Paul Verlaine
Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Decadent movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry. Born in Metz, Verlaine was educated at the Lycée Impérial Bonaparte in Paris and took up a post in the civil service, he began writing poetry at an early age, was influenced by the Parnassien movement and its leader, Leconte de Lisle. Verlaine's first published poem was published in 1863 in La Revue du progrès, a publication founded by poet Louis-Xavier de Ricard. Verlaine was a frequenter of the salon of the Marquise de Ricard at 10 Boulevard des Batignolles and other social venues, where he rubbed shoulders with prominent artistic figures of the day: Anatole France, Emmanuel Chabrier, inventor-poet and humorist Charles Cros, the cynical anti-bourgeois idealist Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Théodore de Banville, François Coppée, Jose-Maria de Heredia, Leconte de Lisle, Catulle Mendes and others. Verlaine's first published collection, Poèmes saturniens, though adversely commented upon by Sainte-Beuve, established him as a poet of promise and originality.
Verlaine's private life spills over into his work, beginning with his love for Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville. Mathilde became Verlaine's wife in 1870. At the proclamation of the Third Republic in the same year, Verlaine joined the 160th battalion of the Garde nationale, turning Communard on 18 March 1871, he became head of the press bureau of the Central Committee of the Paris Commune. Verlaine escaped the deadly street fighting known as the Bloody Week, or Semaine Sanglante, went into hiding in the Pas-de-Calais. Verlaine returned to Paris in August 1871, and, in September, he received the first letter from Arthur Rimbaud, who admired his poetry, he urged Rimbaud to come to Paris, by 1872, he had lost interest in Mathilde, abandoned her and their son, preferring the company of his new lover. Rimbaud and Verlaine's stormy affair took them to London in 1872. In Brussels in July 1873 in a drunken, jealous rage, he fired two shots with a pistol at Rimbaud, wounding his left wrist, though not injuring the poet.
As an indirect result of this incident, Verlaine was arrested and imprisoned at Mons, where he underwent a re-conversion to Roman Catholicism, which again influenced his work and provoked Rimbaud's sharp criticism. The poems collected in Romances sans paroles were written between 1872 and 1873, inspired by Verlaine's nostalgically colored recollections of his life with Mathilde on the one hand and impressionistic sketches of his on-again off-again year-long escapade with Rimbaud on the other. Romances sans. Following his release from prison, Verlaine again traveled to England, where he worked for some years as a teacher, teaching French and Greek, drawing at a grammar school in Stickney in Lincolnshire. From there he went to teach in nearby Boston, before moving to Bournemouth. While in England he produced another successful collection, Sagesse, he returned to France in 1877 and, while teaching English at a school in Rethel, fell in love with one of his pupils, Lucien Létinois, who inspired Verlaine to write further poems.
Verlaine was devastated when Létinois died of typhus in 1883. Verlaine's last years saw his descent into drug addiction and poverty, he lived in slums and public hospitals, spent his days drinking absinthe in Paris cafes. However, the people's love for his art was able to resurrect support and bring in an income for Verlaine: his early poetry was rediscovered, his lifestyle and strange behaviour in front of crowds attracted admiration, in 1894 he was elected France's "Prince of Poets" by his peers, his poetry was admired and recognized as ground-breaking, served as a source of inspiration to composers. Gabriel Fauré composed many mélodies, such as the song cycles Cinq mélodies "de Venise" and La bonne chanson, which were settings of Verlaine's poems. Claude Debussy set to music Clair de lune and six of the Fêtes galantes poems, forming part of the mélodie collection known as the Recueil Vasnier. Reynaldo Hahn set several of Verlaine's poems, his drug dependence and alcoholism took a toll on his life.
