“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, Spring, 1924, 3 rue Gounod, Saint-Cloud; and 23 Quai des Grand-Augustins, Paris

This beautiful home, overlooking the city of Paris from one of its posh suburbs, is owned by the heirs of the late French opera composer, Charles Gounod. As they are experiencing some financial difficulties, the heirs are delighted to rent the three-story, rosy brick, walled property to the American ex-patriates Gerald, 36, and Sara Murphy, 40.

3 rue Gounod, Saint-Cloud, Paris

The Murphys are just as delighted to move in. They fell in love as soon as they saw it.

On Easter Sunday, they are hosting a luncheon and competitive Easter egg hunt on the broad lawn, under the oak trees. Their three children are hunting with both their grandfathers, visiting from America:  Sara’s father, Frank Bestow Wiborg, about to turn 69, co-creator of the printers’ ink manufacturer Ault & Wiborg Company; and Gerald’s father Patrick Murphy, about 66, owner of the Mark Cross retail chain. Both children and adults are all dressed in their Sunday best.

Baoth, almost five, easily beats his brother, Patrick, three; their sister Honoria, six, is much more interested in the tin whistle from Grandfather than looking for eggs with her stupid brothers.

Gerald has been making quite a name for himself lately in Paris with his painting. In February, his 18-foot by 12-foot Boatdeck caused quite a stir in the Salon des Independents at the Grand Palais. There were so many complaints about its size, the organizing committee called a special meeting to toss it out, but a majority voted to keep it in. Two members of the committee resigned! (But were talked in to coming back the next day.)

Boatdeck by Gerald Murphy in the Salon des Independents

In one of the many newspaper interviews he has given, Gerald is quoted as saying that he is

truly sorry to have caused such a bother with my little picture.”

After all, he points out, Boatdeck is smaller than an actual boat deck. The pieces he’s working on now, Razor and Watch, are not quite so large.

Razor by Gerald Murphy

The Murphys have welcomed friends new and old to this house on the hill overlooking Montmartre, with a view of the Eiffel Tower. Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, 42, has brought some British artists. Painters Vanessa Bell, 44, and Duncan Grant, 39, along with Vanessa’s husband, art critic Clive Bell, 42, came and all dined outside. The Murphys played Chinese music on the gramophone, and Picasso began sketching pictures of Chinese dancers’ feet, as he imagined them.

One of the main attractions of this home is the easy access to Paris city center. The train trip on the line from Versailles-Rive-Droite is only 15 minutes, and there are more than 50 trains each day. This makes it easy for the Murphys to go back and forth from their pied a terre on quai des Augustins.

*****

In their city apartment—with its view up and down the Seine, and large black and white vases holding flowers as well as stalks of light green celery—the Murphys have been meeting some more new friends.

23 quai des Grands-Augustins

American writer Donald Ogden Stewart, 29, comes by for dinner almost every night and reads aloud pieces of the comic novel he’s working on, Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad, which has Sara in stitches. Sometimes he brings along novelist John Dos Passos, 28, and former Dial managing editor Gilbert Seldes, 31, who know each other from Harvard.

Stewart has also introduced the Murphys to an American couple whom he met at Yale, poet Archibald MacLeish, turning 32, and his wife, concert singer Ada Hitchcock MacLeish, 31. Mutual friends had helped the MacLeishes find a fourth floor walk up with no heat or hot water on Boulevard St. Michel where they’ve been living since arriving last fall.

When in the city, all these ex-pats pay late night visits to Zelli’s Royal Box in Montmartre. The jazz and the pretty young women are better than what you’ll find at last year’s hotspot, Le Boeuf sur le Toit. And arriving with the Murphys gets you a special seat.

Montmartre jazz clubs

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, City Books on the North Side and Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Mark your calendar! The Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books returns to the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Highland Park on Saturday, May 11. Stop by the “Such Friends” booth in Writers’ Row.

This summer I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, January 31, 1924, Galerie Simon, 29 bis rue d’Astorg, Paris

Making his way down the stairs to the basement of this art gallery, art buyer and dealer Henri-Pierre Roche, 44, has his hopes up.

