Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism (Reaktion Books, Ltd. London, U.K. ) By Mary Ann Caws. Hardcover, Summer 2019, 352 pages. $35.00
Not a day of my adult life goes by that I do not wish I could be part of some extraordinary artists’ collective. I’d love to dream and create alongside a dozen or more like-minded others within a philosophical movement with art as its central pursuit. What I am wishing for is not so much the amorphous, quasi-anonymous, internet-driven groups that spring up online today, but flesh-and-blood local gatherings. I yearn for dynamic collectives like those once led by charismatic visionaries who used to meet weekly or daily in public spaces like bars, cafés or cabarets between the two World Wars. I’d even settle for the more subtle creative environment of a high-quality literary salon, like the one run by the Martinican Nardal sisters just outside Paris; or the ones organized in Parisian flats by Antillean and African students who published provocative magazines that not only shaped a creative aesthetic but entire liberation movements.
In high school I would read about international cabals of Dada and Surrealist activists with a combined feeling of envy and wonder. How did so much anarchic talent gravitate towards the same sense of shared destiny at the same time? You couldn’t really compare what these particular groups did to anything that came before or after. They didn’t do things like the Symbolists or Futurists had; they didn’t do things like the beatniks, the Black Arts group, the hippies, or punk rockers did. Unlike today’s inspired cybernauts, these were not young creatives bonding for careerist goals, striving to become successful entrepreneurs (although money had its uses). Their project—if we can even call it that—was both higher and more abstract. While adherents of Dada aggressively lampooned the nationalistic propaganda and bourgeois imperatives that made armies, colonialism, wage-slavery, and racist oppression possible, the Surrealists not only rejected the political motivations that had plunged the so-called “developed” world into two horrific global conflicts; they thought it possible to prevent the repetition of such folly by using language and visual arts to change the way people perceived reality. Guided by the promising neo-science of depth psychology, Surrealists strove to instill new cognitive processes in mankind that would transform human nature to the point where any desire to abuse or oppress one’s fellow man would fade away.
Clearly the Surrealists did not quite succeed. But their spiritual heirs, those who remain aligned with their original aspirations—are still trying. And perhaps the key to pushing their agenda further along is to rethink and carefully reestablish institutions like the salon and the artist collective. This is perhaps the secret purpose of Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism (2019), a new book from the U.K.-based Reaktion Press about influential artist colonies and salons by Mary Ann Caws.
As an acclaimed teacher, translator, and expert on Modernist art and literature, Caws takes her readers on an exhilarating tour of Florence, Venice, Paris, Prague, Zürich, Sussex, and Asheville, North Carolina. All were famous sites of strategic artistic foment, and proving that genius can flourish almost anywhere given a few basic ingredients. From the 19th century to now.
Beyond the particularities of place and personalities, each of these locations marks an alchemical turning point for the evolutionary mission of “modernism.” As Caws says in her introduction: “…[H]ow to even speak of so many artist’s and writer’s colonies, studios, schools, and bookshops abounding all over, and over the years—places where creative communities could assemble around a table, or an idea, or in a recurring meeting of minds, like or unlike? How to map Modernism?”
As it turns out, the main tools Caws used to create her “map” were personal memories or connections to each site: “In some cases this will be a family connection,” Caws writes, “in some a professional one, in some am object of research over the many years in which the topic has haunted me.”
A haunting. Indeed, the best artifacts of modernism do haunt an audience—whether it be Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” a poem by Simone Yoyotte, a Hannah Höch photomontage, or “The Flute Player” by Remedios Varo. But for Caws it is not only artworks that haunt, but the physical locations that helped bring them into being. Bookstores, like Adrienne Monnier’s Maison des Amis des Livres, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company, and Frances Stelo’s Gotham Book Mart were legendary places that remind us how Amazon.com can never replace the brick and mortar booksellers where catalytic knowledge and friendships were deliberately cultivated.
