Chapter 39 II Departure from Montparnasse to fight (II) Those who fled the war

artwork. Marcel Duchamp In 1914, Georges Braque joined the 224th Infantry Regiment.First commissioned as a sergeant, later promoted to lieutenant, and fought on the front lines. Wounded in the head at the Battle of Carancy in May 1915.After undergoing surgery, he was demobilized in 1916. Loesche fought in the battles of Argonaut and Verdun, was a victim of poison gas, and retired a few months before the end of the First World War. In September 1915, De Lang joined the 82nd Artillery Regiment and took part in the bloody battles of Verdun and Chemin de Damme.After the war, his civilian life resumed.

Roger de Lafrenail served in the infantry until 1918, when he was hospitalized with tuberculosis and bedridden. Kisling was wounded in hand-to-hand combat at the Battle of Caransi.Sandras lost an arm in Champagne.Apollinaire returned to Paris after being wounded in the Forest of Boots... All these people unanimously condemned those who were their friends before the war, but when others risked their lives on the front line to defend the motherland, they still lived here or there leisurely. There are people who continue to paint and continue to sell their work.They condemn not those who were rejected by the army, such as Modigliani and Ortiz de Zarate, but those who deserted, such as Delaunay who took refuge in Spain, Picabia and Krawan went to America.

The trip to America began before the war.A few months after the end of the war, they will all return to Paris and resettle in Montparnasse. On February 17, 1913, an "International Exposition of Modern Art," also known as the Armory Show, was held in New York.This is the first international art fair held in the United States.Elena Sekel believes that "this exhibition is not so much the birth of the art market as it is the re-emergence of the art market".The impact of this exhibition was not small, because the exposition provided a good opportunity for European artists to meet for the first time. After the fair, art collectors flocked to Paris in large numbers in the 1920s.

The works of the Armory Exhibition are concentrated in a former weapons exhibition hall, located in Greenwich Village, an area where writers and artists live in New York City, USA.nearby.The initiator of this exhibition is an American lawyer - John Quinn.After countless times of hard work, he finally exempted some avant-garde excellent works of art from import duties, creating prerequisites for a large number of works to be exhibited.With the help of Henri-Pierre Roche, he obtained a large number of works purchased from France.Walter Pazzi, who translated the works of Elie Faure into English, also collected several works for this exhibition, mostly works of the Cubist Middle Gold School.

The Armory Show featured nearly 1,600 works by European artists, including Cezanne (it was at this exhibition that the British Museum acquired his first work), Braque, Gauguin, Glaze, Kandinsky, Loesche, Malgussi, Picasso, Duchamp and Picabia. In 1913, only Picabia had the ability to travel across the ocean to the United States, so only one French artist attended this art fair.The American press used a lot of space to introduce this painter who jumped into the ranks of avant-garde figures. His father is Cuban and his mother is French.He believed in Impressionism in his youth, and later became a marginal figure of Pointillism and Fauvism, and generally agreed with Cubism.According to Apollinaire, Picabia also believed in the teachings of Orpheus.He became interested in machinery and technology in the United States.He discovered that automobiles are really fast, saw electric motors, and perceived the rich connotations of modern consciousness.Thus, he began a stage of loving machines.New York fascinated Picabia. He believed that American cities were the cities of the future, the future of Cubism.

Back in France, the wealthy dandy was called up to the army, and his disgust was palpable.After some twists and turns, he became the driver of an officer stationed in Paris.Much better in Paris than on the Verdun front.When it was time to retreat to Bordeaux, Picabia called on his father to help.Through the intervention of the Cuban embassy in Paris, he was sent to Havana to work in commerce. Havana was not America, and he was very reluctant to go there.Later, at the urging of his wife Gabriel Biffey, he reluctantly went, but only stayed for two months, and then went to the United States.From there, he traveled to Madrid, Spain, traveled to Switzerland, returned to New York, and traveled to Spain for the second time.

In the summer of 1914, Delaunay, his wife, and the poet and boxer Arthur Klavan also went to Spain. Sandras was very rude to Delaunay, Picabia and Klavan.They're friends, they've participated in countless bohemian activities together, and they've had a good time drinking together.They have been seen tangoing together in ballrooms in brightly embellished or tattered attire, with Klavan wearing paint-stained trousers and tattoos showing through holes here and there in his shirt.All this has also aroused great anger from the people around. The outbreak of the war made these people become rational and returned to the living habits of ordinary people.Yesterday's ruffians have all regrouped in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal.But soon, Portugal also declared war on Germany.So they went to Madrid, the capital of Spain, but the borders there were not reliable.

