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List of Illustrations

1. Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, 1912 (oil on canvas), Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)/Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, PA, USA/The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950/Bridgeman Images. © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

2. The Song of Love, 1914 (oil on canvas), Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978)/Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA/Photo © Boltin Picture Library/Bridgeman Images. © DACS 2018

3. Apolinère Enameled, 1916–17 (gouache and graphite on painted tin, mounted on cardboard), Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)/Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, PA, USA/The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950/Bridgeman Images. © Association Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

4. Jean Cocteau, 1917 (oil on canvas), Modigliani, Amedeo (1884–1920)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

5. Jeanne Hébuterne (1898–1920), wife and muse of Amedeo Modigliani, here young c. 1916/PVDE/Bridgeman Images

6. Belle Haleine – Eau de Voilette (cardboard box and brushed-glass perfume bottle), Duchamp, Marcel (1887–1968)/Private Collection/Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images. © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

7. Title page of Parade, ballet by Erik Satie (1866–1925), theme by Jean Cocteau (1889–1973) and with set and costumes by Pablo Picasso (1888–1973), 1917 (20th century)/Prazska Konzervator, Prague/De Agostini Picture Library/A. Dagli Orti/Bridgeman Images

8. Aphorisms and puns from ‘Rrose Sélavy’, 1939 (litho), Duchamp, Marcel (1887–1968)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images. © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

9. The Great Forest, 1927 (oil on canvas), Ernst, Max (1891–1976)/Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland/Bridgeman Images. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

10. Monument to the Birds, 1927 (oil on canvas), Ernst, Max (1891–1976)/Musée Cantini, Marseille, France/Bridgeman Images. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

11. Flowers and Shells, 1929 (oil on canvas), Ernst, Max (1891–1976)/Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France/Bridgeman. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

12. Illustration from La Femme 100 têtes, 1929 (engraving) (b/w photo), Ernst, Max (1891–1976)/Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

13. Untitled, 1920 (photographic collage), Ernst, Max (1891–1976)/Menil Collection, Houston, TX, USA/Bridgeman Images. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

14. Page from l’Avant-Scène featuring Entr’acte, by René Clair, 1968 (litho), Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, French School (20th century)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

15. The Persistence of Memory, 1931 (oil on canvas), Dalí, Salvador (1904–89)/Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA/Bridgeman Images. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, DACS 2018

16. Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically (1931/73) (shoe, black marble, white marble, photographs, clay, hair, glass, wax, wood, yellow metal, mixed media), Dalí, Salvador (1904–89)/The Art Institute of Chicago, IL, USA/Through prior gift of Mrs Gilbert W. Chapman/Bridgeman Images. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, DACS 2018

17. Marcel Duchamp with his brothers, Jacques Villon (left) and Raymond Duchamp Villon (right) in Puteaux in 1913/Tallandier/Bridgeman Images

18. The surrealist group in a plane in an amusement park. (Left to right): André Breton (1896–1966), Robert Desnos (1900–45), Joseph Delteil (1894–1978), Simone Breton (1897–1980), Paul Éluard (1895–1952), Gala Éluard (1894–1982), Max Morise (1900–1973), Max Ernst (1891–1976) (b/w photo), French School (20th century)/Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, France/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images

19. Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso with the Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova, Rome, 1917 (b/w photo), Italian Photographer (20th century)/Private Collection/Tallandier/Bridgeman Images

20. Salvador Dalí and Gala (b/w photo)/PVDE/Bridgeman Images

Introduction: Nude Descending a Staircase

Introducing painter and future conceptualist Marcel Duchamp, metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico and poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire – artistic experimentation before the evolution of surrealism.

A female nude is walking downstairs, towards the (unseen) viewer waiting at the foot of the staircase. This is no ordinary painted nude. Part Futurist, part cubist, at first glance this early wood-coloured painting by Marcel Duchamp is an arrangement of lines and planes, joints and cantilevers, geometrically constructed. Still staring up at her, the viewer begins to make her out as she makes her way downstairs, head high, shoulders back, hips en avance, moving like a model; perhaps those forms at her feet are even garments she is stepping out of, kicked aside as she descends. We can see her – can’t we?

