephane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue, once the enfants terribles of the Parisian cultural scene, were now approved by the arbiters of taste, people such as Anatole France.

  Cubism, however, had still not been generally accepted. Two days after the Armory Show closed in New York, Guillaume Apollinaire’s publishers announced the almost simultaneous release of his two most influential books, Les Peintres cubistes and Alcools. Apollinaire was born illegitimate in Rome in 1880 to a woman of minor Polish nobility who was seeking political refuge at the papal court. By 1913 he was already notorious: he had just been in jail, accused on no evidence whatsoever of having stolen Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from the Louvre. After the painting was found, he was released, and made the most of the scandal by producing a book that drew attention to the work of his friend, Pablo Picasso (who the police thought also had had a hand in the theft of the Mona Lisa), Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, and a new painter no one had yet heard of, Piet Mondrian. When he was working on the proofs of his book, Apollinaire introduced a famous fourfold organisation of cubism – scientific, physical, orphie, and instinctive cubism.11 This was too much for most people, and his approach never caught on. Elsewhere in the book, however, he wrote sympathetically about what the cubists were trying to achieve, which helped to get them accepted. His argument was that we should soon get bored with nature unless artists continually renewed our experience of it.12

  Brought up on the Côte d’Azur, Apollinaire appealed to Picasso and the bande à Picasso (Max Jacob, André Salmon, later Jean Cocteau) for his ‘candid, voluble, sensuous’ nature. After he moved to Paris to pursue a career as a writer, he gradually earned the tide ‘impresario of the avant-garde’ for his ability to bring together painters, musicians, and writers and to present their works in an exciting way. 1913 was a great year for him. Within a month of Les Peintres cubistes appearing, in April, Apollinaire produced a much more controversial work, Alcools (Liquors), a collection of what he called art poetry, which centred on one long piece of verse, entitled ‘Zone.’13 ‘Zone’ was in many ways the poetic equivalent of Arnold Schoenberg’s music or Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings. Everything about it was new, very little recognisable to traditionalists. Traditional typography and verse forms were bypassed. So far as punctuation was concerned, ‘The rhythm and division of the lines form a natural punctuation; no other is necessary.’14 Apollinaire’s imagery was thoroughly modern too: cityscapes, shorthand typists, aviators (Fre
nch pilots were second only to the Wright brothers in the advances being made). The poem was set in various areas around Paris and in six other cities, including Amsterdam and Prague. It contained some very weird images – at one point the bridges of Paris make bleating sounds, being ‘shepherded’ by the Eiffel Tower.15 ‘Zone’ was regarded as a literary breakthrough, and within a few short years, until Apollinaire died (in a ‘flu epidemic), he was regarded as the leader of the modernist movement in poetry. This owed as much to his fiery reputation as to his writings.16

  Cubism was the art form that most fired Apollinaire. For the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, it was fauvism. He too was a volcano. In the words of the critic Harold Schonberg, Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet produced the most famous scandale in the history of music.17 Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) premiered at the new Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May and overnight changed Paris. Paris, it should be said, was changing in other ways too. The gaslights were being replaced by electric streetlamps, the pneumatique by the telephone, and the last horse-drawn buses went out of service in 1913. For some, the change produced by Stravinsky was no less shocking than Rutherford’s atom bouncing off gold foil.18

  Born in Saint Petersburg on 17 June 1882, Stravinsky was just thirty-one in 1913. He had already been famous for three years, since the first night of his ballet Firebird, which had premiered in Paris in June 1910. Stravinsky owed a lot to his fellow Russian Serge Diaghilev, who had originally intended to become a composer himself. Discouraged by Nicolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, who told him he had no talent, Diaghilev turned instead to art publishing, organising exhibitions, and then putting on music and ballet shows in Paris. Not unlike Apollinaire, he discovered his true talent as an impresario. Diaghilev’s great passion was ballet; it enabled him to work with his three loves – music, dance and painting (for the scenery) – all at the same time.19

