Stephen Longstreet We all went to Paris: Americans in the City of Light, 1776-1971 The Macmillan Co.: NY, 1972, 448 pp., 1900-1914
[p. 185] Chapt. 19 American Madonna Painter-Mary Cassatt [1844 -1926]
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[p. 191] It was never easy to find out just where [Mary Cassatt] stood in relationship to her native land. Yet she did write in a letter: "I am an American definitely and frankly an American . . As for Americans in Paris, she and her family detested Mrs. John W. Mackay, whose wealth had come from the Comstock Lode, and all like her. Mary Cassatt's mother defined the attitude of both herself and her daughter toward Americans in Paris: "We jog along as usual and make no acquaintances among the Americans who form the colony, for as a rule they are people one wouldn't want to know at home." . . . The Cassatts as a group, while in Paris, had cooks, maids, even a coachman until World War I. Then they hired a chauffeur. When horses were still in the family, there was a groom, or tigre, whom Mary painted into a picture with a mother and child." . . . In the summer of 1888, Mary Cassatt has had a fall from a horse, breaking the tibia of her right leg . . . In 1890 she was tossed from her carriage onto the stones of the Rue Pierre Charron . . . The carriage was splintered nearly to bits by the kicking horse . . .
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[p. 194] In 1917 Degas died. . . . Matisse's work she found "extremely feeble . . . commonplace . . ." Scorn was all the Cubists were worth. Monet's remarkable paintings of water lilies looked to her like glorified wallpaper." . . .
As for Gertrude Stein and her menage, really, Mary said they were just buying the decadent stuff for their own vulgar sensationalism. In 1908 she had been lured into meeting Gertrude Stein at the Rue de Fleurus. She looked over the place, the Cezannes, Picasssos, Matisses, since so famous, said to the woman who had dragged her there, "I have never in my life seen so many dreadful paintings in one place! I have never in my life seen so many dreadful people gathered together and I want to be taken home at once." . . . [p. 195] The end came at last at eighty-three, July 14, 1926.
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Chapter 27 La Stein, [p. 242]
Too much has already been written about the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway . . . A great deal more will be written . . . staking out rights to . . . lives in the manner of the gold miners of 1849 cutting up the gold fields. . . .
Perhaps because it is closer to us in time than the American Paris of Franklin or Louis Tiffany, their Paris has produced much recent furore and more readable texts. Paris was the exile base of disillusioned groups [p. 243] of romantics at a time we too often regard as the most interesting of the eras when Americans went to Paris . . .
Both Gertrude and Hemingway, before fame-or notoriety-overtook them (hers long delayed), were to know the pain of forcing themselves onto a world indifferent to them . . .
Paris, the 1900s to the end of the twenties, Gertrude, Hemingway, a postwar world of the Lost Generation (let us remember the mood was presented as romantic rancor), all came together at the proper time in the proper proportions. Elliot Paul . . . was to say of the American writers in Paris in the twenties, "A table of people seated as if aware it was the Last Supper."
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"The Mother of Us All," they-and she repeated it-began to call Gertrude Stein, this strange, remarkable woman. As her writing became more obscure, as her detractors trampled on her work, she grew in public stature, to a few she became a cult, a symbol, until the real person is almost impossible to see in the clouds of myth-making incense that circle her life and times. She was a great myth-maker herself, one of formidable tenacity, never letting fact confuse her idea of what the world should see as La Stein.
She seemed to preach, "Don't go home, and all is forgiven." Paris as a modern American cultural outpost owes much of its popularity to her. [p. 244] "So Paris was the place that suited those of us that were to create the twentieth century art and literature, naturally enough." (No susceptibility to modesty ever stood in her way.) . . .
While most think of her as San Francisco born, Gertrude Stein actually arrived among us on February 3, 1875, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. The Steins were a well-off merchant family, but not multimillionaires, and most of the family money later came from street car companies. They held some interest in the San Francisco Cable Car Company, and one of Gertrude's unintellectual, low-life brothers, Willy, a bit of a drunk, spent the major part of his adult life in the open, on the platform of a cable car, as a jolly, well-liked brakeman.
The Steins, like the Jameses, the Sargents, the Smiths, were a traveling American family, Vienna and Paris saw them sightseeing, learning the languages, but their growing up was done in San Francisco. Besides Willy and Gertrude, there were her older brothers, Leo and Michael. All but Willy were to enjoy Paris. Gertrude claimed to have become a great [p. 245] reader . . . but her conversation . . . was mainly about the works of G. Stein.
. . . At nineteen Gertrude was at Radcliffe where she claimed later to have been "the favorite pupil of William James." No proof exists of this statement. However she did study experiments in automatic writing and was co-author of a paper "Normal Motor Automatism." She was twenty-three when she entered Johns Hopkins to spend four years studying medicine but never taking a degree. When young, Gertrude was short, dumpy, a solid-featured young woman- already aware that emotionally and physically men had no attraction for her. She was inquisitive, bohemian, defiantly arty. Her personal sensibilities were toward girls not boys . . . by 1903 Leo was already in Paris. It was hard for her to admit that he found their first place in Paris, not she.
Leo had rented the studio at 27 Rue de Fleurus and Gertrude joined him in September of 1903. (Alice Toklas didn't get to Paris until 1907.) Leo and Gertrude settled in. Their costumes, when they were dress-alikes, were the brown corduroy outfits and Greek Sandals made by Isadore Duncan's brother, Raymond. He lived across the courtyard from the Steins and milked goats, spun and wove cloth, and grew his hair long . . .
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Self-analysis was Leo's life work just as Gertrude's was self-advertising. Leo had begun to paint, but as with writing, he kept getting in his own way with his self incrimination. He was a brilliant art critic, having remarkably clear ideas on values of poety and prose, much beyond [p. 246] Gertrude's . . .
