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Home , Lump (dog), The Old Guitarist, Three Musicians

Class 5: The Multiple Image

A. Pablo’s Music

1. Title Slide 1 (: Brick Factory at Tortosa, 1909, Hermitage) 2. Charlus: “Viens, poupoule” 3. Picasso: Moulin Rouge and Moulin de la Galette

I threw that in to give us a rousing start. It is a French music-hall song of around 1900, about a working- class Parisian taking his wife to see a show. Last week, I showed you some pictures of night life by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) and others, and wondered what kind of music they might have heard, so I looked it up. The pictures are paintings of Paris night spots made by (1881–1973) in 1900 and 1901, just after he came to Paris. He is my featured artist of the day, though I want to look at him over the next two decades.

4. Picassso: Old Guitarist (1904, Chicago) and (1921, Met)

Here are two well-known paintings of his that also have to do with music. (1904, Chicago) is from his so-called “ period”; the Three Musicians (1921, NY Met) is from the postwar- period. Both are more approachable than much of the work that came in between, though their styles are quite different: one somewhat realistic, the other clearly not so. But can you find anything they might have in common? Primarily, I would say, the extreme flattening of the picture plane, which is something we have seen building up in several of the recent classes.

5. Picasso: Girl with a Mandolin (1910, MoMA) and other paintings

How did Picasso get from one to the other? Here are three pictures that come in between the other two: Girl with a Mandolin (1910), The Guitarist (1911), and Violin (1912); I chose them to keep up my musical theme; I’ll show them larger later. All three are what a normal art-lover would call Cubist, which is—in a very general sense—my main theme today. But they are different. The Girl with a Mandolin is quite recognizable as what the title says; she even has something of a personality, and a real name, Fanny Tellier. In The Guitarist, you would need to be told that this is a person playing an instrument; it is significant that this is equally often catalogued as The Mandolinist. There is no human figure, so far as I know, in The Violin; it is simply an arrangement of slightly overlapping flat shapes, several of which make reference to the Violin of the title.

6. All five Picasso pictures together.

Put them all together on a single slide, and you see that Picasso enters into a very special phase around 1910 through 1912. He was not alone in this; his friend (1882–1963) was painting right along beside him—“yoked together like two mountaineers,” as he later said—and their styles at the time

— 1 — were virtually indistinguishable; in some ways Braque was even in the lead. I have certainly no intention in this class of treating them separately. But I want to make two points: 1. This phase of pure , Analytical Cubism as it’s called, was very short—1910 to 1912 or thereabouts—though ripples from it are still being felt today. 2. While the path through Cubism taken by Picasso and Braque plots the main course of the movement, there were numerous other artists and art movements that intersected with it briefly or moved along a tangential trajectory, and still more who branched off in other directions later.

In today’s class, I to map the mainstream of Cubism fairly coherently. But I don’t want this to become just another art history class, especially when its topic is so challenging. To me, the most interesting thing about Cubism, just as it was for a generation or two earlier, is the possibilities it offered to artists working in other styles and even other media. As Peter Gay, one of the main authors I have read in preparation for this course, said: “All of modernist painting drew dividends from the dismemberment that the Cubists were visiting on their subject matter; it was like a license granted artists to reassert their high status in a striking variety of ways.” So I will follow what I am calling Picasso’s Path with a number of Excursions and Intersections, involving poetry, music, and dance, as well as the visual arts. And I will occasionally interrupt my account of Picasso’s journey to offer short Detours into some other medium—think of my music-hall opening as the first of these.

B. Picasso’s Path

7. Picasso: (1905), with Cézanne: Mardi Gras

Still on the theme of music and night-spots, here is another fairly early Picasso: a Harlequin clown. We have already seen his use of the white-face clown in the poster from 1900 I used as the first slide in the first class. Admittedly, I can easily see the influence of Toulouse-Lautrec in the subject and the painting of the woman, but there is another influence, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). Look at the treatment of the face and hands, and also how the implied perspective of the counter is immediately denied by pulling the figures forward into the flat plane.