Krawan decided to go to the United States.In order to solve the financial problem of transatlantic, he came up with a brilliant idea: to organize his competition with boxer Jack Johnson for the heavyweight world championship.The two had previously met at training halls in Berlin and Paris.According to Sandras, Johnson was a full-time boxer at the time. After the two of them agreed, the game was held in an arena in Madrid (Sandras was in Barcelona at the time).It was heavily advertised in the press, boasting it as a real duel.The day before the game, Klavan reserved a seat on a transatlantic liner that was about to set sail for New York.He knew he was no match for the opponent, so he pre-asked the opponent not to shoot too hard, at least let him have a few rounds before knocking him to the ground.

The game ended much sooner than one would think.As an eyewitness, Sandras described the scene of the game: Klavan was in a daze with fright, huddled in a ball, motionless in a corner of the arena.He was completely at a loss in the face of the aggressive Johnson amidst the booing of the crowd, and Johnson was very happy to see this situation, then kicked him in the ass, wanted him to move, and finally slapped him hard in the face He punched Oscar Wilde's nephew to the ground. "One, two, three..." The referee shouted and counted. Krawan had fled.While the crowd, race organizers, and Johnson, who vowed to kill him, searched for him, the "brave warrior" was already on a boat bound for New York and dressing his wounds in the health ward.

In New York, too, he sparked public outrage.Because Duchamp and Picabia heard that the ladies of the upper class organized a report meeting and asked someone to tell them about modern art.So, they decided to send one of the most radical and fanatical among them to this uneducated but self-respected elegant audience.They drafted Krawan.They bought him lunch before he went, and he ate very little, but drank a lot.He arrived at the lecture hall on time.Groups of wealthy ladies wearing feather crowns who admired the speaker were waiting for him obsessively.The reporter turned his back to them, first took off his coat, then loosened his trousers straps, took off his shirt and pants, turned around, began to insult people in the first row, and then insulted people in other rows, until finally he was locked in by the police. The farce is over when the police car pulls away.He was released after his friend paid a bond.