Rue d’Astorg

He has dealt with the gallery owner, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 39, many times before, buying numerous works of art for Roche’s clients both here in Paris and also in New York City.

Today he is visiting on behalf of one of his best clients, American corporate lawyer John Quinn, 53, who has amassed one of the most substantial collections in America—particularly of French works. One of the painters Roche deals with often, Spaniard Pablo Picasso, 42, has tipped him off that Kahnweiler has a special work by Henri Rousseau in his basement. Roche is thinking that Quinn might be interested.

And then he sees it.

The Sleeping Gypsy.

J’eus le coup de foudre, Roche thinks. Love at first sight. Sweet ghastly splendor. With a dark soul.

He must cable Quinn.

The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, and Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Don’t forget! This Saturday, February 3, we will be celebrating the 150^th birthday of my fellow Pittsburgher Gertrude Stein, at City Books from noon to 4 pm on the North Side, a five-minute walk from where she was born. Details are here.

Later next month I will be talking about early 20^th century supporters of the arts like the Stein family at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, January 14, 1924, 41 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London

Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, 32, is so excited. She is writing to her boyfriend, economist John Maynard Keynes, 40, currently in Cambridge, to tell him the good news.

Despite the feuds they had working together last year, noted Russian choreographer Leonide Massine, 27, has been in touch and has offered Lydia the opportunity to be his lead ballerina in a new company he is putting together, Soirees de Paris.

Lydia Lopokova and Leonide Massine

Both Massine and his funder, patron of the arts Count Etienne de Beaumont, 40, are determined to create a rival to the dominant company, the Ballets Russes, headed by Serge Diaghilev, 51, for whom both Lopokova and Massine used to dance.

Late last year, de Beaumont hired Massine and leased La Cigale music hall in Montmartre to begin building the Soirees de Paris company. He has been commissioning top artists to create new programs, including two involved with Massine in Diaghilev’s radical ballet Parade almost seven years ago—Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, 42, and French composer Erik Satie, 57.

Costume designed by Pablo Picasso for Parade in 1917

The contract means Lydia will be spending six weeks this spring in Paris dancing in many different roles; the program may transfer to London after that; and she can name her own price.

Lydia is thrilled to be asked to join this troupe. She writes to Maynard that Massine has promised

new channels in choreography…All that is best in painting and music shall unite.”

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, and Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Join us on Saturday, February 3, to celebrate the 150^th birthday of my fellow Pittsburgher Gertrude Stein, at City Books on the North Side, a five-minute walk from where she was born. Details are here.

Later next month I will be talking about early 20^th century supporters of the arts like the Stein family at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, December, 1923, Paris

On the Left Bank, inside the English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company on rue de l’Odeon, there are festive decorations, including a lit Christmas tree perched on a table.

The shop owner, American ex-patriate Sylvia Beach, 36, had been planning to spend the holiday with her mother, who is visiting Sylvia’s sister in Florence for her birthday.

Shakespeare and Company

However, Sylvia has decided that, before the end of the year, she needs to bring out another edition of Ulysses by Irish novelist James Joyce, 41, which she first published early last year. The second edition didn’t include all the necessary corrections. Another edition, published in Paris by the London-based Egoist Press, had almost all of its 500 copies destroyed by UK customs last year. The owner of the Egoist, Harriet Shaw Weaver, 47, has suggested that Sylvia call this latest edition—which will include all the corrections—the fourth version. So the ones destroyed will not be forgotten.

This newest Ulysses will have a cover the reverse of the others, this time white paper with blue type. Sylvia wants to send one to her mother as a birthday present, and personally deliver one to Joyce at home for Christmas, the way she did on publication day last year, his 40^th birthday.

Ulysses, fourth edition

This year has been hectic for Beach.

In the fall, she had a visit from the American writer living in London, T. S. Eliot, 35, whose poem The Waste Land, published last year, greatly impressed her. Sylvia wrote to her mother,

He is such a charming fellow and so interesting…the old fashioned sort of American and very good looking. I only wish he lived in Paris. He is our only modern writer I like after Joyce. Everyone that he was exhibited to was carried away with Eliot.”