8. Cézanne: Boy in a Red Waistcoat (1890, NGA DC), with detail

Or take Cézanne’s Boy in a Red Waistcoat (1890) down the road in the National Gallery. Picasso was fascinated by Cézanne, not least by his handling of paint. Look at the way the surface is broken up on the front of the boy’s pants or on the wall to his right, and think of the similar break-up in Cubist pictures. And look at the curtain: the fullness of the folds suggests depth, and yet the multiplication of curtains has the opposite effect, of flattening up the background so that the boy almost seems a part of it. Cubism will make much use of similar push-pull effects, of depth both suggested and denied.

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9. Cézanne: Mont Sainte-Victoire from Bibémus Quarry (1897, Baltimore BMA) 10. — the above with detail of Mont Sainte-Victoire (c.1906, NY Met)

Perhaps you know this landscape from 1897; it is right here in the Baltimore Museum of Art: Mont Sainte-Victoire from Bibémus Quarry from 1897. There was a big retrospective of Cézanne’s work in 1904, and the younger generation saw and marveled. Now we get the flattening of the picture plane more than ever: the distant mountain is pulled up and towards you; even the sky does not recede, as skies normally do. And everything is united by having a similar paint texture of little overlapping planes. This gets even more marked in Cézanne’s very late works, as this detail from one of his last versions of the subject, now in the Met, should show.

11. Braque: Houses at L’Estaque (1908, Lille), with Cézanne detail

Here is a picture by Braque made down in Cézanne country when the new Cubist style was just beginning to brew. Picasso was doing something similar, but Braque’s landscapes most clearly show the debt to Cézanne. What he has done, in effect, is to take the hints of houses among the trees in the foreground of one of the older painter’s landscapes, blow them up, compress them, and turn them into a geometry that is both more solid and less naturalistic than the original.

12. Picasso: Les demoiselles d’Avignon, earlier fragments

But how did Braque get into this? I have got to go back a year to trace another force that shaped the Cubist style. In May of 1907, Picasso began work on a large canvas that he kept strictly hidden in his studio. Now known as Les demoiselles d’Avignon (the Ladies of Avignon), it in fact referred to five prostitutes from a brothel in Barcelona; here is a fragment, showing two of the ladies and most of a third; I will reveal the rest in a moment. The subject may have had something to do with Picasso’s fear of death generally, and of syphilis specifically—and he had certainly not practiced much continence in his own life! (1848–1903) had died of the disease in Tahiti only a few years before, and Picasso was fascinated by what he saw as the occult in his art. Much later, Picasso would describe his own painting as “his first exorcism.”

13. Gauguin: Oviri (Death), 1894, Paris Orsay, with African masks

One day in June, Picasso takes a break, and goes to visit the sculpture museum at the Trocadéro. On impulse on his way out, he ventures into the Ethnographic Museum next door and is struck by a display of African masks. It is as though he had been handed powerful talismans, the raw material of magic. On his return to Montmartre, he sets feverishly to work. As one witness described it, “His eyes widen, his nostrils flare, he frowns, he attacks the canvas like a picador sticking a bull.” He replaces the heads of two of the Ladies with African masks, he greatly alters the modeling of the standing figure at the right, and for the fifth figure, in the lower right corner, he does something that nobody has ever tried before.

14. Picasso: Les demoiselles d’Avignon, transformation (1907, NY MoMA)

Picasso allows selected friends to come and see it. Most think he had gone mad, even Georges Braque. But Braque comes back again and again to study it, then goes to look again at Cézanne, then goes down

— 3 — south the paint landscapes like the one we’ve just seen, and when he comes back, he discovers that he and Picasso are now very much on the same page, and the page is a totally new one.

15. Picasso: Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, NY MoMA), detail bottom right

Picasso’s friend (1874–1946) came to see it with her brother Leo; he thought it was a terrible mess, but Gertrude held her peace; she would remain a staunch supporter of Picasso’s even as she became estranged from her brother. Ambroise Vollard, the dealer who had launched the Impressionists, and Félix Féneon, who had promoted , both retired in horror. But a new young dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, realized there was something unique going on in that bottom right corner. Can you see which way round she is sitting? “I have to say that Cubism was born on the right half of Les demoiselles d’Avignon,” Kahnweiler wrote some years later. Here for the first time, was a figure painted from both sides at once. Picasso sold him all the sketches, but refused for now to part with the picture. But three years later, Picasso did reward Kahnweiler with a portrait; I’ll show it soon.