  Stravinsky’s father had been a singer with the Saint Petersburg opera.20 Both Russian and foreign musicians were always in and out of the Stravinsky home, and Igor was constantly exposed to music. Despite this, he went to university as a law student, and it was only when he was introduced to Rimsky-Korsakov in 1900 and taken on as his pupil after showing some of his compositions that he switched. In 1908, the year Rimsky-Korsakov died, Stravinsky composed an orchestral work that he called Fireworks. Diaghilev heard it in Saint Petersburg, and the music stuck in his mind.21 At that stage he had not formed the Ballets Russes, the company that was to make him and many others famous. However, having staged concerts and operas of Russian music in Paris, Diaghilev decided in 1909 to found a permanent company. In no time, he made the Ballets Russes a centre of the avant-garde. His composers who wrote for the Ballets Russes included Claude Debussy, Manuel de Falla, Sergei Prokofiev, and Maurice Ravel; Picasso and Leon Bakst designed the sets; and the principal dancers were Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, and Léonide Massine. Later, Diaghilev teamed up with another Russian, George Balanchine.22 Diaghilev decided that for the 1910 season in Paris he wanted a ballet on the Firebird legend, to be choreographed by the legendary Michel Fokine, the man who had done so much to modernise the Imperial Ballet. Initially, Diaghilev commissioned Anatol Liadov to write the music, but as the rehearsals approached, Liadov failed to deliver. Growing desperate, Diaghilev decided that he needed another composer, and one who could produce a score in double-quick time. He remembered Fireworks and got word to Stravinsky in Saint Petersburg. The composer immediately took the train for Paris to attend rehearsals.23

  Diaghilev was astounded at what Stravinsky produced. Fireworks had been promising, but Firebird was far more exciting, and the night before the curtain went up, Diaghilev told Stravinsky it would make him famous. He was right. The music for the ballet was strongly Russian, and recognisably by a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, but it was much more original than the impresario had expected, with a dark, almost sinister opening.24 Debussy, who was there on the opening night, picked out one of its essential qualities: ‘It is not the docile servant of the dance.’25 Petrushka came next in 1911. That too was heavily Russian, but at the same time Stravinsky was beginning to explore polytonality. At one point two unrelated harmonies, in different keys, come together to create an electrifying effect that influenced several other composers such as Paul Hindemith. Not even Diaghilev had anticipated the success that Petrushka would bring Stravinsky.

  The young composer was not the only Russian to fuel scandal at the Ballets Russes. The year before Le Sacre du printemps premiered in Paris, the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky had been the star of Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune. No less than Apollinaire, Debussy was a sybarite, a sensualist, and both his music and Nijinsky’s dancing reflected this. Technically brilliant, Nijinsky nonetheless took ninety rehearsals for the ten-minute piece he had choreographed himself. He was attempting his own Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a volcanic, iconoclastic work, to create a half-human, half-feral character, as disturbing as it was sensual. His creature, therefore, had not only the cold primitivism of Picasso’s Demoiselles but also the expressive order (and disorder) of Der Blaue Reiter. Paris was set alight all over again.

  Even though those who attended the premier of Le Sacre were used to the avant-garde and therefore were not exactly expecting a quiet night, this volcano put all others in the shade. Le Sacre is not mere folk lore: it is a powerful legend about the sacrifice of virgins in ancient Russia.26 In the main scene the Chosen Virgin must dance herself to death, propelled by a terrible but irresistible rhythm. It was this that gave the ballet a primitive, archetypal quality. Like Debussy’s Après-midi, it related back to the passions aroused by primitivism – blood history, sexuality, and the unconscious. Perhaps that ‘primitive’ quality is what the audience responded to on the opening night (the premiere was held on the anniversary of the opening of L’Après-midi, Diaghilev being very superstitious).27 The trouble in the auditorium began barely three minutes into the performance, as the bassoon ended its opening phrase.28 People hooted, whistled, and laughed. Soon the noise drowned out the music, though the conductor, Pierre Monteux, manfully kept going. The storm really broke when, in the ‘Dances des adolescents’, the young virgins appeared in braids and red dresses. The composer Camille Saint-Saëns left the theatre, but Maurice Ravel stood up and shouted ‘Genius.’ Stravinsky himself, sitting near the orchestra, also left in a rage, slamming the door behind him. He later said that he had never been so angry. He went backstage, where he found Diaghilev flicking the house lights on and off in an attempt to quell the noise. It didn’t work. Stravinsky then held on to Nijinsky’s coattails while the dancer stood on a chair in the wings shouting out the rhythm to the dancers ‘like a coxswain.’29 Men in the audience who disagreed as to the merits of the ballet challenged each other to duels.30