The young artist himself (twenty-four when he painted it, in January 1912) didn’t think so. ‘This final version of the Nude Descending a Staircase was the convergence in my mind of various interests including the cinema, still in its infancy …’ In the first variant of the painting (No. 1) Duchamp had articulated the joints of the figure (distinguishable as human, and female, only from a distance) in a manner inspired by the photographs of Muybridge, the nineteenth-century photographer who discovered that the way to depict movement was to juxtapose separate successive photographic images. In that first version we can still see the joins, but according to the artist Nude … No. 1 was ‘only a rough sketch in my search for a technique to treat the subject of motion’.

Nude … No. 2 is more fluid – Duchamp finessed the construction and added some gestural marks to the side of the figure. Although seldom willing to discuss exactly how his works came about, he did later reveal that when he painted the Nudes he had been applying himself consistently to the problem of depicting movement. He did not deny, either, the influence of cubism, with cubist paintings being exhibited throughout the small galleries of Paris at the time. His own interpretation of cubism was that it amounted to ‘a repetition of schematic lines, without any regard for anatomy or perspective – a parallelism of lines describing movement through the different positions of a moving person’. One of his aims had been to paint a cubist nude – a challenge that had already defeated most of the cubists, including Picasso. But in Nude … No. 2, Duchamp claimed, ‘the anatomical nude does not exist, or at least cannot be seen, since I discarded completely the naturalistic appearance of a nude, keeping only the abstract lines of some twenty different static positions in the successive action of descending’. Oh, but for the viewer she does exist, emerging from the artist’s architectural draughtsmanship like an articulated mannequin coming to life. The stepping motion animates her, rendering her at the same time geometrical and dreamlike – both an articulated wooden construction and uncannily super-real.

Duchamp was satisfied with Nude … No. 2 and sent it to the 1912 Salon des Indépendants, where it was exhibited by a reluctant committee of cubists. After displaying it for a few weeks they admitted they found it disturbing, and appealed to Duchamp’s brothers (a painter and a sculptor) to persuade him to at least change the title, whereupon Duchamp withdrew the work from the exhibition. In October he showed Nude … No. 2 again, this time exhibiting with his brothers at Galerie la Boétie. Here it was admired by Apollinaire,who had already seen Duchamp’s work in earlier shows and noted that the youngest Duchamp brother was producing interesting work, including some ‘vilains’ nudes.

Always on the lookout for new talent, Apollinaire had also spotted another young artist new to the Parisian scene, the Italian Giorgio de Chirico, painter of strange urban scenes – deserted piazzas and stations sparsely littered with apparently unconnected objects, fragments of masonry, statues, archways, trains disappearing into the distance. When his work appeared at the 1913 Salon, it caught the attention of both Apollinaire and Picasso. De Chirico, too, was an artist whose work seemed to reach beyond the parameters of cubism. (Before long it was being dubbed ‘surrealist’ – by everyone but de Chirico himself.)

From about 1911 onwards the artistic centre of the French capital had begun to shift from Montmartre, when the artists who grouped themselves around Picasso left the world of the Moulin Rouge and the Folies-Bergère to gather instead in the galleries, studios and cafés of Montparnasse. Following the success of cubism, young dealers had arrived on the Left Bank and opened new galleries, mostly clustered around the rue de Seine. The district soon became a hotbed of entertainment and a destination for those leading liberated lifestyles, as well as the place where painters and writers would meet, in the Café de la Rotonde, the Café du Dôme and the Bal Bullier, until then the haunt of typists and shopgirls but now frequented by artists and poets dancing the foxtrot and the tango – women cheek to cheek, careful not to disturb their obligatory hats, wearing dresses created from contrasting scraps of fabric by Sonia Delaunay, designer, artist and friend of Apollinaire – until he fell out with her husband. (In 1912 and 1913 she painted four pictures depicting the Bal Bullier on mattress ticking, because it was cheaper than canvas.) The cafés of Montparnasse between 1913 and 1929 played host to encounters and conversations that would change the face of modern art, as the artists sought new friendships and love affairs and different ways of experimenting and opportunities to show their work. When the surrealists put their revolutionary ideas into practice, in many respects the scene was already set.