Paul Verlaine died in Paris at the age of 51 on 8 January 1896. Much of the French poetry produced during the fin de siècle was characterized as "decadent" for its lurid content or moral vision. In a similar vein, Verlaine used the expression poète maudit in 1884 to refer to a number of poets like Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Aloysius Bertrand, Comte de Lautréamont or Alice de Chambrier, who had fought against poetic conventions and suffered social rebuke or were ignored by the critics, but with the publication of Jean Moréas' Symbolist Manifesto in 1886, it was the term symbolism, most applied to the new literary environment. Along with Verlaine, Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Albert Samain and many others began to be referred to as "Symbolists." These poets would share themes that parallel Schopenhauer's aesthetics and notions of will and unconscious forces, used themes of sex, the city, irrational phenomena, sometimes a vaguely medieval setting. I
Mercure de France
The Mercure de France was a French gazette and literary magazine first published in the 17th century, but after several incarnations has evolved as a publisher, is now part of the Éditions Gallimard publishing group. The gazette was published from 1672 to 1724 under the title Mercure galant and Nouveau Mercure galant; the title was changed to Mercure de France in 1724. The gazette was suppressed from 1811 to 1815 and ceased publication in 1825; the name was revived in 1890 for both a literary review and a publishing house linked with the symbolist movement. Since 1995 Mercure de France has been part of the Éditions Gallimard publishing group. Mercure de France should not be confused with the Mercure du XIXe siècle; the Mercure galant was founded by the writer Jean Donneau de Visé in 1672. The name refers to the messenger of the gods; the magazine's goal was to inform elegant society about life in the court and intellectual/artistic debates. Publication stopped in 1674, but began again as a monthly with the name Nouveau Mercure galant in 1677.
The Mercure galant was a significant development in the history of journalism (it was the first gazette to report on the fashion world and played a pivotal role in the dissemination of news about fashion, luxury goods and court life under Louis XIV to the provinces and abroad. In the 1670s, articles on the new season's fashions were accompanied with engravings See this work for an extensive analysis of the Mercure galant's mediatization of styles and fashion The August, 1697 edition contains a detailed description of a popular new puzzle, now known as peg solitaire; this article is the earliest known reference to peg solitaire. The gazette was denigrated by authors of the period; the name Mercure galant was used by the playwright Edmé Boursault for one of his plays critical of social pretensions. The gazette played an important role in the "Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns", a debate on whether the arts and literature of the 17th century had achieved more than the illustrious writers and artists of antiquity, which would last until the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle and the Mercure galant joined the "Moderns". Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux was pushed into the role of champion of the "Anciens", Jean Racine, Jean de La Fontaine and Jean de La Bruyère took his defense; the periodical became a financial success and it brought Donneau de Visé comfortable revenues. The Mercure de France became the uncontested arbiter of French arts and humanities, it has been called the most important literary journal in prerevolutionary France. Thomas Corneille was a frequent contributor to the gazette; the Mercure continued to be published after Donneau de Visé's death in 1710. In 1724 its title was changed to Mercure de France and it developed a semi-official character with a governmentally appointed editor. Jean-François de la Harpe was the editor in chief for 20 years. Other significant editors and contributors include: Marmontel, Raynal and Voltaire, it is on the pages of the May 1734 issue of the Mercure de France that the term "Baroque" makes its first attested appearance – used in an anonymous, satirical review of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie.
Right before the revolution, management was handed over to Charles-Joseph Panckoucke. During the revolutionary era, the title was changed to Le Mercure français. Napoleon stopped its publication in 1811, but the review was resurrected in 1815; the review was last published in 1825. At the end of the 19th century, the name Mercure de France was revived by Alfred Vallette. Vallette was linked to a group of writers associated with Symbolism who met at the café la Mère Clarisse in Paris, which included: Jean Moréas, Émile Raynaud, Pierre Arène, Remy de Gourmont, Alfred Jarry, Albert Samain and Charles Cros; the first edition of the review appeared on January 1, 1890. Over the next decade, the review achieved critical success, poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé and José-Maria de Heredia published original works in it; the review became bimonthly in 1905. In 1889, Alfred Vallette married the novelist Rachilde whose novel Monsieur Vénus was condemned on moral grounds. Rachilde was a member of the editorial committee of the review until 1924 and her personality and works did much to publicize the review.
