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Home , Dance (Matisse), Parade (ballet), The Rite of Spring, The Shock of the New

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ural of artistic gestures – the line. why bother doing it?” (1881-1973) was an in many ways defined artist of such extraordinary vision and 20th century , represent- originality that it is impossible to imag- ing a seemingly definitive break with ine the 20th century without him; his of the previous century. forceful personality laid claim to the Radically diverse factors contributed time in which he lived. Singularly pro- to cubism’s development: painterly re- lific, both in quantity of output and di- action to the work of Cezanne; a new versity of styles, Picasso worked in all awareness of non-European ; the artistic media of his day, from draw- utilization of the vernacular and the in- ing, painting, sculpture, and printmak- vention of collage. ing to ceramics, tapestry and photog- Discovery of the masks and sculp- raphy. He also wrote poetry, published tures from Africa and Pacific Islands two plays, and created stage designs was essential to Picasso’s work in the and costumes for ground-breaking the- century’s first decade, as boldly evi- An encounter with a Picasso exhibit atrical productions. No matter what denced in his Cubist masterpiece of can be overwhelming, the hyperac- the genre, Picasso left his mark. Like 1907, Les demoiselles d’Avignon. The tive imagination and virtuosity dazzle a genie that morphs into the shape of result of multiple sketches, outlines, one so. The artist dominates us imme- his vessel, Picasso seems to magically compositional edits and redos, this is a diately, almost takes us by force. The project himself into each medium that work that is truly rehearsed and staged: electricity of the paintings radiates out. he tackles. the painting’s interior scene of a Span- Hence the delight of entering the Me- Born in Malaga, Spain to a bour- ish brothel reveals five nude women, nil Collection’s exhibition of , geois family, Picasso arrived in as appropriately framed by a curtain. Picasso The Line. Absent the bold col- the new century began. In the coming There are two studies for Demoi- ors, the imposing canvasses. Instead, decades, the city thrived as a cosmopol- selles from 1907 on view at the Menil: we enter a space of quiet intimacy. itan hotbed of international cross-pol- in the first, a compositional sketch, Drawings invite dialogue. The Self- lination. Emigré painters, composers, the essential curtain is present, cross- Portrait of 1918 on the back wall of the writers and performers mingled with hatched, and pulled back by a semi- exhibit beckons, the intent gaze of the the native French, and a radical new robed woman standing with left arm artist draws us closer. It is a gaze we modernism emerged that left no stone upraised; the other four nude women know well from painted self-portraits unturned. Visual art, literature, theater, are also placed in poses analogous to both earlier and later, from photos of and music were each the staging the final painting. But, the Picasso throughout his life – those im- ground of revolutions that would im- includes at its center a sixth figure, a posing eyes with their magnetic pull. pact artists for the next 100 years and seated interloper. Despite the absence But here, in this drawing, all process beyond. of facial features, we feel, in the tilt of is exposed. The erasures, the soft faint- From the ateliers of Montmartre, the head and the forward lean of this ness of shadow, the sharper lines that where the painter worked in proxim- body, the voyeuristic male gaze. The are retraced; the darkening around the ity to and , paper reveals layers of erased lines, left eye, which intensifies the young to expatriate ’s rue de evidence of movement and thought; man’s stare. We feel the presence of Fleurus salon, Picasso was at the nexus the five women are decisively outlined the artist’s hand, and this immediacy of this creative activity. Between 1904 with a heavy hand, but the seated male redefines our relationship to both work and the 1920’s, Picasso’s work evolved is not. It is as though we can see the art- and creator. with startling rapidity, moving through ist removing him from the final com- Drawings leave nowhere to hide. the varying stages of cubism to the position before our eyes. Picasso’s sleight-of-hand virtuosity in stylistic turn towards neo-classicism. