The artist of the modern movement is a savage . . . this enormous, jangling, journalistic, fairy desert of modern life serves him as Nature did more technically primitive man.
--Wyndham Lewis, Blast 1
Mr. Bell assures us that Mr. Wyndham Lewis's art is practically independent of "association or suggestion." Obviously if this means anything it is that this gifted painter's art means nothing. Humanly speaking it is impossible for a man to picture things that are associated with nothing, suggested by nothing, and which suggest nothing.
--C. H. Collins Baker, "Post-Impressionist Prefaces," Saturday Review 9 November 1912
Among those blessed in Blast were George Robey, Shirley Kellogg, Harry Weldon, George Mozart, and Gaby (Deslys). 1 Wyndham Lewis is nevertheless not a painter we associate with the music hall (like Walter Sickert or Spencer Gore). If an affection for certain kinds of popular culture (cabaret, revue, boxing, early Chaplin films) parallels the interests of cubists and Futurists and sits well with the polemics of Blast, it seems to have little to do with the art: with Kermesse, for instance, considered one of the first cubist paintings in England and "a landmark in the development of modernist painting in Britain." 2 I want to argue on the contrary that Kermesse and its studies were richly suggestive and their associations locatable, and that the artist of the modern movement--though he might see himself as a primitive mercenary in the iron jungle of the modern city--was also an armchair flâneur at the Alhambra who riffled through the Tatler at the breakfast table. This "enormous, jangling, journalistic, fairy desert of modern life" was the social and discursive space of popular entertainment--"of music halls and motor-buses and women's legs in tights and newspapers and electric sky-signs spelling out words letter by letter"--rather than the direct expression of the industrialized modernity that underpinned it. 3
Lewis dated his maturity as a painter to 1912, to the year of Kermesse and its studies, the Timon series, and paintings exhibited at the second Post-Impressionist exhibition, including Creation and Mother and Child. 4 "Kermesse" is the term for a peasant fair or carnival in the Low Countries, one characterized by boisterous merry-making. 5 Kermesse was important to him: it was very large (nearly nine foot square), it was several times repainted and exhibited to some réclame, and Lewis himself at a moment of sober stocktaking considered it the touchstone of his prewar achievement. 6 It is probably the major loss among his early paintings and Lewis would not have balked at its landmark status. But it was more than a staging-post en route to abstraction. It was also "of" something, something that resides not in "what it depicts or resembles" but in what it is "causally related to or determined by"; its imagery and modernist handling served Lewis's private purposes as well as his professional ambitions. 7 More generally, the case of Lewis invites us to reconsider the tangled relations between popular culture and the prewar avant-gardes. These relations are usually conceived in one-way terms as a popular response to the avant-garde (where outrage or satire is the sine qua non of radical status), or an avant-garde address to the popular (where strategic raids on mass culture secure the vigor and modernity of a new cultural elite). But something more complicated seems to have gone on, something that partially undermined the high/low divide and involved the new fashionability both of popular forms like music-hall revue and of marginal forms like avant-garde art. Ragtime, Post-Impressionism, Futurism, and the tango craze excited a broad slice of the social spectrum, jostled for space in the newspapers with suffragette militancy and industrial unrest, and were often discussed in reciprocal terms ("Futurist politics," "ragtime painting," "anarchy in high art"). Social spaces (the salon, the gallery, the music hall, the studio, the bar), agents and networks of relations (between colleagues, rivals, patrons, critics, curators, dealers), formal and informal institutions and events (the Slade, the Café Royal, the Cabaret Theatre Club, the Omega Workshops, the Rebel Art Centre, the Post-Impressionist exhibitions, Ethel Levey in Hullo Ragtime!, Sergey Diaghilev at Covent Garden, F. T. Marinetti at the Coliseum): all these produced a world in which subjectivities, social relations, works of art, and aesthetic programs were being constantly and reciprocally retuned. 8 Perhaps this happens anyway, under modern conditions, but the process is at this moment newly self-conscious and peculiarly vivid. We can neither dissolve the art object back into the full complexity of its social context, hoping to rediscover it in its full historicity--context, like semiosis, is a story without end--nor offer an exhaustive account of its causes inferred from a reading of the object as "effect." In the case of Lewis, however, we can at least track some of the traffic between painting and performance, between the studio and the outside world (including the avant-garde as a phenomenon in the public world of newspapers, cabaret, decor, and fancy dress), between high culture and popular entertainment, between modernism and masculinity.
Many of Lewis's prewar works take dance as an explicit theme or a covert resource, a fact that should be taken a great deal more seriously than it is. The variety and significance of Edwardian dance forms, however, has been wildly underrated. The impact of Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet has been allowed to eclipse the reputations of their contemporaries (many of them women) and the influence of eurhythmics, popular and vernacular dance forms, and dance in music-hall revue. Edward Marsh, an early patron of Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, and Duncan Grant, certainly went to see Vaslav Nijinsky, but he also went ten times to Hullo Ragtime! at the Alhambra, often in the company of Rupert Brooke. 9 They would have heard Ethel Levey's rendition of Waiting for the Robert E. Lee, presumably the inspiration for the painting by Christopher Nevinson, reproduced upside down in the Daily Sketch in October 1913 ("to show that it doesn't matter"), and described as "certainly ragtime art." 10 Marsh was one of those dragooned by Lady Muriel Paget into wearing the costumes she had commissioned from Nevinson and Lewis for the Futurism tableaux at the Albert Hall Picture Ball in December 1913. That he wore such a costume (and what D. H. Lawrence thought about it) we know from his biography, but the little we know of its appearance derives from photographs published in the Sketch. 11
It is now a commonplace that the early years of the twentieth century were marked by accelerating modernization in all the technological and social meanings of the term and that a single generation encountered the internal combustion engine, the radio, the telephone, the gramophone, aeroplanes, and the cinema. One of the less remarked but more influential developments was the introduction of photography into the mass-circulation dailies and weeklies of the period. 12 These had always been illustrated, if at all, with engravings. The half-tone reproduction process brought not just a change of technique but a change in content and impact. The photograph had a different kind of detail and immediacy, and lent itself to that promiscuous collage of items that makes up the substance of magazines like the Tatler, the Bystander, or the Sketch. This immediacy was enhanced in contemporary advertising and in the cinema actualités that formed a popular part of the music-hall program, and it was exploited both by the "invented traditions" of the establishment and the political tactics of contemporary pressure groups. This new photographic hegemony, if we can call it that, marks a key moment in the consolidation of a spectacular society: not just a society saturated with images, or with spectacles of different kinds--the audience for which was massively extended by photographic reproduction, mass literacy, and the huge circulations of the halfpenny papers--but a "society of the spectacle" in Guy Debord's sense, a society in which social relations are mediated through spectacle. 13
Art--although in many debates a term that acted as a repository for everything immutable and transcendent, the principal signifier of what could not be brought down to the terms of technological progress or the vested interests of politics or the marketplace--was itself caught up in the processes of modernization (and modern reproduction). Avant-garde artists particularly, shorn of the forms of patronage that kept society portraitists, the genre painters, academicians--or for that matter the New English Art Club--afloat, nevertheless had to make their reputations and their livings. They were notorious in a new way, partly by accident and partly by design, partly because their works confounded established criteria of competence and partly because they were (prepared to be) fodder for a voracious press that could now print photographs of their paintings, sometimes sideways or upside down. "Modern art" became a subcategory of the editor's repertoire of humorous, topical, or scandalous images, and labels like "Post-Impressionist," "cubist," or "Futurist" caused "copy to foam up under the pen like paper in a conjurer's hat to overflowing." 14
At the same time as artists like Lewis reacted to what they perceived as the "feminization" and "bourgeoisification" of art--and perhaps for this reason--they were seeking a living from wealthy, aristocratic, female patrons, some of them not averse to a certain butch allure, who wanted dining rooms, fancy dresses, and party favors in avant-garde styles. Contrary to the popular trope of the embattled avant-garde, the avant-garde was briefly and--on certain terms, it is true--fashionable. 15 Nevinson refers to lectures and soirées attended by prewar Society and "one hundred and one Guardees and Guinnesses"; 16 and Lewis to the years when "Coronetted envelopes showered into my letter-box." 17 In the Tatler the avant-garde rubs shoulders with the aristocracy, with sportsmen and adventurers, popular entertainers, dancers, and music-hall artists. Futurism, in effect, offered to broker relations between them. It produced a frenzied, self-consciously modern imagery of railway stations and states of mind, of Waiting for the Robert E. Lee or The Pan-Pan Dance at the Monico. 18 It transformed the avant-garde artist into a sportsman-adventurer in the grip of technophiliac lust--a new prototype of masculinity roaring away from the fin de siècle in a gobble and whirr of pistons and propellers--and simultaneously into a performer (even a music-hall performer) in an ambiguous embrace of the demotic. Futurism offered newspaper readers a new entertainment, entertainers a topic for popular satire, the avant-garde a newly bombastic self-image, and a few aristocratic patrons a celebrity based not on birth, wealth, or attainment but on consumption and taste: an identity, indeed, derived from association with the avant-garde and from being seen as a consumer of outré commodities in the popular press. For those who chose to respond to it, from principle or expediency, this was a new, if compromised, space in which to operate. 19
We can bring these relations into sharper focus by looking at the studies associated with Kermesse--the painting itself was sold at auction in 1927 and disappeared after 1930--and at the kinds of performance in which they were implicated. 20 Take, first, Lewis's Lovers ( 1), a work on paper of 1912, 21 and its remarkable similarity to a photograph published in J. E. Crawford Flitch's Modern Dancing and Dancers ( 2). 22 Lewis's image may have been based on the photographs in Flitch, and certainly they reference the same event and the same way of choreographing relations between couples who in Lewis's title are specifically "Lovers." 23 But in what sense are studies like Lovers--including the Yale Kermesse (M72), Design for a Programme Cover--Kermesse (M52), and The Dancers (Study for Kermesse?)--"of" the dance? And of which dance? And what was the referent and work of "the dance" in Lewis's pictorial strategies?
The Flitch illustration is a photograph of Fred Farren and Beatrice Collier performing the "Danse des Apaches" from A Day in Paris, a ballet that opened at the Empire music hall in London on 19 October 1908 and continued well into 1909. 24 Paris was easily accessible yet peculiarly exotic: a place where tourism was not just a matter of viewing the principal monuments, collections, and promenades, but of experiencing a social and sexual geography of brasseries, cafés, markets, studios, dance halls, music halls and cabarets, all of them linked to an ethnography of writers, painters, students, dancers, clowns, prostitutes, gangsters, and grisettes. A Day in Paris revelled in the tourist's city. Its scenes were set in the Place de l'Opéra, on the quais, in the Champs Elysées, outside the Moulin Rouge, and inside the Artists' Ball. Its cast of characters included a panoply of Parisian types and the Bullivant Smiths, tourists from Brixton, whose visit provided the narrative conceit. The audience could revel in the myth of "Gay Paree"--the Paris of Trilby, the Moulin Rouge, and La Vie de Bohème--or affect a knowing distance from it by finding the tourists amusing. As Max Beerbohm observed in his column in the Saturday Review, Paris was now a pasteboard parody of its former glories: "All reality seems to have gone out of it, leaving only a hard artificial glare for the bedazzlement of tourists." It was "less like a city than a stage set": bohemia was dead. 25
The sensation of the evening was the "Danse des Apaches." The Times suggested that "for this alone A Day in Paris is well worth seeing"; it was rapidly written up, photographed, and caricatured in the press, in addition to being widely imitated. 26 (By February 1909, the Tatler observed that "at the present time--such is the penalty of success--the apache dance finds a place on nearly every music-hall programme throughout the country.") 27 More securely to the point, perhaps, than the comparison of Lovers with the photograph in Flitch, is the parallel between Lewis's characteristic aura of erotic menace and this account of the dance's emotional temperature:
The cold, compelling cruelty of everything he did, the calculated brutality to the girl who adored him for it, was a thing of great artistry, because the passion of the man for the girl he half strangled and threw about, was allowed to throb through in the most subtle and amazing way. Every movement, every poise, every piece of seeming brutality registered and was from the miming and dancing point of view, a work of art . . . such things come but once in a lifetime and the Apache Dance filled the Empire for months and still glows in the memory. 28
"Apaches" was a term coined in 1902 by the journalist Authur Dupin for the "savages" of the Parisian underclass: tribes of unemployed, violent, criminal hooligans with "the manners of the apaches, of the Far-West, the native scum of our civilisation." 29 In the early months of 1902 the headlines were filled with the vendetta between Manda and Leca, the leaders of rival apache bands, and in particular with accounts of an affray in broad daylight on 5 January, which left the rue Planchat splattered with blood and strewn with knives, axes, and revolvers. 30 Lewis himself lived for several years in the vicinity of the Montparnasse territory fought over by the gangs of "la Mouffe" and "la Maube." Like Augustus John and Christopher Nevinson (known in Montmartre as "l'apache qui rit" [PP, 65]), he had first-hand knowledge of the Paris apaches. 31 In Blast Lewis blessed Paris specifically for the "BALLADS of its PREHISTORIC APACHE Superb hardness and hardiesse of its Voyou type, rebellious adolescent" (an implicit riposte to the "BRITANNIC AESTHETE . . . SNEAK AND SWOT OF THE SCHOOL-ROOM"). 32 But the image of Lovers comes via the stage, not direct from the street.
