Copyright by Francisca Antonia Sofia Folch-Couyoumdjian 2014
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Copyright by Francisca Antonia Sofia Folch-Couyoumdjian 2014 The Dissertation Committee for Francisca Antonia Sofia Folch-Couyoumdjian Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The Marquis de Cuevas: Pushing the Boundaries of Self Committee: Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, Supervisor Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba Tatiana Kuzmic Alexandra Wettlaufer Lynn Wilkinson The Marquis de Cuevas: Pushing the Boundaries of Self by Francisca Antonia Sofia Folch-Couyoumdjian, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2014 The Marquis de Cuevas: Pushing the Boundaries of Self Francisca Antonia Sofia Folch-Couyoumdjian, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisor: Elizabeth Richmond-Garza Abstract: Chilean dance impresario Marquis George de Cuevas was born Jorge Cuevas Bartholin (1885-1961) and is best remembered as a fashionable socialite of the 1940s and 50s who married heiress Margaret Rockefeller Strong and founded several ballet companies in Europe and America in the wake of the great Ballet Russes era. This dissertation examines how Cuevas cultivated his fictionalized public persona, an identity that is essentially queer on several levels. Cuevas participated, reflected and resisted the several labels that were imposed on him. As Spanish aristocrat, American citizen, international ballet patron, Parisian socialite, and heir to the Russian dance avant-gardes, Cuevas distanced himself from his Chilean origins. Proud of having achieved “real” success by triumphing abroad, however, Cuevas was always acutely aware of his shortcomings as a foreigner. Classed as an eccentric other, Cuevas participates in the larger discourse of cosmopolitanism, engaging with the issue of what it means to be foreign in the cities of Paris, New York and Santiago de Chile. The four chapters that comprise this dissertation explore the ways that boundaries of class, sexuality, gender, race, and citizenship are broken, or momentarily disrupted by iv Cuevas. I situate Cuevas’s foreign aspirations in the context of the South American obsession with Europe, and Paris in particular. I also examine how Cuevas inhabits the roles of dandy and flâneur in an attempt to fit in the modern urban context of Paris. Anxiety regarding the figure of the foreigner and social upstart is perceived in the arguable failure of Cuevas’s best-remembered social event, a grand costume ball that was to gather the most fashionable men and women of the international Café Society. Perhaps Cuevas’s most successful project was the making of his own chameleonic identity, which emerges in the letters addressed to French-Romanian author Princess Marthe Bibesco, who wrote the libretto for the ballet initially entitled The Bird Wounded by an Arrow, which also crucially establishes Cuevas’s artistic manifesto. An account of Cuevas’s life and works treads into the swampy terrain of fiction, and this dissertation offers a literary approach that considers Cuevas as a figure of legend. v Table of Contents List of Figures………………………………………………………………… vii Introduction. Before the Curtain: The Marquis de Cuevas as a Literary Character………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter 1. Chileans in Paris: A De(con)structive Ideal………………………… 13 Chapter 2. Strangers within the City Gates: Dandies, Flâneurs, Foreigners…… 65 Chapter 3. The King of Nature at the Fête Champêtre: The Perils of Staging a Costume Ball………………………………………………………… 136 Chapter 4. The Tale of the Wounded Bird: Epistolary Agony and the Abject Self……………………………………………………… 232 Conclusion. Curtain Call: The Legacy of the Marquis de Cuevas.………… 310 Notes………………………………………………………………………… 319 Works Cited………………………………………………………………… 343 vi List of Figures Fig. 1. Photographs of Eduardo Cuevas Avaria and Napoleon III……………… 27 Fig. 2. Illustration showing the Marquis in profile by Joan Junyer.…………… 94 Fig. 3. Studio photograph showing the marquis in the dandy attire. …………… 94 Fig. 4. Advertisement for Ballet Gala Premiere………………………………. 109 Fig. 5. La loge grillée (The Grated Box). Lithography by Honoré Daumier…. 112 Fig. 6. Les Invisibles. Hand-colored etching by James Gillray………………… 128 Fig. 7. Les Suites du bal masqué (After a Masquerade) by Paul Gavarni……... 150 Fig. 8. Jorge Cuevas dressed as an eighteenth century courtier for the 1905 costume ball in Chile………………………………………………… 160 Fig. 9. Photograph showing the Marquis de Cuevas and his Countess for the Santiago ball in 2008. ………………………………………… 165 Fig. 10. Invitation to Cuevas’s Fête Champêtre designed by Federico Pallavicini……………………………………………………………………. 