Rachilde held a salon on Tuesdays, these "mardis du Mercure" would become famous for the authors who attended. Like other reviews of the period, the Mercure began to publish books. Along with works by symbolists, the Mercure brought out the first French translations of Friedrich Nietzsche, the first works of André Gide, Paul Claudel and Guillaume Apollinaire and the poems of Tristan Klingsor. Publications include works by: Henri Michaux, Pierre Reverdy, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Louis-Ren
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style originates with the 1857 publication of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal; the works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers; the term "symbolist" was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the Symbolists from the related Decadents of literature and of art. Distinct from, but related to, the style of literature, symbolism in art is related to the gothic component of Romanticism and Impressionism; the term "symbolism" is derived from the word "symbol" which derives from the Latin symbolum, a symbol of faith, symbolus, a sign of recognition, in turn from classical Greek σύμβολον symbolon, an object cut in half constituting a sign of recognition when the carriers were able to reassemble the two halves.
In ancient Greece, the symbolon was a shard of pottery, inscribed and broken into two pieces which were given to the ambassadors from two allied city states as a record of the alliance. Symbolism was a reaction against naturalism and realism, anti-idealistic styles which were attempts to represent reality in its gritty particularity, to elevate the humble and the ordinary over the ideal. Symbolism was a reaction in favour of spirituality, the imagination, dreams; some writers, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, began as naturalists before becoming symbolists. Certain of the characteristic subjects of the Decadents represent naturalist interest in sexuality and taboo topics, but in their case this was mixed with Byronic romanticism and the world-weariness characteristic of the fin de siècle period; the Symbolist poets have a more complex relationship with Parnassianism, a French literary style that preceded it. While being influenced by hermeticism, allowing freer versification, rejecting Parnassian clarity and objectivity, it retained Parnassianism's love of word play and concern for the musical qualities of verse.
The Symbolists continued to admire Théophile Gautier's motto of "art for art's sake", retained – and modified – Parnassianism's mood of ironic detachment. Many Symbolist poets, including Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, published early works in Le Parnasse contemporain, the poetry anthologies that gave Parnassianism its name, but Arthur Rimbaud publicly mocked prominent Parnassians and published scatological parodies of some of their main authors, including François Coppée – misattributed to Coppée himself – in L'Album zutique. One of Symbolism's most colourful promoters in Paris was art and literary critic Joséphin Péladan, who established the Salon de la Rose + Croix; the Salon hosted a series of six presentations of avant-garde art and music during the 1890s, to give a presentation space for artists embracing spiritualism and idealism in their work. A number of Symbolists were associated with the Salon. Symbolists believed that art should represent absolute truths that could only be described indirectly.
Thus, they wrote in a metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. Jean Moréas published the Symbolist Manifesto in Le Figaro on 18 September 1886; the Symbolist Manifesto names Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine as the three leading poets of the movement. Moréas announced that symbolism was hostile to "plain meanings, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description", that its goal instead was to "clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form" whose "goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal." Ainsi, dans cet art, les tableaux de la nature, les actions des humains, tous les phénomènes concrets ne sauraient se manifester eux-mêmes. In a nutshell, as Mallarmé writes in a letter to his friend Cazalis,'to depict not the thing but the effect it produces'; the symbolist poets wished to liberate techniques of versification in order to allow greater room for "fluidity", as such were sympathetic with the trend toward free verse, as evident in the poems of Gustave Kahn and Ezra Pound.