Surrealist art as it gradually emerged in Paris unleashed the irrational and released the erotic, transforming the depiction of reality so that it became not filtered and restricted but exhilaratingly uncivilized, releasing marvels on to canvas, the stage and in a variety of other media. On canvas, and in their readymades and other artworks, the surrealist artists juxtaposed objects never before seen together, to confound viewers with the ordinary, presenting them with fantastical connections they somehow, in the darkest regions of their minds, felt they had already made but had never expressed. The original surrealists also tapped into other, darker emotions, of terror, horror, disgust or fear, depicting limbs detached from bodies, heads that were also machines, massive birds in flight above tiny landscapes, partially constructed (or devastated) aeroplanes hurtling perilously low through landscapes or seascapes littered with scattered objects. The impact of the First World War in their work cannot be ignored. Two lumps of bread and a chess piece could appear provocative, caged birds frightening, forest scenes dystopian and women (and female body parts) weirdly menacing. Still later there were melting watches, a chest of drawers fashioned from a woman’s torso and cups and saucers covered with fur.

By the time André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto appeared in 1924, surrealism had become identified as a way of making art that privileged the imaginative over the rational, realizing a kind of dream language in paint and celebrating the apparent nonsense generated by the unconscious and the disruptions of the erotic. The author wrote that, although ‘we are still living under the rule of logic’, change was afoot. Values had shifted: the chaotic drives of the unconscious had become the source of contemporary art; and in painting and writing, lawlessness was being embraced rather than repressed.

The lure of the decadent, the uncensored expression of chaotic, disruptive, erotic drives and the power of the unconscious to direct the artist’s work (a subtler encounter for the artist than simply making paintings of dreams) – all these things together added up to what the artists in this book understood by surrealism. For Gertrude Stein (whose Tender Buttons appeared in 1914), surrealism was simply ‘ordinary’ life, far more interesting to her than mysticism or the occult (which the surrealists sporadically explored). While it may have been Apollinaire who first used the word in print, Picasso subsequently claimed to have invented it, and he was not the only one.

As surrealist art evolved during those early years in Montparnasse, who was in, who out? What did the world of Montparnasse feel like in those years in which surrealism as an art movement evolved? The crowd of respectful viewers moving attentively through the Dalí/Duchamp exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 2017 would have been unimaginable in 1917. If surrealism changed the way we see things, surrealist ideas evolved gradually, into a world very different from ours. What were the correspondences, during that extraordinary period, between the various artists now regarded as surrealist? What was the impact on the emerging new ideas of Duchamp’s conceptualist and de Chirico’s metaphysical art? Why was Picasso wary of Breton? Why was Diaghilev always on the social margins of the art scene, despite the path-breaking impact of his work? Why did Breton loathe Cocteau? What part did the women (including the artist’s model, nightclub singer and Man Ray’s muse Kiki de Montparnasse), the time, the place play in the development of ideas that have had such a lasting impact on the way we view a work of art? Today’s artists include many whose work is overtly influenced by surrealism. How did it all begin?

1. Café Life, Performances and Fancy-dress Balls

In 1913, when Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes performs in the theatres of the Right Bank, the artists of the more bohemian Left Bank are, as yet, conspicuous by their absence. The district of Montparnasse seems to be under construction. Picasso is already celebrated as a cubist; Modigliani is carving stone heads; Apollinaire praises Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase; and de Chirico’s work looks (to the jury of the Salon des Indépendants) like backdrops in a theatre.

From her box in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées Gertrude Stein glanced down and noticed Apollinaire moving around the auditorium – the first time she had seen any artist from Montparnasse in evening dress. She watched as he slid between the seats, shaking hands as he went with the fashionable women of the Right Bank. It was 29 May 1913, the opening night of the Ballets Russes production of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). Paris adored the Ballets Russes. The gratin of Paris had gathered for the premiere. The curtain rose; the performance was about to start. What happened next has gone down in history. With the primitive jug-jug of the opening notes on the horns, the first glimpse of the dancers in their rough, peasant costumes jumping with their feet turned inwards, the hissing began. This, surely, was not ballet but a display of unrestrained and uncensored primitive emotion. The costumes were coarse, the dancers’ moves were ugly, the music was unmistakably lewd. It immediately dawned on some that whatever the joke was supposed to be, it was clearly – insultingly – on them. In her box, old Comtesse de Pourtalès rose to her feet, coronet askew, brandishing her fan, protesting, ‘This is the first time in sixty years anyone has dared insult me!’ Supporters of Diaghilev hastily applauded, loudly, hoping to drown out the jeers. As Gertrude Stein recalled, ‘We could hear nothing … one literally could not, throughout the whole performance, hear the sound of music.’ The man in the box next to hers brought down his cane on an obvious enthusiast in the box to the other side of him. Marcel Duchamp was also in the tumultuous auditorium; he later remarked that the performance of the audience had made more of an impression on him than that of the dancers. Mayhem ensued. The dancers danced on.