167 Fig. 11. L’Indifferent (The Indifferent Man) by Jean-Antoine Watteau……… 172 Fig. 12. Maskerade (Masquerade) by Jean-Antoine Watteau.……………….. 174 Fig. 13. Photograph of Paul Phelan’s article “The Marquis Holds a Levée”… 179 Fig. 14. Ready for the Big Shindig. Associated Press Photograph…………….. 205 Fig. 15. “The Marquis de Cuevas Makes His Entrée as the God of Nature”.….. 208 Fig. 16. Valerian Rybar, the Marquis de Cuevas, and Count Rasponi at the Biarritz Ball……………………………………………………. 215 Fig. 17. Photograph of a pas de deux divertissement starring Rosella Hightower, performed in front of the Marquis and guests……………. 216 Fig. 18. Elsa Maxwell and Merle Oberon at the Biarritz Ball………………… 224 Fig. 19. Photograph of Cuevas and Salvador Dalí taken backstage at a performance of Ballet International………………………………….. 239 Fig. 20. Portrait of Princess Marthe-Lucile Bibesco by Giovanni Boldini..….. 251 Fig. 21. Photograph of Piège de Lumière…………………………………….. 264 vii Fig. 22. Photograph after performance of L’Aigrette………………………… 270 Fig. 23. Photograph of Pekinese dogs sent to Marthe Bibesco………………… 273 Fig. 24. Photograph Les chiens du marquis de Cuevas by Robert Doisneau….. 289 Fig. 25. Still from newsreel for British Pathé showing Cuevas surrounded by dancers…………………………………………………………….. 292 Fig. 26. Photograph of Cuevas and Lifar during the duel…………………… 295 Fig. 27. Portrait of Marquis George de Cuevas by Salvador Dalí……………… 301 Fig. 28. Isola dei Morti by Arnold Böcklin……………………………………. 302 Fig. 29. Photograph of Sleeping Beauty ballet……………………………….. 306 Fig. 30. Photograph of George de Cuevas and Serge Lifar at the premiere of Sleeping Beauty…………………………………………. 307 Fig. 31. “Marquis de Cuevas” blue woven floral fabric sample…………… 317 viii Introduction Before the Curtain: The Marquis de Cuevas as a Literary Character Whenever I mention in Chile that I have been writing about the Marquis de Cuevas, people from my parents’ generation or older will smile knowingly and say, “Ah, Cuevitas!” The diminutive moniker is proffered with a nostalgic tone, and uttered with a sense of admiration and a mild undercurrent of scorn. Cuevitas was a nickname of youth, and Chileans who knew him in this more modest incarnation could never reconcile themselves to his aristocratic title. To my generation the Marquis de Cuevas remains at best a string of words that rings a distant bell. In the social imaginary of Chile he languishes as a somewhat forgotten figure, but one who is periodically trotted out in press articles that mention countrymen who succeeded abroad. Cuevas had been blessed by fortune all his life, and in this seemed to honor his last name, which is close to the word cueva, a slang expression in Chilean Spanish that indicates good luck, as Jorge Edwards notes (389). The charmed life that was observed with envious disdain by Chileans was mostly the product of wonderful charisma and an audacious imagination. This dissertation examines the intercultural position held by the Europeanized (Latin) American in the mid-twentieth century as illustrated by Chilean dance impresario Jorge Cuevas Bartholin (1885-1961), better known as the Marquis George de Cuevas, who married heiress Margaret Rockefeller Strong and founded several ballet companies in the United States and in Europe in the wake of the great Ballet Russes era. I am 1 particularly interested in how Cuevas cultivates his fictionalized public persona and uses the company as a way to live in a fantasy world of his own fashioning. I posit that this desire to invent his identity is essentially queer on several levels, understanding queer as deviant and resistant to the heteronormative, and as eccentric—odd, peripheral, other. David Halperin argues that “Queer is . whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. [it] demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative” (62). This field of studies also considers sexuality in transnational terms, “investigat[ing] the formation of sexuality alongside race, ethnicity, nationality, citizenship and diasporic identities in order to demonstrate the significant ways in which sexual and racial identities are inextricable” (Hall and Jagose xvii). This more inclusive concept of queer as defined by location and temporality will be vital to my analysis of the way that Cuevas constructed his identity abroad. Cuevas was frequently considered to be a source of embarrassment, to his country of origin, to the Rockefeller family into which he married, and to his adopted countries of citizenship, the United States and France. He is thus permanently being disowned, even as he pushes back, forcing the world to acknowledge his existence. In this sense, I consider how Cuevas reflected and resisted the several labels that were imposed on him in terms of nationality, citizenship,