Another American who came to visit early this month was Barnet Braverman, 35, an advertising man who successfully smuggled illegal copies of Ulysses from his Ontario office to his Michigan apartment. He brought along a copy for Joyce to sign.

A French tax man showed up the other day, requesting to see her company books. Sylvia sent him on his way, promising to have one of her assistants bring a set of accounts to his office.

All this activity has left Sylvia exhausted. But she and her partner Adrienne Monnier, 31, who owns the French-language bookstore across the street, have still managed to go out to the theatre most nights.

*****

Map to help find your way around Paris

On the Ile St. Louis, about a 20-minute walk north of rue de l’Odeon, another small American publisher is winding up a successful year. The Three Mountains Press, run by Bill Bird, 35, has brought out a series of six books by ex-patriates, edited by poet Ezra Pound, 38. The most promising is in our time, a group of 10 vignettes by the foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, Ernest Hemingway, 24. Ernie is currently back in Toronto where he and his wife moved for the birth of their first child, John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, now two months old. Bird has heard that they are not happy in Canada and will be moving back to Paris soon in the new year.

Ile St. Louis

*****

Up in Montmartre, Ezra’s mistress Olga Rudge, 28, recently performed a concert with American composer George Antheil, 23, who is renting an upstairs room at Shakespeare and Company. Ezra is tone deaf; but Olga jumped right in for the challenge of Antheil’s experimental Three Violin Sonatas, commissioned by her friend, French writer Jean Cocteau, 34. The first sonata is a dramatic piece which ends with the composer-pianist literally hammering out the notes.

Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique, Montmartre

*****

Across the Right Bank, in mid-December there is a dramatic funeral procession from the church of Saint Honoré d’Eylau in the west to Pere Lachaise Cemetery in the east. Raymond Radiguet had died at the age of 20. His first novel, Le Diable du Corps, was such a big hit, all his fans had been hopeful for his second, which will now be published posthumously.

Saint Honoré d’Eylau church

Cocteau was so affected by his young friend’s death, he hasn’t been out to see anyone since. All the funeral arrangements were handled by designer Coco Chanel, 40. To emphasize Radiguet’s youth, the coffin, hearse, flowers and horses are all white. Marching with the mourners, who include Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, 42, and one of Radiguet’s former lovers, Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, 47, is a jazz band from the club Le Boeuf sur le Toit, fronted by bandleader Vance Lowry, 34, the African-American “Banjo King.”

*****

Across the Seine, back on the Left Bank, another club is drawing in the ex-pats and the French as well. The Jockey on Boulevard Montparnasse, about a 20-minute walk south of Sylvia’s shop, has recently been bought and totally redecorated by American designer Hilaire Hiler, 25. He has used a cowboy motif, which appeals to locals as well as tourists.

The Jockey, 146 Boulevard Montparnasse

Radiguet and Cocteau frequented the bar, along with American publisher Robert McAlmon, 28. Painter Marcel Duchamp, 36, who recently returned to his native Paris after a few years in New York City, comes often with his American friend, Man Ray, 33, and his partner, Kiki of Montparnasse, 22. Man and Kiki have just moved into the nearby Istria Hotel, where Duchamp is staying, to be closer to Ray’s studio on rue Campagne-Premier. Ray has hired his first assistant, a sculptor he knew back in New York, Berenice Abbott, 25, whom he found almost starving on the streets of Paris. Ray is having more success with photography now, rather than the painting and sculpting he used to do.

*****

About a 15-minute walk east of the Jockey, other ex-pats are changing their living arrangements as well.

English editor Ford Madox Ford, just turned 50, has come to stay with his brother and brought along his Australian partner, artist and writer Stella Bowen, 30, and their three-year old daughter Julia. His sister-in-law has become annoyed with this intrusion, so she has rented the Ford-Bowen family a cottage behind their house on the Boulevard Arago for only 200Fr a month. They are near the tennis courts where Hemingway and Pound often play. Unfortunately, when Ford wants to give one of his frequent parties, he has to rent out a local bal musette.

65 Boulevard Arago

A few weeks ago, a friend, West Indian writer Ella Gwendoline Rees-Williams, 33, moved into the cottage with Ford and Stella. Rees-Williams’ husband was recently extradited to Holland for being in France illegally, and she is grateful to have a place to stay. Stella doesn’t seem to mind the attention Ford pays to their new roommate.