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon other media can have the artifice of Sometimes within the span of one year broke radically with the tradition of staged theater. Stripped of the formal- radical contrasts of style co-exist, as the female nude. Softness and sensu- ity of painting, Picasso with pencil in each visual discovery leads the artist to ality have been replaced by defiance, hand leads us into his studio; we find respond with yet another. Continuous angularity and a sense of impending ourselves miraculously one-on-one invention was Picasso’s mode of exis- danger. In the painting, two central with the master, alone in a room, fol- tence. As the artist would put it, “If you women stare out at us boldly, unsmil- lowing the most spontaneous and nat- know exactly what you are going to do, ing and lewd; the other three faces are

22 23 a rite of the sacri- Spring. Years later, when I sat down to ficial virgin, but learn the composer’s arrangement for we don’t need to piano duet, I was struck with wonder know the story that this visceral work could be con- in order to feel tained within dots and lines on a page. the primal sub- Performing the piano version of ject of the music. , which was created The work boldly by Stravinsky for the announced a rehearsals, brings this massive work modernism with down to the size of four-hands. The ex- ties to a mythic, perience is much like seeing the com- unknown past. position of a large painting outlined on Stravinsky repeat- paper. Just as color, scale and texture edly described are absent in Picasso’s 1907 study for the compositional Demoiselles, the piano version of The process for the Rite removes Stravinsky’s brilliant and work as intuitive, seductive , leaving us, unconscious. In simply, with musical lines. The pitches a concern that and rhythms remain unchanged, but would continue the color and dynamic scale are dra- to occupy modern matically reduced as instrumental tim- Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, artists throughout bres are replaced by the homogenous 8’ x 7’ 8” (243.9 x 233.7 cm) (Museum of , New York) the century, both sound of the piano. The Rite and Dem- Most composers work at the piano, fierce, mask-like and unknowable. The oiselles evoke art as shamanism. The using the keyboard instrument much confrontation with the viewer is direct. provocative quality of “otherness,” and as a painter may use pencil and pa- In an act of genius – to which the draw- its resultant confrontational relation to per. The first score of a large orches- ing makes us witness – Picasso has the public would become a defining as- tral work is usually written within the transferred the gaze of the male figure, pect of modernism, but there is simul- staves of piano music, with penciled at the center of the 1907 sketch, to our taneously, in the shock of the new, a notations for future orchestration. And own: outside the canvas, peering into summoning of ancient powers. so listening to the piano version, with the curtained interior, we are the voy- When I was a student at the Curtis instrumental colors removed, brings eur. Institute of Music, the Spanish conduc- unexpected insights – beyond the fun The musical equivalent of Picas- tor Rafael Fruhbeck du Burgos came to for the audience of watching two pia- so’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon is Igor lead a performance of The Rite of Spring nists scramble to produce the equiva- Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps with the conservatory’s . Only (1912). The infamous succès du scan- the pianists were left out of the proj- dale of the work’s premiere – a riot ect, as the scoring has no piano, but I at the Theatre du Champs-Elysee due attended rehearsals daily. With each as much to Nijinsky’s risqué choreog- generation, the rhythmic challenges of raphy as to the music itself, at times this complex work are met more easily, barely audible through the din of cat- but its demands for instrumental virtu- calls and fist-fights in the audience – osity and tight ensemble are high. The the orchestral masterpiece is the most orchestral magic of individual sounds influential musical work of the century. merging into the great whole is some- The Rite of Spring shares much with thing a pianist never truly experiences, the cubist aesthetic of Les demoiselles and I never felt this loss of experience d’Avignon. Angularity, , and as greatly as during those days hear- savage eroticism dominate. Rhythmic ing The Rite of Spring, as I listened dynamism is at the foreground, and to the progression from the first ner- one could say the same for Picasso’s