  ‘Exactly what I wanted,’ said Diaghilev to Stravinsky when they reached the restaurant after the performance. It was the sort of thing an impresario would say. Other people’s reactions were, however, less predictable. ‘Massacre du Printemps’ said one paper the next morning – it became a stock joke.31 For many people, The Rite of Spring was lumped in with cubist works as a form of barbarism resulting from the unwelcome presence of ‘degenerate’ foreigners in the French capital. (The cubists were known as métèques, damn foreigners, and foreign artists were often likened in cartoons and jokes to epileptics.)32 The critic for Le Figaro didn’t like the music, but he was concerned that he might be too old-fashioned and wondered whether, in years to come, the evening might turn out to have been a pivotal event.33 He was right to be concerned, for despite the first-night scandal, Le Sacre quickly caught on: companies from all over requested permission to perform the ballet, and within months composers across the Western world were imitating or echoing Stravinsky’s rhythms. For it was the rhythms of Le Sacre more than anything else that suggested such great barbarity: ‘They entered the musical subconscious of every young composer.’

  In August 1913 Albert Einstein was walking in the Swiss Alps w
ith the widowed Marie Curie, the French physicist, and her daughters. Marie was in hiding from a scandal that had blown up after the wife of Paul Langevin, another physicist and friend of Jules-Henri Poincaré, had in a fit of pique published Marie’s love letters to her husband. Einstein, then thirty-four, was a professor at the Federal Institute of Technology, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, or ETH, in Zurich and much in demand for lectures and guest appearances. That summer, however, he was grappling with a problem that had first occurred to him in 1907. At one point in their walks, he turned to Marie Curie, gripped her arm, and said, ‘You understand, what I need to know is exactly what happens to the passengers in an elevator when it falls into emptiness.’34

  Following his special theory of relativity, published in 1905, Einstein had turned his ideas, if not on their head, then on their side. As we have seen, in his special theory of relativity, Einstein had carried out a thought experiment involving a train travelling through a station. (It was called the ‘special’ theory because it related only to bodies moving in relation to one another.) In that experiment, light had been travelling in the same direction as the train. But he had suspected since 1911 that gravity attracted light.35 Now he imagined himself in an elevator falling down to earth in a vacuum and therefore accelerating, as every schoolchild knows, at 32 feet per second. However, without windows, and if the acceleration were constant, there would be no way of telling that the elevator was not stationary. Nor would the person in the elevator feel his or her own weight. This notion startled Einstein. He conceived of a thought experiment in which a beam of light struck the elevator not in the direction of movement but at right angles. Again he compared the view of the light beam seen by a person inside the elevator and one outside. As in the 1905 thought experiment, the person inside the elevator would see the light beam enter the box or structure at one level and hit the opposite wall at the same level. The observer outside, however, would see the light beam bend because, by the time it reached the other side of the elevator, the far wall would have moved on. Einstein concluded that if acceleration could curve the light beam, and since the acceleration was a result of gravity, then gravity must also be able to bend light. Einstein revealed his thinking on this subject in a lecture in Vienna later in the year, where it caused a sensation among physicists. The implications of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity may be explained by a model, as the special theory was explained using a pencil twisting in the light, casting a longer and shorter shallow. Imagine a thin rubber sheet set out on frame, like a picture canvas, and laid horizontally. Roll a small marble or a ball bearing across the rubber sheet, and the marble will roll in a straight line. However, if you place a heavy ball, say a cannonball, in the centre of the frame, depressing the rubber sheet, the marble would then roll in a curve as it approaches this massive weight. In effect, this is what Einstein argued would happen to light when it approached large bodies like stars. There is a curvature in space-time, and light bends too.36