John Baxter - The Golden Moments of Paris: A Guide to the Paris of the 1920s

2014 John Baxter

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Right page: Kiki with an accordionist at the Cabaret des Fleurs, Brassai, 1932

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ISBN 978-0-9846334-7-0

112163

Printed in China

Wars will wash over us... bombs will fall... all civilization will crumble... but not yet. Let us be happy... give us our moment.

Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (1939). Screenplay by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch, from a story by Melchior Lengyel.

For every city, there is an occasional golden momentthat vintage season when it attains a peak of achievement, and becomes, for people of all nations, the place they most desire to visit or whose qualities they most strive to emulate. London of the 1870s, Victorias imperial capital, the city of Charles Dickens and James McNeil Whistler; Vienna two decades later, as the Secession remade art and Sigmund Freud redefined the nature of man; New York in 1956, when Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl, Elvis Presley sang Heartbreak Hotel, and Don Larsen pitched the only perfect game in World Series history to win the pennant for the Yankees.

Paris has enjoyed many such moments, but few more strident, seminal and flamboyant as that between the end of World War I in 1918 and the rise of European totalitarianism in the mid-1930s: the period known as les annes follesthe crazy years. Paris was where the 20th century was, wrote Gertrude Stein, one of the American expatriates whose writings helped preserve a memory of that time, like a gaudy insect embedded in the amber of nostalgia.

At times, the history of Paris between the wars can seem like a scientific discovery to which the formula has been lost. As with the evolution of jazz in the United States, the chemistry that led a few gifted individuals in Paris to develop Cubism and Surrealism is hopelessly tangled. One can chart the development of such small presses as Black Sun, Contact, Three Mountains and Obelisk, but the process by which they sprang up during the 1920s in Parisrather than in London or Berlin or New Yorkand why, in publishing Joyce and Miller and Hemingway changed the direction of modern literature, stubbornly resists analysis. Woody Allens 2011 film Midnight in Paris was a timely reminder that certain moments in history can only truly be understood through direct experience. As those who lived through Paris in this golden age often sayyou had to have been there.

John Baxter

Few districts of any city can boast such a transformation as Montparnasse, a garbage heap that, in the course of a century, came to be hailed as the center of the civilized world.

When, in the 19th century, seminarians from the Latin Quarter climbed up from the Seine, heading for the village of stonemasons who made and sold cheap wine, they first had to clamber over an accumulation of rubble from demolished buildings and spoil from the underground stone quarries. Worse, this was also Pariss Potters Field, where the unknown dead lay in unmarked graves. Sarcastically, the students christened it Mont ParnasseMount Parnassusafter the peak in Greece where the muses lived. In 1860, Baron Haussmanns work gangs leveled the spoil heap and built an avenue along the hilltop to mark the southernmost border of Paris. But the name stuck. The street became boulevard du Montparnasse.

Tsuguharu Foujita, Japanese painter and engraver (left), at a cabaret with one of his outrageous models, Kiki of Montparnasse (centre)

Invasion created the culture of Montparnasse. Like the first hippies in San Francisco colliding with the last of the Beats, or Londons Angry Young Men bumping heads with survivors of prewar Fitzrovia, new arrivals after World War I found a colony dating back 50 years, to when Haussmann demolished the Left Bank slums. In shacks they called estaminets, Italian masons, powdered with stone dust, shared tables with men and women dressed like gypsieswho, since gypsies were thought to come from the German region of Bohemia, were called bohemians.

The rival cultures settled down to an uneasy peace. In a city notorious for its insularity and suspicion of foreigners, this was a community where artist could meet writer, dancer befriend painter, model encounter poet, Surrealist consort with Impressionist, Russian seduce Greek. Some compared male behavior in Montparnasse to that of diplomats socializing in the legation quarter of a foreign country, others to gentlemen passing the evening in a brothel.

Once accepted by the Montparnos, the newcomer had no need to look further for work, shelter or sex. On her first night in Paris in 1914, British painter Nina Hamnett went to the Rotonde alone. The man at the next table introduced himself as Modigliani, painter and Jew. The beautiful and bisexual Hamnett was soon a fixture of the community, and destined to be christened Queen of Bohemia.

Man Ray arrived from New York in July 1921. Met at the Gare Saint-Lazare by Marcel Duchamp, he was taken that night to Montparnasse and introduced to the core of the Surrealist group, including Andr Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul luard and Philippe Soupault. He rented a studio on nearby rue Delambre, and met Alice Prin, aka Kiki of Montparnasse, who became his lover and model. The following December, Soupaults wife organized his first show at the Librairie Six on rue Brea. In the cafs, Ray met couturier Paul Poiret, who hired him to shoot his gowns. Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Andr Masson, Joan Mir and Pablo Picasso asked him to photograph their work and, in many cases, make their portraits. Both Henri-Pierre Roch, author of Jules et Jim, and American William Seabrook commissioned him to create erotica for their private use. His address changed from rue Delambre to rue Campagne-Premire, but both geographically and intellectually he never left Montparnasse.

Amadeo Modigliani (left), Pablo Picasso and Andr Salmon in front of the Caf de La Rotonde, 1916

Group portrait of American and European artists and performers in Paris: Man Ray, Mina Loy, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau, Ezra Pound, Jane Heap, Kiki de Montparnasse, c. 1920s

Boulevard du Montparnasse marked the frontier of what expatriates designated as The Quarter. Bounded to the east by boulevard St. Michel (aka BoulMich), rue de Rennes to the west and the Seine to the north, the Quarter was not so much a suburb of Paris as its international colony, as alien to the city at large as Soho was to London or Greenwich Village to New York. Life within it had little to do with France. Few residents spoke more than a smattering of the language, fewer still consorted with the French. Why bother? What British journalist Sisley Huddleston wrote of Paris in 1927 went double for Montparnasse. It offered everything that is obtainable. Things of the spirit and things that minister to bodily needs, comforts and pleasures. Everything there is to be seen anywhere is in some form to be seen [here]. It is the microcosm of the universe.