From 1902 to 1914 the Parisian papers were constantly exercised by the problem of apaches. A major campaign in Le Matin (probably intended to counter liberal moves to abolish the guillotine) peaked in 1907. 33 In 1907 and 1908 Lewis was living in Paris while Max Dearly was choreographing his new Revue de la femme. The apaches in a sense were already "spectacular": each band distinguished itself in a particular way, though sharing a propensity for peaked caps or melon hats, pomaded hair and kiss-curls, collarless shirts with vivid silk neckerchiefs, and elaborate footwear (CO, 40). The violent, amoral, and flamboyant re of the apache condensed a range of social anxieties while offering what the image of the gangster has always offered: a seductive, unfettered masculinity, the revenge of the outcast on bourgeois propriety. Manda, Leca, and Amélie Hélie ("Casque d'Or"), the object of their affections, became household names and even folk-heroes. The beau monde flocked to see Leca and his apaches arrive at the cabaret of Le Bruyant Alexandre where Casque d'Or had been booked as a chanteuse. The Bouffes-du-Nord offered her a contract to star in a production of Casque d'Or et les Apaches. She was painted by Albert Dupré for the Salon and photographed by the Pirou studios for portrait cartes de visite wearing a pearl-grey costume and ostrich-feather hat. Her memoirs were published in serial form in the fortnightly Fin-de-Siècle. She had a starring role at the trial of Manda and his associates in May 1902, when the elegance of the public galleries rivalled that of a theatrical first night. 34
The apaches shared with even impoverished working-class Parisians a passion for dancing. 35 The bals of Montmartre and Montparnasse were legendary. What became known as the danse des apaches was not, however, the vernacular expression of a Parisian subculture, despite being occasionally taken as such. In fact it was wholly the invention of Max Dearly for a revue at the Moulin Rouge. 36 He danced it with Mistinguett, the stage name for Jean Bourgeois, as part of a show called La Revue de la femme, starting a vogue that first reached London in Fred Farren's choreography for A Day in Paris in 1908, in a scene set in the Moulin Rouge, and lasted into the 1950s.
Dearly's choreography, and its English and American adaptations, focused new anxieties concerning the numbers, effects, and supposed tribal organization of the Parisian underclass through the Manda-Leca-Casque d'Or geometry of the sexual triangle. The notoriety of the apaches and the public clamor surrounding them was condensed into a drama of Montagues and Capulets in modern dress, a self-conscious update of La Vie de Bohème. 37 The Tatler described the apache dance as the dance of the Parisian hooligan, "the degenerate, half-mad creature which seems to be a product of the twentieth-century civilisation"; and Flitch, who considered Farren's adaptation of it his finest achievement, praised Mistinguett as "a dancer who has brought into the dance all the nervous excitement of modernity" (MD, 183). 38
The crimes of passion enacted in the apache dance were "savage" insofar as they represented the antithesis of bourgeois concepts of love and sexuality--illicit, sadistic, explicit, vengeful, and wildly disruptive ( 3). The choreography represented the antithesis of the Romantic ballet tradition and of "classical" dancing on the London stage. It is not necessary to rely on photographs for a sense of it, since several fragments of film survive. A brief extract from Pathé's L'Empreinte, ou, la Main Rouge clearly shows Dearly and Mistinguett, dancing in a wine cellar to an accordianist before an impromptu audience of local Parisians joined, significantly, by two slumming, top-hatted, fur-collared bourgeois and a fashionably dressed woman. 39 The movements are violently acrobatic and erotic, miming extremes of attraction and repulsion: the woman is literally thrown around by the man, threatened by him (at one moment he simulates garrotting, with his forearm across her throat), and, in a defining gesture, pulled down backwards by her hair. Casque d'Or, in her memoirs, dismisses pallid, milk-sop notions of bourgeois romance and explicitly celebrates the exaction of a blood tribute from her admirers. 40 But the dance is usually a pas de deux, in which the jealous rival is presumed to be offstage. It ends violently, often with the murder of the girl, but in any case with the reassertion of masculine power over her fickle and disruptive sexuality. In illustrations the male is always dark and unshaven, with a cap, muffler, and sometimes a dagger, while the woman has a flared, ankle-length skirt, and a necktie by which she is whirled around. These movements and accessories were the defining elements of the apache image, not as it existed in its local variety, but as it was reduced and condensed for the cinema, the stage, contemporary photographs and caricatures, and as a popular form of fancy dress. 41
If we miss that cap and muffler and the contemporary resonance of those sequential poses--the complex of allusions to the social reality, mythology, and popular choreography of the apaches--we miss the narratives of violence and sexual jealousy that fuel an image like Lovers, an image nevertheless frozen and staged in its geometries. In the end this image is not located on the street but at the Moulin Rouge, the Empire, the Alhambra, the Coliseum, or the Palace, and identities that were already to a high degree performative have been tamed and transformed into a commodified spectacle for the music-hall stage. The shift from the whirling forms of popular caricature, as in the work of H. M. Bateman ( 4), into the angular vocabulary of cubo-futurism, is also expressive. The jagged shapes of Lovers have work to do, sliding ambiguously between reference and abstraction. The splintered facets on the left, for instance, framing the corners at top and bottom, evoke, subliminally, the top-hatted head and shoulder of a looming spectator; alternatively, the torpedo-shape in the bottom left corner seems to contain a viewer seen from above, and a tautly elliptical phallus thrusting vigorously into the back of the woman on the left presses her into the rough embrace of her partner, underwriting the sexual tensions in more rative elements of the drawing. The work is partly about this self-conscious restaging of modern sexualities, in which the apache stands as a local and contemporary manifestation of an atavistic masculinity, and as the screen for projective identifications on the part of a (very bourgeois and masculine) avant-garde subjectivity, one in flight from nineteenth-century bourgeois proprieties and in pursuit of an emancipated, twentieth-century sexual identity and experience.
The ambience of the music hall features here too, as a particular kind of social space and a particular kind of pictorial subject. R. Belfort, describing the Empire in 1902, observed that "aristocrats, artists, bourgeois, students, provincials, foreigners and 'the man in the street' form component parts of the Empire public." 42 Many were connoisseurs of variety turns and, especially, ballet but at least some derived part of their pleasure from the social mix and the sexual attractions of stage and promenade. What distinguished the music hall from the legitimate theater was the nature of the acts, the availability of drink, and the opportunity of circulating during the performance. This encouraged a volatile, well-oiled, participatory audience, and a link to prostitution. Halls like the Empire and the Alhambra (both in Leicester Square) were located in areas well known for soliciting. The Empire "Promenade," in particular, was notorious as the haunt of prostitutes and an informal club for "colonial officials, soldiers, civil servants, 'advanced' clergymen . . . the aristocracy, young bloods, Bohemians, and ordinary music-hall goers"--all attracted by what Compton Mackenzie nostalgically recalled as "peripatetic harlotry." 43
The taint, or promise, of sexuality caused an outcry when Walter Sickert exhibited Gatti's Hungerford Palace of Varieties: Second Turn of Miss Katie Lawrence in 1888. 44 Sickert was no doubt stimulated by contact with Edgar Degas and scenes of urban entertainment in France. Until then, as Anna Robins points out, the halls were celebrated in literary circles but not depicted by the Victorian painters of modern life. Sickert in turn inspired Spencer Gore, who began a series of studies of music-hall and ballet subjects at the Old Bedford and the Alhambra in 1906. 45 Both artists depict the audience against a brightly lit stage or up in the gallery. Sickert offers a comédie humaine and Gore a rendering of the artificial brilliance of performance itself; they seem a world away from Lewis and Lovers (although Lewis was friendly with Gore and wrote his obituary in Blast, praising him over Degas for his "scenes from the London music-halls [which] brought to light a new world of witty illusion"). 46 The influence of cubism and Futurism lies between them but also something more: Lewis's detachment and antihumanism: the artist cannot be "of" the scene or even portray it with human warmth. But Lovers belongs to the tradition of Degas, Sickert, and Gore, albeit tangentially. Lewis made the connection himself. The transformation of the tradition was not a matter of the flight to abstraction--"the particular transcripts you make will respond to some personal and logical vision, or the abstract arrangements will have their direct parallel in Nature." 47 It was a matter of short-circuiting the connection between inner vision and outer motif. "Dégas would be getting in the Poulailler [the gallery] and gaze down on actors' heads, or get next the orchestra and stare up at them, to induce Nature to supply a simulance of his vision. We to-day dispense more or less with these acrobatics." 48 Lewis had seen his dancers but had not directly transcribed them, or that was the claim: they were inside his head.
Four years separate Lovers from A Day in Paris. The strong but speculative argument is that Flitch's 1912 reproduction of Farren and Collier's 1908 performance is the link that brings them together. The weaker but less contentious claim is that there was a rich vein of apache references in popular culture before and after 1912--apache dancers, apache balls, apache films, apache costumes in the fancy-dress craze--on which Lovers draws, but with an affect peculiar to Lewis's private concerns. The immediate impetus for Lovers, as for Kermesse, lies in the coincidence of two events in the spring of 1912: the first London exhibition of Futurist paintings at the Sackville Gallery in March, and Madame Frida Uhl Strindberg's plans for a cabaret called the Cave of the Golden Calf or Cabaret Theatre Club, published in April. 49
The "Preliminary Prospectus" of the Cave promised an interior "entirely and exclusively decorated" by "leading young British artists." The cabaret would embrace "On one hand such art as we owe to the genius of the people, the dance, folk lore--on the other offering free development to the youngest and best of our contemporaries and--'Futurists'" (ABG, 63). 50 Gore was put in charge of decorations, and Lewis was a leading contributor. Through them the cabaret drew into its more exclusive and self-conscious ambience a tradition of painterly engagement with music hall and revue, a tradition now redefined as Futurist for reasons of modernist credibility. Dance was a common emblem of emancipation and even, in its contentious new forms, of sexual licence. It made a suitable theme for a venue taking its title from the Biblical narrative of Moses and the Golden Calf, hinting none too subtly at pagan orgies and drunken revelry. The Cave staged everything from flamenco and tarantella to "classical," "nautch," "veil," and "coster" dances. It offered tango teas and champagne suppers; in the small hours it was, according to Osbert Sitwell, "a super-heated Vorticist garden of gesticulating res, dancing and talking while the rhythm of the primitive forms of ragtime throbbed through the wide room." 51 Dance was also prominent at the Sackville Gallery, where the most popular works were the Futurist Gino Severini's Blue Dancer and The Pan-Pan Dance at the Monico. 52 The impact of Futurism was critical for Lewis, if often denied. It can be traced obliquely, in the impress of comparable handling or themes, and even in the force of denial itself. The use of blue in the Kermesse studies might alert us to it (as a nod to Blue Dancer or, somewhat sarcastically, in the direction of precubist Picasso); or what is perhaps a reworking of Severini's Pan-Pan Dance--a cheerful, urbane, kaleidoscopic, picture-puzzle--into something whirling, darker, fractured, and menacing like the Yale Kermesse. The precise dates within 1912 are not secure, so nothing is sure, but I am arguing that a confluence of rivalry and patronage provoked Kermesse and its associated studies, a rivalry sparked by the challenge of Futurism, even Blue Dancer, and patronage secured with the commission for the Cave. 53
Cabaret developed in France, out of the café concert. 54 Originally rooted in the more or less private and spontaneous exchanges of writers and poets, during the 1880s and 1890s cabaret was transformed through the efforts of entrepreneurs and performers like Rodolph Salis (at the Chat Noir) and Aristide Bruant (at Le Mirliton) into an intimate but public entertainment, by turns literary, dramatic, satirical, scabrous, sentimental, and demotic. Half a dozen cabarets are listed in the 1907 Paris Baedeker, including the "cabarets illusionnistes" on the Boulevard Clichy: the Cabaret de l'Enfer, the Cabaret du Ciel, and the Cabaret du Néant, but tourists are warned that their songs, mystic illusions, and shadow-plays "presuppose a considerable knowledge of colloquial French" and "are scarcely suitable for ladies." 55 Already in 1905, one commentator had observed that the local cabarets have "long since ceased to attract the Montmartrois, and are kept up as mere show places for provincial and foreign tourists" (like the Bullevant Smiths in A Day in Paris). 56 After 1900, however, cabaret was increasingly taken up by the avant-garde and diffused across Europe. While its passing or dilution was mourned in Paris, new cabarets were opened in Berlin, Barcelona, Munich, Cracow, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Zurich. Italy and England are absent from the list because in Italy the place of cabaret was to some extent taken by Futurism, while in England cabaret was "alien from its very inception." 57 This was the view early in 1912 of Francis Toye in the Bystander: satire was the lifeblood of cabaret and satire (and shameless chansonniers) were precluded by English good taste. Cabaret would never transplant. 58 But only two months later he offered a warm if cautious reception to the Cave of the Golden Calf, and the Times concluded that the cabaret habit was finally taking root in London. 59
Mme. Strindberg embraced avant-garde art and artists with unfeigned enthusiasm, but undoubtedly her "futurist" décor was good for publicity and publicity was good--in fact was a precondition--for the avant-garde. It was a two-way street. Cabaret interiors, informal and eclectic, had signalled their bohemianism with artists' posters, paintings, and signboards, ever since Salis and Bruant had shown work by Théophile Steinlen, Jules Cheret, and Toulouse-Lautrec. The actual Golden Calf in the Cave, Eric Gill's household pet and tutelary presence, was prered in Steinlen's signboard for the Chat Noir, in the stained-glass window of the Golden Calf that Salis commissioned for the club's new premises in 1885, and by the huge golden pig in the Cabaret du Ciel. 60 The promise of an artistic ambience was part of the cabaret's attraction for its social mix: "artists, writers, poets, East-end Jews, men-about-town, dancers, cocottes and all the rest of them," as Nevinson described the customers at the Crab Tree Club (PP, 62). 61 Mme. Strindberg's promotional literature linked the cabaret and the music hall to the Futurists as sources of inspiration; she praised variety as "the natural form of art" or "at least a perennial expression of artistic temperament" and promised that her new cabaret would encourage "art in this spontaneous and flexible form." 62 For their part artists could earn some money (a pressing need), socialize, manifesto-ize, and inhale what we have come to call the oxygen of publicity. (Lewis confessed that although the Cabaret was "the cause of so many ridiculous vexations to me. . . . it serves to fill up the necessary gaps financially" [L, 46]). 63
Lewis's contribution to the Cave was extensive. An unsigned note in the Cornell archives from Mme. Strindberg offers him payment for two paintings, a pair of screens, and the arrangement and decoration of the walls. 64 In a later memoir he refers to "the somewhat abstract hieroglyphics I had painted round the walls, [which] with the impassioned orchestra . . . must have provided a kick or two for the young man about town of the moment," adding that it was his first job: "I did not receive a great deal for my night-club murals (actually £60). I was quite unknown, however, and would have done them for nothing." 65 He also painted the drop-curtain (still wet on the opening night), designed posters, menus, envelopes, and various pieces of printed ephemera, and contributed a "Painter-Poet's Night" of ombres chinoises ("chinese shadows," or shadow plays) in 1913. 66 Most importantly, he also contributed Kermesse, which hung on the stairs like a preface to the revelry below.