Symbolist poems were attempts to evoke, rather than to describe. T. S. Eliot was influenced by the poets Jules Laforgue, Paul Valéry and Arthur Rimbaud who used the techniques of the Symbolist school, though it has been said that'Imagism' was the style to which both Pound and Eliot subscribed. Synesthesia was a prized experience. In Baudelaire's poem Correspondences mentions forêts de symboles – forests of symbols – Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,– Et d'autres, riches et triomphants,Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,Qui chantent le
French literature
This article is a general introduction to French literature. For detailed information on French literature in specific historic periods, see the separate historical articles in the template to the right. French literature is speaking, literature written in the French language by citizens of France. Literature written in French language, by citizens of other nations such as Belgium, Canada, Algeria, etc. is referred to as Francophone literature. France itself ranks first in the list of Nobel Prizes in literature by country. French literature has been for French people an object of national pride for centuries, it has been one of the most influential components of the literature of Europe; the French language is a Romance language derived from Latin and influenced principally by Celtic and Frankish. Beginning in the 11th century, literature written in medieval French was one of the oldest vernacular literatures in western Europe and it became a key source of literary themes in the Middle Ages across the continent.
Although the European prominence of French literature was eclipsed in part by vernacular literature in Italy in the 14th century, literature in France in the 16th century underwent a major creative evolution, through the political and artistic programs of the Ancien Régime, French literature came to dominate European letters in the 17th century. In the 18th century, French became the literary lingua franca and diplomatic language of western Europe, French letters have had a profound impact on all European and American literary traditions while at the same time being influenced by these other national traditions Africa, the far East have brought the French language to non-European cultures that are transforming and adding to the French literary experience today. Under the aristocratic ideals of the Ancien Régime, the nationalist spirit of post-revolutionary France, the mass educational ideals of the Third Republic and modern France, the French have come to have a profound cultural attachment to their literary heritage.
Today, French schools emphasize the study of novels and poetry. The literary arts are sponsored by the state and literary prizes are major news; the Académie française and the Institut de France are important linguistic and artistic institutions in France, French television features shows on writers and poets. Literature matters to the people of France and plays an important role in their sense of identity; as of 2006, French literary people have been awarded more Nobel Prizes in Literature than novelists and essayists of any other country. In 1964 Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but he declined it, stating that "It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution if it takes place in the most honorable form." For most of the 20th century, French authors had more Literature Nobel Prizes than those of any other nation. The following French or French language authors have won a Nobel Prize in Literature: 1901 – Sully Prudhomme 1904 – Frédéric Mistral 1911 – Maurice Maeterlinck 1915 – Romain Rolland 1921 – Anatole France 1927 – Henri Bergson 1937 – Roger Martin du Gard 1947 – André Gide 1952 – François Mauriac 1957 – Albert Camus 1960 – Saint-John Perse 1964 – Jean-Paul Sartre 1969 – Samuel Beckett 1985 – Claude Simon 2000 – Gao Xingjian 2008 – J. M. G.
Le Clézio 2014 – Patrick Modiano Grand Prix de Littérature Policière – created in 1948, for crime and detective fiction. Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française – created 1918. Prix Décembre – created in 1989. Prix Femina – created 1904, decided each year by an female jury, although the authors of the winning works do not have to be women. Prix Goncourt – created 1903, given to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year". Prix Goncourt des Lycéens – created in 1987. Prix Littéraire Valery Larbaud – created in 1957. Prix Médicis – created 1958, awarded to an author whose "fame does not yet match their talent." Prix Renaudot – created in 1926. Prix Tour-Apollo Award – 1972–1990, given to the best science fiction novel published in French during the preceding year. Prix des Deux Magots – created in 1933. Middle Ages anonymous – La Chanson de Roland Chrétien de Troyes – Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion, Lancelot, ou le Chevalier à la charrette various – Tristan et Iseult anonymous – Lancelot-Graal known as the prose Lancelot or the Vulgate Cycle Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung – Roman de la Rose Christine de Pizan – "The Book of the City of Ladies" 16th century François Rabelais – La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel 17th century Honoré d'Urfé – L'Astrée Madame de Lafayette – La Princesse de Clèves 18th century Abbé Prévost – Manon Lescaut Voltaire – Candide, Zadig ou la Destinée Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse Denis Diderot – Jacques le fataliste (Jacques the Fata
August Strindberg
Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, poet and painter. A prolific writer who drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, history, cultural analysis, politics. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action and visual composition, he is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room has been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, poet, as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known as a playwright; the Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872. In his plays The Father, Miss Julie, Creditors, he created naturalistic dramas that – building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play – responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" and the example set by André Antoine's newly established Théâtre Libre.