Klavan then went to Canada, escaped from Canada disguised as a woman, and was hired as a mechanic on a fishing boat bound for Newfoundland, eastern Canada.Later, he opened a boxing training school in Mexico City, and finally married American writer Mina Loy, before disappearing into the sea of ​​the Gulf of Mexico without a trace. As for Jack Johnson, no one saw him in the ring after that. Although Sandras has always admitted that Arthur Klavan had a "huge" talent for writing poetry, he could never forgive Klavin's desertion from France on the eve of the outbreak of war.Sandras also could not forgive those friends in New York, those "cowards of all stripes who laid bare their true colors in the face of the storm of war blowing up in Europe."They were a "hodgepodge of European deserters, internationalists, pacifists and neutrals". [Excerpt from Bryce Sandras' "Divide the Sky" published in 1949] Among them was a major exponent of modern art: Marcel Duchamp.He may be neutral, but he is definitely a pacifist, a deserter in every sense of the word. What did he do in America? In a word, scandal. He arrived in New York in 1915, and before he arrived in New York, he was already notorious in New York.Two years earlier he had been a European star at the Armory Show.His "Nude Descending the Staircase" (Figure 48) once aroused the anger of some people, the disgust of some people, the excitement of some people, and the fanatical worship of others... Some people in the press praised him and praised him to heaven Enjoy all the favors; some mock him and roast him on the fires of hell. For him, this is not the first time. When he held an exhibition of independent paintings in Paris in 1912, his cubist friends had asked him to take down the painting.Gleize and Le Fauconnier urged their two older brothers, Jacques Veron and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, to persuade their younger brother not to exhibit his too daring in design, "Descending the Staircase". The Nude,” to avoid condemnation.Marcel Duchamp complied, just once, and the second time he quit: the following year his Nude Descending a Staircase was exhibited at the exhibition of the Cubist Middle Gold School.Then, he crossed the Atlantic to the United States. Marcel Duchamp sold his entire exhibit at the Armory Show, getting the money he needed to leave Europe for New York.He was discharged from the army because of some defects in heart function.He admits that he lacks the patriotism that the times demand, but he has no qualms about it.When the United States entered the war, he had been a secretary in the French army for six months. After arriving in New York, Duchamp admitted his artistic origins: a bit of Impressionism, a bit of Fauvism, and a bit of Cubism. He didn't particularly appreciate Cézanne, but he liked Monet very much and respected Matisse very much. When the exhibition of Braque's paintings was held in 1910, his works were boycotted by Carnville. However, it was not a painter who had the greatest influence on Duchamp, but a writer: Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), a French writer and poet. .Duchamp never denied that he started writing "The Bride Stripped Naked by Her Celibates" after seeing "Impressions of Africa" ​​at the Antoine Theater in the company of Guillaume Apollinaire. The prototype of the protagonist in Raymond Russell's works is a wealthy young man in the upper class of the "Belle Epoque" (referring to the years before 1900, which is generally considered to be a beautiful age when all people are carefree).He reminded Philippe Soupeau of Proust de Cabourg: they had the same persona, the same tastes in food and clothing, the same needs and desires in literature. After the failure of his first book, Russell suffered from "a dreadful disease" [HTH] [from Raymond Russell's How Some of My Books Are Made, 1963], The disease tormented him for a long time.Later, because his literary creation could not reach the highest level, he was tortured by rage and disappointment, so painful that he fell to the ground and rolled on the ground. He travels around in an RV equipped with several rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen.During the journey of the vehicle, he has been insisting on writing.All the curtains were drawn so that nothing outside the windows would interfere with his work.His family employed a gardener to tend his garden, which contained a large number of flowers, but he was too busy writing to see them.He financed the publication of his own books, which were not sold; he financed the rehearsal of plays, and the social response was flat, or if there was a response, it was discussion, anger, and curses, such as "African Impressions" when it was published. There has been social backlash. He once had the idea of ​​putting one of his books on stage in order to win over the part of the public who would not go to the bookstore to buy his books.Only Edmund Rostang welcomed his move.The audience exploded, protesting against exactly what fascinated Marcel Duchamp: the novelty of the language, the modernity of the repertoire, especially the human machines, one of which was a fencer.Roussel's creative roots are the same as those of the pioneers: technological revolution, movement, speed and cinematography... The painter Duchamp, like the writer Russell, perhaps should have given up their art when they were young.They are all obsessed with chess, and they are the best chess kings of that era.They don't belong to any faction. There is a very important reason for Duchamp not to join any faction: the fact that the painters of the Gold School took off his "Nude Descending the Staircase" made him forever have an inexplicable aversion to all the factions.Whether in France or the United States, he was always alone, especially after Dada painters and writers were expelled from the Gold School when Sulvage, Glaze and Alcipenco drove them out. In New York, the young Duchamp was gentle and generous. He often smoked a pipe or a cigar and paced among his many admirers. He walked from one salon to another, and in his heart Smiling to himself how could he be the object of either admiration or anger and condemnation.He was the leader of the avant-garde of all kinds.He gave French lessons to some very beautiful young ladies, and he taught them the most vulgar words in the language.He was often associated with Man Ray, the musicians Edgar Valez, Francis Picabia, Arthur Krawan and Mina Loy, with whom he first discovered jazz Play chess, smoke, drink and dance.Women came and went, but he paid no attention to them. money?No problem, he has nothing extra, just enough for normal use.His father fully supported the three children