The only remaining record of this nine-foot painting is a drypoint by Horace Brodzky, about the size of a postcard, called Viewing Kermesse, from an exhibition in New York in 1917. 67 At an earlier exhibition (the Allied Artists' Association in 1912), Roger Fry had praised it as the only work to survive the ordeal of being hung in the ample surroundings of the Albert Hall, and both Fry and Clive Bell, in contemporary reviews, had advised the viewer to take the lift to the gallery, from which vantage "He will be able to judge [it] as he would judge music--that is to say as pure formal composition" 68 and "abstract harmony." 69 Brodzky's viewer looks at an easel painting that he is encouraged to read formally, framed by the gallery context and by a critical discourse adapting Walter Pater's dictum that "all art aspires to the condition of music" to modernist ends. 70 This was not, however, the painting's original form or context at the Cabaret Theatre Club. Brodzky's viewer did not see the same painting that Lewis had painted in 1912, not only because Lewis had changed it, but because the cabaret itself produced a different kind of audience. This audience was socially mixed; self-consciously bohemian; seated at tables or milling around; out to enjoy itself talking, flirting, eating, drinking, smoking, and dancing; engaged with the spectacle on stage and off; it occupied to the full the senses of its social body, with art as backdrop--the very antithesis of the gallery's contemplative, even critical, "eye." Augustus John, Lewis's erstwhile mentor, wrote that he was "greatly impressed by your picture. . . . In spite of the perplexing and unaccustomed elements of the design I recognize the energy and grandeur of the conception and am positively moved by it as to the beating of drums and blowing of horns and thumping of feet." 71 Sickert, who was sceptical of Lewis's more abstract work, suggested that for a real sense of his talent "one should see the decoration he has done for a night club called the Cabaret. For a club where you go to dance the tango or to have other amusement, this is just the right form of decoration." 72
Reviewing his work in a letter to Ezra Pound in 1916, Lewis remarked that Kermesse (in its "primitive state") had been "praised by Roger Fry in 'the Nation,' [and then] John wrote 'thanking me' for it etc. But even for a wall painting it is too uncouth and its unfinished state would not recommend it to the very discriminating, with which ideal audience we must always suppose we are dealing." (L, 79, emphasis Lewis's). Collectively, the Cave's customers might not have been Lewis's ideal audience, and the discriminating among them less distracted in a gallery. But renting Kermesse to Mme. Strindberg (who retained an option to purchase as part of the contract) kept Lewis in the company of artists such as Jacob Epstein, Harold Gilman, Eric Gill, and Gore, not to mention patrons like Ford Madox Ford and Osbert Sitwell (later owner of Lovers). 73 It kept Lewis, "futurism," and the cabaret itself in the public eye; it framed Kermesse in particular ways, not necessarily to its disadvantage, as part of the new traffic between the avant-garde, performers, and entrepreneurs; and it displayed the work to a mixed clientele of artists, writers, actors, bohemians, aristocrats, and the Brigade of Guards.
Something of the flavor of the club and a sense of its checkered fortunes can be gained (with caution) from its lightly fictionalized appearances in three contemporary novels: Charles Marriott's Subsoil , where it res as the Rocking Horse Club; Gilbert Cannan's Mendel , where it is called the Merlin's Cave; and Ford Madox Ford's The Marsden Case (set in 1914 but published in 1923), where it appears as the Night Club.
In Subsoil the Rocking Horse is "a Bohemian club, in the style of Montmartre. . . . furnished as a café restaurant, and freakishly decorated." 74 It has been started with wealthy patronage as a rallying place for "the younger and more experimental painters and writers of London" (S, 9). But Marriott's hero, Hugh Sutherland, one of its decorators and a founding member, is already suspicious of its success with the newspapers and distrustful of those who insist "on the possibility of Bohemia in evening-dress" (S, 10). Publicity was a contested value. The Cabaret Theatre Club vaunted its uniquely congenial surroundings for artists and art lovers, citing "an eminent art critic" who had praised its interior as the "most notable attempt in England to apply the new artistic gospel to permanent mural decoration." 75 Within the novel, however, Sutherland feels that the club has been betrayed into the hands of traders and philistines. His acquaintance, Valentine Saffery, observes that they "regard us as truffle-hogs, nosing out the refinements of pleasure they haven't the wit to discover for themselves" (S, 16). Sutherland himself, having designed a panel for the club, regrets the company it keeps:
[It] represented a procession of dancing-girls, of a type suggested to him by some Cretan rines in the British Museum, with hour-glass waists, exaggerated hips, and breasts enormously enlarged and amalgamated by upward pressure. While painting it, he had been inspired by the idea of the factitious and meretricious as right for the atmosphere of the place, as well as by the way the queerly distorted res lent themselves to the suggestion of rhythmical movement. Now he realised how a purely artistic intention could be misinterpreted . . . [by] the dirty innuendo of the Philistine, sniffing corruption. [S, 22-23]
Bohemia has become "a sort of game preserve for the wealthy classes" (S, 315), and images of pimps and procurement hover in Marriott's text as metaphors for the prostitution of art by dealers, by fashionable, shallow, and sensation-seeking patrons, and by an opportunistic avant-garde.
While Marriott's reservations may owe something to his Arts-and-Crafts Christian Socialism, and a certain reforming zeal, a similar complaint is made by the characters in Gilbert Cannan's Mendel. 76 At the Merlin's Cave, the painters Logan and Mendel 77 find a commissionaire at the door, a book to be signed, and silk-lined overcoats and opera hats in the cloakroom. Two young men in immaculate evening dress follow them in, looking "slightly self-conscious and ashamed of themselves" (M, 236), and Mendel wonders, "Why did they come there if they were ashamed? and why did they expect an Asmodean lewdness of an artists' club, they for whom the flesh-markets of the music-hall promenades existed?" (M, 236) When Mendel's friend and model Jessie Petrie asks him what he thinks of the place--"I suppose if the swells come it'll be a success, but they do spoil it"--he agrees, "Yes. They spoil everything" (M, 238).
Ford Madox Ford, describing 1914 from the distance of 1923, is more
benign. Mme. Strindberg is "a kind, voluptuous, abstracted creature
. . . very benevolent to innumerable young men with steeple-crowned hats
and black side whiskers"
78
and someone who, as he counselled the exasperated Lewis in 1913,
"is trying to build up a palace of all the Arts with three oyster
shells and stale patchouli and sawdust and creme and verse libre and
champagne corks."
79
Ford later recalled writing a shadow-play for the Cabaret--ombres
chinoises had been one of the glories of the Chat Noir
--and it is tempting to see it as the basis for his account of the
shadow-play in The Marsden Case.
80
The narrator is sunk at his marble table during the preparations;
the young man who has designed the silhouettes passes "swiftly before
the screen, a cardboard box beneath his cape, himself a silhouette"
(MC, 90); and then the lights are switched on, revealing
"a terrific white wooden pillar like a beaked man with a scarlet
tongue" (MC, 92), and all around white caryatids with "scarlet
details, the heads of hawks, cats, camels, and the white of their paint
[giving] small shining reflections" (MC, 92). Clarice Honeywill,
a diseuse who is "a true Tragic muse with an awful voice in which every
word [is] clearer than type," performs while "non-representational
snakes, assassins, and harem-grilles" (MC, 128) wriggle across
the illuminated sheet. She brings the house down. The "Guardees and
stockbrokers and German Jews" (MC, 129) demand an encore, and
London loses "a great diseuse" (MC, 130), as she is "swept
up into the footlights of blessed and stereotyped inanities and did
the same thing night after night for a thousand nights, literally"
(MC, 130).
81
And we will never know if Lewis was the young man in the cape, and if
this was the same occasion as his "Painter-Poet's Night" in October
1913, an event that led him to write to his friend Cuthbert Hamilton
of the "shadow-picture bustle" and of his concern that the "beastly
Cabaret, that has been the cause of so many ridiculous vexations to me,
. . . [should not] add lessening of our good camaraderie to the number
of its senseless misdeeds" (L, 46).
82
Early in 1914 the club closed down. There had been financial difficulties and the artists had not been paid. (In April 1913 Mme. Strindberg offered Ginner and Gore her Augustus John paintings, drawings, and etchings in settlement of £535, once she had un-mortgaged them; Lewis took his money out of the till.) 83 The club's minute books make mysterious references to libels and scandals, and the club was raided by police because nonmembers were purchasing food and drink in breach of the regulations. A creditors' meeting had been arranged as early as July 1913, but Mme. Strindberg seems to have evaded the noose until February 1914, when a liquidation sale took place. (The furniture was sold for £80 and the "good will" for £10 [ABG, 113].) 84 In April 1914, apparently still trading, she was fined £160 with the option of two month's imprisonment for selling wine, beer, spirits, and tobacco without a licence. 85 In May the same magistrate, for the same offence, "ordered the Cabaret Club to be struck off the register, and directed that the premises should not be used as a club for the next five years." 86
The Sketch ran a series on the new supper clubs for dining and tango dancing (the Lotus, Murray's, and the Four Hundred Club), but there were no outré decorations, no cabaret turns, no avant-garde company. This was followed in July by an article on the Crab Tree Club, on Greek Street, with which John was associated. This was artier than the supper clubs and full of young women with bobbed hair and red neckerchiefs, but only as masquerade. 87 In April, on the rebound from the Cabaret Theatre Club and the Omega Workshops, Lewis founded the Rebel Art Centre with Kate Lechmere, whose idea it was, as codirector and source of capital. 88 The Cubist Art Centre, as it was also known, was several things at once. It was an art school (costing five guineas a quarter; with instruction in various applied arts including the painting of screens, fans, lampshades, and scarves available if required; Mr. Lewis to visit as professor five days a week). It was a workshop for painters and craftsmen who could "bring their work and go on with it, if this atmosphere is congenial. . . . " 89 It was a place for lectures, performances, and public discussion, with talks to be given by Pound and Marinetti, a Blast evening and addresses given "to the sound of carefully chosen trumpets"; short plays, ombres chinoises, and lectures by Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander Scriabin were promised. Finally, it was an avant-garde environment: "the only room in Europe where artists belonging to the New movement in art have had so free a hand, and done work on this scale." But it was scarcely a social center; it had no dining facilities, no cabaret turns, and no tango teas. The stockbrokers and tradesmen were left behind, but at some cost: almost nobody came. The avant-garde cabaret experiment was over and its principal components disassembled into the Rebel Art Centre (which quickly faded), the dance-and-supper clubs (which sprang up everywhere), and the music hall (which enjoyed a final flourish with the coming of revue).