16. Picasso: Gertrude Stein (1906, NY Met)

Let’s take a short detour. I mentioned Gertrude Stein. She bought her first Picasso in 1905—by no means her last. He became a regular visitor to her weekly salons, and painted her portrait in 1906. (She said it did not look much like her; he replied, “Oh, but it will do.”) Her work is difficult, but no more so than than Cubist paintings it resembles. Here is the first prose poem from her book Tender Buttons (1912), read by Laynie Browne. Yes, the title is a reference to nipples, but its content is not in the least salacious. This one is a description of that stock item in Cubist Still Life paintings, the glass carafe.; halfway through, I shall change to a Braque painting from 1910 that might be its visual equivalent.

17. Stein: “A Carafe” from Tender Buttons (1912) 18. — still from the above 19. Braque: Glass on a Table (1909–10, Tate)

I ended with a Braque painting from 1910 that might be the visual equivalent of Stein’s subject. Let’s look at it larger. You can see how the fractured handling of the object—split into fragments, and seen from different angles—is at this stage sculptural and rather heavy, as though carved out of wood. But all that would change in the work of both Braque and Picasso over the next few months.

20. Picasso: Girl with Mandolin / Fanny Tellier (1910, MoMA)

Almost all their work in the Analytic period of Cubism from later 1910 to early 1912 is delicate and almost weightless, as you will recall from the graceful Girl with a Mandolin, the portrait of Fanny Tellier that I showed you earlier. By breaking the image into fragments, Picasso makes the beholder do the work of putting it back together. I don’t know about you, but I find it relatively easy to put the pieces together here, not so much into an image, as into a personality—and one I very much like.

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21. Picasso: Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910, Chicago)

Though I should say that Picasso considered the work unfinished; had he continued, it might have become more complex and even more abstract, like the Kahnweiler portrait from later in the year that I mentioned before. I don’t recall seeing it, though I must have done—it’s in Chicago—but I am told it is really beautiful in the flesh, so to speak. Daniel-Henry is more difficult to reassemble in the mind than Fanny was, but it is still possible, and in more than one dimension; Picasso has painted him both with a serious mouth and with a smile, for example.

22. Van Dongen, Picasso, and Gris: Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

I went looking for a photo of what the man really looked like, didn’t find one, but perhaps went one better, with the work of two other artists. Kees van Dongen (1877–1968) was one of the original Fauves; flamboyant though his picture is, it still gives the sense of a true portrait. (1887–1927) on the right was very much part of the Cubist revolution, but by 1921 he had settled down—this is a topic I shall addess in a later class; his portrait drawing is the most objective, but I find it the least interesting.

23. Jouffret: Elementary Treatise on the Geometry of Four Dimensions (1903) 24. — the same, with Picasso’s Kahnweiler

Analytic Cubism, a term I’ve mentioned several times, refers to the visual processing of an actual model or subject, as opposed to Synthetic, where the content comes from the imagination. You sometimes hear people talk as though the analysis involved were something akin to a mathematical process, but I can’t see it. But mathematics comes into the story nonetheless. In 1907, someone gave Picasso a copy of a book by a mathematician called Esprit Jouffret (1837–1904): Elementary Treatise on the Geometry of Four Dimensions, 1903. Did Picasso understand it? I very much doubt it; I had to get my son, who has a PhD in the field, to explain just this plate. But if you look again at the last part of the Demoiselles, you can see how he was influenced by Jouffret’s irregular rectangles, and his triangles of cross-hatching. And I bet he was intrigued by the premise that you can use a two-dimensional medium to represent not only the three-dimensions of normal life, but also an invisible fourth dimension. And in that light, I see Jouffret’s influence all over a picture like the Kahnweiler. It is not math at all, but the excitement of all those geometric forms that look as though they should resolve but in fact never do.

