The Spirit of Montmartre
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"With the Chat Noir cabaret (1881-1897) and the Quat'z 'Arts cabaret (1893-1910) as its main focus, and concentrating on individuals who participated in the group activities of the Hydropathes (1878-1881) and the Incoherents (1882-1896), this collection of five essays documents and explores the development of the Montmartre cabaret from 1875 to 1905. Montmartre is revealed as the primary promoter, catalyst, and often, site for the collaboration of artists, writers, composers, and performers in the production of illustrated journals, books, dramatic pieces, music, puppet shows, and the protocinema invention of shadow theater. The contributors reveal the essence of Montmartre's artistic, intellectual environment and analyze its inextricable relations with an important, multidisciplinary body of avant-garde, fin-de-siecle art, literature, and music. The Spirit of Montmartre is the story of Paris's earliest, original, avant-garde groups - an essential part of the cultural context for Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters and for such important writers and composers as Mallarme, Zola, Huysmans, Debussy and Satie. Relying on Rabelaisian humor, this ephemeral avant-garde group phenomenon anticipates twentieth-century Dada, Surrealism fluxus, and Performance Art."--The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905 (1996) by Cate and Shaw |
Illustration: Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe by Eugène Bataille
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The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905 (1996) is a book edited by Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw, published by Rutgers University Press.
The book was published to accompany the exhibition at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (March 24 - July 31, 1996). On the cover is Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe (1883) by Eugène Bataille.
Information about the men who created the images and the activities of the Le Chat Noir group as a whole is provided on pp. 1-94. A 19th-century work like Degas's The Curtain Falls hears a conceptual relation to this productive tradition of fumisterie; for when the curtain falls, the scene will be eliminated, the image reduced to its essence: color on a flat surface, a kind of Rothko or Barnett Newman before the fact, even if that color itself represents a thing, a curtain.
It also has extensive documentation on monochrome paintings "Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel at Night" and other paintings from the Album primo-avrilesque.
In addition to the editors, the contributors are Olga Anna Dull, Daniel Grojnowski, and Steven Moore Whiting.