Eating and drinking establishments were understandably important to writers and artists, as Caws takes pains to remind us. In Spain, Federico García Lorca mentored fellow writers at Grenada’s Café Almeda; while in Madrid the Café Pombo was where a young Lorca, Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dalí shared ideas and meals during their exploratory student years. In Paris, artist-loving grills and bistros were incredibly numerous. In lieu of money, fresh paintings and poems were often accepted as payment. Painters and musicians alike hobnobbed at the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, a space justly famous for connecting the musical mystic Erik Satie, with the musical mystic Maurice Ravel. Moreover, the international and multi-generational flavor of these artistic meeting grounds were always a big part of their chemistry. Now in her mid-‘80s, Caws tells their stories from perfect perspective.
Most fascinating (and perhaps most instructive) are stories about how so many fertile groups were launched and kept together by a single creator or core of creators. The bucolic Barbizon School in France led by Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and Charles-François Daubigny; the Provincetown-based Cape Cod School of Art led by Charles Webster Hawthorne; The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire founded by Marian MacDowell, Gerald Cassidy’s Santa Fe colony, and of course the Surrealist Movement assiduously controlled by André Breton.
Caws is also able to appreciate and contrast these vintage examples against post-modern reference points like Max’s Kansas City where Andy Warhol held court; and the revolving contemporary scene of emerging curators who congregate in New York at Le Poisson Rouge or the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Hers is a rich, multimedia perspective, that rewards close attention with illuminating discoveries and surprising comparisons.
In today’s fragmented mediascape with too few qualified arbiters of taste to serve as reliable sources of critical (or consensus) opinion, it is too easy to forget that once musicians, artists, poets, novelists, essayists, and dramatists found it necessary to stay connected and vitally concerned with each other’s latest work. Experimental collaborations like Picasso illustrating Aimé Césaire’s poems in Lost Body; or Picasso, Satie, Cocteau, and Diaghilev collectively executing the ballet Parade render the ostensibly innovative pairings of pop stars from different disciplines that attract so much publicity today almost laughable. (Not that I don’t enjoy Lil Nas X with Billy Ray Cyrus, but it doesn’t even measure up to the provocative juxtaposition of Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines in White Nights.)
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There are interesting ideas aplenty in Creative Gatherings; assessments of the relative benefits of rural vs. urban settings; female vs. male leadership; and the relevance of free-floating conversation vs. critical dialectics in the building of aesthetic theories. Because many of the art scenes Caws describes were either underground subcultures or officially privatized to a certain degree, the participants themselves had to document most of the goings on which led to incredibly revealing and intimate photographs of their peers from the likes of Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Roland Penrose, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and others.
This notion of a collective “insider’s view” of the artistic world is another narrative thread in Creative Gatherings, and one well worth contemplating. However, as Caws suggests, the proliferation of gossip, hearsay, slander and myth which accretes around artists no matter how obscure or famous they are, would seem to undermine any guarantee of objective truth in any insider’s recollections. Nevertheless, Caws seems to come as close as anyone could to the authentic flavor of what true artists say and do among themselves. Ultimately, it’s how Caws ties these disparate explosions of artistic activity together—from Venice to Providence, Rhode Island—that gives them meaning beyond any regional or temporal significance.
“To sum up,” Caws writes about her intentions, “the major impetus behind this gathering of gatherings, is an exploration of some of the kinds of artistic community that appear to have been successful, nourishing an incessant creativity or longing for it, [the] preparation for that creativity, or then, nostalgia for a past community, in itself potentially creative.“ Then she segues to the crux of why this book, and the collaborative endeavors it celebrates, are so important.
“I love,” Caws begins, “what Cecilia Beaux said about the kind of working companionship that major creative communities enjoyed: ‘Passion is often lost to recollection in its own murk, but the peak of happy comradeship remains, like the dawn star, clear, unforgettable, in memory.’”