*****

All predictions are that, by the end of the year, the Seine will rise and overflow its banks, spreading itself throughout the Left and the Right Banks.

River Seine flooding

N. B.: Thanks to Lisa Thomson (LisaT2@comcast.net) for the wonderfully helpful map of Paris.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923, are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, and Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Early in the new year I will be talking about the literary summer of 1923 at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes at the University of Pittsburgh, and early 20^th century patrons of the arts in the Osher program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, October 2, 1923, Paris

This European trip is going so well. American corporate lawyer John Quinn, 53, sent his social secretary, Mrs. Jeanne Foster, 44, to Paris ahead of him to make arrangements and set up visits with the French artists and dealers Quinn has been buying from for years. Tomorrow he and Mrs. Foster are leaving Paris for 10 days of meeting artists and collectors in Italy. Today, he is writing an update to an associate back in New York City:

I am leaving for Italy tomorrow…I shall be back in Paris next Thursday morning, 11^th [of October]…I have seen Braque since I have been here, at his studio, and Picasso, at his studio…

Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in their studios

also Brancusi, and I have been to the studio of Signac during his absence in the country. This afternoon I have an appointment to see Doucet’s collection and probably the Pellerin collection…We played golf at Fontainebleau and on Friday we played at St. Cloud. Brancusi played with us the first two days and on our trip to Fontainebleau…Satie came along as an ‘observer.’

Erik Satie, John Quinn, Constantin Brancusi, and Quinn’s associate Henri-Pierre Roche at Fontainebleau

All the games were delightful. You would like Braque very much. I saw the most interesting things in Picasso’s studio that I have seen in Paris…I also saw Delaunay.”

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University, and about art collector John Quinn at the Tiffin-Seneca Public Library, co-sponsored by the Heidelberg University English Department, in Quinn’s hometown of Tiffin, OH.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, early July, 1923, Hotel du Cap, Cap d’Antibes, Riviera, France

Sitting on the beach, about a half mile from the hotel, Russian ballerina Olga Picasso, 32, is watching her two-year-old son, Paolo, playing with their American friends’ children.

Portrait of Olga by Pablo Picasso

Shortly after Olga arrived here with Paolo; her husband, Spanish painter Pablo, 41, and his mother, Maria Ruiz, 68, the Murphys, a family they’ve gotten to know back in Paris, showed up at the same hotel. Gerald, 35, has worked on some theatre projects with Pablo, and the Picassos have attended many of the fabulous parties Gerald and his wife Sara, 39, have given.

What’s odd is to be here on the Riviera in the summer! The French won’t come near the place after May. But Gerald and Sara enjoyed the remote quiet so much last summer, they vowed to keep coming back. The Hotel du Cap owner agreed to keep the place open; he’s hoping that the damp, cold weather up north this year will lead many more Parisians to give the south a try.

At first, communication between the two couples was a bit formal. Olga received a note from Sara, in French, saying,

Cher Mme. Picasso…Our children are going to the beach at 945 and will return at 1130 (they eat lunch at 12). We would be so happy if your baby could accompany them, with his nurse. Would you and M. Picasso come swimming with us later, at 11? The beach is really very nice and we have an American canoe.”

The hotel is so empty, the two families have taken to having dinner together in the big dining room, with a kids table for Paolo and the Murphys’ Honoria, 5, Baoth, 4, and Patrick, 2. The only other guest is a Chinese diplomat and his family, who decided to stay on when they found out the hotel would remain open.

Baoth, Sara, Patrick and Honoria Murphy

The Murphys are getting along just great with Pablo’s mother, who is on her first trip to France from Spain to see her grandson, even though she speaks no English or French. She’s trying to teach the Murphys Spanish.

Olga is watching Pablo and Gerald rake seaweed in the sand. He is interested in Gerald’s unique style, but they rarely talk about art.

She turns her gaze to Sara, sitting on a small rug, her linen dress blowing in the warm Mediterranean breeze, her string of pearls running down her back.

Sara makes motherhood seem so effortless. She enjoys her children.