C. Time for a Drink

25. Picasso: Absinthe Drinker (1901, Hermitage) with Glass of Absinthe (1911)

Around 1912, there came a crisis. So intense had been the work of Picasso and Braque, and an increasing number of their friends in developing Analytical Cubism that it seemed they were at an impasse; there was not much farther they could go. Time for some color; time for some contact with real life; time, in short, for a drink! All through his career, Picasso could turn on a dime and go off in some entirely new direction. Keeping to the Drinking theme, let me show you two of them.

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26. Picasso: Absinthe Drinker (1901, Hermitage) with Absinthe Glass (1914)

The larger picture on the first slide was Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe from 1911, just about as complex as he gets. Now let me replace it with two little sculptures he made on the same subject in 1914. Actually, Picasso made sculptures all through his career, largely for his own amusement. This piece was made in wax, then cast in six bronze copies, each of which he painted differently. You will see that the glass, distorted in definite Cubist style, merges with the woman drinking from it; depending on how each cast is painted, parts become her dress, parts her hair, and parts her lips. Picasso has also added a real slotted spoon holding up a fake of sugar; absinthe was taken by pouring the liquor slowly through a sugar-lump into the glass.

27. Picasso: Glass Bottle of Suze (1912, Washington University of St. Louis)

So there he was moving into three dimensions. In this painting from 1912, also on the subject of Drinking, he remains resolutely in two, but he makes even more use of real materials. This is a , composed of cut-out papers with relatively little pure painting. It solves one of the problems of Analytic Cubism, the loss of contact with real life—in fact the newspaper is an account of the 1912 Balkan War, which Picasso opposed—and abandons the previous battles between three (or four) dimensions and two by frankly capitulating to the flatness of the picture surface.

28. Pablo Picasso: Still Life with Chair Caning (1912, Musée Picasso)

One last work in my Drinking series: the Still Life with Chair Caning of 1912, which is Picasso’s first use of collage in a painting. It shows, or at least suggests, drinks on a glass-topped table with a chair tucked underneath. But for once I am going to outsource my teaching to this 6½-minute video by Drs. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. They clearly have the resources to pull in all sorts of visual aids that would take me weeks to prepare in such detail. Quite apart from their discussion of this particular work, what they say can stand as a summary of everything we have done today. They do move rather fast, however, so if there is anything you don’t understand, I will pause for questions after.

29. Video on Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning 30. Pablo Picasso: Still Life with Chair Caning, repeat

There was a lot there, so… Any questions?

31. Picasso: Three Musicians (1921, NY Met)

It is but a short step from here to the Three Musicians of 1921 that I showed at the beginning of class. This is now Synthetic Cubism, an art that does not rely on subjects from life, such as landscapes and portrait sitters, but which derived solely from the artist’s imagination, as a composition on the canvas, parallel to a poem or a piece of music.

That is as far as I am going to go in my narrative of Cubism. I am going end this hour with an Intersection I promised earlier. together with a short musical detour. The second hour will consist entirely of Excursions to other countries (Italy, Germany, America) and other media (music, poetry, melodrama, and dance), ending in 1917 with a Return to Paris.

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D. Lights, Color, Action!

32. : Champ de Mars (1911, Chicago) 33. — the same with the artist’s self-portrait (1906, Paris MN Art Moderne)

Remember the pictures of the Eiffel Tower I showed in the first class? So what do you make of this? It is influenced by Cubism, certainly; that Eiffel Tower bursting through the buildings and the weird conglomeration behind it could come from nothing else. But its color?! Neither Braque nor Picasso were doing anything so bright in 1911. The painter, Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) began with the bright palette of the Fauves, and he never gave it up, even when exhibiting with the Cubists. Later, he said: “I made paintings that seemed like prisms compared to the Cubism my fellow artists were producing. I was the heretic of Cubism. I had great arguments with my comrades who banned color from their palette, depriving it of all elemental mobility.” And there is something else here: so far from being isolated from reality as classic Cubism tended to be, Delaunay has the noise and bustle of burst through the picture frame. More on this element after the break.