The audience (carefully cultivated by Diaghilev) consisted almost exclusively of inhabitants of the Right Bank, all fabulously wealthy members of high-ranking society, a milieu strikingly different from the more bohemian and even the bourgeois milieu on the other side of the river. In terms of the inflexible, deeply rooted hierarchy of France’s Third Republic, the real thing was here on the Right Bank – the wealthy, cultured vicomtes and vicomtesses, princesses and countesses, the aristocrats and grande bourgeoisie who patronized the arts and on whose support Diaghilev depended if he wished to bring the avant-garde to the world of Parisian theatre. As for the social make-up of the corps de ballet, that was a different matter. The dancers were mainly classless Russian immigrants, among them the privately decadent, socially outrageous, temperamentally volatile and daringly (in those days, illegally) gay – an intoxicating mix to some followers, including twenty-four-year-old Jean Cocteau, who remarked on the conspicuous absence of any artist from Montparnasse. The involvement of Picasso and others with the Ballets Russes came a few years later, and only with the intervention of Cocteau. In 1913 the district’s young painters showed no interest in the ballet, while the more senior ones still thought of it as the exclusive reserve of the beau monde. ‘Montparnasse knew nothing of Le Sacre du printemps …’

Cocteau later claimed he had never been to Montparnasse until he met Picasso there in 1916, but he must have had some familiarity with the district. Our introduction to Montparnasse comes to us instead through the eyes of Beatrice Hastings, a young writer who arrived in the district in May 1914 who soon became Modigliani’s lover and reported her ‘Impressions of Paris’ for London’s literary magazine the New Age. In Montparnasse she discovered café life, artists and fancy-dress balls. ‘Much laughter, much applause for your frock if it is chic, three hundred people inside and outside the Rotonde, very much alive!’ Everything seemed ‘quick and fireworky, impressionist’. With its preponderance of cafés, dance halls, small studios and newly built cités des artistes (blocks of purpose-built studios) the district was conducive to the bohemian way of life. In the new galleries still opening up, exhibitions of works by individual artists (a relatively recent strategy, initiated in the small galleries of Montmartre) had proved successful in pushing up prices; and for aspiring artists there were prospects of commercial success and opportunities to exhibit work that tested the boundaries of artistic experimentation. During the previous few years cubism had exploded upon the scene, filling the small galleries with avant-garde work (and heaving aside those artists – including Picasso’s old friends from his Montmartre days, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck – for whom cubism held no appeal).

The wide boulevard du Montparnasse was flanked by a muddle of small streets where grass grew between the cobbles. In those days the district felt borderless, containing a mixture of architecture, and the geography of the area (then, as now) could be confusing; not long after arriving Beatrice discovered that ‘the street I used to take two trams to get to is round the corner’. There was no obvious demarcation, since the quartier spanned both the 6th and 14th arrondissements and bordered on the district of St-Germain-des-Prés. It had long ago acquired the nickname Mount Parnassus from the students at the universities there. With the overlapping arrondissements came an eclectic social mix; writers, journalists, students, politicians, nuns and cab drivers could all be seen on the streets of Montparnasse, mingling with the bourgeois owners of the larger properties still under construction throughout the district. New buildings were going up everywhere, the noise of the works competing with the rattle of the trams. The Rotonde had been refurbished in 1911, its terrace reduced following the instalment of the Métro line (begun in 1905, and continuing well into the 1920s), though the café had gained a smart new façade and an extended interior room. The locals kept to the old back room, where the models went, too, in the afternoons, the artists favouring the large new room at the front, where Modigliani could usually be found in heated debate and Picasso stood ‘like a seigneur waiting for a train’, keeping his distance from all the latest artistic disputes.

