Paysage Fautif

In 1946 Marcel Duchamp made a present of his own semen to his Brazilian lover, sculptor Maria Martins. Hard as it is to imagine, he preserved his spoor on Astralon, a forerunner to Acryllic, gave it a black satin backing, and framed it with wood. The naughty abstraction, Paysage Fautif, comments perversely on the childishness of Jackson Pollack’s paint spillage technique, anarchic at the time, and gratuitous. Duchamp on Paysage:  “It’s olfactory masturbation, dare I say. Each morning a painter, on working, needs apart from his breakfast, a whiff of turpentine…. A form of great pleasure alone, onanistic almost.”¹

Art around the globe and through the ages has always depicted the erotic. Exactly when masturbation became a subject unto itself is unknowable, so we’ve chosen a ceramic amphora from 6th Century Greece to represent the agelessness of our topic (image below left). But it’s Duchamp’s immediate predecessors who most intrigue us. Their works surely resonated with him, the former librarian, theorist, global nomad, and of course, man of rogue intellect.

Duchamp’s pleasure in Paysage Fautif was a private act, causing not much stir in the Post-War decade, when the social order already had fallen apart. In 1912, the year of the ankle length skirt and the broad brimmed hat, when the horseless carriage was just four years old, the great dancer Vaslav Nijinsky hinted at pleasuring himself with a chiffon scarf. Paris went wild (see Nureyev in the Joffrey Ballet’s 1979 hommage, below right).

A tremendous amount has been written on the web about this moment in time, this poet, this composer, this piece of music, this Nijinsky dancing with Les Ballets Russes and the impressario Sergei Diaghilev, and set and costume designer Léon Bakst. The ferment was rich and held within it the birth of the Modern. Yet the research and writing surrounding it is littered with conflicting dates, misspelled names, photos incorrectly credited and captioned, incomplete information. These and other inaccuracies mar both the narrative and the record. We’ve tried to correct the misinformation, digging up original texts, images, and sources, and citing the collections where artworks, and video and audio clips are currently held. Please let us know of any inaccuracies you find here. We hate the idea of misinformation circulating around the globe because soon enough they turn into facts.

In the case of Mallarmé’s poem (below left), you’ll see a copy of the original cover with a line drawing by his great friend Édouard Manet (below right). We’ve chosen clips that we think represent faithfully Debussy’s orchestration and the re-staging of Diaghilev’s choreography as re-interpreted by Rudolf Nureyev with the Joffrey Ballet in 1979. We’ve also posted 26-second flickering instance of Nijinsky himself dancing the role of the faun in 1912, the only live one extant (below left).

To find the review of L’Après-Midi d’un Faune in a 1912 issue of Le Figaro archived at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (below), to read about the fracas that ensued the morning after the show and the bickering that broke out between the arts reviewer and the great national sculptor Auguste Rodin– this makes us think about art in the round, thinkart360. Society was still innocent in those days in its expectations for entertainment. The world had not yet been pornified. The audience— remember, women still wore roped girdles and men, monacles and white gloves– was easily abashed.

The dream of the avant-garde was and still is gesamtkunstwerk or the harmony of the arts working in concert. We can’t express it in one word in English. “Multi-media installation” doesn’t even come close. Back then the concept was just coming to life. Think about it: L’Après-Midi d’un Faune presented a poem set to an orchestral piece written for a ballet choreographed with set and costume design that suggested the realm of the bestial deep within us, publicized with stunning lithographs of exceptional artistry (see below), all celebrating the freedom of body and soul. The glory of the arts came together that evening on a single stage. No wonder the audience was beside itself. Art, not just masturbation art, wielded its tremendous power to shock.