In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasized. Strindberg modeled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder", "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre", a preface to Miss Julie, the last of, the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement. During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of psychotic attacks between 1894 and 1896 led to his return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become "the Zola of the Occult". In 1898 he returned to play-writing with To Damascus, like The Great Highway, is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage, his A Dream Play – with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling and multiplication of its characters – was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism.
He returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his play-writing career. He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modeled on Max Reinhardt's Kammerspielhaus, that staged his chamber plays. Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, the third surviving son of Carl Oscar Strindberg and Eleonora Ulrika Norling. In his autobiographical novel The Son of a Servant, Strindberg describes a childhood affected by "emotional insecurity, religious fanaticism and neglect"; when he was seven, Strindberg moved to Norrtullsgatan on the northern, almost-rural periphery of the city. A year the family moved near to Sabbatsberg, where they stayed for three years before returning to Norrtullsgatan, he attended a harsh school in Klara for four years, an experience that haunted him in his adult life. He was moved to the school in Jakob in 1860, which he found far more pleasant, though he remained there for only a year. In the autumn of 1861, he was moved to the Stockholm Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys, where he remained for six years.
As a child he had a keen interest in natural science and religion. His mother, Strindberg recalled with bitterness, always resented her son's intelligence, she died when he was thirteen, although his grief lasted for only three months, in life he came to feel a sense of loss and longing for an idealized maternal figure. Less than a year after her death, his father married the children's governess, Emilia Charlotta Pettersson. According to his sisters, Strindberg came to regard them as his worst enemies, he passed his graduation exam in May 1867 and enrolled at the Uppsala University, where he began on 13 September. Strindberg spent the next few years in Uppsala and Stockholm, alternately studying for exams and trying his hand at non-academic pursuits; as a young student, Strindberg worked as an assistant in a pharmacy in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden. He supported himself in between studies as a substitute primary-school teacher and as a tutor for the children of two well-known physicians in Stockholm.
He first left Uppsala in 1868 to work as a schoolteacher, but studied chemistry for some time at the Institute of Technology in Stockholm in preparation for medical studies working as a private tutor before becoming an extra at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. In May 1869, he failed his qualifying chemistry exam which in turn made him uninterested in schooling. Strindberg returned to Uppsala University in January 1870 to study aesthetics and modern languages and to work on a number of plays, it was at this time that
Montparnasse
Montparnasse is an area of Paris, France, on the left bank of the river Seine, centered at the crossroads of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Rue de Rennes, between the Rue de Rennes and boulevard Raspail. Montparnasse has been part of Paris since 1669; the area gives its name to: Gare Montparnasse: trains to Brittany, TGV to Rennes, Bordeaux, Le Mans. The Pasteur Institute is located in the area. Beneath the ground are tunnels of the Catacombs of Paris. Students in the 17th century who came to recite poetry in the hilly neighbourhood nicknamed it after "Mount Parnassus", home to the nine Muses of arts and sciences in Greek mythology; the hill was levelled to construct the Boulevard Montparnasse in the 18th century. During the French Revolution many dance halls and cabarets opened their doors; the area is known for cafés and bars, such as the Breton restaurants specialising in crêpes located a few blocks from the Gare Montparnasse. In the 18th century, students recited poems at the foot of an artificial hillock of rock rubble from the catacombs, a near-by network of underground galleries.