vous rehearsal to a coherent yet edgy masterpiece, with its jagged edges and performance. The piece carries with it raw sexuality. tremendous aura. No musician forgets The scenario for the ballet involves his/her first performance of The Rite of 23 lent sounds of 100 musicians. We see essential step in modernism. Collage moniously marry artistic abstraction with immediacy the hand of the com- brought the materials of daily life to with grounded reality; the newspaper poser, the lines of compositional form. high art. The kiosks of Paris, a 19th cen- clippings anchor the drawings and We quite literally experience a black tury innovation, were plastered with lend them concreteness, in addition to and white version of the score, and multi-colored sheets of printed adver- textural contrast. in so doing, the musical materials are tising and announcements; in period But the act of cutting and pasting thrust starkly into the foreground. The photos, these columns of overlapping itself became a visual means to compo- harmonies are defined only by pitch; rectangles of paper resemble cubist sitional form, and eventually we see the there is no mix of reeds, strings and works. With collage, the graphics of outlines of cut-out shapes replace the brass to inform the sound. With The everyday city life are brought within paper itself: the line remains when the Rite of Spring, the haunting opening the artistic frame. The three drawings object disappears, and abstract compo- solo is stripped of its straining from 1912 (Bottle on a Table, Bottle and sition begins. Look at on a Table eeriness, and instead becomes a wind- Glass on a Table, Bottle and Glass) har- (1912), created with four contrasting ing melody; the savage colored papers, chords of of the and then Head Maidens no longer pit (1913) or Head strings against brass and with Moustache winds, and, similarly, (1912), where the ominous calm with all the geomet- which The Sacrifice be- ric shapes are gins is heard purely as drawn. The harmony, without the drawing Guitar plaintive hollowness that (1912) reads as Stravinsky achieves in his a harmonious orchestration. In a work jigsaw puzzle as dominantly rhythmic of interlocking as The Rite of Spring, the forms, while in piano version allows the Guitar (Sum- harmonies themselves to mer-Autumn become clearer and, in 1912), the re- some ways, more pun- peated squares, gent. rectangles and In composing The half circles seem Rite of Spring, Stravin- to emanate di- sky used cut-and-paste rectly out of the techniques to construct instrument, like a large score out of small harmonic vibra- compositional cells. Rath- tions of sound. er than creating transi- The focus tional passages to glue on geometric together contrasting ma- outlines, and terial, Stravinsky would stripping down sharply cut to a new tem- to the essential, po or texture, juxtaposing seem to be lead- blocks of compositional ing toward com- material. 1912, the year plete abstraction in which Stravinsky com- (where Kandin- posed The Rite of Spring, sky, following was also the year that his own compo- saw Picasso’s first forays sitional evolu- into collage. tion, is arriving The invention of Pablo Picasso; Three Dancers (Trois danseurs); 1925 at about this collage, the art of cut- Ink on paper;13 3/4 × 10 1/16 in. (35 × 25.5 cm) time in Munich). ting and pasting, was an The Menil Collection, Houston But instead, we

24 25 find Picasso veering into a complete- his own music maintained a distinct “art pauvre” into the limelight, continu- ly different direction, towards what economy and style of its own. ing the new “high art” fascination with would emerge as neo-classicism by the Although the relationship with the “low” or popular arts of the street. end of the decade. self-promoting and vain Cocteau often Satie’s music for is simple In 1917, Picasso sets off for Rome irritated Picasso to fits of exasperation, yet experimental, filled with rhythmic with , leaving behind war- the painter and composer got along fa- repetitions and seamlessly shifting time Paris. The trip would have long- mously – an unlikely duo. Satie, who meters. Like the scenario, the music time implications for Picasso. Here he had adopted his trademark costume of is non-developmental, and employs meets Olga, a dancer with the Ballets bowler hat, white collar and umbrella, mechanistic rhythms, American rag- russes, who becomes his first wife. She lived in spartan conditions, and seems time, and what one could call fractured appears here in the drawing, Seven an odd match with the