What Debussy heard

Crátera ática de Columnas

The moment occurred at Théâtre du Châtelet near the end of L’Après-Midi d’un Faune, the ballet set to Claude Debussy’s 10-minute composition, Prélude de L’Après-Midi d’un Faune. The piece was inspired by the poem written by Stéphane Mallarmé in 1876. The ballet opened with a plaintive flute solo drawing the audience into the lush visual and aural experience that was about to unwind before them. The melody, hung alone and naked in the air. The faun is sensuous; in Greek mythology he plays the flute like the god Pan. Debussy chose the flute to insinuate melody and sensuality throughout Prélude à L’Après-Midi d’un Faune. As a solo orchestral instrument the flute is naked, elusive, and insistent, like the contours of desire. It is vague and suggestive, waxing and waning. In Debussy’s 1894 score the flute moves down a tritone in whole steps and conveys mood chromatically. The flute suggests a move towards atonality and, in 10 short years to come will liberate music from a known key.

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Pierre Boulez, a leading contemporary classical composer of the 20th Century, sees Debussy’s work as visionary. “Just as modern poetry surely took root in certain of Baudelaire’s poems [the first Modern poet], so one is justified in saying that modern music was awakened by L’Après-Midi d’un Faune.”²

Creator of the twelve tone compositional technique, Arnold Schoenberg is credited with revolutionizing classical music in the 20th century. No coincidence then that one his first completely atonal pieces, Pierrot Lunaire Op.21, reflects the spectrum Boulez credits Debussy with awakening. It debuted in 1912 in Berlin, the same year as L’Après-Midi d’un Faune premiered in Paris. The piece was based on Albert Giraud’s Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Giraud’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’. Like Mallarmé, Giraud was a Symbolist.

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Edouard Manet's drawing for L'Après-Midi d'un Faune.

The Symbolists were a group of poets in late-19th Century France who wrote highly associative and obscure verse. Mallarmé gave them a second name, the Decadents. Their style diverged from poetry at the time, which was based on a strictly linear narrative. For our purposes Mallarmé and the new thinking his poem gave birth to bears directly on Duchamp. Surrealists and Dadaists drew inspiration from the Symbolists. Surrealists were nothing if not decadent, at least in their thinking, and endlessly associative for audiences who understood tethe tropes.

The Afternoon of a Faun (1876)

by Stéphane Mallarmé

These nymphs I would perpetuate.
So clear
Their light carnation, that it floats in the air
Heavy with tufted slumbers.
Was it a dream I loved?

All alone I gave
Myself for triumph the ideal sin of roses.

No water murmurs but what my flute pours
On the chord sprinkled thicket; and the sole wind
Prompt to exhale from my two pipes, before
It scatters the sound in a waterless shower,
Is, on the horizon’s unwrinkled space,
The visible serene artificial breath
Of inspiration, which regains the sky.

Inert, all burns in the fierce hour

Then shall I awake to the primitive fervor,
Straight and alone, ‘neath antique floods of light,
Lilies and one of you all through my ingenuousness.

Exceptional programme cover for premiere of L'Après-Midi d'un Faune by Léon Bakst.

My breast, though proofless, still attests a bite
Mysterious, due to some august tooth;
But enough! For confidant such mystery chose.
The great double reed which one plays ‘neath the blue.

I, proud of my rumour, for long I will talk
Of goddesses; and by picturings idolatrous,
From their shades unloose yet more of their girdles:
So when of grapes the clearness I’ve sucked,
To banish regret by my ruse disavowed,
Laughing, I lift the empty bunch to the sky,
Blowing into its luminous skins and a thirst
To be drunk, till the evening I keep looking through.
Oh nymphs, we diverse MEMORIES [sic] refill.

Ah well, towards happiness others will lead me
With their tresses knotted to the horns of my brow:
You know, my passion, that purple and just ripe,
The pomegranates burst and murmur with bees;
And our blood, aflame for her who will take it,
Flows for all the eternal swarm of desire.

Etna! ’tis amid you, visited by Venus
On your lava fields placing her candid feet,
When a sad stillness thunders wherein the flame dies.
I hold the queen!

No more, I must sleep, forgetting the outrage,
On the thirsty sand lying, and as I delight
Open my mouth to wine’s potent star!
Adieu, both! I shall see the shade you became.

Shall we dance?