A Day in Paris was a music-hall ballet. Kill That Fly! was a music-hall revue. Between 1908 and 1912 the metropolitan halls were developing into "palaces of variety," and revue helped broaden their audience and extend their appeal, while "killing with refinement" the music hall as Victorian audiences had known it. 90 The impact of revue, together with that of the Russian Ballet and American song and dance forms, eclipsed the long tradition of music-hall ballet. The last in-house work at the Alhambra was staged in 1912 and at the Empire in 1915, but already in 1912, as one critic commented, above and beyond revue hung the shadow of cinema, where "by the expenditure of the humble sixpence . . . one can for a couple of hours run through the gamut of all the histrionic emotions--tragedy, comedy, farce, scenic effect, melodrama, and illustrations of Nature's marvels hitherto undreamt of." 91
"Revue" was a term adopted from the French for a dramatic "review of the year," satirizing topical events and personalities in loosely linked scenes of dialogue and song. It became both increasingly spectacular, with lavish costumes, sets, and chorus numbers, and increasingly parodic, offering not only burlesques of current events, popular fashions, and well-known individuals but also parodies of both "high" art forms and rival performers. Extravagant spectacles with long-legged chorus lines made an easy appeal to popular taste (and to the new bourgeois audience for variety and revue), even while the audience for Shirley Kellogg in Hullo Ragtime! at the London Hippodrome in 1912 had to get the point of Ethel Levey's impersonation of Anna Pavlova in "The Baccanale Rag." Kellogg and Levey appeared in the 1913 follow-up revue, Hullo Tango!, with costumes by Léon Bakst, the designer for the Russian Ballet. Levey appeared in one scene as Countess Zicka in "Hiplomacy," a parody of Victorien Sardou's Diplomacy; in another scene, in a startlingly self-referential bit of business, Harry Tate gave an impersonation of how George Robey would play Tate's own sketch "Golfing." Hullo . . . London! by George Grossmith at the Empire Theatre in 1910 included a skit on Lady Constance Stewart-Richardson, the aristocratic "Grecian" dancer in the style of Isadora Duncan. All Change Here at the Alhambra in 1911 offered a burlesque of Richard Strauss's Elektra at Covent Garden. 92 This is all to say that the contemporary audience was sufficiently familiar with current developments in the music hall, the Russian Ballet, opera, the legitimate theatre, and popular music, to get the references. 93 But at the same time the increasingly lavish productions of "spectacular" revue, derived from America, were smothering the sharpness, pace, and irony of "intimate" revue, closer to cabaret and derived from Paris. 94
Kill That Fly!, "a new and original review by George Grossmith," opened at the Alhambra on 14 October 1912. 95 The scene set in the Metropolitan Cabaret was a skit on the Cave of the Golden Calf: a popular cultural spoof of the avant-garde; and almost, if not quite, a "spectacular" spoof of an "intimate" revue. 96 The phrase "kill that fly" was "a Yankeeism which implies having a flip at anything that may be making a buzz"; the revue touched "gaily and without offence upon nearly every subject of the period--Politics, the Stage, Eugenics, Fashions in Costume and in Dancing, Society, the Exhibitions, and so on and so on" 97 (though to the relief of another critic, not on those now-tedious topics, the "Suffragists, the Insurance Act . . . the revolt of the doctors, the Balkan War, and Home Rule"). 98 Kill That Fly! was one of the first revues to benefit from the Lord Chamberlain's relaxation of rules governing music-hall performance, and to stage satirical characterizations of the politicians Asquith, Lloyd George, and Reginald McKenna as well as skits on George Edwardes (the manager of the Empire), Gaby Deslys, and the composer Oscar Straus. 99
Discussing the Parisian context, Weiss has pointed out that revue depends on topicality, allusion, and parody, in the form of a "jumbling and splicing of current events" into a rapid succession of loosely linked scenes (PC, 30). Its heterogeneity and lack of a framing narrative link it to newspapers and collage. Both collage and revue aestheticize the elisions of newspaper syntax, so that to "practice the revue in any form [is] . . . to cultivate an aesthetic of the newspaper," the essential context and subtext of the revue genre (PC, 18). In Weiss's definition, revue is to be understood as "a comic system according to which . . . society commentated itself" (PC, 36). In Britain as in Paris, a loosely understood "cubism," or as of 1912 "futurism," or some such phrase as "modern art" was a topic for newspapers and music hall alike: one more sign of the times, one more source of parody. But at the same time music-hall revue, with its puns and allusions and spliced topicalities, its fondness for ragtime and spectacle and punctured pretensions, offered a quotidian touchstone for a certain kind of modernist aesthetic. This was the "enormous, jangling, journalistic, fairy desert of modern life" that served the artist "as Nature did more technically primitive man." 100 Or as Lewis put it elsewhere, "Folk Art, along with Music Hall Songs, and authors of Pagliaccis, Viennese Waltzes, etc., is very seducing and certainly the next best thing to Bach. (The officially 'serious' artists of any time, who practise 'le grand Art,' come well below 'My Home in Dixie.')" 101
The vernacular and the popular are sources of invigoration for an avant-garde that wants to mark its distance from the diluted naturalisms, symbolisms, and impressionisms of fin-de-siècle bourgeois culture, and stake its claim to modernity through a newly expressive formal vocabulary allied to a keen sensibility toward the textures and experience of everyday life. Nevertheless, the move toward the vernacular or the popular is, in Lewis's terms, a careful discrimination made with a new elite culture in mind. "We don't want to-day things made entirely of gold (but gold mixed with flint or grass, diamond with paste, etc.). . . . But the condition of our enjoyment of vulgarity, discord, cheapness or noise is an unimpaired and keen disgust with it. . . . Rare and cheap, fine and poor, these contrasts are the male and female, the principle of creation to-day." 102
The topicality of the avant-garde brought Mme. Strindberg added publicity and a return on her investment in avant-garde artists. Once the Cabaret Theatre Club had entered the public domain, or once the press had turned it into a (distinctively visual) reference point for a larger audience than had ever frequented the club, it was ripe for parody in music-hall revue. The Sunday Referee complained that Kill That Fly! was at times "a little too intimate, perhaps, for anybody but the man about town," but the press was happy to spell out references, and the Sketch reproduced a photograph of the Metropolitan Cabaret scene, clearly labelling it "A Skit on the Cave of the Calf." 103 The circularity of the connections between publicity, performance, the avant-garde, and urban themes in modernist painting, can be neatly tracked through a clipping from the Paris newspaper Actualité, with its photograph of a "Cabaret de Cubistes à Londres": in the background is Lewis's drop-curtain for the Cave of the Calf. 104 Actualité also ran a painting of Piccadilly Circus, rendered in a hard-edged, sardonic, cartoon-like style, loosely compatible with the cabaret manner of Ginner and Gore. Charles Ginner's Piccadilly Circus , now in the Tate Gallery, is clearly distinct; this piece is probably one of the two posters Mme. Strindberg commissioned from the artist along with wall decorations for the Cave. Most of the image's middle ground is taken up with the Clapham omnibus, and most of the omnibus is occupied by a large advertisement for the "new Alhambra revue." Any time after 14 October, this would have been Kill That Fly!, with its skit on the Cabaret Theatre Club.
It might even be the case, allowing for theatrical license and the constraints of a proscenium stage, that photographs of Kill That Fly! contain further clues as to what the Cave looked like ( 5); the "A. E. Craven" who designed the sets was well acquainted with the Cave of the Golden Calf. 105 Obviously the high frontal sets could not reproduce the smoky, intimate ambience of the basement Cave. There is no sign of Epstein's "barbaric" plaster carvings that clothed the supporting iron columns, although in the scene of "Miss Muriel Hudson singing her rag-time medley" there are two squat, shaven-headed, Eastern-looking idols seated on either side of the back doorway. 106 Other features, however, are readily identifiable. Gill's calf appears three times: at the back of the stage on the right; in relief above the curtained central door (with the word "Troglodytes" attached to it); and again above the door on the left. Ginner's triptych in the Cave is directly reproduced in the wall painting at the back, but inserted into it are two jagged, irregular forms and the re of a performer strongly reminiscent of Gore's A Singer at the Bedford Music Hall of 1912. The frieze above loosely follows the jungle theme and cartoon-like style of Ginner's Oil Study for Tiger-Hunting Mural in the Cave of the Golden Calf. 107 Above the "Cabaret Cosmopolitan" poster at the back left is a hieroglyph based on Lewis's three-headed calf design for the "Cabaret Theatre Club" brochure. (The two res on either side have been separated out so that the overall shape is no longer as compact; the features on the left have been orientalized, and those on the right made more conventionally feminine.)
Above the right-hand door are three res at a table, with Lewis's characteristic, jagged-edged diagonals, and what appear to be ominous, Gauguinesque birds in the foreground. On the left-hand side of the photograph, Lewis's seated female (at the top) and dancing res (below) are taken from the "Programme" and the "Cabaret Theatre Club" brochure. (Craven probably took them directly from the publicity; Lewis is unlikely to have scaled them up as wall decorations himself or they would have been mentioned in the club's publicity for its second season, opening at precisely this moment, on 15 October.) Between them hangs a painting with something like the motif of ships on a wedge of sea from Gore's studies for his deer-hunting mural, and on the left side of the set, above the door and calf, quite clearly if inexplicably, is Frederick Etchells's The Dead Mole, exhibited at the second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912 and reproduced in its catalog (this angle does not appear in 5).
The Metropolitan Cabaret scene appears to reproduce accurately the loosely knit program of the Cabaret Theatre Club, with its odd division between the pagan, "primitive" jungle themes of Epstein, Gill, Ginner, and Gore; as well as what Violet Hunt recalled as Lewis's "raw meat designs": "Bismarckian images, severings, disembowellings, mixed pell-mell with the iron shards that did it, splashed with the pale blood of exhausted heroes." 108 There was more than a touch of irony here, so Craven's sets were, perhaps unwittingly, doubly parodic. One Observer critic (P. G. Konody perhaps, who was parti pris) complimented
this group of artistic revolutionaries upon the happy title which has been bestowed upon and accepted by them. The "Troglodytes," or "Cave-dwellers," is a singularly appropriate appellation for a coterie of artists, who are not only connected with the "Cave of the Calf," but who aim--most of them--at the primitive simplicity of the days when art was in its infancy. . . . on bones and on the walls of caves. . . . 109
The irony may have been lost on the casual visitor. The Rocking Horse Club in Marriott's Subsoil was "named after an innocent illustration in art-criticism which had raised a storm of mingled derision and enthusiastic assent about the writer's ears" (S, 9). The reference is clearly to the catalog of the first Post-Impressionist exhibition in which Desmond MacCarthy, writing from Fry's notes, claimed that "a good rocking-horse is more like a horse than the snapshot of a Derby winner"; the same essay suggested that Post-Impressionism was symptomatic of a "return to primitive, even perhaps of a return to barbaric art." 110 Cork may not be wrong to suggest that on one level the jungle scenes offered "a fitting location for the primal emotions they wanted to unleash" (ABG, 68), but it seems possible that he misses the sarcasm: a gleeful fastening on the notion of the primitive as a now ubiquitous critical term, lapped up by a shallow and gullible audience prepared to rehearse their modernist litany without too much care for the paintings it served. 111
The dance was a favorite theme of artists and poets from the 1880s to World War I. 112 But Edvard Munch's dance of life or W. B. Yeats's symbolist identity of dancer and dance, the art nouveau line of La Goulue or Loie Fuller, the rapturous roses of fin-de-siècle decadence at the Empire ballet, even Matisse's La Danse, have little in common with Lewis's fascination with the "primitive" and the machine. Lewis depicts res in a dance that is vigorous, acrobatic, and highly expressive. Arms are raised above the head; knees and elbows are akimbo; torsos are twisted; and features are fixed, mask-like, and grim. We can at least be confident of what it is not--languid, decorous, fluid or balletic--and confident too that this is more than just an unforeseen consequence of Lewis's chosen style. Bearing in mind the social and pictorial relations between sexuality, modernity, and the dance, we may ask: What were the dances popular at the time and danced at the Cabaret Theatre Club; and what was the point (and the work) of the dance as a referent in Lewis's pictorial strategies?
Between about 1910 and 1914 there was an explosion of interest in all forms of dance--vernacular, theatrical, and social. 113 Folk dances were energetically collected, photographed and revived. Theatrical and ballet conventions were overturned by dancers like Isadora Duncan and the Russian Ballet. On the dance floor, the previously daring "Do you reverse?" paled beside risqué new dances like the tango, the two-step, and the Brazilian maxixe. These forms leaked into each other: the tango reached London from Paris via The Sunshine Girl at the Gaiety Theatre in 1912; professionals gave theatrical displays of the flamenco or tarantella; the professional tango dancers Irene and Vernon Castle gave demonstrations at social dances or shared the bill with the Russian Ballet at Deauville Casino; and the Parisian apache dance, posing as an urban vernacular, became a popular spectacle in music halls and cabarets. Dance societies and classes were formed; journals, sheet music, and books were published; tango teas were instituted everywhere; and ragtime became a craze. Augustus John wrote to John Quinn, "I haven't got the Tango-craze yet but I have a dance now and then; rag-time can't be resisted." 114
Although Kermesse itself is lost, there are several gouache studies associated with it, and similar themes in Lewis's other designs for the club including stationery, menus, a poster, and a program cover. This corpus of works includes the Yale Kermesse (M72), The Dancers (Study for Kermesse?) (M48), the Design for a Programme Cover--Kermesse (M52), Dancer (M47), Lovers (M74), A Wall Decoration in the Cave of the Golden Calf (M33), and probably the comparable Abstract Design (M29). 115 They constitute a recognizable subgroup among Lewis's works of 1912, having in common a cubo-futurist mode of drawing, a set of thematic references to dance and festivity, and a direct or inferential link to the Cave of the Golden Calf.
