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100 8 the return to order “My Life is hell,” Picasso wrote to Stein in 1915, a year after the war had broken out.1 It was six months after Marcel Duchamp had left for America. Stein herself had left for Spain. As Éva lay dying of cancer (or tuberculosis) in a crowded clinic on the edge of wartime Paris, Picasso’s hell took the shape of a vacuum, steadily emptying. Everything he had known seemed to have evaporated over the first year of the war: the Paris art scene, his bande de Picasso, and his financial security , especially since his dealer, the German businessman Kahnweiler, was in Switzerland when war broke out, prompting the French to confiscate his considerable cache of Picasso paintings as enemy property.2 When Éva died on December 14, 1915, the vacuum was almost total—but not completely, when it came to women at least. Picasso had given in to his philandering ways in Éva’s last year. He also seriously pursued three Montparnasse women—dancers and models—but in a bit of harsh selfrealization (at age thirty-four), he had failed to persuade the two he liked best to marry him.3 One activity that continued on the Left Bank of Paris was a bohemian salon, or social gathering, held by an exotic Slavic couple, Serge Férat and Helen Férat (Baroness d’Oettingen).4 In Paris, Serge’s generosity represented the last gasp of czarist Russia’s decadent class, soon to be swept away by the Bolshevik Revolution. The Férats had more money than Gertrude Stein. Their glittering parties, and lavish spending, soon overshadowed Stein’s soirees. Serge, for example, financed Apollinaire’s journal, Soirées de Paris. As a painter, Serge fell in with the salon Cubists. In the Férat circle Picasso was getting his first taste of the Russian avant-garde, about which he would learn a good deal more very soon. Operating as a bachelor from his studio at rue Schoelcher, Picasso immersed himself in the scaled-back, wartime Montparnasse scene. He no longer had his first poet and painter friends, or his business manager, to shield him from the rough-and-tumble of Paris, where the opportunists among the avant-garde were always plentiful. They flourished among the the return to order || 101 street-life bohemians, naturally. But occasionally they were present also in the Parisian upper class, and it was just such a person, a young poet, who arrived at Picasso’s door on a late summer day in 1915 looking for opportunity. His name was Jean Cocteau, a child of privilege who, to the pride of his parents, was noted in the poetry circles in Montparnasse as a young talent. He produced a repertoire of poetry called “frivolity.” His wittiness was undeniable. For Cocteau to rise, though, he needed an avenue into the higher realms of the avant-garde, and that meant finding it among the Cubist painters. He had asked the composer Edgard Varèse to introduce him to Picasso, and the day finally came at the rue Schoelcher studio, “the greatest encounter of his [own] life,” Cocteau recalled.5 As the story goes, Cocteau saw a large Harlequin painting at the studio, and so, on another day, he returned in a raincoat. On entering Picasso’s studio, he took it off, revealing himself in a Harlequin costume. It was this sort of foppish forwardness—combined with homosexual excursions—that won Cocteau both scorn and grudging admiration in Paris. Stein called him a “slim, elegant youth.” The bohemian composer Erik Satie preferred “loathsome bird.”6 Either way, Cocteau had talent, ambition, and an inside track in Parisian literary culture. He had a vision of uniting the left wing and right wing of French culture, the wealthy patrons with the left-wing bohemians. It also helped that Cocteau had a way with language. He had the ability to invent a catchy phrase that captured a moment, event, or time. One of those phrases—by no means his alone—had two variations, either retour à l’ordre (return to order) or rappel à l’ordre (call to order). The words meant a return to, or revival of, France’s “classical” past in literature and the arts. This return seemed especially necessary after the great national debate on the “hoax” of modern art, and especially after the diversity spawned by Cubism. From the start, some French critics had described Cubism as a foreign art form. Now that the...

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