Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

In 1913, some doubted whether France was still the cultural arbiter to the world, arguing that it had become more fascinated by foreign culture than by its own. While French artists and composers such as Renoir, Braque, Matisse, Ravel, Debussy and Fauré were being seen and heard, it was the innovation of the foreigners — Picasso, Chagall, Apollinaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Arthur Rubinstein, Rachmaninov and the Ballets Russes — that was attracting more animated attention. The foreigners seemed more thrusting in their search for liberation from past aesthetic and moral ideals, from authority and bourgeois conformity. They had traveled, physically and mentally, from the margins to Paris, which they saw as the place where revolution was fermented. The Polish-Italian Frenchman Guillaume Apollinaire understood that an essential element of the modern mentality was exile, the “battle on the frontiers.” The French painter Jacques-Emile Blanche wrote that the French capital had become the central station of Europe, and that “in Paris uncertainty rules.” 1

One May evening in 1913, following much anticipation, the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev presented a new ballet at the avant-garde Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. This work embodied the rejection of everything in art and life that its creators regarded as outmoded, and was to become one of the seminal works of the modern era. In the audience on that historic occasion was Gabrielle Chanel, invited by her dance teacher Elise Toulemon. (Eurythmics had become so influential that Diaghilev and his dancer-choreographer, the legendary Vaslav Nijinsky, had visited its founder, Jaques-Dalcroze, to ask for help with the dance movements for their ballet.)

Its composer, Igor Stravinsky, had named the ballet Le sacre du printemps ( The Rite of Spring ). He said that “it represents pagan Russia, and is unified by a single idea: the mystery surge of the creative power of Spring. The piece has no plot.” 2Nijinsky, who was Diaghilev’s lover, had written to Stravinsky: “Now I know what Le Sacre du printemps will be when everything is as we both want it: new, beautiful and utterly different — but for the ordinary viewer a jolting and emotional experience.” 3

Stravinsky told his mother not to be afraid if the response to the ballet was negative, saying that “it is in the order of things.” 4Meanwhile, Nijinsky’s dancers complained that his ideas were incomprehensible and his style entirely without beauty. With Stravinsky and Nijinsky, Diaghilev was intent on confrontation; their united goal was to shock.

How had it come about that Sergei Diaghilev and his dance troupe, the Ballets Russes, had not only become essential elements of the Parisian avant-garde but were central to the development of the modern movement?

A younger Diaghilev had described himself candidly to his beloved stepmother in a letter expressing his anxieties about his younger brothers: “As for myself… I am first a great charlatan, although one with great flair; second, I am a great charmer; third, I’ve a great nerve; fourth, I’m a man with a great deal of logic and few principles; and fifth, I think I lack talent; but if you like I think I’ve found my real calling — patronage of the arts.” 5He had written that he felt a force in himself, and had come to realize “that I for the devil am not an ordinary person.”

Sergei Diaghilev’s father was a cultivated provincial aristocrat who had become a bankrupt. His son learned to convert several vital elements — the collapse of his family, his sexuality and the loss of his homeland through revolution — into an evangelical blurring of all present boundaries. Diaghilev had early flaunted his homosexuality — then a dangerous thing to do in Russia — and established himself as a cosmopolitan dandy with deeply antiestablishment sentiments. If he lacked the essential talent to become an artist, nonetheless, Diaghilev’s remarkable ability to innovate and transform the world of art itself would be carried out with an extraordinary degree of creativity. He loved the tension caused by all that was contradictory: “He loved the friction, the struggle and the fire that was engendered by the new but not necessarily… for its own sake.” 6

Diaghilev had founded an influential art journal in Russia, had mounted highly successful exhibitions and gradually had come to believe that only the ballet exemplified the ideal, which was that all art forms should be united into one. By 1909, he had formed his own company. The Ballets Russes de Diaghilev caused a sensation across Europe. The colors and boldness of the sets and costumes and the foreignness and exoticism of the company’s Russian and oriental themes became all the rage. But while Diaghilev’s aim was a totality of art, it was as much about liberation of all kinds, including sexuality. And sexuality became a vehicle of rebellion against bourgeois values and one of the central themes of the modern movement.

Audiences were awed by Diaghilev’s lover, the extraordinary dancer Nijinsky, whom Debussy called “a perverse genius… a young savage.” It had been Nijinsky’s elemental faun simulating orgasm in Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune that broke all traditional rules of good taste and brought the underlying eroticism of much of the Ballets Russes’ work blatantly to the fore. Women, and men, were left in a heightened erotic state; Faune had caught the imagination of a generation. Privately, homosexuality, too, was a powerful element of the rebellious theme pervading the Ballets Russes; Stravinsky noted that Diaghilev’s entourage was “a kind of homosexual Swiss Guard.” While each new success encouraged Diaghilev to blur yet more boundaries and become still more daring, any disquiet at his company’s work was outweighed by the loud approval.

By 1912, Diaghilev had turned to more introspective and expressionistic music. Without any overarching philosophy of art, he was a master of a powerful strand in modern artistic thought. This was the belief that art delivered people from the constraints of morality and convention to recover a spontaneous life of the emotions. A man constrained by morality would never be free to create. In this way, art was seen as a life force greater than the individual and, eventually, a substitute for religion.

Thus it was only natural that Diaghilev should become one of the standard-bearers for this developing attitude to life and art. Emotions and intuition had just as much validity as all that was rational and objective, and an element of shock was necessary to provoke experience. Art would no longer teach. Its aim was to excite, provoke and inspire, to unlock experience. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was a success because the spirit behind it was already in the air.

However, in 1913, at the first performance of The Rite of Spring , Diaghilev and his colleagues’ daring was to unsettle even this audience that saw itself as in the vanguard of change. Rumor and counterrumor had carefully been circulated by Diaghilev for weeks, and the air of anticipation was palpable. An observer wrote later that, in fact, the audience’s “role had been written for it.” This was that it should be scandalized.

As the very first mournful notes of the bassoon melody rose up, some in the audience began to whistle. But by the time the weirdly dressed dancers appeared, with their shivering and shaking and jumping up and down in ugly and angular poses, there were cries of disapproval. Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s staunch followers loyally cheered, but many others booed at this “grotesque caricature.” People began to argue. Some apparently exchanged punches, a society woman spat in a man’s face and it is said that a duel was fought the next morning. It was reported that there was pandemonium.