Paris in the Roaring 20s:

Stein, Toklas, Hemingway, Matisse, PicassoINTRODUCTION

Pablo Picasso, a half-naked woman at a

party, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, flappers

at a café

The Influence of WWI: (1914-1918)

The heavy loss of lives (1,400,000 killed in France,

including 300,000 in the first five months) led to people

refusing to subscribe to the notion of ‘la gloire’ (glory).

The total deaths of all nations who fought in the war is

thought to have been 8.5 million with 21 million being

wounded.

During the war, the death toll was so high that many

found themselves inflicted with an “eat-drink-and-be-

merry-for-tomorrow-we-die spirit.”

Hotel de Ville Arras, France soon after WWI, circa March 1919.

The Influence of WWI: (1914-1918)

While men were fighting in the war, women took on more

responsibilities (jobs, etc). Women did not want to return to traditional

gender norms after the war.

The Suffrage Movement (particularly in Britain and The United States)

The emergence of the flapper

Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald

A flapper is a woman

who thought “it was

fun to flirt, …bobbed

her hair, …put on her

choicest pair of

earrings, and a great

deal of audacity and

rouge and went into

battle” (Zelda

Fitzgerald)

Fashion – The Garconne

“By mid decade, in fashion terms the ideal new woman was a tomboy, a garconne, young,

slim, athletic, short-haired and short-skirted, almost androgynous in appearance; a friend and

an equal rather than a passive dependent” (Madeleine Ginsburg, Paris Fashions: The Art Deco

Style of the 1920s 12)

“The shape of the lady who wore the fashion was…considered an enchanting, bosomless, hipless, thighlesscreature…and fairly tall but seemed taller than she was by reason of her remarkable slenderness” (Madeleine Ginsburg, Paris Fashions: The Art Deco Style of the

1920s 50).

Gibson girl Camille Clifford andFlapper girl Louise Brooks

Post-War Disillusionment

American soldiers came back to a divided

America: Ku Klux Klan became bigger, there were

anti-labour movements, the beginning of

prohibition (1920-1933).

There was a national effort to return to traditional

gender norms.

Paris offered a more Bohemian lifestyle.

The dollar was very strong. People could live off

very little money for a long time. They could easily

live off $100/month in Paris.

Post-War Disillusionment

“Paris was full of the young from Africa, from Eastern Europe, from Asia, the

Swedes, the Norwegians, the Finns, the Latinos, every kind of Latino. They

poured into Paris after the war. I think it is possible to say (it may not be

possible to prove) that they felt a kind of vacuum. The youth of Europe had

been slaughtered. The thing I used to notice in Paris was the total absence of

the young, even young women, because young women didn’t look young.

They looked old. They were dressed in black and their faces were unsmiling.”

Archibald MacLeish: Reflections, 1986

Foreigners in

Paris:

Of the 2,906,472 people residing in Paris in

1921, according to the census of the year,

no fewer than 400,000 were foreigners.

(Today: population in Paris is 2,234,105)

Café Culture in Paris: From Afternoon to Night

The Lost Generation

This term refers to a group of (mostly American and British) writers, who lived primarily in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s and who has lived through and sometimes witnessed firsthand the devastations of World War I.

Included writes such as Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, Kay Boyle, John Dos Passos, Lawrence Durrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein.

Disillusionment after WWI

The Waste Land (1922)

BY T. S. ELIOT

FOR EZRA POUND

IL MIGLIOR FABBRO

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

The poem asks how can we rebuild a civilization after the devastation of

the Great War?

Ezra Pound: “Make it new”

Gertrude Stein tried to find new forms and wrote still-lifes and portraits.

Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse experimented with different forms (see Matisse, Blue Nude(Souvenir de Biskra) 1907 – pre-war)

Ernest Hemingway attempted to write the “one true sentence.”

Igor Stravinsky re-imagined music and experimented with tonality, metre, rhythm, stress and dissonance.

Dadaism flourished in Paris in the 1920s and questioned aesthetics (see Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917)

In A Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound (1913)

Modernist Movement

Interest in subjective

experience, interiority

Experimentation in form

Questioning of aesthetics

Interest in non-European

art forms (Japanese haiku,

African masks)

Influences besides the

Great War: emergence of

psychoanalysis,

modernization,

industrialization, and more.

The Persistence of Memory, oil on canvas, by Salvador Dalí, 1931

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas – 27 rue du Fleurus

“America is my

country, Paris is my

hometown.”

Stein: Patron and Critic

From 1903 until 1914,

Leo and Gertrude Stein

collected art works

Picasso’s Portrait of Stein

(1906)

“[Picasso’s] reduction of the figure to simple

masses and the face to a mask with heavy lidded

eyes reflects his recent encounter with African,

Roman, and Iberian sculpture and foreshadows

his adoption of Cubism. He painted the head,

which differs in style from the body and hands,

without the sitter, testimony to the fact that it was

his personal vision, rather than empirical reality,

that guided his work. When someone

commented that Stein did not look like her

portrait, Picasso replied, ‘She will.’” (The

Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Picasso’s Portrait of Stein (1906)

"I was and still am

satisfied with my

portrait, for me it is I,

and it is the only

reproduction of me

which is always I, for

me.” Gertrude Stein

Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company, 1939

Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald

Watching her face you could see her mind leave the table and go to the night's party and return with her eyes blank as a cat's and then pleased, and the pleasure would show along the thin line of her lips and then be gone. Scott was being the good cheerful host and Zelda looked at him and she smiled happily with her eyes and her mouth too as he drank the wine. I learned to know that smile very well. It meant she knew Scott would not be able to write.

Scott in a 1930 letter to Zelda

The Villa America - Sara Murphy, standing at far right, New Year’s party in 1920.

Stock Market Crash 1929

Hemingway and his

new wife Pauline, the

Fitzgeralds went back

to America.

The Murphys went to

Switzerland. Villa

America was shut

down.

Crowd gathering on Wall Street after the 1929 crash

Next Week: A Moveable Feast

The 1964 Edition vs. The 2009 Restored Edition

Mary re-arranged the chapters in chronological order.

As seen on the right, Hemingway also revised his epigraph to the Fitzgerald chapter.

Mary eliminated passages that show that Hemingway felt remorse about his conduct to Hadley. Mary Hemingway deletes the section in which Hemingway apologized to Hadley.

Next Week: A Moveable Feast

The 1964 Edition vs. The 2009 Restored Edition

Mary re-arranged the chapters in chronological order.

As seen on the right, Hemingway also revised his epigraph to the Fitzgerald chapter.

Mary eliminated passages that show that Hemingway felt remorse about his conduct to Hadley. Mary Hemingway deletes the section in which Hemingway apologized to Hadley.

Can one re-establish the author’s intent? According to Irene Gammel, "Ethically and

pragmatically, restoring an author's original intent is a slippery slope when the published text has stood

the test of time and when edits have been approved by authors or their legal representatives."