In the spring of 1903 he had bought his first Cezanne and when Gertrude joined him in the autumn, it was already hung on the wall. By the time the nineteenth century ended in 1914 (it did not end in 1900 as most claim), the walls of the Rue de Fleurus studio held Renoirs, Matisses, Picassos, two Gauguins, Manguins, a nude by Vallotton, a Toulouse-Lautrec, a Daumier, a small Delacroix, and an El Greco (suspect).
. . . it was at the Rue de Fleurus that Matisse and Picasso first met. There came Rousseau, the odd-ball primitive genius, Braque, Vlaminck, who was also a professional bike racer (he even wrote good novels), Pascin, born Pincus, who was to become an American citizen during the Great War when he came to the United States. Marie Laurencin also came . . . getting her eye blackened by her lover, Guillaume Apollonaire, the writer of pornographic books who was to become one of the great modern French poets. He wrote the first critical book on the cubists and coined the name for another art group, the surrealists. He hinted his father had been a cardinal at the Vatican.
There were whole clusters of American painters digging away at the mountain that was Cezanne, taking from it the discoveries of the first cubists. Many Americans were just painters of no school at all. Gertrude and Leo fed and entertained Alfred Maurer, Maurice Sterne (who was to marry Mabel Dodge), Marsden Hartley. There were other American painters in Paris, Max Weber, a major second-generation cubist in those days and two Americans who worked at what they called Synchronism, Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Russell loved to dress in women's clothes, Wright turned toward Buddha's navel.
The American closest to Gertrude's idea of attracting attention was Man Ray, but he did not get to Paris until after the war . . . [p. 247]
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Chapter 28 Gertrude in Glory [p. 249]
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The sister and brother act was breaking up, a chasm too wide for jumping was developing. In 1914 they parted for good, each going his own way . . .
[p. 255] . . . When her friend Bernard Fay said to her that the three people of genius he had met were Picasso, Gertrude and Gide, Gertrude asked "Why include Gide?
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Chapter 29 Stanton Macdonald-Wright-American of the School of Paris [p. 257]
As this book is being prepared for publication, Stanton Macdonald-Wright is eighty-one. He is one of the two Americans who contributed directly a new style to the School of Paris painting. With Morgan Russell he developed an abstract colorist form of painting called synchronism [sic]. Samples of his work were featured in the great cubist exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1971.
Macdonald-Wright's Paris, the art student days from 1907 to the opening guns of the Great War, was a Paris that was to prove that the nineteenth century lasted until 1914. Paris was to enter the twentieth century after the war as a different city.
Sitting with the artist in his Pacific Palisades studio, where he is still painting, I asked him to set down his version of that Paris.
"My Paris of 1907 bore little resemblance to the Paris of today. Stately buildings, beautiful avenues remain, but the buoyant spirit of the people has changed to a bitter and mournful pessimism, a hard-edged greed for money, a lack of pride in its tradition of gaiety, fine food and wine, blithe spirits-and yes, its treatment of women. In 1907 Paris was wine itself. In memory it remains the only place I ever felt wholly at home-chez moi.
"At least three times a week the uniformed guards, called piupiu, in their shining helmets and cuirasses rode throught the streets on their prancing horses, the band played Sambre et Meuse or other marching songs and always the citizens stopped to admire.
[p. 258] "The first day I enrolled at art school and fell at once to work. There were four schools on the Rue de la Grande Chaumiere and art material shops close by. George Moore, who had once studied painting in France, came to give a talk every spring at the Sorbonne. He began: "Gentlement, there are only two subjects a man of intelligence can dwell on-art and women." And those were our only interests. The croquis classes cost 50 cents, lasted two hours, and provided models (but no instruction and were always full of students. We missed these night classes only for special events like the Concert Rouge, the Russian ballet with Nijinsky and designs by Bakst or Mary Garden in Stauss's Salome.
"Art engulfed us during working hours, and after that there were only the ladies. I knew a dozen Americans who had jumped their Methodist barriers and were enjoying double menages. But the French girls would cook, clean and speak to tradesmen, and since they also helped us learn French, it was cheaper in the long run than living alone. Few Americans spoke French from childhood. In those days the French looked upon Americans as wealthy barbarians, incapable of producing art, or even of benefitting from French culture.
"There were plenty of studios to rent cheaply (no bathrooms, no tubs), but there were public bathrooms, or one could drag out an oversized fingerbowl and your girl would fill it for you so you could sit in five inches of tepid water. The girls were always perfumed and dressed with great chic. They addressed each other as Madame when sharing a menage.
"Restaurants and cafes resounded with noisy arguments about art and cliques battled cliques over Fauvism, Intimism, Cubism. One might tussle with a copain in a dance hall or cafe . . . A number of Americans were proteges of Mrs. Harry Paine Whitney, among them my confrere Morgan Russell, who did her proud. Unfortunately there were many who were bums and came over to live the life of Bohemians, or were merely incompetent . . .
"The Cafe du Dome was the gathering place of most American and German artists . . . [p. 258]
[p. 259] "There were no political activities, no political patterns. I doubt if one of us in fifty knew the name of the French president. We were dedicated only to art; the problems of society did not touch us. Art was god, and churches were only to hold great paintings. We did not even read the newspapers except for the extras put out at the yearly exhibition of the Salon des Independants. Anyone could enter for the fee of 25 Fr., and practically eveyone did. But the hanging jury was astute- the finest works by important artists were in the last six rooms and you passed through miles of abortions to see the art of the day. You went many times for the sake of comparing what was done by others with your own work. It was in the Salon d'Automne I saw a painting by Matisse called The Dance. I still remember it in detail; possibly it was the door that opened for me into modern art and my own development."
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