Beatrice’s Baedeker guide recommended the Musée du Luxembourg and promised glimpses of artists’ studios beneath ‘trees that have leaves like fingers spread out’ but, so far, she had seen neither. She had, however (within days of her arrival), met Modigliani, ‘the bad garçon of a sculptor’, in one of the small restaurants. When they met again in the Rotonde he invited her to the cinema. She doesn’t say what they saw – the latest episode of Les Mystères de New York (The Exploits of Elaine), perhaps, with Pearl White, American darling of the silver screen, or the popular thriller Les Vampires, starring Musidora, with her seductively wild, black, undone hair. Or perhaps Fantômas, based on a popular crime series, whose hero, the ‘genius of evil’, rampaged across Paris robbing, torturing and killing his victims before escaping in scenes of daring. Whatever they saw, it would have been silent – talkies came to the Parisian screens only in the 1930s. Modigliani said he adored the cinema – before falling asleep on Beatrice’s shoulder. ‘ “You mustn’t go to sleep on my shoulder!” I objected – “all the world knows you.” “Not a soul,” he said, and waved anew to somebody else. “You mustn’t fall in love with me,” he said. “It’s no use – yes, do! – no, don’t – it’s no use.” ’ Then they went for a walk around Montparnasse, through the Luxembourg Gardens, to where Gertrude Stein lived, in the rue de Fleurus, and held soirées for painters and writers. ‘Ah!’ said Modigliani. ‘That is where la belle Américaine lives with her brother.’ Beatrice asked to be taken to meet them. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘She’s as ugly as Fate. I have a horror of her.’ (Since, over the previous few years, Gertrude Stein had purchased the work of virtually every talented contemporary artist except Modigliani, the feeling may well have been mutual.)

At no. 216, boulevard Raspail, not far from where Picasso lived, in a large, modern apartment building at no. 242, Modigliani seemed to have taken up residence in a glass box, or perhaps a small, disused greenhouse, in a tiny courtyard reached by a short passageway. Its floor was littered with drawings, paintings and one or two sculpted heads roughly hewn of stone – dramatic, boulder-like, emerging from the rock like primitive figures. But Modigliani never stayed anywhere for long. He roamed Montparnasse, borrowing or sharing other people’s studios or sleeping on their floors, cutting a distinctive figure in his battered black corduroy suit, or the brown one he wore with a brownish-yellow cap, to look like Picasso. When not sculpting or painting he read the philosophers Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, or the cult novel of the moment, Les Chants de Maldoror, by the ‘Comte de Lautréamont’ (aka Isidore-Lucien Ducasse; he wrote it in 1868, and died two years later, at the age of twenty-four). Modigliani was a great exponent of Maldoror (it was also later championed by the surrealist artists), a fantasy of apocalyptic licentiousness, dark and dreamlike as a painting by Gustave Moreau, though more overtly pornographic. A naked woman and a glow worm appear at Maldoror’s feet. ‘This woman’s name is Prostitution,’ warns the glow worm (voice of morality and reason), whereupon Maldoror crushes it with a rock. ‘The wind groans in its languorous tones through the leaves, and the owl intones its deep lament … Then dogs, driven wild, snap their chains …’ Before the surrealists came to dominate the art world of Montparnasse, this was the closest art got to tapping the outlawed drives of the unconscious.

With Modigliani, Beatrice explored the art scene. He took her to one exhibition, a gathering consisting of starving artists, a few successful painters and the bourgeoisie of Montparnasse (unlike the Right Bank crowd, these were not, it seems, wealthy patrons of the arts so much as snobbish hangers-on, on the alert for any artist who seemed about to ‘arrive’), at which paintings by Picasso and Henri Rousseau were displayed above a table on which stood one of Modigliani’s powerful stone heads. Everyone gathered round to admire Picasso’s work – ‘Superbe!’ ‘Magnifique!’ ‘Oui! Très joli!’ Nobody (except Beatrice) seemed to be paying any attention to Modigliani’s. Not that he seemed to mind; he was always happy to give away a work for a few francs, as long as the purchaser stood him a drink or two.

