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in my pocket that evening), only a scant knowledge of French.… I arrived at the Gare de Lyon in a lighthearted, ebullient frame of mind. I took the white tram… went straight to Montparnasse, and ordered my first café-au-lait at a little bar on the corner of boulevard Montparnasse and boulevard Raspail. The bar was called La Rotonde and years later would become a famous meeting place for modern artists.… Having arrived at six in the morning, by nine I was settled in, and could wander out to the boulevard Raspail, where a new building was going up in a wonderfully chaotic construction site that I could start to draw.” 22 Paris, with its unmatched atmosphere of intellectual and artistic ideas, was a place where Severini, like others, could thrive.

iv

Paris at the turn of the century was the epicenter of modernism — the new artistic, social, cultural, and scientific revolution that was changing the way people looked at the world. Rapid change was to be an essential part of modern life. Technological advances, including automobiles, telephones, airplanes, electric streetcars, and urban railways such as Paris’s Métro, were radically increasing the speed at which products and information could be exchanged. The dense urban concentration of populations made retail establishments like department stores possible and gave rise to a new consumerism. Population density also fostered crime, for human relationships became increasingly random and impersonal and the gaps between the haves and the have-nots became more conspicuous. Meanwhile, Freudian psychology, physical studies of the human brain, and the experiments of French psychologists such as Jean Charcot were providing new theories of human behavior and motivation.

Above all, modern life was marked by speed. As the poet Octave Mirbeau said of the streetcar, “Life everywhere rushes headlong.” 23 Nothing captured the imagination of people like the automobile. Between 1890 and 1904, France led the world in the production of motor cars, and in 1900 the wait could be as long as twenty-two months for delivery. Before the days of the assembly line, each coach was custom-built to each owner’s specifications, and the height could vary along with the fashions in ladies’ hats. The renowned grande horizontale (courtesan) known as La Belle Otéro had an automobile that was so high and narrow that it could overturn if rounding a curve too fast. Race car drivers became celebrities, and before World War I, some automobiles reached the phenomenal speed of eighty miles per hour. Even at lower velocities, however, an automobile made the world seem different. Mirbeau observed that riding in a car “put things into a new relief, giving me an impression that objects and persons were not just static but intensely active.” 24 The poet strained to express the feelings that his automobile gave him: “I can contemplate without a tremor the dispersion of my books, my pictures, and all my collection, but I cannot bear the thought that a day may come when I shall no longer possess my magic charger, this fabulous unicorn that bears me so gently and swiftly, with a clearer and a keener brain, across the whole map of nature’s beauties, the richness and diversity of the human scene.” 25

Even more thrilling than the automobile, though not so widely available, was the airplane. The realization of the dream of flight, one of the many obsessions that Leonardo had filled his notebooks with, was seen as a manifestation of the great power of modern science. At the 1900 Paris Exposition, Alberto Santos-Dumont, the son of a Brazilian coffee king, made ascents in his bicycle-powered balloon, using the handlebars to steer. By 1906, Santos-Dumont had constructed a biplane, which he flew a distance of 60 meters, the first powered flight in Europe. This set off a competition to build better engines and planes and increase the time in the air. In 1908, Léon Delagrange, a sculptor, flew a plane 854 meters, the first flight to be filmed.

The great hero of early flight in France was Louis Blériot. The survivor of many crashes,