Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [152]
Paul Poiret, the fashion designer and friend of Picasso, opened an art gallery on the rue d’Antin in 1916. Criticized because it seemed a frivolous thing to do during wartime, Poiret was defended in the newspaper L’Intransigeant, whose critic wrote, “Artists have to live, like other people, and France, more than any other nation, needs art.” 14 In need of money, Picasso remounted the rolled-up canvas of his controversial 1907 painting and let Poiret display it. For the first time, it appeared under the title Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a name Picasso is said to have disliked. 15
That same year, while designing the costumes and scenery for a production of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Picasso met a ballerina named Olga Kokhlova, whom he would soon marry. In November 1918, Olga brought the news of Apollinaire’s death to Picasso as he was shaving. He put down his razor and began to draw the face he saw in the mirror. He was later to claim it was the last self-portrait he ever made. 16
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The carnage of the war, in which millions died for a cause no one could understand, left disillusionment and cynicism in its wake. Artists, or those who aspired to be artists, felt themselves unable to adequately express the emotions the unprecedented horror produced. George Grosz and John Heartfield, 17 two German artists, condemned the “cloud-wandering tendencies of so-called sacred art, whose adherents mused on cubes and gothic while the generals painted in blood.” 18
In the midst of the war, in the city of Geneva in the neutral nation of Switzerland, arose a new form, or theory, of art. Called Dada, 19 it was born at the Cabaret Voltaire, where refugees from other nations often gathered. The idea is generally said to have originated with Tristan Tzara, a Romanian poet, but many others contributed. Dada has been called “a nihilistic creed of disintegration, showing the meaninglessness of all western thought, art, morals, traditions.” 20 In short, it was a reaction against the civilization that had created the war. However, Dada artists made their point through black humor and absurdity. To them, art could be more—or less—than a drawing, a painting, a poem, a play; it might be something “created” at random or even an event where the actions of the participants, spontaneously generated, are the art. “Everything the artist spits is art,” declared Kurt Schwitters, one of the group. 21 The idea spread rapidly, for it appealed to those who felt that traditional art was inadequate in the face of the ultimate failure of civilization.
One of those who fell under Dada’s influence was Marcel Duchamp, a Frenchman from a family of artists. His cubist painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, had created a sensation at the 1913 New York Armory Show, the first major exhibition of modern art in the United States. Inspired by the spirit of Dada, Duchamp began to exhibit “readymades,” which were manufactured objects that he had transformed into art by either altering them slightly or simply giving them a title and declaring them art. One famous example was a urinal, turned upside down, that he signed “R. Mutt” and titled Fountain.
In 1919, the four hundredth anniversary of Leonardo’s death, Duchamp took an ordinary postcard-sized reproduction of the Mona Lisa and drew a mustache and goatee on it. He wrote at the bottom his “title”: L.H.O.O.Q. With that alteration, Leonardo’s painting made the transition from a masterpiece of Renaissance art to an icon of modernism. Duchamp chose that particular painting to transform—or deface, if you like—because its theft had made it the most famous painting in the world, which