34. Robert Delaunay: Hommage à Blériot (1914, Grenoble)

Or what about this? It is a riot of color, and almost abstract. But not entirely. Look at the biplane at top right, the airplane propellers here and there. And again the Eiffel Tower. It has a title: it’s a homage to Louis Blériot, the French aviator who had flown across the English channel five years before. You might say that all those circle motifs were also spinning propellers, but in fact the colored circle is a motif that interested Delaunay all his life, as you can see from these two pictures from a year or two earlier.

35. Robert Delaunay: First Disc (1912–13, p.c.) 36. Robert Delaunay: Simultaneous Contrasts, Sun and Moon (1913–13, NY MoMA)

You could call the first of these purely a color exercise. Like Georges Seurat (1859–91), his first inspiration, Delaunay was deeply interested in color theory; many of his paintings could be thought of as taking the interreaction Seurat’s of color touches and magnifying them to huge scale. But a work such as this one, also circular, from the same time, is no mere exercise. It is called Simultaneous Contrasts, Sun and Moon, but that is only a title. It is not a painting of the sun or moon. No, these two paintings are the first true Abstracts in French Art.

37. : Réunion à la campagne (1909, Musée Picasso)

One name that I must mention in all this is the poet and critic (1880–1918), who—until he died in 1918 by a war wound finished off by the Spanish Flu—could claim to be the mover and shaker of the avant-garde Parisian art community. As this painting by his lover, the painter Marie Laurencin (1883–1956) suggests, he knew everyone. He was one of the first promoters of Picasso. He is credited with coining the terms Cubism, Surrealism, and in between those, to describe the abstract work of Delaunay and his group, on the grounds that such work is the product of pure imagination, like the music of Orpheus.

38. Apollinaire: Lines for Lou

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He was in fact a very serious poet, and if I had the time to be responsible, I would give you a serious poem. But instead, I offer one of his Calligrammes, small drawings made up of words, such as this sweet little Valentine. It is but one example of the playful side coming into French art, poetry, and especially music around the time of the First World War, and lasting to mid-century at least. Although Apollinaire was not the originator of Concrete Poetry, he certainly reintroduced it to 20th-century art. We will see another example, in a very different context, after the break.

39. Cakewalk illustrations, early 20th century 40. — the above, animated, with Debussy’s “Little Nigar”

Apollinaire’s Calligrammes are but one example of the playful side coming into French art, poetry, and especially music in the second decade of the century. Another is the persistent interest in popular entertainment, as I have pointed out in many classes, including the beginning of this one. The illustrations show pictures of an American Negro dance, the Cakewalk, which got taken up by Minstrel shows, and reached Paris around the start of the century; the postcard on the left is dated 1903. Let’s animate the little clip in the middle—though the loop is very short—and add some music.

41. Cakewalk illustrations, repeat

The music was The Little “Nigar” by Claude Debussy (1862–1918), whom we have previously heard in the context of Impressionism or Symbolism. But the piece I am going to play, General Lavine, Eccentric, from his second book of Preludes (1913), is the closet thing I can think of to Cubism in French music, other than the pieces by Satie I’ll give you at the end of class. It is marked to be played “in the manner of a cakewalk.” General Lavine was Edward Levine, an American clown, who appeared in a mixture of military and minstrel garb. I suppose Debussy is merely echoing a vaudeville routine, but the little snatches of melody which result, set off against one another with abrupt contrasts of speed or dynamic, is pretty much Cubism in sound. I hope you agree. The pianist is Célimène Daudet.

42. Debussy: General Lavine, Eccentric 43. Class title 2 (Gris: Still Life)

E. Moving to Italy

44. Matisse: The Dance (1910, St. Petersburg Hermitage)

This slide, The Dance (1910) by Henri Matisse (1869–1954), is all about movement, which Matisse captures entirely through line. You would have thought that this would have been a quality of interest to the Cubists, but it is not something you see with either Picasso or Braque.

45. Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase #2 (1912, Philadelphia)

You do, however, get such a record of movement with the Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) by (1887–1968), a multi-faceted artist whom we’ll meet again in a later class. It is based

— 8 — on some of the stop-action photography being done at the time, but there is no doubt of the Cubist language he uses to express it.

46. Umberto Boccioni: The City Rises (1910, NY MoMA)

Here is another picture involving movement, in this case the street workers and horses in a big city. The title is The City Rises (1910) and the artist Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), a leading artist in the Italian Futurist Movement, which I consider an intersection with, rather than an outgrowth from, Cubism. The movement was founded in 1909 by the poet and journalist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944). Their milieu was essentially urban. Their aim was to express dynamism in all its forms, capture movement and not so much the passage as the simultaneity of time, creating an art of action and danger, rather than complacency and repose. But they were still looking for a language in which to do it; Boccioni’s tiny brush-strokes seem to derive from Renoir; their effect is rather blurred.

47. Umberto Boccioni: The Street Enters the House (1911, Hanover)

But by 1911, he had discovered Cubism. This is The Street Enters the House from 1911. It is a little like the Delaunay Eiffel Tower in the way all the buildings seem to be falling down in some explosion, caused this time by the woman opening her balcony shutters and looking out. But movement and light is only part of what assails her; what is really entering the house, more than anything, is noise.

48. Luigi Russolo: Scent (1910), and Intonarumori (1913)

And there was one Futurist artist, Luigi Russolo (1885–1947), who tried to address noise directly. All the senses, actually: the painting to the right is called Scent. But Russolo was a composer as well as a painter; the photo at top left shows Russolo with the Intonarumori or noise-makers he constructed to make sounds, and part of the score he wrote for an urban symphony called Risveglia di una città (Awakening of a City). I have a video of a number of enthusiastic college students performing a snatch of it, though I must admit that scored city noise is not much more interesting than the real thing!

49. Russolo: Risveglia di una città (1913), excerpt 50. Boccioni: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), with Charge of the Lancers (1915)

Boccioni absorbed the Cubist message not only as a painter, but also a sculptor, creating powerful forms with an immense sense of energy. By now, though, as the picture on the right suggests, the First World War was on the horizon, if not actually here. The approach of war was a gift to the Futurists, especially Marinetti, their founder, who proclaimed that “Art, in fact, can be nothing by violence, cruelty, and injustice.” He reported on the Siege of Adrianople in the 1912 Balkan War, and published an onomatapoeic poem glorifying the sound of gunfire. Although the subject is horrific, I can’t but thrill to this recording of Marinetti reading it. Note its use of abstract sound and, in its physical layout, another example of concrete poetry.

51. Marinetti: Zang, Tumb, Tumb (opening) 52. Luigi Russolo: The Revolt (1911)

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So what happened? Boccioni signed up with a cavalry regiment, but fell off his horse during exercises and died without firing a shot. Marinetti, unfortunately, survived to become the close friend and adviser to Benito Mussolini. The Revolution preached by Russolo and others would surface again in Russia.

F. Nightmare in Berlin

53. Giraud: Lunaire IV; with Rousseau: Carnival Evening (1886, Phildelphia)

The rest of this hour is basically a recital of works from the second decade of the century, which share with Cubism the characteristic of showing a subject in brief fragments seen from different angles. They will continue our excursions to different countries. The first, though, begins as a set of French Symbolist poems from the 1880s. In 1884, the Belgian writer Albert Giraud (1860–1929) published Pierrot Lunaire, a set of poems with fantastic imagery woven around the figure of the clown Pierrot in the moonlight. Like the Baudelaire poem I showed in the second class, this is written in a very tight form, the rondel, with only two rhymes, and with the first lines repeated at different points lower down. And also like Baudelaire, the exotic quality of the imagery is in constant tension with the restraint of the structure.

