The Fictions of Arthur Cravan by Dafydd Jones;

Author:Dafydd Jones;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

8 Maintenant no. 4, March–April 1914, cover.

Cendrars drew decidedly sceptical conclusions about Cravan, suggesting how ‘the actions of this giant, this lazy man, had the fatal quality of the pricked balloon about them’,39 yet the audience beyond immediate acquaintances appeared enthralled. Towards the end of November, with his rising literary stock trading on the established credential as nephew of Wilde, Cravan was invited to speak to the literary Cercle de la Biche, which met regularly at 37 rue des Martyrs in Montmartre.40 Advance notice of the meeting was given in Gil Blas,41 and what the assembled la Biche audience eventually sat through that evening was a stream of Cravan’s pronouncements on art and literature that would struggle to amount to any coherent whole, ‘spouting so many platitudes’ as Cendrars recalled.42 Expressing his contempt for artists and demanding the audience’s silence before a fanfare for what he was about to say, Cravan lamented that death from cholera at the age of thirty (in order to forestall their own creative decline and dereliction) was not prerequisite of all great poets; he loudly denounced Marinetti’s annual investment in artistic pursuits (which, in order to emphasise the point, Cravan estimated to be in the region of 100,000 francs); and, in summation for Gil Blas, André Salmon provocatively posed Cravan as ranking alongside Alfred Jarry for the quality of his literary aggression, his absurdity and the impact of his maturing public address.43

Conférencier Cravan was evidently finding his stride and, for the months following 1 March 1914, the background to his public, publicised and published activity was the annual salon of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. The salon was held on the avenue de la Bourdonnais on the Champ de Mars, south of the Eiffel Tower, and housed in temporary structures:

the sheds for this exposition have been built on a corner of the Champ de Mars, a site once covered by the Galerie des Maclunes, in which the old Barnum & Bailey circus gave its performances when it came to Paris.44

This would be the final salon after thirty years of annual exhibiting by the Indépendants, thus concluding only at the start of the First World War, and in the wake of the triumph of Cubism during the preceding years, the public sensation in 1914 was Orphism. This abstracting strain of Cubism was named Orphism and championed by Apollinaire, and its development had been led by Robert Delaunay since 1912, gaining salon prominence in the works exhibited by him and Sonia Delaunay. Robert exhibited his Hommage à Blériot and Sonia exhibited her Étude de lumière (prismes électriques), the latter taking as its subject the coloured halos of the night, the newly installed electric street globes on boulevard Saint-Michel; the painting was prominently emblazoned with Cendrars’s name across his and Sonia’s collaborative artists’ book La prose du transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France:

Right at the entrance may be seen the works of the ‘simultanists’, Robert Delaunay, his wife, Sonia Delaunay, and P. H. Bruce, an American.

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