Lewis's works of 1912 refer to a variety of contemporary dance forms. Lovers, as we have seen, derives from Dearly's and Mistinguett's apaches. The Wall Decoration in the Cave of the Golden Calf may owe something to the influence of Diaghilev's dancers en point (the Russian Ballet had its first London season in 1911). 116 The Dancers seem to hold drapery or veils (see the cover illustration of this issue): Salomes were ubiquitous in this period 117 and the Cave advertised "veil dances" in 1912, but the connection may be to The Nautch Girl, with Indian costumes designed by Albert Rothenstein, performed in June 1912. (The conventional delicacy of Rothenstein's watercolor costume-study, reproduced in the Cave's publicity, has perhaps blinded us to the link between this work and The Dancers.) The Yale Kermesse is different again ( 6). A Sunday Times reviewer praised as the best item on the program a Spanish dancer "fraught with the spirit of Spain and the passion of the Latin blood. Not for a long time has a male dancer, whose art is not academic but intuitive, roused so much enthusiasm among an audience, many of whom were connoisseurs and gourmets of choreographic art." 118 Lewis was in Spain in 1902, 1908, and 1910; the raised arms, ferocious expressions, and ecstatic rhythm of the Yale Kermesse do invoke something like flamenco and the patterned, almost mechanical beat of stamping feet and castanets. The Breton costumes, however, put it in Brittany, and the "Preliminary Prospectus" promised "a scene from a Breton 'Wake'" along with coster dances and dances from Goya's "Caprichos" on the opening night. 119
In the Yale Kermesse the sense of sexual abandon is menacing. Even in the study we can not watch the performance with impunity; the spectator in Brodzky's drypoint would have been engulfed by it. The central couple advances threateningly, a demented arthropod with limbs akimbo, its face a mask of fury, a voracious puppet with the appetite of a praying mantis. 120 The man on the left raises a glass; two more lie overturned on the countertop, and in a flurry of angular pen-strokes we can make out his legs and shoes drumming at the ground below. A skirted re leaps screaming into the frame on the right with the drink held in an outstretched arm streaming in a solid arc down to her head. If this is a dance it is somehow a dance of danger and death, an impression enhanced by the blue-white shards (all pleated metal and sharpened blades and broken glass); by the tyro-like dentistry and up-flung arm of the re on the right; by the characteristically crosshatched, lobster-claw ellipses; by the white wings of light, offsetting with their upward sweep the orchestration of curves and blades below; and by the force with which Lewis has scratched and gouged the lines across his washes and into the surface of the paper. It is very difficult to read this image more benignly, and one critic who admired its vigorous geometry nevertheless claimed that it was less like a peasant carnival than the tournament scene from Ivanhoe or "some terrible battle of extermination between murderous insects." 121 Design for a Programme Cover--Kermesse appears to re a sexual assault. The Dancers, with some lessening of hostilities, confirms the theme of penetration, partly through the re-ground relation in all these pictures. Pound once praised Vorticism for giving him new eyes, for showing him the shapes between things and the wedges of sky between the roofs of houses; here the wedges attack the roofs. 122 There is no background, only intersecting planes where, in contrast with cubism proper, the manner of intersection is violently rendered. The nonral shapes, where we can distinguish them, thrust into, dissect, and abrade the combatants in a manner that echos the etched scars of Lewis's pen.
The point is not that the Lewisian dance was simply a stylized illustration of any particular contemporary dance, or that there is a simple correspondence between salon painting and the sylvan ballet or ballroom waltz, on the one hand, and between Lewis's brand of cubo-futurism and the tango, flamenco, or apache dance on the other. I mean instead that there were certain intense sympathies between the Latin histories, myths, rhythms, and overtly erotic movements of such dances--Quinn in a letter to Augustus John called tango dancing "homeopathic fornication" 123 --and Lewis's apparent desire to move in and out of the hinterland of abstraction, retaining the re as a sexualized body, but splintering his forms, integrating re and ground, reducing (though by no means eliminating) the signifiers of sexual difference. He stages an encounter between violence and sexuality, all the while refusing absolutely the coy fleshiness of the salon nude in favour of something more imperious but mechanical.
Here Lewis had his peers in mind as well. His combative personality was such that he needed "a network of enmity and opposition . . . to have a sense of himself as a creative and coherent personality." 124 Part of that network can be found in the work and influence of Duncan, Diaghilev, and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. The "connoisseurs and gourmets of choreographic art" at the Cabaret Theatre Club--indeed any attentive newspaper reader--would have been familiar with them all. 125
Isadora Duncan "radically altered ideas about the potential of the human body as an expressive instrument"; she danced alone, barefoot, in a self-consciously "Greek" manner, with spare settings and classical draperies. 126 Margaret Morris, who appeared at the Cabaret Theatre Club with her "Greek Children Dancers," took lessons from Duncan's brother Raymond, who was in London "lecturing on the way of life of the ancient Greeks and on their dance and music." 127 From him Morris learned "the six Greek positions and variations, copied from early Greek vases" and made them the basis of her technique. 128 In 1913 she took her troupe to Paris, together with a letter of introduction to the Scottish painter John Fergusson, whom she later married.
Fergusson was the art editor of Rhythm magazine and a great admirer of Diaghilev's Russian Ballet, whose lush exoticism exploited a range of Balkan and Near Eastern sources in pursuit of effects that were voluptuously decorative and at times scandalously erotic. Rhythm was influenced by Henri Bergson and fauvism, and its writers and illustrators valued in the Russian Ballet qualities directly opposed to those of Lewis. 129 Writing on the ballet Schéhérazade in Rhythm in 1912, Anne Estelle Rice praised
this Arabian Nights' orgy of voluptuous fullness, where designs, drapery, arms, legs, bodies, groups have a circular movement, [with] the luxurious overhanging emerald green curtain, the undulating movement of the dancers, the immense trousers of the supple almées, the rich flowing music of Rimsky Korsakow--harem and spectator are caught up in a maddening whirl of sound, colour and curve to the point of exhaustion. 130
Lewis favoured something sparer, harder, and more directly red as sexual combat.  His Cabaret res are amazons who part their thighs and tilt their pelvises with studied provocation. Duncan and Morris were too self-absorbed for Lewis; their "neo-Greekness"--the bare feet and fluttering draperies--was to invoke an expressive and spontaneous femininity, and was therefore alien to the Vorticist men. 131 Classicism literally wasn't their line. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska specifically associated the soft contours of the Hellenic tradition with a debased aesthetic, placing himself in what he saw as the tougher, more instinctual, and phallic lineage of the tribal and "barbaric." He also made the particular connection between Greek sculpture and "Greek love."  And with the Russian Ballet (particularly through the impact of Léon Bakst on the designer Poiret) the world of ballet erupted into the world of fashion. Both the covert homosexuality and the explicit (and "feminine") fashionability of the Ballet, together with Rhythm's enthusiasm for it and the terms in which that was expressed, grated on Lewis's sensibilities. His sympathies lay elsewhere: broadly, on the side of the masculine, the mechanical, the abstract, and the engineered, as opposed to the Bakst-Poiret-Matisse axis described by Peter Wollen as the alternative trajectory never developed, but never entirely repressed, in modernism's myth of its own origins: a liminal art of eroticism, exoticism, decoration, and the body. 133
One can not imagine Lewis as a student of eurhythmics, the system of rhythmical bodily movements advocated by Dalcroze that emphasized the link between dance and health. Dalcroze's Institut opened in a Dresden suburb in 1911, and in 1912 The Eurhythmics of Emile Jaques Dalcroze was published in English, replete with illustrations of various "plastic exercises" and an essay by Michael Sadler on "The Value of Eurhythmics to Art." 134 All this would have been known to John Fergusson when he painted Les Eus ("The well people," or "The healthy ones") in 1911-12 ( 7). 135 The peculiar title, though invented by Fergusson, derives from Dalcroze. The rather heavy-handed la ronde amid luxuriant vegetation, a transparently modern fantasy of an ancient fertility rite, is indebted to Duncan, Dalcroze, and possibly Diaghilev. It sums up pictorially Rhythm's obsession with dance as an art form, and with rhythm as the condition to which all art aspires. Lewis probably didn't know it before 1914, when it was shown at the Doré Galleries, and perhaps not even then. It would be hard to prove that Lewis intended Kermesse, among other things, as a rebuff to Les Eus specifically, but not that it was directed against Rhythm's Bergsonian vitalism in general. 136 For Rhythm, as for Dalcroze, energy expressed in patterned movement was a symbol of life, health, and sanity (an implicit reproach to Max Nordau and the view of modernism as a symptom of cultural degeneracy). Such female nudes as Fergusson's Rhythm, La Force, and Torse de Femme portray buxom women as the source of natural fecundity; they are the allegorical embodiment of Bergson's élan vital. Lewis's res are demonic rather than eurhythmic, and they are far from promising what Michael Sadler looked for in Hellerau: "a new and more harmonious race, almost a realization of Rousseau's ideal." 137
Kermesse is an urgent reworking of the fauve dance as it had been inherited from the symbolists as an emblem both of the dance of life and of the "thinking body." For Lewis, life is combat, the body doesn't think, and dance isn't the easy expression of Bergsonian vitality.  The Latin or "negro" rhythms of the tango, the tarantella, the flamenco, and ragtime are by contrast flamboyantly demotic and hot-bloodedly heterosexual. When Blast speaks of the Vortex that "will not hear of anything but its disastrous polished dance," it is neither Duncan, Diaghilev, nor Dalcroze who comes to mind. 138
At the end of November 1913, Edward Marsh wrote to a friend, "Another new light whom I met today is Wyndham Lewis. (I am going to the Picture Ball, if you please, as a futurist picture designed by him!) He is very magnificent to look at, but I don't think he liked me, and I suspected him of pose, so we shan't make friends." 139 Shortly after the ball took place Marsh received a letter from D. H. Lawrence, avid for news of both it and the Lewis costume: "How did you look, futuristically? Lord, you're a bit of a jig-saw puzzle to start with, mixing poets and pictures, the Admiralty, and what-not, like somebody shuffling cards." 140 Trivial in itself, the Albert Hall Picture Ball is nevertheless an exemplary instance of high society's assimilation of the popular culture of modern art and of Lewis's part in it. This moment of absorption depended on an extension of Futurist elements from the gallery into fashion, décor, and entertainment--not quite the same thing as a Futurist dissolution of art into life but briefly consonant with it. It depended too on the emergence of a fancy-dress craze spanning artists' revels and fashionable balls, in which competitive participants distinguished themselves from the common ruck of historical, Old Master, or commedia dell'arte res by their enthusiasm for dressing out of Post-Impressionist paintings, à la Diaghilev, as Futurists, or apaches. 141
The Sketch supplement for 10 December 1913 devoted six pages of photographs to the Albert Hall Picture Ball, including the two tableaux designed by Lewis and Nevinson to represent "The Very Latest School of Painting: Futurist res" ( 8). 142 The caption explains that one represents "The Birth of Futurism" and one "The Culmination of Futurism," and certainly the three res on the upper right, with their more angular stances and boxy costumes, bear witness to the impact of cubism on the milder Futurism to the left. Somewhere here, but unidentifiable, lurks Eddie Marsh. Lewis is present at least symbolically in the masked re whose dark and mustachioed features bear a striking resemblance to his own. The page as a whole evokes the context, with its illustrations of friends and family parties arrayed as Italian Primitives, or the Dutch School, or res from an Egyptian frieze, and in this company the Futurist costumes seem to pack a certain subversive punch. But the extended captions are dense with Lords, Ladies, and Honourables and with (mostly feminine) names familiar from the overlapping circles of art, society, and politics (Lavery, Tennant, Asquith). "Futurism" was quite at home in this company, or at least its domesticated variants were, exuding as they did the pleasantly pungent whiff of lingering controversy. The Futurist groups were not a disruptive or even mischievous contribution from beyond the pale of the historical canon or the charmed circle of the chief participants, but a witty update commissioned by Lady Muriel Paget, honorary secretary of the charity ball, a well-known social re, a regular supporter of the avant-garde, and, as the Tatler noted, a very capable tangoist. 143
Nevinson, in his autobiographical Paint and Prejudice, gives the flavor of the moment: he and Lewis used to meet in Verrey's Restaurant to discuss the first issue of Blast, and Nevinson remarks that
as I had more on my hands than I knew how to cope with, I was at the same time able to put work in his way. We were designing a tableau for the Albert Hall Picture Ball of the Futurists, while Lady Cunard had arranged for me to decorate the drawing-room of Mr. Moore, who was giving a dance to General Sir John French. I went fifty-fifty with Lewis. The Countess of Drogheda was thinking of having a modern décor in her new drawing-room, but somehow or other he got the job entirely. [PP, 60]
Two drafts of undated letters to Lady Muriel Paget survive in Lewis's correspondence at Cornell. In what is presumably the first he writes, "It occurred to me after I had left you that I should have advised you not to show the two sketches to people destined to impersonate res in them, unless they were peculiarly imaginative and débrouillards." 144 (Crossed out is a note to the effect that they might be appalled by them.) "I am sure that, without much difficulty, we shall be able to build up the res as I suggested." 145 The second draft points to a public restaging and, if one reads between the lines, his irritation at being left out of it.
I see in the paper today that the friezes and pictures are being shown again at some theatre next Monday. I suppose you will not be able to get the same people to take part in them. In any case, I had better be present at any rehearsal or the thing itself and see that the attitudes are taken more or less accurately. I should be much obliged if you would let me know where the rehearsal is going to take place. 146
This note reminds us of two things. In October of 1913 Lewis had fallen out with Roger Fry and the Omega Workshops but not yet with Nevinson and Marinetti. (Nevinson was an ally in his opposition to Bloomsbury and in the opening months of 1914 a colleague in the planning of Blast and the opening of the Rebel Art Centre; the break with Nevinson and Marinetti would come over the publication of their joint Manifesto of Vital English Art in June). Lewis probably needed to earn some money, but if his costumes are in any sense a parody of Futurism, it is affectionate and, as it were, from the inside. Secondly, as in the relations between the avant-garde and popular entertainment, there is something newly spectacular, journalistic, even flirtatious, in the alliance between modernists like Lewis and Nevinson and fashionable aristocrats like Countess Drogheda, Lady Muriel Paget, and Lady Cunard. There was nothing new about pageants and fancy-dress parties. What is new is the sense that they have an audience beyond their participants, that they provide copy and photographs for the press and can be restaged for new purposes. These are no longer the more-or-less documentary images of the wealthy and influential en route to Parliament or Ascot or St. Moritz or the local hunt. Here we have high society arranging itself in ordered tableaux for consumption by the readership of the illustrated press.