sensual, ma- versions of organ grinder music, a Dancers with Olga Khoklova (1919). We chismo Spanish painter. But Satie was a staple of Parisian street fairs. Satie also see Picasso influenced by the fluid lyri- true original. And the two bonded over employed the urban sounds of sirens cism of the ballerinas; liquid, curving their shared frustrations with Cocteau. and typewriters, which often drowned lines outline the harmonious move- Satie wrote to his confidante Valentine out the music “as tramways drown ment of arched arms, poised bodies Gross, “I am sad and going crazy… Pi- out ,” noted composer and expressively tilted heads. Olga, in casso has ideas that I like much more Georges Auric. This constructivist mu- the foreground at bottom, is drawn than those of Jean! He tells me to keep sical element was mirrored in Picasso’s with delicate beauty, and she smiles working on Jean’s texts, but meanwhile cubist representations of skyscrapers, at the artist. Nothing could be farther he is working on another text, his presumably inspired by photographs from Les demoiselles d’Avignon, and own…And since I am aware of Picas- of New York that Gertrude Stein had one is hard put to imagine the chaste so’s wonderful ideas, it’s killing me to shown the artist, as no such buildings Olga’s reaction to her husband’s cubist work on the less good ones of Jean- oh, existed in Europe at that time. Satie’s chef d’oeuvre. The couple had married yes, much less good…what shall I do?” willingness to let the music drop into in 1918. Parade represented a break with the background presages both the The elegant classicism we see in past Ballets russes productions. Staged composer’s (1920) this drawing follows Picasso’s encoun- in Paris in the midst of World War I and film music; a few years later, Satie ters with Greek and Roman sculpture at the posh Theatre de Champs Ely- would compose the first synchronized on his Italian sojourn. Picasso and Coc- sees, the work was both avant-garde film score for René Clair’s surrealist teau had headed to Rome to start work and light entertainment. A series of Entr’acte. Parade did not become a sta- on a commission from Diaghilev for a vignettes on a poor theatre troupe in ple of the Ballet russes repertoire, but new ballet, Parade. The eccentric Erik Paris, the “parade” refers to the infor- the work left its mark. Satie’s reputa- Satie (1866-1925) would be the com- mal performances given outside the tion among the younger generation poser. theater before show time, which serve expanded, and Picasso would soon Satie existed on the margins of the as advertising to attract ticket-buyers. embark on yet another production for establishment music world. The com- The plotless entertainment, which Diaghilev’s Ballet russes. poser of 3 pieces in the form of a pear included the colorful characters of a It was also during the visit to Rome (1903) had emerged from the cabarets Chinese magician, three hawking the- of 1917 that Picasso and Igor Stravin- of Montmartre as an inspiration to the ater managers and an American little sky (1882-1971) first met, a meeting Dadaists. But prior to this, the influen- girl, baffled much of the audience but that reportedly provoked the painter to tial Gymnopedies (1888) had opened a excited artistic circles; it inspired Guil- confess that he did not have much of a path to French that steered laume Apollinaire to coin the term musical ear, but did have a strong inner away from the muddied waters of Wag- “sur-realism” in his post-performance sense of rhythm. Of these two great art- nerian chromaticism; Debussy had essay, which especially praised Satie ists that dominate their century, of this been among the first to seize the open- for music “so clear and simple” that it relationship of friendship and collabo- ing. In recognition of the outlier com- reflects “the marvelously lucid spirit of ration, we will hear more… poser’s impact, Debussy orchestrated France.” 10-foot high Cubist characters Copyright: Sarah Rothenberg two of the Gymnopedies in 1898, and paraded onstage with more naturalisti- his conducted concert performance of cally costumed dancers, referring back these arrangements in 1911 brought to Picasso’s circus figures of the past Satie further esteem. By the time he as well as bringing a light-heartedness began work on Parade, younger com- to cubism. The collaboration between posers were looking to Satie as a fore- Picasso, Cocteau, Satie and choreogra- runner of French , but pher/dancer Leonid Massine brought

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