54. Giraud: Pierrot Lunaire, with Schoenberg self-portrait

In 1912, the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), then living in Berlin, made a setting of 18 of these poems in German translation for soprano and chamber ensemble. The music is atonal, but not yet serial. Every strange image in the Giraud text is made even stranger by the angular musical writing, the sharply contrasted instrumental colors, and the singing of the soprano who is directed to declaim in Sprechstimme—following the pitches and rhythms notated in the score, but not sustaining them as in song. We shall hear five minutes’ worth, three numbers: the comparatively gentle Nostalgia, followed by the violence of Cruel Pierrot and the quirky Parody. The singer is Hila Baggio with the Israeli Chamber Project. As the original titles were often hard to read, I have simply rewritten them brighter.

55. Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, 15–17

G. American Blackbirds

56. Wallace Stevens

At around the same time, England and especially America were seeing a parallel development among the Imagist poets, who favored a compressed style that placed sharp images in clear juxtaposition. Something of a cross between Symbolism and Cubism, in fact. And if we were to think of the English language poem that most clearly combines the Cubist multiplication of images with Imagist concision, what better than Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1917) by Wallace Stevens (1879–1955). It is short enough to get onto a single slide; I will show the text larger when we hear him read it.

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57. Stevens: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, text

By this time, Stevens was aware of the developments in French art. But I think his inspiration came as much from across the Pacific as the Atlantic. There is a decidedly Japanese feel to a lot of his imagery— in the first stanza, for instance—and several of the verses look like haikus. Let’s hear him read it.

58. Stevens: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, author’s reading 59. Stevens: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, text repeat

It is surprisingly dry, isn’t it? But then Modernism and Romanticism are very different things. Stevens is not aiming to create a feeling, so much as a sharp play of ideas. I would like to play two settings of the first three poems, both quite a lot later than our period. The first, from 1947, is by the Australian- American composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912–90). It is more romantic in nature, but I find it both vigorous and engaging. The singer is Lisa Harper-Brown with David Wickham at the piano

60. Glanville-Hicks: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, first three numbers 61. Foss: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, opening page

The second, from 1978, is by the German-American composer Lukas Foss (1922–2009). He is quite clear that such a radically modern poem should have equally radical modern music. He accompanies his singer by flute (for the blackbird, of course), piano, and percussion, but all three use what we call extended techniques, such as exploring extremes of range, or playing inside the lid of the piano. The singer here is Judith Kellogg.

62. Lukas Foss: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, first three numbers 63. Ramon Casas: The Bohemian (1981)

H. French Diversions

This is Erik Satie (1866–1925), the man whom Apollinaire was referring to when he coined the term Surrealist. I am ending the hour with him, because he did an actual collaboration with Picasso, but also because his music has several qualities that I think mirror the Cubist spirit: the abandonment of conventional time-signatures and bar-lines, the quicksilver switching of images from one point of view to another, and the habit of adding words to a non-verbal medium.

64. Satie: Sports et Divertissements, le reveil de la mariée

Satie wrote comments all over his instrumental scores, and had to issue instructions to the pianists not to read them out. Here is the manuscript of one of the 21 pieces in his Sports and Pastimes of 1914. Or fragments, rather. They are all very short, and all are further fragmented within that. I am going to play you four of the pieces: Waking up Married, Yachting, Fishing, and Golf. I have added translations by Laura Prichard, which I shall reveal progressively as the piece goes by. Some are more coherent than others, but you can certainly see why Apollinaire called Satie Surréaliste!

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65. Satie: Sports et Divertissements, excerpts 66. Picasso with the scene-painters for , 1917

In 1916, Satie collaborated with the writer Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) on a ballet scenario. Cocteau wanted to use some of Satie’s existing music, but the composer wanted to write something new. Too new for the orchestra, who refused to play until Ravel was called in to assure them that this was rea; music! There was no real story; the idea was a kind of competition between different groups in a circus parade to attract the largest audience. Anyway, the ballet was mounted in 1917 by Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929), with choreography by Leonide Massine (1896–1979) and sets and some quite extraordinary costumes by Picasso. There is a video of the complete one-act ballet online (in a more recent revival), but I am just giving you a few excerpts.

67. Satie/Cocteau/Picasso/Massine: Parade, excerpts 68. Class title 3 (Parade drop cloth)

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