The same thing goes on in all of the many images of beautiful women posed with their children, at their dressing tables, in their newly designed drawing rooms, among the accoutrements we would now describe as signifying a lifestyle through patterns of leisure and consumption. It seems extraordinary, given the power of (bourgeois) concepts of "womanliness," that this phenomenon was so little commented on. The contemporaneous spectacle of women taking to the streets in pursuit of the vote caused apoplexy in the same people whose wives and daughters were happy to make a spectacle of themselves in the popular press. One of the few critics to voice an opinion was David Cooper, in the deeply conservative pages of Modern Man. According to Cooper,
one of the most disquieting and unpleasant symptoms of modern English society is the disgusting and shameless way in which people in the position of ladies and gentlemen advertise themselves in the Press. . . .  Pick up any of the illustrated weeklies and you will find photographs of titled women, in attire a good deal scantier than that of Miss Maud Allan as Salome. . . . they expose their charms to the gaze of the vulgar.  These women are obsessed with an insensate and depraved craving for publicity. Snobs themselves, they pander to the most despicable snobbery. . . . What sort of men are the husbands, fathers, brothers who permit their womenkind thus to prostitute themselves in the press. 147
There is something virulent and almost hysterical about this
conflation of class hatred with misogyny, this lumping together of
spectacle, femininity, consumption, and snobbery as a kind of symbolic
prostitution. But it hits a nerve. Both the production and consumption
of art are, under modern conditions, closely linked to subjectivity. One
of the pleasures and consolations of patronage, for the Medici, say,
in the fifteenth century or for the purchasers of Wedgwood ware in the
eighteenth, derived from its social prestige. The controversies attached
to avant-garde movements
before World War I, the lack of a public arena (in the traditional
sense), together with the rise of press interest and a concomitant flurry
of manifestos raised the stakes in the game of consuming identities. This
is not to suggest that modernist gambits or the patronage they attracted
were in some simple sense spurious; rather, that they had (and have)
different tasks to perform. Bound up with more obviously "painterly"
issues is an ambiguous and unstable dynamic, involving a relation
between the artist's differentiation of himself as avant-garde
and the consumer's identity-
in-difference purchased through association and the expression of an
"advanced" taste.
The process is peculiarly transparent with Lewis, who protests loudly and in print his successive detachment from the orbits of John, Sickert, Bloomsbury, and Futurism; and perhaps also with Lady Cunard, Lady Drogheda ("Countess and Futurist: A Patron of the New Decor"), 148 and Lady Muriel Paget ("One of Our Younger Social Beauties" who "knows everybody, does everything, and goes everywhere"). 149 Of course Blast was controversial when it appeared in 1914, but several reviewers found it tame, a diluted Futurism. One reviewer claimed to have "left it on the sofa in my wife's drawing-room on the occasion of her monthly 'At Home,' and she tells me that the t for it among her visitant women-folk was vicious." 150 Edward Marsh never bought an abstract work despite his "deep and distant respect" for it; "if I had done so, I should only have [been indicted] for snobbishness and hypocrisy instead." 151 "Kill John Bull With Art" had been Lewis's slogan, but as Lewis himself acknowledged, "John and Mrs. Bull leapt for joy, in a cynical convulsion. For they felt as safe as houses. So did I" (BB, 36).
"The Spirit of Futurism" was the title for Lewis Baumer's design for a costume at the All Fools' Ball in 1914. 152 Some version of that spirit erupted in clothing, décor, typography, theatrical sets, music-hall turns, party favors, dance performances, and other aspects of British culture between 1912 and 1914. As a term, "futurism" was borrowed from Marinetti and his associates, stripped of some of its specific aesthetic and political content, and used to name a sense of disruption and change in all areas of social and cultural life. As Lawrence Rainey puts it, "By a kind of metonymy facilitated by the modern newspaper's juxtaposition of disparate events, Futurism [became] the cipher of a contemporary crisis" ("FT," 198-99). An article in the Tatler accompanying the first main impact of Futurism in 1912 and headed "Unrest in the Art World" is characteristic.
I wonder whether western Europe is going rapidly mad. Most decidedly it is getting terribly hysterical. Labour is in blind revolt against Capital, and Capital is seeking new spectacles with which to regard Labour. Youth has begun to kick out at Age and modern Womanhood has certainly gone off her head. Strauss has hurled the fury of his atmospheric discords into the middle of Music; Debussy has put the extinguisher on Melody, and it is significant of the signs of the times that last week, when the Royal Academy had to close its doors for fear that some rampant petticoat would show her aptitude for voting by smashing pictures, the Italian Futurists opened an exhibition of their works at the Sackville Gallery and dared Rampancy to do its worst. 153
A year later another article, this time headed "The Wave of Unrest," offered to map the incursions of Futurism into "Art, Music, Society, and the Home." 154
Futurism itself depended on a high public profile, derived partly from Marinetti's splenetic performances and partly from this association with revolution (for its supporters) or hysteria (for its detractors). It drew simultaneously on the resources of popular culture and on this aube-de-siècle sense of change. There was two-way traffic between Futurism and the music hall. When Edward Marsh heard Marinetti lecture at the Poetry Bookshop, probably on 18 November 1913, he wrote to Rupert Brooke that Marinetti was "beyond doubt an extraordinary man, full of force and fire, with a surprising gift of turgid lucidity, a full and roaring and foaming flood of indubitable half-truths . . . [as] a piece of art, I thought it was about on the level of a very good farmyard-imitation--a supreme music-hall turn" (EM, 295). Marinetti thought highly of the music hall and would have taken this as a compliment. He performed in small avant-garde contexts such as the Cabaret Theatre Club, the Poetry Bookshop, and the Doré Gallery, but also staked a claim for the larger spaces and public audiences of the Bechstein Hall and the Coliseum and, in his 1913 manifesto "The Variety Theater," for music hall as a paradigmatically Futurist art. 155
Weiss suggests that "The Variety Theater" manifesto has been grossly neglected and that it contains "virtually a complete repertoire of the pictorial devices of futurism, most notably the principles of dynamism and audience participation" (PC, 39). "The music hall," according to Marinetti, is "naturally anti-academic, primitive, and ingenuous, and therefore the more significant for the unexpectedness of its experiments and the simplicity of its means. . . . It destroys the solemn, the sacred, the serious and the sublime of Art with a capital A" (SW, 119). Its radical techniques of collage, montage, slapstick, and parody provided in effect a modern urban aesthetic parallel to the avant-garde address to city life. The music hall could only be enhanced by such further Futurist devices as soaping the stage, painting the actors, and selling several tickets to the same seat. Weiss goes so far as to suggest that "the subtext of Marinetti's claims appears to be that futurism itself is virtually an avant-garde counterpart to recent developments in popular entertainment" (PC, 40), with both Marinetti and the entertainment daily Comoedia "promoting music-hall comedy as a force of modernity" (PC, 41).
Marinetti's own appearance on the music-hall stage in 1914 was not a success with the audience. He mistook at a stroke the nature of the context and the possibilities available to him. Futurism in British variety was a subject for revue, not in revue, and framing Luigi Russolo's electric noise machines (the intonarumori) at the Coliseum was not enough to reposition them in some hybrid space as other than entertainment or art. 156 This is Nevinson's account:
Naturally I went to see the first performance, and I must say it was one of the funniest shows ever put on in London, provided, of course, that one looked at things from the right angle. Marinetti swaggered on to that vast stage looking about the size of a house fly, and bowed. As he spoke no English, there was no time wasted in explanations or in the preparation of his audience. Had they spoken Italian, I do believe Marinetti could have magnetized them as he did everybody else. There was nothing for it, however, but to call upon his ten noise tuners to play, so they turned handles like those of a hurdy-gurdy. It must have sounded magnificent to him, for he beamed; but a little way back in the auditorium all one could hear was the faintest of buzzes. At first the audience did not understand that this was the performance offered them in return for their hard-earned cash, but when they did there was one vast, deep, and long-sustained, "Boo!" . . . When I went round to the back I found Marinetti in the best of spirits, dismissing the unanimous condemnation of the audience and calmly announcing to the Press, "C'était un cabal." For the next performance Stoll introduced a gramophone record by Elgar to bring a little melody into the act. It helped, and the effort was received in stony silence. Marinetti described it as a "succés [sic] fou" [PP, 61-62].
Ezra Pound described it as "a mimetic representation of dead cats in a fog-horn." 157 The Sketch asked facetiously if its readers were "content with what that sylvan solitude, the Strand, already gives you in the way of roarers and gurglers and buzzers, or do you vexedly hold the opinion that the motor traffic is meanly withholding from you your proper share of London's bewildering orgy of sound signifying lunacy?" 158 (If so it was recommended that they visit the Grand Futurist Concert of Noises at the Coliseum.)
All this came to an abrupt end in August 1914. The artists continued their activities, distracted or constrained in particular ways by the outbreak of war, but Marinetti was no longer the caffeine of Europe; Futurists and apaches (both copies and originals) changed into uniform; and the avant-garde vanished from the illustrated press. In the Sketch, the Bystander, the Tatler, and Vanity Fair there is still material on pantomimes and music halls (with patriotic tableaux) lightening the dark hours; there are fashion notes and exhortations to keep the workers working in the fashion and entertainment industries. But there are no references to Futurism or to fashionable patrons of the avant-garde. The pages are filled with portraits of young widows, of officers killed or wounded, of aristocratic women nursing or raising money for the war effort. Lewis's patron Mary Borden Turner offers an exemplary case, one no doubt heightened by the apparently intimate relations between them. On 8 June 1914 she had confirmed the commission to decorate her drawing room in Park Lane for £250: £100 in advance and £150 due on completion. ("I understand that you intend painting six panels for the walls of the room but I leave the scheme of decorations to you.") 159 In August she thought of buying Slow Attack from an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. By 31 December, with the panels nearly completed, she was uncertain how to proceed since the drawing-room scheme had had to be given up, at least temporarily. "I thought possibly in the meantime you might like to have them on Exhibition somewhere. People ought to have a chance to see them." 160 In May 1915 she sent £35, which brought the total payment to £200. She was sorry not to enclose the last £50 for the furniture and for decorating the room, but "Every penny I've got is going into my hospital." 161 Later she wrote that she had expected to have a very unusual room, but that would have meant buying a complete set of furniture, rugs, lamps, and so on, which was now impossible. She would leave the walls plain and use her old furniture: "Please believe that this is a matter of necessity and conscience." 162 The next letter is from Dunkirk, dated 16 May [1916]; she is shutting up Park Lane and does not know what to do with the pictures, Lewis can exhibit them wherever he likes, and does he really want to come over and drive an ambulance (does he know anything about driving ambulances)? A final note offers a very frosty response to Lewis's request for the remaining £50.
Claire Pajaczkowska has argued that just as Marx understood the product of capitalist economics to be profit rather than commodities, so we should recognize the "product of the signifying process to be . . . identity rather than the art object or text." 163 Modernism has, for historical reasons, a heightened autobiographical component, and "abstraction" may be less formal, or less reticent, than it appears. I would argue at the very least that certain forms of twentieth-century modernism have had as one of their principal objects the assertion of "virility and domination," in Carol Duncan's words, and that this assertion has been linked to a crisis in artistic masculinity and to the prominence of politically militant women. 164 ("BLAST is I believe, really coming out this week," Pound wrote to his mother in 1914. "Delicate sensitive work. Suffragettes are blowing up most everything else.") 165
Lewis's early writings, beginning in Brittany in the summer of 1908 and culminating with the collection published as The Wild Body in 1927, can be related to Kermesse, where the drinks and revelry and Breton hats suggest a local pardon. 166 In notes written in Quimperlé in 1908 Lewis wrote that the peasants go to pardons "consciously with fatalism finding the starting point there of their orgies in the clamour, the multitude of the fête." 167 The pardons, he insists, are "essentially orgies" dissipating the energies that might have fuelled rebellion or creativity. 168 The dancers' Dionysian abandon thus entails abandoning intelligence, selfhood, and the detachment necessary for art or protest.  Art is opposed to life and--pace the symbolists--cannot aspire to the condition of dance. (We may note in passing that this view is at odds with the contemporary guidebooks, one of which explicitly stated that the Brittany pardons "are not excuses for drunken debauches, like the Flemish Kermess"). 169
The Brittany stories illustrate what has been called Lewis's concept of the Wild Body, and its corollary: the repudiation of Bergson and his reversal of Bergson's theory of humour in Le Rire (1900 [Laughter]). Whereas in Bergson's humanist theory we laugh if we see a person acting like a thing (or a machine), for Lewis the root of comedy lies in perceiving a thing behaving like a person (a body behaving like an intelligence). As Lewis's narrator Ker-Orr puts it in The Wild Body: "this forked, strange-scented, blond-skinned gut-bag, with its two bright rolling marbles with which it sees, bull's eyes full of mockery and madness, is my stalking-horse. I hang somewhere in its midst operating it with detachment." 170 The wild body, the physiological system, is the absurd and mechanical appendage handcuffed to the laughing observer.
