Saints and lovers: myths of the avant-garde in Michel Georges-Michel's Les Montparnos

This article examines Michel Georges-Michel’s 1924 novel Les Montparnos as a study of the myths circulating around the Montparnasse avant-garde of the 1920s, and their function in relation to art. Key amongst these myths is the idea of art as a religion, according to which avant-garde artists are conceived as secular saints and martyrs. While this notion of artist as saint is strongly present in early-twentieth-century biographies of Van Gogh, Georges-Michel explicitly relates his fictionalized version of Modigliani’s life not to such recent models but rather to the Renaissance masters, and especially to Raphael, a link which is explained in terms of the post-war ‘retour à l’ordre’ in French artistic culture. The novel’s references to Raphael as archetypal painter-lover are also related to its construction of a myth of the artist as virile and sexually prolific, and to its identification of creative and sexual impulses

Serge Romoff - temoin inconnu

En mai 1921 et à Paris depuis une quinzaine d’années, Serge Romoff est appelé comme témoin au procès fictif de Maurice Barrès monté par les Dadaïstes et les Surréalistes. Bien qu’il soit presque certain qu’il connaissait plusieurs membres des deux groupes, il n’y a aucune trace de sa participation au cours des années précédentes ni à leurs activités ni à leurs publications. Qui donc était Serge Romoff?? La documentation manque, mais il semble qu’à partir de 1920 il joue un rôle de plus en plus important dans le monde culturel et surtout dans celui des artistes émigrés russes dans le quartier de Montparnasse. Il travaille dans l’imprimerie, fait quelques traductions, collabore à plusieurs revues culturelles, organise des expositions et écrit des articles de presse, notamment pour L’Humanité. En 1928 il retourne à Moscou où il continue à faire des conférences, probablement sur la littérature française et l’art. Il est mort en février 1939, une des victimes peut-être des purges staliniennes

Portraits of the garçonne as artist: gender and creativity in French fiction of the années folles

This article examines a series of popular and middlebrow works of fiction from the 1920s which represent the garçonne (the flapper, or androgynous, emancipated young woman) as artist. Challenging the popular view of the années folles as a period of relatively relaxed social conventions and gender norms, it shows that far from embracing female creativity, the authors of the period took pains to link it to moral and aesthetic deviance. Having considered what the representation of female creativity in novels by Berthe Bernage, Victor Margueritte and Marcel Prévost can tell us about gender in the 1920s, I go on to examine novels by the art critics André Warnod and François Fosca, who use the figure of the garçonne as artist to air art-critical positions about the modernist art produced in Montparnasse, especially by members of the École de Paris. Whereas Warnod represents his female artist as a victim of a modernism linked with the foreign and the ‘primitive’, in Fosca’s novel the female painter is a more threatening figure: an agent of a modernism whose attacks on the female body (in the form of the conventional academic nude) are in turn echoed in a broader ‘troubling’ of gendered and aesthetic categories