Olga is a wreck. She and Pablo have been growing apart. They fight more often. And he has been doing many more drawings of Sara than he is doing of his own wife. In some, he incorporates sand from the beach. In one he is depicted as Mars and Sara is Venus. There is even one nude portrait—it must be of Sara. The figure is wearing her pearls draped down her back.

Oil and pencil drawing for Woman in White by Picasso

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, June 17, 1923, Pont de la Concorde, down river from Quai Anatole France, Paris

Those Americans are throwing a party. Again. This time on a barge.

Ex-pats Sara, 39, and Gerald Murphy, 35, are so enamored of Les Noces, the ballet premiered last week by Serge Diaghilev, 51, that they have invited everyone associated with the production to a huge party on this restored barge, which serves as a restaurant during the week.

Les Noces

Well, almost everyone. Diaghilev wouldn’t let them invite all the dancers and the Polish choreographer, Bronislava Nijinska, 32, isn’t here because she is still feuding with the Russian costume and set designer, Natalia Goncharova, 41.

The Murphys had wanted to hold the party at Cirque Medrano, but the circus manager refused, stating that his venue “isn’t an American colony yet.”

Sara forgot that the markets on Ile de la Cite would be selling birds, not flowers, because it is a Sunday. So instead she went to the Montparnasse bazaar, bought a whole lot of cheap toys and arranged them as pyramids up and down the banquet table.

Sara and Gerald Murphy in party dress

The evening starts with cocktails under the canopy of the upper deck. The ballet’s composer, Igor Stravinsky, celebrating his 41^st birthday, sneaks downstairs to re-arrange the seating cards to his liking.

A huge laurel wreath with a banner reading “Les Noces—Hommages” greets the guests when they enter the party room.

French poet Jean Cocteau, 33, steals a dress uniform from the captain’s room and runs through the barge carrying a lantern, shouting,

On coule!” (“We’re sinking!”).

Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, 41, here with his wife Russian wife Olga, celebrating her 32^nd birthday, is taking all the toys from the banquet table and piling them into one large pyramid, topped with a stuffed cow standing astride a fire truck ladder.

Marcelle Meyer, 26, French pianist with Les Six group, is playing Scarlatti on the piano.

Les Six with Marcelle Meyer

Designer Goncharova is reading the guests’ palms.

Both the publisher, Scofield Thayer, 33, and the editor Gilbert Seldes, 30, of the American Dial magazine, are here. Seldes is getting all the guests to autograph his copy of the menu.

As dawn approaches, Les Noces’ Swiss conductor, Ernest Ansermet, 39, takes down the large wreath and holds it as the ballet’s composer, Stravinsky, takes a flying leap straight through the middle.

Igor Stravinsky

Then everyone goes home.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, March 20, 1923, Art Institute of Chicago, Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois

Last year, English art critic Clive Bell, 41, published an influential essay, “Since Cezanne,” which discussed Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, also 41: 

…Picasso is a born chef d’ecole. His is one of the most inventive minds in Europe…His career has been a series of discoveries, each of which he has rapidly developed.

A highly original and extremely happy conception enters his head, suggested probably by some odd thing he has seen. Forthwith he sets himself to analyze it and disentangle those principles that account for its peculiar happiness. He proceeds by experiment, applying his hypothesis in the most unlikely place.”

Today, Picasso’s first solo show in the United States, “Original Drawings by Pablo Picasso,” opens here, put on by the Arts Club of Chicago in the galleries they lease from the Art Institute.

Catalog for “Original Drawings by Pablo Picasso”

Picasso’s paintings have been exhibited in the States before, as part of the 1913 Armory Show, which opened in New York City but then toured here at the Art Institute, and moved on to Boston. Two years ago the Arts Club included two of his paintings in a group show.

This time, from his home in Paris, Picasso has given specific instructions to the organizers about how to display the 53 original drawings, ranging from 1907 to just last year.

Tete de jeune homme by Picasso

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This summer I will be talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, late December, 1922, Montmartre, Paris; and West End, London

In Paris, the Ballets Russes is performing Parade, which they premiered here five years ago with music by Erik Satie, 56, and a scenario written by Jean Cocteau, 33. The scenery, curtains and costumes are all created in a Cubist style by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, 41, who gets his own ovation when the audience stands up to cheer, and faces the box he is seated in.