They decided to baptize this mound "Mount Parnassus", named after the one celebrated by Greek poets. In early 20th century, many Bretons driven out of their region by poverty arrived by train at Montparnasse station, the heart of the district, settled near-by. Montparnasse became famous in the 1920s, referred to as les Années Folles, the 1930s as the heart of intellectual and artistic life in Paris. From 1910 to the start of World War II, Paris' artistic circles migrated to Montparnasse as alternative to the Montmartre district, the intellectual breeding ground for the previous generation of artists; the Paris of Zola, France, Fauré, a group that had assembled more on the basis of status affinity than actual artistic tastes, indulging in the refinements of Dandyism, was at the opposite end of the economic and political spectrum from the gritty, tough-talking, die-hard, emigrant artists that peopled Montparnasse. Penniless painters, writers and composers came from around the world to thrive in the creative atmosphere and for the cheap rent at artist communes such as La Ruche.
Living without running water, in damp, unheated "studios" free of rats, many sold their works for a few francs just to buy food. Jean Cocteau once said. First promoted by art dealers such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, today works by those artists sell for millions of euros. In post-World War I Paris, Montparnasse was a euphoric meeting ground for the artistic world. Fernand Léger wrote of that period: "man…relaxes and recaptures his taste for life, his frenzy to dance, to spend money…an explosion of life-force fills the world." They came to Montparnasse from all over the globe, from Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, from the United States, Mexico and South America, from as far away as Japan. Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, Camilo Mori and others made their way from Chile where the profound innovations in art spawned the formation of the Grupo Montparnasse in Santiago. A few of the other artists who gathered in Montparnasse were Jacob Macznik, Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ossip Zadkine, Julio Gonzalez, Moise Kisling, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Marios Varvoglis, Marc Chagall, Nina Hamnett, Jean Rhys, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Chaim Soutine, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Michel Kikoine, Pinchus Kremegne, Amedeo Modigliani, Ford Madox Ford, Toño Salazar, Ezra Pound, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, Henri Rousseau, Constantin Brâncuși, Paul Fort, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, Federico Cantú, Angel Zarraga, Tsuguharu Foujita, Marie Vassilieff, Léon-Paul Fargue, Alberto Giacometti, René Iché, André Breton, Alfonso Reyes, Nils Dardel, Salvador Dalí, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Emil Cioran, Reginald Gray, Endre Ady poet and journalist, Joan Miró, Hilaire Hiler and, in his declining years, Edgar Degas.
Montparnasse was a community where creativity was embraced with all its oddities, each new arrival welcomed unreservedly by its existing members. When Tsuguharu Foujita arrived from Japan in 1913 not knowing a soul, he met Soutine, Pascin and Léger the same night and within a week became friends with Juan Gris and Matisse. In 1914, when the English painter Nina Hamnett arrived in Montparnasse, on her first evening the smiling man at the next table at La Rotonde graciously introduced himself as "Modigliani and Jew", they became good friends, Hamnett recounting how she once borrowed a jersey and corduroy trousers from Modigliani went to La Rotonde and danced in the street all night. Between 1921 and 1924, the number of Americans in Paris swelled from 6,000 to 30,000. While most of the artistic community gathered here were struggling to eke out an existence, well-heeled American socialites such as Peggy Guggenheim, Edith Wharton from New York City, Harry Crosby from Boston and Beatrice Wood from San Francisco were caught in the fever of creativity.
Robert McAlmon, Maria and Eugene Jolas came to Paris and published their literary magazine Transition. Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse would establish the Black Sun Press in Paris in 1927, publishing works by such future luminaries as D. H. Lawrence, Archibald M
Paul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a French post-Impressionist artist. Unappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his experimental use of color and Synthetist style that were distinctly different from Impressionism. Toward the end of his life, he spent ten years in French Polynesia, most of his paintings from this time depict people or landscapes from that region, his work was influential to the French avant-garde and many modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Gauguin's art became popular after his death from the efforts of art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who organized exhibitions of his work late in his career and assisted in organizing two important posthumous exhibitions in Paris. Gauguin was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, printmaker and writer, his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. He was an influential proponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.
