"Poets and artists together determine the features of their age, and the future meekly conforms to their edit.”

I N T R O D U C T I O N

“Without poets, without artists...everything would fall apart into chaos. There would be no more seasons, no more civilizations, no more thought, no more humanity, no more life even; and impotent darkness would reign forever. Poets and artists together determine the features of their age, and the future meekly conforms to their edit.” GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE

Attempts to define artistic currents and experiments of the period yielded terminology that proved more obscure than helpful. “Modernism,” used as short-hand to express rejection of the old ways, was insufficient to capture the seemingly limitless exuberant creativity. “Modernism” spawned a litany of “isms” — Dadaism, Surrealism, Cubism, Orphism, Futurism, Expressionism, Vorticism, and Suprematism, to name but a few. These titles were more than pure theory, and were largely intended to evoke new sensations, calling upon the viewer’s sixth sense. This was so, even though several artists published pamphlets, manifestos, and essays describing the basis of their so-called new movement — such as Gleizes and Metzinger’s Du Cubisme in 1912, or the Blast publications by the Vorticists in 1914 and 1915, or Marinetti’s Manifesto del Futurismo in 1909. The ease with which participants categorized and labeled these movements belies a porous and fluid art world in which artists tested and combined aspects of each of these supposedly distinct movements. These boundaries are artificial, and may in fact preclude understanding: for example, Henry Valensi’s 1930 La Casbah d’Alger combines the unearthly qualities of Surrealism, the structural play of Cubism, and the garish colors of Fauvism, yet Valensi is usually categorized as simply a Cubist. In a few years, the Cubists’s playbook had moved far from its intellectual constructs, but was still firmly based on the precepts of more “classic” works such as Gleizes’s 1915 Portrait de Florent Schmitt. Whether the “Cubist” label (a term Apollinaire coined) is appropriately used or not with respect to La Casbah d’Alger is ultimately not as important as recognizing that it unquestionably fits within the aesthetic of the period by reinventing forms and colors. It is reinvention without ever turning away from the concepts on which art history is built.

Accordingly, the title of this publication can only be viewed as an attempt to delineate a moment in history that feels both inherently distinctive and impossible to accurately define. The artists presented here defy categorization, and that is one of the striking aspects that make the works so appealing. Exceptions are validated: Blanche Lazzell was an American artist, but studied with Albert Gleizes, and her works illustrated here were made during her stay in Paris; Hélion was French, but made his cubist composition whilst living in the US between the World Wars. There is a liberating force in the assembled paintings, because they each stand as a powerful statement of the will to change the way we look at art. These works initiated the now-accepted dislocation between art and reality.

Apollinaire was not entirely wrong, of course. If he and his fellow poets and artists could not ward off the violence, their art did capture the disparate movements and chaos of the period. Peace in the early twentieth century was only transient, fraught with economic woes and political upheavals. Cubist works became newly infused with blazing colors, as in Valmier’s exquisitely balanced collage, Personnage debout (1920). Aspects of Surrealism pervade Lurçat’s evocative still lifes and depiction of a river, as well as Survage’s 1940 landscape, in which an irreverent clown makes an appearance.

During the first half of the twentieth century, fine and visual arts and the written word took paths previously deemed unacceptable. Tables are slanted, as in Juan Gris’s delicate depiction of a bouquet of flowers, and a reclining nude is orange and angular in Henri Laurens’s gouache. Even words are no longer confined to their proper alignment on the page: Apollinaire’s calligrammes turn words into shapes, just as Cubist works incorporate words.

The work of Paul Éluard links the written word with the world of painting and spans that heady creative time: Le cirque (Triptyque), his rare Surrealist work of 1913, portrays the joyous world of the Cirque Modiano, while in 1942 thousands of copies of his most celebrated poem “Liberté”— expressing an anguished cry against tyranny — were dropped by the Royal Air Force over occupied France.

The works illustrated in this catalogue are simply fine examples of what certain of the leading artists in the early twentieth century were creating by drawing upon each other’s forms and colors and thoughts. This is not intended nor could it be a complete compendium, but it is a beautiful mosaic of a unique slice of European history that lives on in today’s contemporary art. This time period forever changed artists’ aesthetic vision, but it also altered the role of the art dealer: great dealers took their place among the artists and the poets, propelling all of them further than they could have gone alone. Among them were Léonce Rosenberg and his Galerie de l’Effort Moderne, and Paul Rosenberg, to both of whom this publication is dedicated.

MARIANNE ROSENBERG