Drawings like The Vorticist are often viewed as comments on modernity, as images of alienated man in the vortex of the modern city (Foster, above, 8). They can be read that way, and their robotic look attributed to the dehumanizing effects of modernity. But Lewis was not a humanist. They serve I think a double and absolutely contradictory purpose. On the one hand they are dehumanized and their look of being automata, puppets, or insects, makes them cogs in the social machine, will-less specks in the crowd or the herd. On the other hand they represent a desirable dehumanization--and with pregnant mistresses and venereal disease Lewis had problems with his own wild body--a tempering and sheathing of the old "forked . . . blond-skinned gut-bag" into a gleaming new Futurist masculinity. 171 Like Marinetti, Lewis exempted the suffragettes (admired but patronized) from a general scorn for femininity. In his Nietzschean manifesto "The Code of a Herdsman" he described "women and the processes for which they exist" as "the arch conjuring trick." 172 Tarr claims that "Surrender to a woman was a sort of suicide for an artist"; and that "soft, quivering and quick flesh is as far from art as an object can be." 173 Women are here the death of art and, it is tempting to suggest, the revenge of the wild body. In a spectacularly redundant piece of advice Lewis's friend Sturge Moore warned him against any woman who used "the slop of sex" to trap him: "If [a man] puts his genius between her legs she will cover it with any petticoat that takes her fancy and no one will see it again." 174 For Lewis all his rivals were enfeebled or in some way feminized. John had surrendered to his family romance and was buried in "tribes after tribes of archaic and romantic Gitanos and Gitanas." 175 Sickert's low-life nudes squatting listlessly on Camden Town beds were squalid and démodé. Bloomsbury Post-Impressionism was the decoration of the "between-men" 176 (and Tarr's Alan Hobson, the average specimen of the "Cambridge set"--a hybrid of the Quaker, the homosexual, and the Chelsea artist). 177 Cubism, more promising, was nevertheless passive before its apples and mandolins, producing from its studio props aptly-named natures-mortes. Futurist machismo on closer inspection was shrouded in Latin romance and so surrendered to the flux. 178 Vorticism alone was hard and clean, unspent--in Pound's phrase, "art before it has spread itself into a state of flacidity" 179 --an aesthetic of the piston-rod, in Hulme's analogy. 180
The point is that subjectivity and the dance, primitivism and the machine, are all about sex and "phallic aesthetics." 181 They are all connected, and they are all unstable. The dance skirts femininity; the primitive, a bestial stupidity; the machine, a robotic mockery of masculinity. Yet each can be turned to secure the others, however contingently, for masculinity. Lewis's res do not carry the symbolic weight of gamboling nudity but have tensed anatomies that are crisp as foil, and indeterminate clothing like a carapace. The rhythm of life is violent and abrupt. "Nature" is combat and schism, not the fecund paradise of Les Eus.  At the same time, the mechanical forms turn "soft, quivering and quick flesh" into art, offering a vocabulary for what Lewis called in Blast "any heroic, that is, energetic, representations of men to-day" ("RC," 44).
Lewis remains one of the most vigorous, intelligent, and challenging artists and writers of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most problematic: homophobic, misogynist, and politically right-wing (charges perhaps only Joyce escapes among the "men of 1914" [BB, 249]). Writing about Yeats, an "extreme right-wing, sporadically fascist writer," Terry Eagleton argues that "valuable art comes into being not despite its historical limitations . . . but by virtue of them." 182 This is not a matter of the straightforward thrust of a progressive ideology through the constraints of the hegemonic formation, but rather of "a certain curvature in the ideological space" (CI, 180) resulting from that formation being produced "from a particular dissentient conflictual position within it" (CI, 181). The analogy holds, I think, if we make the triple translation from Yeats to Lewis, from poetry to art, and from class to sex. The Victorian "sex-gender system" was shifting ground from various pressures, including feminism, before World War I. Eagleton suggests that Yeats's critique of bourgeois values could only come from the radical Right, but for that very reason could not avoid being "warped, corrupted and disabled" (CI, 180) by the moulds in which it was cast. Lewis's implicit critique of art and sex--of the role of the body as an expressive instrument, of Bergsonian vitalism, of the Salon cocotte, or Camden Town nudes, or feminine embodiments of Nature and Rhythm--might have been feminist, but was, in the end, similarly compromised. Women are sexually threatening or sexually vulnerable rather than sexually emancipated as moderns. In fact it is astonishing how rarely and equivocally any image of the modern woman appears in the traditional iconography of modernity; look, for instance, at the sprightly vernacular of this new one-step called Shopping in 1911 ( 9). 183 The feminine is not precisely equated by Lewis with those "technically on the distaff side" but remains a framing device for the heterosexual masculine imaginary. Homosexuality is obsessively repressed (though that is another story). But with hindsight we might argue that in Vorticist circles at least, "phallic aesthetics" comes into a new and vivid visibility, not as a purely contingent accompaniment to the influence of Futurism and the move to abstraction, but at a moment of crisis in the relations between masculinity and representation that made that move urgent. This, as well as the dance--indeed via the dance as a resource in the choreography of sexual relations--is what the work is "of."
Lisa Tickner is Professor of Art History at Middlesex University, London. She is the author of The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907-1914 , and of numerous articles on British modernism and on feminist art and theory.
I gratefully acknowledge the award of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, which enabled me to begin work in this field at the end of 1992. I am indebted for my title to Jeffrey Weiss's excellent book, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp and Avant-Gardism ; for hospitality at Cornell University to the generosity of Hal Foster and Sandy Tait; and for percipient readings of earlier drafts to Paul Edwards and--as always--Sandy Nairne: this is for him.
This article will appear in a slightly altered form in In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity, ed. Terry Smith, forthcoming from the Power Institute of Fine Arts.
1. George Robey: a favorite actor and comedian of Lewis's ("the Prime Minister of Mirth"); Shirley Kellogg: American star of Hullo Ragtime! (which opened at the London Hippodrome in December 1912) and Hullo Tango! (December 1913), helped popularize American idioms, songs, and dance routines as part of the spectacle of British music-hall revue; Harry Weldon: a specialist in comic antiheroes and an early player in [Fred] "Karno's Komics"; George Mozart: comedian and pantomime artist playing in revue and in early films (one of the first directors of Hammer Productions); Gaby Deslys: popular actress and dancer who worked as a vaudeville artist in Paris but appeared in London at the Gaiety , the Alhambra and Palace (1912, 1913) theaters. Also blessed were Gertie Millar, one of the best-known "Gaiety Girls" from the Gaiety chorus line, and Basil Hallam, famous for "Gilbert the Filbert, the Colonel of the Nuts," a song in The Passing Show at the Palace Theatre running through the summer of 1914. Osbert Sitwell describes the "nut" or "knut"--the dandy of 1913-14--with his "air of concave and fatigued elegance" (but able to dance "with vigour and ease, in the new style"), in Great Morning (1948; London: Reprint Society, 1949), 232. Among those blasted were George Edwardes, the managing director of Daly's Theatre and the Gaiety Theatre ("Daly's Musical Comedy" and the "Gaiety Chorus Girl" received separate blasts), and George Grossmith, the actor and writer who appeared in a number of his own reviews at the Gaiety Theatre and who wrote and codirected Kill That Fly! at the Alhambra .
2. Richard Cork, Art Beyond the Gallery in Early Twentieth Century England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 2; hereafter abbreviated ABG. Cork quotes Frank Rutter's claim that with Kermesse, "for the first time London saw by an English artist a painting altogether in sympathy with the later developments in Paris" .
3. Gilbert Cannan, Mendel: A Story of Youth (London: Fisher Unwin, 1916), 310; hereafter abbreviated M. These are Mendel's thoughts as he paints, which continue, "Out of this hotch-potch pictures, works of art, were to emerge. They were to take their place in it and . . . reduce it to order" (M, 310). Clive Bell, discussing Kermesse, was astute enough to remark that
The enemy that dogs him [Lewis] in all his works is an excessive taste for life. He is inclined to modify his forms in the interest of drama and psychology to the detriment of pure design. At times his simplifications and rhythms seem to be determined by a literary rather than a plastic conception. Probably this is not the kind of criticism which by now Wyndham Lewis must have learnt to disregard. He is more accustomed, I suspect, to hearing his work called "mechanical" and "lifeless" . . . [Nation, 25 October 1913, 172-73].
4. Creation is known from a reproduction in the catalog of the second Post-Impressionist exhibition; on Mother and Child (reproduced in the Sketch supplement, 9 October 1912, 9) see my "A Lost Lewis: The Mother and Child of 1912," The Wyndham Lewis Annual 2 .
5. Lewis was familiar with Rubens's Flemish Kermesse in the Louvre and complains about its "carnivorous Belgian bumpkins" in Blast (Wyndham Lewis, "Futurism, Magic and Life," Blast 1 [20 June 1914; Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989]: 132). Richard Cork points this out in ABG, 88.
6. Wyndham Lewis to Ezra Pound, postmarked 12 April 1916, in The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose (London: Methuen, 1963), 80; hereafter abbreviated L:
Should I come through the War safe and sound, I can, and undoubtedly shall, paint a hundred Kermesses, finishing Quinn's to begin with. . . . On the other hand, should I get killed or smashed up so that I cant [sic] paint any more Kermesses, he can have 1. The Kermesse as it is. or 2. As many drawings as would, by their combined price, cover the money he had paid out. [80]
Lewis gives his address as "Gunner W. Lewis. / 71050. Hut 61. / R. G. A. Merstham Training Unit. / Weymouth. Dorset."
7. On "of," see Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison, and Mel Ramsden, "Art History, Art Criticism and Explanation," Art History 4 (December 1981): 432-56, esp. 433-36. This is an edited version of a paper given by Charles Harrison to the Association of Art Historians' annual conference, London, 3 April 1981. A more detailed discussion can be found in Art & Language, "A Portrait of V. I. Lenin," Art-Language 4 (June 1980): 26-62. See also Fred Orton, ring Jasper Johns (London: Reaktion, 1994). It glosses the Art & Language group's (including Harrison's) use of "of," as developed from David Kaplan's essay "Quantifying In," in Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine, ed. Donald Davidson and Jaakko Hintikka (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969) "and its discussion of the relations between names, their objects and the uses of those names" (215 n. 7).
8. I borrow this "actor-network" formulation from Bruno Latour's Science in Action via Andrew Pickering's review of We Have Never Been Modern, by Latour, 1 (September 1994): 257-58.
9. On Marsh, see Christopher Hassall, Edward Marsh, Patron of the Arts: A Biography (London: Longman, 1959), 204; hereafter abbreviated EM.
10. The Daily Sketch clipping (18 October 1913, 5) is cited from the C. R. W. Nevinson scrapbooks, vol. 1, press mark 7311.1, p. 23, Tate Gallery Archive, London. Two other "futurist" paintings from the Doré Gallery are reproduced: Robert Delaunay's The Cardiff Football Team (sideways at the top of the page), and Nevinson's The Departure of the Train du Luxe, which has been confused with Edward Wadsworth's Omnibus (upside down at bottom left). An unidentified clipping headed "The Confetti School of Painting" suggests that Waiting for the Robert E. Lee "perfectly expresses the feelings aroused by five barrel organs in succession playing that inescapable tune under one's windows" .
11. Sketch supplement, 10 December 1913, 9; Lawrence is quoted in EM, 263.
12. The spectacular expansion of the British popular press in the late nineteenth century was based on the exploitation of new technology (cheap paper and faster printing), advertising revenues, a high adult literacy rate due to the Education Act of 1870, and a well developed railway and distribution network. The Daily News, Daily Sketch, Daily Mirror, and Daily Mail all built up tremendous circulations in the late Victorian and Edwardian period (the Daily Mail, founded in 1896, was soon selling a million copies a day), and enhanced their appeal with photographic reproductions popularized by the Daily Mirror in 1904 and the Daily Sketch in 1909. See Michael Twyman, Printing, 1770-1970 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1970), 51, 96-97; A. J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England: 1855-1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1976); and James Curran, "Capitalism and Control of the Press, 1800-1975," in Mass Communication and Society, ed. Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and Janet Wollacott (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 195-230. During the Edwardian period, photographs begin to displace other forms of reproduction in the illustrated press both in size and quantity, and photographs of "society" assume a prominence at first accorded only to the stage and popular entertainers.
13. See Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle ; an English translation is Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994).
14. The final phrase is Walter Sickert's, in the draft of an article, "Mr. Ginner's Preface," TS, p. 354, W. R. Sickert Collection, Islington Public Library, London. The article appeared in the New Age, 30 April 1914.
15. See Stella Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism, 1900-1920: Early Modernism and the Arts and Crafts Movement in Edwardian England (New York: Routledge, 1988).
16. C. R. W. Nevinson, Paint and Prejudice (London: Methuen, 1937), 58; hereafter abbreviated PP. Nevinson notes that he "was now lunching and dining with all the rich and great of the land" (57-58), including Prime Minister Henry Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, Sir John French, and F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead. He also mentions that Frank Rutter lectured in the evenings on Modern Art at the Doré Gallery "and here I met Lady Muriel Paget, Lady Grosvenor, Lady Lavery, and through them pre-War Society" .
17. Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937; London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), 46; hereafter abbreviated BB.
Everyone by way of being fashionably interested in art, and many who had never opened a book or bought so much as a sporting-print, much less "an oil," wanted to look at this new oddity, thrown up by that amusing spook, the Zeitgeist. So the luncheon and dinner-tables of Mayfair were turned into show-booths. For a few months I was on constant exhibition. [46]
His claim not to have sold a single painting as a result is economical with the truth: Kermesse was rented to Madame Frida Uhl Strindberg for £30 and he received altogether several hundred pounds' worth of decorative commissions from Countess Drogheda, Lady Muriel Paget, and Mary Borden Turner, as well as from Mme. Strindberg for the Cabaret Theatre Club and Rodolph Stulik for the Eiffel Tower Restaurant.
18. Severini's The Pan-Pan Dance at the Monico was singled out in reviews of the exhibition of Futurist Painters at the Sackville Gallery in March 1912.
19. "The Press in 1914 had no Cinema, no Radio, and no Politics: so the painter could really become a 'star.' There was nothing against it. Anybody could become one, who did anything funny. And Vorticism was replete with humour, of course; it was acclaimed the best joke ever. Pictures, I mean oil-paintings, were 'news.' Exhibitions were reviewed in column after column. And no illustrated paper worth its salt but carried a photograph of some picture of mine or of my 'school,' as I have said, or one of myself, smiling insinuatingly from its pages." (BB, 36)
20. Kermesse, entry no. 382 in the John Quinn sale catalog, Paintings and Sculptures: The Renowned Collection of Modern and Ultra-Modern Art Formed by the Late John Quinn (New York: American Art Association, 1927), was sold to Richard Wyndham, who advertised it for sale in the London Times after Lewis satirized him in The Apes of God .