On the evening of May 29 at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris the audience was scandalously titillated (or titillated scandalously) as they watched Nijinsky’s erotic pleasure dancing the lead to Claude Debussy’s Prélude à L’Après-Midi d’un Faune. The audience was captive to and captivated by the great exhibitionist in a dark brown and white costume designed by Léon Bakst and based on a Greek satyr (above) enthralled with his erection the size of a tree trunk. (Nureyev as the faun in the Joffrey Ballet’s 1979 production, right). Audiences at the time would have been schooled in the image. Diaghilev and his corps de ballet reinforced the reference.

Sergei Diaghilev (portrait by Léon Baskt, 1906) established the Ballets Russes in Paris in 1909. The ballet company featured top dancers from the Tsar’s Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg, Russia. The company ran until 1929 and premiered many controversial performances such as the L’Après d’un Faune in 1912 and The Rite of Spring in 1913, both choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky.

Diaghilev understood gesamkunstwerk, working with anarchic artists (Picasso, Matisse, and Cocteau) and composers (Prokofiev and Stravinsky) whose art was radical to the eyes and ears of Parisian audiences in the early 1900s. Even reaching into fashion, Diaghilev commissioned Coco Chanel to design costumes in the elegant simplicity of her signature. He understood that he was introducing, through the Faune, not only masturbation, but Modernism and Cubism to Paris and thus the world.

“Faux Pas,” said the critic

Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro, stood in for the Arts editor on May 30, 1912, to review (see left) the opening of L’Après-Midi d’un Faune, claiming ignorance of both the music and the ballet. That did not keep him from slamming the performance as bestially erotic, replete with shameless gestures, libidinous, and mocking the audience.

“Pas Faux,” said Rodin

French is the only tongue and a sculptor the only writer able to capture the plasticity in the tableau that vivified the satyr’s paean to lust. Rodin writes that each minute movement of Nijinsky— nervous, angular, extended, open— utterly embodied the spirit frozen in the ancient statuary. One could say the dancer himself was the frieze, Rodin writes, from the time the curtain rose until the denouement, when Nijinsky, rent with pleasure, heaped himself face down upon the nymph’s chiffon scarf. Pas de faux pas ici.

Vaslav Nijinsky in “L’Après-Midi d'un Faune” in 1912

Naughty sketches

Rodin was living in the Hôtel Biron at the time, now the home of the Musée Rodin. He already had achieved national popularity as  a sculptor and artist. Although generally known for his sculptures, he also produced more than 3,000 sketches and drawings. A large portion of sketches from this period were of female nudes in erotic poses of masturbation and acts of lesbianism. These are most likely the sketches which Mr. Calmette of  Le Figaro is referring to as “crayons libidineux” that reflect the “attitudes impudiques du faune,” which were then on exhibition in the the Sacred Heart Chapel of the Hôtel Biron. Rodin was well versed in the erotic. The Hôtel Biron was a municipal building where he maintained a studio and kept company with his models, not generally women of Parisian society. He enjoyed living large pas comme il faut. In fact Calmette complains that the real scandal here is that the French State was paying for Rodin’s erotic, masturbatory art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hôtel Biron, 1910, rue de Varenne, Paris

Sacré-Coeur Chapel at the Hôtel Biron

Everybody: Get up off the couch!

Was there something in the air in 1912? Erotic art was the taste of the time, the forbidden country charted on Freud’s couch (his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality was published in 1905), Klimt’s canvas, Rodin’s clay, Diaghilev’s corps, and Bakst’s sets. Nijinsky was simply the frolicking libido making merry with it on an evening at Théâtre du Châtelet. How could the public, acting in the role of salacious voyeur, but disapprove of the shameful pleasure?

While Freud was treating patients for sexual neuroses like masturbating, Gustav Klimt, his Viennese contemporary, was siring seven children with different women and sketching hundreds of crayons libidineux depicting women doing just that (two sketches appear below). Klimt was a founder of the Viennese Secession movement that wanted to break free of artistic stricture, convention, historicism in subject, medium, and approach. Hence his choice of erotic poses, often with lesbian subjects, his eccentric taste in garb (deep blue smock with white epaulettes), and his bizarre choice, despite his promiscuity, of living at home with his mother and sisters. Yet his artistic pleasure was, like Rodin’s, private and static, bordered by picture frame. By contrast, Nijinsky’s was deliberately public and acted out. It occupied the whole stage. It was choreographed to shock and scandalize.