A costume for Parade designed by Pablo Picasso

But the big success of the season is Cocteau’s production of Antigone, his “contraction” of Sophocles’ original, as Cocteau calls it.

Picasso also received a round of cheers during the rehearsals for the play, when Cocteau brought him to an almost bare set, with just some masks and a violet-blue and white backdrop, and told the painter to create a hot, sunny day.

Picasso paced the stage. Picked up a piece of red chalk. Rubbed the white boards with it until they looked like marble. Dipped a brush in a bottle of ink. Drew some lines on the background and blackened in a few spaces.

Three Doric columns appeared. All those watching applauded.

Cocteau also persuaded Coco Chanel, 39, to design the heavy Scotch woolen costumes for Oedipus’s daughters.

Antigone is packing them in at the 100-year-old Théâtre de l’Atelier, owned by the actor and drama teacher Charles Dullin, 37, who directed the production and appears in it as well. Dullin’s mother pawned the family’s furniture and silverware to get enough money for Charles to buy and renovate this theatre.

Théâtre de l’Atelier,

Cocteau himself is playing the part of the Chorus, and also in the cast is one of Dullin’s students, Antonin Artaud, 26. The music for the play has been written by Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, 30, and the lead is played by a Romanian dancer, Génica Athanasiou, 25, who speaks so little French she had to learn her lines syllable by syllable. As a reward for her efforts, Cocteau has dedicated the production to her.

Génica Athanasiou by Man Ray

Each evening begins with a short curtain-raiser by Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, 55, who had success last year with his Six Characters in Search of an Author.

The names Picasso, Chanel and Pirandello are what initially drew the crowds. However, now that Antigone is a big hit, Cocteau is becoming a cult figure among young men who show up in large groups to applaud each night. Some have even been hanging around outside Cocteau’s house and climbing up the lamp post just to get a look at him.

Jean Cocteau by Man Ray

*****

In London’s West End, German Count Harry Kessler, 54, is enjoying theatre while visiting the city for the first time since the Great War broke out. He confides his impressions to his diary,

Not much change in the shops. They are as good class and as elegant as they used to be. But there is no longer the astounding amount of hustle and luxury as in 1914 and which is still to be met in Paris. It can be sensed that the country has become poorer and the shoppers rarer…[At the theatre] to my astonishment, at least half the men in the stalls were in lounge suits, the rest in dinner jackets, and only five or six in tails. A real revolution or, more accurately, the symptom of such.”

A West End theatre audience

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Early next year I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, and about The Literary 1920s in Paris and New York City at the Osher program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available d on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, early November, 1922, Pension Nowe, Ronda San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain

Had he not promised to give the lecture, French writer Andre Breton, 26, and his wife Simone, 25, would head back to Paris today.

But they drove here a few days ago with their friends, painter Francis Picabia, 43, and his mistress, for the opening of an exhibit of Picabia’s work at the Dalmau Gallery, and Breton promised to deliver a lecture about the current state of art in France.

Femme Espagnole by Francis Picabia

It took over a week to get here, in Picabia’s sporty Mercer convertible. Breton wore his leather pilot’s helmet, goggles and his heavy fur coat. In Marseilles they stopped to see a disappointing exhibit with fake African artefacts, where Breton spent 20 francs on a stuffed armadillo. Which woke up and jumped out of his arms.

Mercer touring car

Since they arrived in Barcelona, Simone has been bedridden with salmonella poisoning. The only saving grace has been the Gaudi architecture throughout the town. Andre sent a postcard of the cathedral Sagrada Familia to his Spanish friend back in Paris, painter Pablo Picasso, 41, asking,

Do you know this marvel?”

Sagrada Familia

In his talk Breton is planning to announce, in French to an audience of Spaniards, his belief that the Dada movement is over. He feels that there is a new movement brewing, which involves artists such as Picabia, Picasso, and American Man Ray, 32, but they are so far unorganized and un-named.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Early next year I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, and about The Literary 1920s in Paris and New York City at the Osher program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.