in the arts, and later American patrons followed suit.Duchamp had been living at the home of Louise and Walter Arenberg, who later bought all his paintings, not paying him in cash, but in exchange for his rent.On the walls of their home, there are works of famous painters such as Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso and Braque.The Arenbergs were very staunch modernists and ardent defenders of the avant-garde. It was with the couple and Man Ray that Duchamp founded the Society of Independent Artists.The association's principles were very similar to those of the Independents in Paris: without censorship, they exhibited what they wished. He sent all the independent artists a drawing of a urinal, dated, signed by a sanitary ware dealer: R. Moute.This constitutes yet another sensational scandal.Although the painting was not expelled from the exhibition, it was hidden behind a curtain.Duchamp therefore announced his resignation from the Independent Artists Association. What did he do other than take immediate and obviously provocative action?He is seeking to create new art forms.This form liberates painting from the confinement of usual painting tools, requiring neither canvas nor brushes nor drawing boards.He also began to think about the fourth dimension invisible to the naked eye.Such as his is completely out of the consideration of representing the fourth dimension space in his research.His research will open up new avenues for many people's artistic talent: as Pierre Cabana said: "The appearance of Duchamp's example brought about major changes in the art world in the second half of the 20th century, prompting Neo-Dada eventually developed into popular art." [From Duchamp and Cie by Pierre Cabana, published in 1996] It is not the first completed painting that Duchamp has proposed to exhibit. One day in Paris in 1913, he suddenly had the idea of ​​drawing these items: he fixed a bicycle wheel on a square bench (Fig. 49), and bought a drain rack.These things have been lying about in his house since then, and for a long time, he never thought of their value or any use for them. In New York, before painting, he bought a shovel for shoveling snow and hung it from the ceiling of his studio.Not long after, the work "Hidden Noise" painted a ball of wire sandwiched between two brass sheets (Fig. 50), "Tour Promotional Materials" painted a "Shitagi" brand typewriter cover, and "LHO. OQ" added a goatee and a mustache to Mona Lisa (Fig. 51). From the 1920s, Duchamp was not satisfied with only signing existing works, but bringing them together.So in 1920 "Why Don't You Sneeze" came out, which was composed of some cubes of marble blocks, a thermometer and a cuttlefish bone in a birdcage (Fig. 52); "The Happy Widow" is a shrunken Double Windows, signed by an anonymous woman, Rose Selavi.Duchamp later used this signature frequently, and one can also see it in the poems of Robert Desnos. Duchamp explained his choice of anonymity: he wanted to change his identity, at first he wanted to choose a Jewish name, and finally decided to change the gender of the name.When Picabia asked him to add his signature to that of his friends (Mei Jingqi, Segonzac, Jean Hugo, Millau, Aurique, Perret, Chara and Douglas) , Duchamp came up with the idea of ​​using Rose Serraway, who wrote Picabia's signature as: Picabia Mei Jingqi, Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Kupka, Bibi Kabia, Lot, Segonzak, Ross Serraoui, and finally reduced to Ross Serraoui.He concluded by saying: All of this is just a play on words. [Excerpt from "Conversations with Pierre Cabana" by Marcel Duchamp] Duchamp loved word games.The word "even" was often added to the titles of his works created between 1915 and 1923, "Bride stripped naked by her celibates, may even be (Large glass - eight vertical lines on the cup)" Is an example (Figure 53).The latter part of the title has nothing to do with the content and is actually meaningless, which he did on purpose.Breton admired Duchamp very much. He thought Duchamp was the smartest person in the 20th century. However, Duchamp also said of Raymond Russell that he was also the smartest man of the 20th century.The two of them are indeed heroes in this regard.They share a common notion of representational techniques such as wordplay and unexpected mutations.In Roussel's painting "Napoleon, First Emperor of France", the signature of Ross Serraway is also used. In Duchamp's best friend Francis Picabia, there is the same modern conception.For him, the United States is also the laboratory where he prepares for the future. One of them is as fat as a bucket and the other is as thin as a bamboo pole, but they often walk together on the sidewalks of American cities.Picabia was short and plump, but he hoped to make up for it by padded heels high; Duchamp was a tall man.Both were eagerly looking forward to the end of the war in Europe.They often met at the gallery of Alfred Stiglitz, an American photographer of Austrian descent, at 291 Fifth Avenue.Avant-garde figures in the art circles of the European and American continents often meet there.Stiglitz exhibited some painters' works in his gallery, and gave all the income from selling paintings to the painter himself, and he himself lived only on his photography income. The gallery also founded a newspaper, 291.Inspired by it, Picabia founded a magazine "391" in Barcelona in January 1917.The magazine appeared on the streets of Paris in 1924, as the war could neither stop people from traveling nor from contact between them.Picabia commutes between Barcelona, ​​New York and Switzerland with his friends Klavan, Glaize, Roger, Valez, Duchamp, Marie Laurentian and Isadora Duncan. Through thick and thin.He paints and writes every day, visits his children in Berne, Switzerland, and goes to Lausanne to ask a neurologist to treat him.In Zurich he met a small man with a monocle, Tristan Chara, a Franco-Cuban man who was preparing a book about him. In Sandras's eyes, Tristan Tzara was an "adventurer of art for art's sake", the backbone of various types of spies, so-called artists and pacifists in exile in Switzerland. Duchamp was almost the only one who survived without being executed.However, like everyone else, he was slightly deranged by the explosion of bombs falling on the battlefield.The Dadaists centered on Tristan Tzara often met at the Voltaire Tavern in Zurich, and the three surrealists Klavan, Duchamp and Picabia often traveled to and from the salons in New York.Although they are in different places, they have a common idea: against war.It is a pity that in the era they lived in, their proposition was completely unacceptable, and they didn't even like to listen to it.