 

Freddie Mercury wanted to break free in the pop group Queen’s video for the song “I Want to Break Free” (1984). He worked with the Royal Ballet’s then choreographer Wayne Eagling to create the ballet section of the video. This hommage to Nijinsky and L’Après-Midi d’un Faune was filmed off-hours at night using dancers from the Royal Ballet without the knowledge of Artistic Director Norman Morrice.

 

Duchamp, whence our blog began, knew these precedents. How could he not? How could Freddie Mercury, acting the outrageous spotted faun in a 1984, not? No ribbon of chiffon or rocky crag for Queen; only a conveyor belt of women in the mist would do. Crude or not, Mercury was a Vienna Secessionist in a modern key wanting to break free.

Klimt used sketches in the same way a musician uses scales. He produced thousands of them, hundreds of which were of women pleasuring themselves, like the two poses you see here. Before he died, he destroyed the majority of his drawings, which were stacked to the ceiling in his mother’s house.

In 2008 an exhibition of Klimt’s paintings and erotic drawings was held at the Neue Galerie in New York. The museum was founded and endowed by Ronald Lauder, the legendary patron of the arts. The Economist expressed no shock in its review of the show at the time. No fracas à la Le Figaro ensued between the Arts Critic and any sculptor of renown. Pas de scandale de tout. That country is no longer fautif.  Society was pornified long ago.

Notes

¹ Demos, T.J. The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge: MIT, 2007. 59.

² Boulez, Pierre. “Entries for a Musical Encyclopedia: Claude Debussy”, Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1991, pp. 259-277.

Sources

General

Ballet Histories – Russian Ballet History. Web. 23 Oct. 2011. <http://www.russianballethistory.com>.

Bouttell, Liz. “Wayne Eagling Artistic Director, English National Ballet.” Wayne Eagling, Artistic Director, English National Ballet Interviewed at Ballet Association. The Ballet Association. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. <http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_10/feb10/interview_wayne_eagling.htm>.

Calmette, Gaston. “Un Faux Pas.” Le Figaro [Paris] 30 May 1912: 1. Print.

Calmette, Gaston. Le Figaro [Paris] 31 May 1912: 1. Print.

Mallarmé, Stéphane. Mallarmé: Poems. Ed. Julian Bell. Trans. Roger Fry. New York: Directions, 1949. Print.

Rodin, Auguste. Le Figaro [Paris] 31 May 1912: 1. Print.

“Sergei Diaghilev: Ballet’s Master Networker Provocateur – Features – Theatre & Dance – The Independent.” Sergei Diaghilev: Ballet’s Master Networker Provocateur – Features – Theatre & Dance – The Independent. The Independent. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/sergei-diaghilev-ballets-master-networker-provocateur-2073914.html>.

The Economist. “Gustav Klimt, A Lover of Women.” The Economist 15 Nov. 2007. The Economist Newspaper Limited. Web. 15 Oct. 2011. <http://www.economist.com/node/10130719>.

The Economist. “Gustav Klimt’s Erotic Drawings. Private Passions.” The Economist 7 Apr. 2005. The Economist Newspaper Limited, 12 Oct. 2011. Web. <http://www.economist.com/node/10130719>.

Art

Bakst, Léon. Portrait of Sergei Diaghilev and His Nanny. Digital image. Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900-1920: Art, Life, & Culture of the Russian Silver Age by John E. Bowlt. California Literary Review, 02 Feb. 2009. Web. <http://calitreview.com/2465>.

Baskt, Léon. Programe cover, L’Après-Midi d’un Faune. Digital image. Ballet Histories– Russian Ballet History. Russian Ballet History Collection. Web. <http://www.russianballethistory.com/ballethistories.htm>.