Gauguin was born in Paris to Clovis Gauguin and Alina Maria Chazal on June 7, 1848. His birth coincided with revolutionary upheavals throughout Europe that year, his father, a 34-year-old liberal journalist, came from a family of petits bourgeois entrepreneurs residing in Orléans. He was compelled to flee France when the newspaper for which he wrote was suppressed by French authorities. Gauguin's mother was the 22-year-old daughter of André Chazal, an engraver, Flora Tristan, an author and activist in early socialist movements, their union ended when André assaulted his wife Flora and was sentenced to prison for attempted murder. Paul Gauguin's maternal grandmother, Flora Tristan, was the illegitimate daughter of Thérèse Laisnay and Don Mariano de Tristan Moscoso. Details of Thérèse's family background are not known, he was an officer of the Dragoons. Members of the wealthy Tristan Moscoso family held powerful positions in Peru. Nonetheless, Don Mariano's unexpected death plunged his daughter Flora into poverty.
When Flora's marriage with André failed, she petitioned for and obtained a small monetary settlement from her father's Peruvian relatives. She sailed to Peru in hopes of enlarging her share of the Tristan Moscoso family fortune; this never materialized. An active supporter of early socialist societies, Gauguin's maternal grandmother helped to lay the foundations for the 1848 revolutionary movements. Placed under surveillance by French police and suffering from overwork, she died in 1844, her grandson Paul "idolized his grandmother, kept copies of her books with him to the end of his life."In 1850, Clovis Gauguin departed for Peru with his wife Alina and young children in hopes of continuing his journalistic career under the auspices of his wife's South American relations. He died of a heart attack en route, Alina arrived in Peru a widow with the 18-month-old Paul and his 2½ year-old sister, Marie. Gauguin's mother was welcomed by her paternal granduncle, whose son-in-law would shortly assume the presidency of Peru.
To the age of six, Paul enjoyed a privileged upbringing, attended by servants. He retained a vivid memory of that period of his childhood which instilled "indelible impressions of Peru that haunted him the rest of his life."Gauguin's idyllic childhood ended abruptly when his family mentors fell from political power during Peruvian civil conflicts in 1854. Aline returned to France with her children, leaving Paul with his paternal grandfather, Guillaume Gauguin, in Orléans. Deprived by the Peruvian Tristan Moscoso clan of a generous annuity arranged by her granduncle, Alina settled in Paris to work as a dressmaker. After attending a couple of local schools, Gauguin was sent to the prestigious Catholic boarding school Petit Séminaire de La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, he spent three years at the school. At age fourteen, he entered the Loriol Institute in Paris, a naval preparatory school, before returning to Orléans to take his final year at the Lycée Jeanne D'Arc. Gauguin signed on as a pilot's assistant in the merchant marine.
Three years he joined the French navy in which he served for two years. His mother died on 7 July 1867, but he did not learn of it for several months until a letter from his sister Marie caught up with him in India. In 1871, Gauguin returned to Paris. A close family friend, Gustave Arosa, got him a job at the Paris Bourse, he remained one for the next 11 years. In 1879 he was earning 30,000 francs a year as a stockbroker, as much again in his dealings in the art market, but in 1882 the Paris stock market crashed and the art market contracted. Gauguin's earnings deteriorated and he decided to pursue painting full-time. In 1873, he married Mette-Sophie Gad. Over the next ten years, they had five children: Émile. By 1884, Gauguin had moved with his family to Copenhagen, where he pursued a business career as a tarpaulin salesman, it was not a success: He could not speak Danish, the Danes did not want French tarpaulins. Mette became the chief breadwinner, his middle-class family and marriage fell apart after 11 years when Gauguin was driven to paint full-time.
He returned to Paris in
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