FABULOUS TIMES, PLACES AND PEOPLE: PARIS IN THE 20s and 30s.

PLEASURE

Photo: A flapper flirts with a gentleman friend: illustration
by Jacques Leclerc in La Vie Parisienne,
20th February, 1926.

Ecstasy had been invented in 1913, but had to wait another 75 years to become popular. Absinthe, a wormwood-based drink with hallucinogenic properties, was banned in 1915. Pernod replaced it as the arty drink of choice. Opium had its fans, including the writer Jean Cocteau. Modigliani liked a spliff, apparently. Women were beginning to gain more freedom and were more openly going out on the razz.

Paris in this era was probably the most liberal place in Europe. It certainly was a lot more easy-going than the United States, where prohibition was being enforced. There was also a more liberal attitude to sex. Homosexuality and promiscuity did not mean the instant rejection from society that it would mean in many parts of the World. Gertrude Stein's partner was the writer Alice B. Toklas and they had a fairly open relationship considering it was the 20s. In fact, if they dared, the 'modern' woman could smoke, drink and have all sorts of new fun. The beautiful American nicknamed 'Kiki de Montparnasse' was a model posing nude as well as clothed, for many famous artists of the day including Man Ray. She is an appropriate symbol of the free sexual attitudes and bohemian behaviour, but her activities would have been beyond shocking in the USA. Condoms had been issued to soldiers during the war to guard against venereal disease and brands such as Trojan were made publicly available by 1920. This meant that not only could married couples control the size of their families but young people could engage in more sex before marriage. Ernest Hemingway famously called Paris, "a moveable feast". Cafés, clubs, parties (big parties), think tanks, salons - no doubt about it, if you were an outsider looking for a good time, it was definitely the place to be.

 

FABULOUS TIMES, PLACES AND PEOPLE: PARIS IN THE 20s and 30s.

 

PHOTOS OF THE LIFESTYLE OF THE ERA

  Mistinguet                                                                           Coco Chanel                                                                      Aristide Bruant by Toulouse-Lautrec

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  La Goulue by Toulouse-Lautrec                                      Toulouse-Lautrec                                                              Jane Avril

 

 

PARIS BETWEEN 1920 AND 1930

 

Dress from La Belle Epoque of Paris, circa 1930

 

FABULOUS TIMES, PLACES AND PEOPLE: PARIS IN THE 20s and 30s.

POETRY

Photo: Ideogramme, in the shape of a horse by surrealist poet Apollinaire.

Everyone loves a good poet, though they're not always so keen on themselves. Cubism and collage had made the wordsmiths look at their medium with fresh eyes - new ideas were championed by the arch-Modernist Apollinaire. These included arranging words into images on the page, experimental punctuation and all sorts of other confusing things. He also invented the word 'Surrealism' in an attempt to describe the musical happening "Parade" in 1922.

In the modernist world of Parisian poetry Cubism and Dada had a resounding effect. Not only did the subject-matter go through a radical change, but even the shape of the poetry altered. These changes are most noticeable in the work of Guillaume Apollinaire, a close friend of the Dada artists, who championed their work as an art critic and helped build many a reputation. In his Calligrammes Apollinaire experimented with arranging fragments of speech spatially, in the shape of the subject of the poem. Hence a poem about a horse would be ... horse-shaped. Apollinaire also experimented with poetry based on the layout and subject matter of the press, proudly claiming: "I believe that I have found a source of inspiration in prospectuses … catalogues, posters, advertisements of all sorts. Believe me, they contain the poetry of our epoch". The complete removal of punctuation was another of Apollinaire's innovations, leading the Cubist painter Georges Braque to describe his work as closer to "Cubist typography" than "Cubist poetry".

Apollinaire claimed to have no need of punctuation, saying "the rhythm itself and the division into lines provide the real punctuation, and no other is needed". Dada's call for the freedom to experiment lead to much nonsense poetry. This freedom allowed taking a newspaper article, cutting it up, putting the pieces in a bag and shaking it. The order in which the words or groups of words came out determined the order of the words in the poem. While in Paris Ezra Pound followed the Dada movement closely, drawn by its subversive tendencies. He even attempted his own Dada poems, one of which was published in The Little Review under a pseudonym and is as far from traditional poetry as it is possible to get. Its opening lines are: "Godsway bugwash... Bill's way backwash ..." ... and it includes such nonsense as: "... Brot wit thranen, con plaisir ou con patate pomodoro …." Hemingway, on the other hand, thought Dada was ridiculous, and was in Paris writing economical prose stripped of superfluous words and florid language. He worked on this new, sparse style with the help of Pound, who he claimed taught him "to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations".

 Hemingway was in Paris as a reporter, while Pound was contributing regularly to The Little Review and writing "Parisian Letters" to The Dial. Several issues of The Little Review were devoted to the work of the modernist artists Pound was rubbing shoulders with. He also published a piece for the New York Evening Post which focused on Picabia and the Parisian scene.  With the demise of Dada the poets and writers Louis Aragon, Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault became principal members of the Surrealist group, going on to write novels which had Paris as a focus. Later, in 1929, Walter Benjamin wrote of the Surrealists "At the centre of this world of things stands the most dreamed-of of their objects, the city of Paris itself".

END OF THE ARTICLE.