Berthelomier, Charles. L’Hôtel Biron, Côté Jardin, Vers 1910. Digital image. The Hôtel Biron | Musée Rodin. Musée Rodin. Web. 11 Nov. 2011. <http://rs.musee-rodin.fr/filestore/3/4/7/3_c64aa25f0c63382/3473_7b690d2f0186287.jpg>.

Couch in Freud’s study. Digital image. Austrian Information. Austrian Press and Information Service. Web. <http://www.austrianinformation.org/september-october/2006/11/8/sigmund-freud-symposium.html>.

Duchamp, Marcel. Paysage Fautif, 1946, semen on Astralon, 21 x 16.5 cm. Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan. <http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/powers/powers6.html#N_81_top>.

Garcia, Luis. Crátera ática De Columnas. Digital image. File:Crátera ática De Columnas (M.A.N. 1999-99-65) 02.jpg – Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia.org, 11 Sept. 2009. Web. 25 Oct. 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cr%C3%A1tera_%C3%A1tica_de_columnas_%28M.A.N._1999-99-65%29_02.jpg>

“M. Nijinsky”. Le Figaro [Paris] 30 May 1912: 6. Print.

Manet, Édouard. Manet’s drawing of the faun for Mallarmé’s poem. Digital image. Stéphane Mallarmé and Édouard Manet– Graphic Arts. The Trustees of Princeton University, 01 Feb. 2011. Web <http://blogs.princeton.edu/graphicarts/2011/02/stephane_mallarme_1842-1898_la.html>.

Metzger, Rainer, and Gustav Klimt. Gustav Klimt: Das Graphische Werk. Wien: Brandstätter, 2005. Print.

Rodin, Auguste. Femme Nue, Une Main Entre Les Cuisses Dite Naissance De Vénus. Digital image. Joconde– Catalogue– Dictionnaires. Culture.gouv.fr. Web. <http://www.culture.gouv.fr/public/mistral/joconde_fr>.

Rodin, Auguste, Femme Nue Allongée, Une Main Passée Sous Une Jambe Relèvée. Digital image. Joconde – Catalogue – Dictionnaires. Culture.gouv.fr. Web. <http://www.culture.gouv.fr/public/mistral/joconde_fr>.

Sacré-Coeur Chapel at the Hôtel Biron. Digital image. La Chapelle Musée Rodin. Musée Rodin. Web. <http://www.musee-rodin.fr/fr/le-musee/le-musee-rodin-paris/la-chapelle>.

Vaslav Nijinsky in “L’Après-Midi d’un Faune” in 1912. Digital image. Dance– Ballets Russes’ 100-Year-Old Revolution Still Dazzles– NYTimes.com: Nytimes.com, Feb. 2009. Web. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/arts/dance/08maca.html?pagewanted=all>.

Audio

Debussy, Claude. “Prelude à L’Après-Midi d’un Faune.”  Nureyev and the Joffrey Ballet in A Tribute to Nijinsky, Perf. Rudolph Nureyev. :esuch Dance Collection, Nonesuch Records, New York, 1980. Rudolph Nureyev: “L’Après-Midi d’un Faune” Youtube.com, 11 Sept. 2008. Web. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7b1FkZYarU>.

Ensemble Musique Oblique. “Pierrot Lunaire.” Cond. Pierre Boulez. Rec. 2003. Schönberg: Pierrot Lunaire Op. 21. Web.

Video

I Want to Break Free. Perf. Queen. Youtube.com. Web. <http://youtu.be/f4Mc-NYPHaQ>.

Nijinsky 2 – Afternoon of a Faun. Perf. Vaslav Nijinsky. Youtube.com. Web. <http://www.youtube.com/embed/nMqLLYrEF60>.

Nureyev and the Joffrey Ballet in A Tribute to Nijinsky, Perf. Rudolph Nureyev. :esuch Dance Collection, Nonesuch Records, New York, 1980. Rudolph Nureyev: “L’Après-Midi d’un Faune” Youtube.com, 11 Sept. 2008. Web. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7b1FkZYarU>.