In the art magazines, it seemed that virtually every exhibition of contemporary art was reviewed by Apollinaire. Rushing from exhibition to exhibition, soirée to soirée, he was a familiar figure in the streets of Montparnasse, always laden with rare or second-hand books (he was an enthusiastic bibliophile). When he did stop for a conversation he was an expressive listener, widening his eyes and crossing and uncrossing his arms as if to punctuate the dialogue. He seemed to know everyone, noticing every promising newcomer and making a point of mentioning young artists in the art press; he relished any kind of experimentation. He had been among the first admirers of Picasso’s work, heaping praise on his early paintings of harlequins and clowns, beneath whose ‘tawdry finery’ he detected ‘the presence of real … people – versatile, shrewd, clever, poor, and deceitful’. Before anyone had even thought of surrealism, Apollinaire had been looking for the next thing that would shake up the art world. In 1911 he still favoured the work of painters such as his friend Robert Delaunay – great, jagged forms painted in greens and yellows like vivid bursts of sunlight – until he and Delaunay fell out when Apollinaire referred to him as a fauvist. Other exciting young artists, though, were emerging.

Apollinaire had been keeping an eye on the young Marcel Duchamp (aged twenty-six in 1913) since being struck by the artist’s work at the 1910 Salon des Indépendants. In Apollinaire’s view the geometrical elements of Duchamp’s painting broadly aligned him with cubism but seemed to suggest something more – there were aspects which Apollinaire could describe only as ‘elements of real being’ (‘ces traces d’êtres’).

In spring 1913 Duchamp was still living in his family home in Puteaux, a district just beyond the Bois de Boulogne, with his brother and half-brother (painter Jacques Villon and sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon). All three artists were concerned with the geometrical element described by mathematicians as the ‘golden section’ (the Euclidean ‘fourth dimension’), which introduced the element of velocity into a three-dimensional structure and thus elements of movement into two- and three-dimensional works of art. The three brothers were passionately committed to exploring the mathematical elements of pictorial art. Exhibiting together, they called themselves the Section d’Or, or Golden Section Group, the name they had used when they exhibited together in October 1912 at Galerie la Boétie, where Duchamp had shown Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2. (They were familiarly known as the Groupe Puteaux.)

Apollinaire was not the only one who found this particular painting arresting. Among others taking note of all three Duchamp brothers’ work was the American Walter Pach, who had been in Paris since 1907. In late 1912 he and two associates had been exploring Paris for examples of French modern art to exhibit at the Armory show that was to take place in February 1913 and which was intended to be New York’s most significant showcase of contemporary work to date. Pach introduced his visitors to all the artists he knew in Paris and took them to meet the Duchamp brothers in Puteaux, probably on the recommendation of Picasso, whose scribbled list of recommended artists, most of them cubist, including Duchamp (Picasso spelled it ‘Duchan’), appears in the archives of the Armory show. Pach was so impressed by Nude … No. 2 that he had the canvas shipped to New York for the exhibition. Nevertheless, by October 1912 Marcel Duchamp was already deeply disillusioned with the art world. In exhibiting with his brothers, he was making an exception – following his recent experience with the Salon des Indépendants he had ‘lost interest in groups’. From now on he would resolutely keep his distance from the Parisian art scene.

Apollinaire moved from the suburbs to Paris in January 1913 to an apartment at no. 202, boulevard Saint-Germain. It was ideally located for café life, only about a hundred yards from Les Deux Magots and Café Flore, two other places popular with the artists of the Left Bank. He filled his new home with treasured possessions – rare books, ethnic carvings, wooden theatrical puppets and paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Marie Laurencin (his first love) and other contemporary artists – and began holding weekly soirées for friends. Young painters, poets and scholars could be found draped across the divans, smoking clay pipes or reciting poetry while Apollinaire presided, seated at his work table.

Among his first visitors was twenty-four-year-old Giorgio de Chirico, sent along on the recommendation of Parisian friends familiar with the artistic ‘ambiance’ of Apollinaire’s gatherings. Apollinaire encouraged him to submit four works to the 1913 Salon des Indépendants, where members of the selection committee (including André Dunoyer de Segonzac and Moreau) told the artist his paintings were like stage sets; he would probably make a good set designer. As far as de Chirico was concerned, they had missed the point entirely; in his opinion, his paintings were purely ‘metaphysical’. In one of his most striking works of 1913, The Uncertainty of the Poet, a twisted torso of plaster or marble stands opposite a row of arches which casts a deep shadow on the ground. The bust is strongly lit, as is the steam train racing past the horizon, a cloud of white smoke billowing behind it. On the ground in front of the bust is an outsized bunch of bananas. The jury had clearly ignored the ‘exceedingly solitary and profound lyricism’ of his work, as did others (including, shortly, the surrealists), who persisted in reading into it prophecies of catastrophe or cataclysm, ‘a kind of atmosphere of terror, the air of a thriller or suspense film’, which he had had no intention of creating.