21. Lovers is in a private collection. I am grateful to its owners for the opportunity to examine it, and to Sadie Coles, of the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, for help in tracing it. The image is described in Walter Michel, Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 353; its catalog number is 74. "M" numbers are used to identify works as they are cataloged in Michel, and will hereafter be abbreviated M, followed by the catalog number.
22. J. E. Crawford Flitch, Modern Dancing and Dancers (London: Grant Richards, 1912), hereafter abbreviated MD, was out in November 1911, according to The English Catalogue of Books in the British Library.
23. By 1912 similar dancers were pictured in films, in magazines, and on the stage. Lovers was originally in the possession of Sir Osbert Sitwell, whom Lewis knew well. I am inclined to think that this was Lewis's title, or one he was happy with, although it is not inscribed on the work.
24. The following information is taken from the Day in Paris program in the collection of the Theatre Museum, London.
25. Max Beerbohm, Saturday Review, 21 October 1908, quoted in Ivor Guest, The Empire Ballet (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1962), 75. Chelsea and Hampstead were feeble imitations, full of people in slouch hats smoking cigarettes in studios or Soho restaurants, people who "toady sham genius, flutter in emancipatory 'movements,' and generally do nothing on quite enough a year" (Orlo Williams, La Vie de Bohème: A Patch of Romantic Paris [London: Martin Secker, 1913], 6).
26. "Miss Collier's face is particularly well suited to express the dog-like fidelity and, if the phrase may be allowed, the ferocious submission proper to the lady in this curiously fascinating importation from Paris. There is a deal of human nature--the human nature of the bête féroce--in this Danse des Apaches, and for this alone A Day in Paris is well worth seeing." (Times [London], 20 October 1908, 10)
27. Tatler, 3 February 1909, 125.
28. W. Macqueen-Pope, The Melody Lingers On: The Story of Music Hall (London: W. H. Allen, 1950), 250.
29. Authur Dupin in Le Petit Journal, quoted in Pierre Drachline and Claude Petit-Castelli, Casque d'Or et les apaches (Paris: Renaudot, 1990), 66; hereafter abbreviated CO. I am very grateful to Adrian Rifkin for suggesting this text. See also Louis Chevalier, Montmartre du plaisir et du crime (Paris: Robert Laffoni, 1980), 280-82, 288-89, and 298-300; hereafter abbreviated MP. Chevalier notes a possible source for the term "apache" in Gustave Aimard's novels of the 1860s and 1870s, which are set in America, and credits another journalist, Victor Moris, with its dissemination in 1902. Moris may have picked up on its use by the gangs themselves or by their neighbors, who had all read Aimard; by whatever route, however, "l'Apache des prairies est devenu l'Apache des faubourgs" (281 n. 10). Méral points out that James Fenimore Cooper's prairie novels were already an influence on the French adventure novel, and that Eugène Sue had openly acknowledged his debt to Cooper in transferring "the savage customs of the Indians" to "a different group of [urban] barbarians" (Jean Méral, Paris in American Literature [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989], 15). See Eugène Sue, The Mysteries of Paris, trans. Charles H. Town (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1843). The apaches rapidly entered Parisian folklore and took up permanent residence in French and American literature before World War II.
30. Chevalier argues that Leca was motivated by vengeance for Manda's theft of his former mistress, Germaine van Maëlle, known as "la Panthère" (MP, 282). "The Panther" was the name taken by Beatrice Collier for the Empire version of the danse des apaches.
31. On apache haunts in the area see CO, 157, 208. Between 1903 and 1908 Lewis shifted between the rues Denfert Rochereau, d'Assas, Mouton-Duvernet, Delambre, de la Grande Chaumière, and the boulevard Raspail, all in Montparnasse, a stone's throw from streets that had become the permanent theatre of scenes of violence on the other side of the Luxembourg Gardens: around la place Maubert, the rues Mouffetard, de la Harpe, Lagrange, the boulevard Saint Michel, and the area immediately north of the Panthéon.
32. Wyndham Lewis, "Manifesto--1," Blast 1, 27, 15.
33. See Lenard Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 1871-1914 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 232 n. 135. Chevalier notes that on 12 January 1910 Le Matin argued that the only way for Parisians to rid themselves of the apaches was through the whip or the noose; the English, it suggested, had a better way with their murderous hooligans, hanging them with minimal formality and without glory in a prison courtyard: "deux lignes dans les journaux, pas de héros comme en France" (MP, 299).
34. See CO, 82, 86-93. By 1933, when Casque d'Or died of asthma, she was a respectable wife and mother, but when her widower tried to ban Jacques Becker's 1952 film (in which she was played by Simone Signoret), Becker's lawyer successfully pleaded that her image belonged in collective memory and hence in the public domain; see Dudley Andrew, "Casque d'Or, Casquettes, A Cask of Aging Wine: Jacques Becker's Casque d'Or ," in French Film: Texts and Contexts, ed. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (New York: Routledge, 1990).
In fact the engagement at the Bouffes-du-Nord never materialized; the theater was picketed by a group of fathers from the quartier de la Chapelle, and the police planned to close it as a threat to public order. The prefect Lépine placed an injunction on Le Bruyant's cabaret after her first performances, and at the Salon the jury asked Dupré to withdraw his work from exhibition. On the trial, see CO, 105; on her later life, see CO, 142, 143. I am grateful to Ginette Vincendeau for advice on apache references.
35. Berlanstein remarks on the Parisian workers' passion for dancing; he points out that in the 1880s Saint-Denis, a town of about twenty thousand adults, 70 percent of them wage-earners, supported twenty dance halls and four cabarets (Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 127).
36. "I had not been considered beautiful enough to take part in the 'Jewel Finale' in which the showgirls paraded as precious stones, ruby, diamond, emerald, pearl," but Dearly taught her a new dance, saying, "'Never mind the Jewels. I've found your stone for you--the paving stone. Mistinguett, the 'pavement lily'" (Mistinguett, Mistinguette: [sic] Queen of the Paris Night, trans. Lucienne Hill [London: Elek, 1954], 53). This "brutal and tender" dance has "been imitated countless times, but always on the basis of what Dearly and I, in our 'street corner apache' get-up, created at the Moulin-Rouge" . Kees van Dongen painted Mistinguett and Max Dearly in La Valse Chaloupée (The apache dance), with Mistinguett bending backwards with naked breasts, for "the requirements of his canvas" . In 1919 Dearly and Mistinguett performed the apache dance for the last time in La Grande Revue, a review of the Moulin-Rouge in the days of La Goulue (106-7).
37. The apache was construed as specifically modern by both litterateurs and politicians; see CO, 149, 204. For Le Matin in 1907 the type was unknown to a Balzac or a Sue, who could have drawn him minutely, but was now widely prevalent in literature, so that one no longer knew whether the apache had provoked a certain literature or was the product of it; for Clemanceau, President of the Council in 1907, the apache was notable for his exploitation of the railways, the telegraph, the telephone and all the perfectionnements modernes (modern conveniences) for criminal ends. The captions four photographs of the apache dance from The Queen of the Moulin Rouge, playing in New York in 1909, spell out the narrative of sexual jealousy:
ATTRACTION-- . . . the interior of a vile cabaret in Montmartre, Paris . . . the first phase, the violent mutual attraction, so characteristic of the species, followed by the dance; INTERVENTION-- . . . the appearance of the discarded lover, who, enraged at the success of his rival, threatens him with a knife; REVENGE . . . the third scene of this extraordinary terpsichorean melodrama, shows the sudden interruption of the dance through the murder of the girl [and then her partner]; RETRIBUTION-- . . . the arrest of the double murderer ["The New York Apache--A Dreadful and Demoralizing Dance for Decadents," Tatler, 7 April 1909, 26-27].
38. "The Craze of the Age: The Evolution of Modern Dancing," Tatler, 30 November 1910, 259.
39. I am very grateful to Thomas Elsaesser of the University of Amsterdam for pointing me in the direction of early Pathé films, and to Graham Melville of the National Film Archive in London for help in locating what was subsequently identified as a seventy-second fragment of L'Empreinte. Dearly and Mistinguett are mentioned in the cast list, and Mistinguett wears the rather distinctive dress in which she was photographed for the Sketch supplement, 21 October 1908, 8; this is probably her first appearance on film. See Henri Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé des années 1896 à 1914 (Paris: Henri Bousquet, 1993), 138. Graham Melville has located for me three apache films advertised or reviewed in the Bioscope (the British trade paper) in 1912 and 1913. All of them turn on plots involving fancy-dress apaches and resulting cases of mistaken identity: The Apache Ball (30 May and 6 June 1912), The Apache (15 and 18 August 1912), and The Amateur Apache (4 September 1913).
40. Casque d'Or was "inclined to consider two men ting on her account, especially if knives were drawn, the finest homage" she could be rendered (CO, 45-46). She also states in effect that she preferred tragic love in the apache fashion to "that foolish little thing made with resignation by the grocer, haberdasher and baker of my quarter" (CO, 209).
41. See for example "A Famous Freak Dinner in Paris: Well-Known Dramatic and Literary Stars Come Dressed as Apaches" (Tatler, 6 December 1911, 285).
42. R. Belfort, "The Empire: An Hour at London's Smartest Hall," The Playgoer (July 1902): 236. I owe this reference to Alexandra Carter, "'Winged and Shivering': Images of Dancers in the Alhambra and Empire Ballets, 1884-1915" (Ph.D. diss. University of Surrey, 1993). I am very grateful to Dr. Carter for advice on music-hall ballet. There is an extensive and uneven literature on the music hall; see Music Hall: Performance and Style, ed. Jacqueline Bratton (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1987); Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, ed. Peter Bailey (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986); Roy Busby, British Music Hall: An Illustrated Who's Who from 1850 to the Present Day (London: Elek, 1976); and David Cheshire, Music Hall in Britain (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1974).
According to a contemporary Baedeker, London possessed "about 60 regular music-halls, besides ten times the number of smaller halls and assembly-rooms" (London and Its Environs [Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1905], 67). In the larger halls the social mix was obviously rearranged by the ticket prices; seats at the Empire cost 7s. 6d., 5s., 3s., 2s., 1s., and 6d. . Six pence was the price of an illustrated paper like the Tatler or Vanity Fair.
43. Peter Gilchrist, "Where Men Foregather: The Music Hall," Modern Man, 27 March 1909, 10; Compton Mackenzie, re of Eight (London: Cassell, 1936), 8, quoted in Guest, The Empire Ballet, 82:
Large hats, long trains, ample busts, sequins and silk petticoats gave the women of the Alhambra . . . and Empire promenades that five-pound look which for thirty years had been accepted as the standard of a luxury article. When hobbled skirts came in they might as well have frequented the Leicester Lounge or one of the Cafés nearby; full-rigged whores were going the way of full-rigged ships: the promenade . . . was not what it was. . . .
See also "London Hell: Sisters of Sin," Modern Man, 14 November 1908, 10, for an account of the three phases of prostitution: the two promenades (i. e., the Empire and the Alhambra) with their 5s. entrance fees; Piccadilly and Regent Street; the Strand, Pimlico, or the suburbs, leading to destitution and suicide in the Thames. Alexandra Carter has found evidence to suggest that the Alhambra and Empire promenades were also meeting places for homosexual men (Carter, "Winged and Shivering," 88 n. 48).
44. On Sickert and the music hall see Wendy Baron, Sickert (London: Phaidon, 1973), chaps. 3 and 4; and Anna Gruetzner Robins, "Sickert 'Painter-in-Ordinary' to the Music-Hall," in Sickert: Paintings, ed. Wendy Baron and Richard Shone (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 12-32.
45. On Gore see three catalogs with the same title: Spencer Frederick Gore, 1878-1914, one with an essay by J. Wood Palmer (London: Arts Council, 1955); Spencer Frederick Gore (London: Anthony d'Offay Gallery, 1974); and Spencer Frederick Gore (London: Anthony d'Offay Gallery, 1983).
46. Wyndham Lewis, "Frederick Spencer Gore," Blast 1, 150. Lewis adds: "The memorial exhibition of his work shortly to be held should, if possible, since the Cabaret Club has closed, contain the large paintings he did for that place" . Lewis had also exhibited with the Camden Town Group, and in 1902 had travelled with Gore to Spain, where they shared a studio.
47. Wyndham Lewis, "Futurism and the Flesh: A Futurist's Reply to Mr. G. K. Chesterton," T. P.'s Weekly, 11 July 1914, clipping in the Nevinson scrapbooks, vol. 1, press mark 7311.1, p. 66, Tate Gallery Archive. Lewis's piece was a response to Chesterton's "The Asceticism of the Futurists," published 4 July 1914.
48. Ibid.
49. William Wees discusses the Cabaret Theatre Club in Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 49-52, but the first substantial study of the club as an avant-garde project is Richard Cork, "The Cave of the Golden Calf," Artforum (December 1982): 56-68. This developed into the second chapter of Art Beyond the Gallery. Any discussion of the Cabaret Theatre Club is inevitably indebted to this pioneering account. I have drawn on it selectively for my own ends, while adding some information of my own.
Mme. Frida Uhl Strindberg (1872-1943) was the playwright's divorced second wife, and according to Nevinson, "the origin, or shall we say one of the inspirations of Strindberg's tirades against women in general and married women in particular" (PP, 41). Part of her motivation in starting the club was apparently to perform Strindberg's plays in England, although she had tried to start other supper- and nightclubs in London on Percy Street and Hanover Square (PP, 41-42). Wees describes her as given "to intense enthusiasms and histrionics" (Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, 49). She was in amorous pursuit of both John and Lewis; in Lewis's case at least, the pursuit was probably unsuccessful.