At the Salon des Indépendants both Apollinaire and Picasso admired de Chirico’s work, and one of Picasso’s regular purchasers bought one of his paintings. Picasso asked Apollinaire to introduce him to the artist. Together they tracked him down to his basement studio and introduced him to their friend Paul Guillaume. Guillaume was a former garage worker who had spotted an African artefact amid a delivery of tyres; on the strength of this he had established a reputation as a prospective dealer and was about to open a gallery. After some persuasion Guillaume bought a few paintings and offered to make a contractual agreement with de Chirico which amounted to the monopoly of his work, a new practice among dealers in Paris which de Chirico thought despicable; he dismissed the offer as ‘nefarious’.

That same spring Apollinaire had a book on art and artists published, Les Peintres cubistes: Méditations ésthetiques (Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations), a mixture of previously published articles and new pieces on contemporary painters, including Marcel Duchamp. (Apollinaire’s attempt in the preface to distinguish between four types of cubism succeeded only in irritating some artists, who grumbled that he might be a gifted poet but he obviously had no idea how to paint.) In a more persuasive piece for the arts magazine Montjoie! he described Picasso’s attempts to test the boundaries of cubism by bringing ‘real objects to the light … a real postage-stamp, pieces of newspaper …’ in constructions juxtaposed in bas-relief on to canvas or free-standing wood, letting the connections between them speak for themselves. When he saw these new mixed-media collages Apollinaire predicted that the object, ‘real or in trompe-l’œil’, would become increasingly significant in the development of contemporary art, as artists went on finding ways to incorporate everyday things into the fabric of their work. (He might almost have been predicting the appearance of the earliest examples of surrealism.)

In the rue Christine, a small street in the 6th arrondissement not far from the place Saint-Michel, Apollinaire sat in a workmen’s bar enjoying the movement of people and picking up random snatches of conversation: ‘La mère de la concierge et la concierge laisseront tout passer/ … Je partirai à 20h/ … Le chat noir traverse la brasserie’ (‘The concierge’s mother and the concierge will let anything go by/ … I leave at 8 o’clock/ … The black cat crosses the bar’). These overheard fragments were incorporated into a poem he wrote that summer, ‘Lundi rue Christine’ (‘Monday rue Christine’), still one of his best-known, most highly praised works. He had just published his second volume of poetry, Alcools (Alcohol), and with it he made his most significant contribution to the art world of 1913. In a literary climate still dominated by symbolism this work was truly avant-garde, creating a new kind of poetic intervention. Alcools was effectively a poetic collage, comparable with Picasso’s visual collages; the poet is simply – as it were – passing on to the reader fragments of the city’s café culture and street life. In ‘Vendémiaire’ (the first month of the French Revolutionary calendar) the poet is deeply embedded in the life of the city, a mere vessel for words to pass through: ‘Écoutez-moi je suis le gosier de Paris/Et je boirai encore s’il me plaît l’univers’ (‘Listen to me I’m the throat of Paris/And if I want I’ll drink the universe again’).

Apollinaire was ahead of his time; one critic wrote of Alcools that ‘nothing is more reminiscent of a junk shop’. However, the book did attract some enthusiastic young readers. Marcel Duchamp liked it, as did the seventeen-year-old schoolboy André Breton, then still living with his parents in the rue Étienne-Marcel, a district adjoining (in fact, barely distinct from) Montparnasse. On the point of discovering his own youthful desire for rebellion, he was reading the poetry of Rimbaud and Baudelaire and for the first time exploring the museums and galleries of Paris, including the Gustave Moreau museum in the rue de La Rochefoucauld, where he was riveted by Moreau’s tantalizing ‘ “evil women” of history and mythology’.

Sue Roe

IN MONTPARNASSE

The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dalí

FIG TREE

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Nude Descending a Staircase

1.

Café Life, Performances and Fancy-dress Balls