Modjesko, Soprano Singer MoMA(2s)
Week 9 Picasso the Foreigner (1441-1445) 3/23 – 3/28/2025
ID 1441
Kees van Dongen French 1877- 1968
Modjesko, Soprano Singer , 1908
Oil on canvas
Van Dongen, a Dutch artist who lived in Paris, was briefly a member of the Dresden-based artist group Brücke in 1908. The group's founders, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (whose works are on view on the opposite wall), invited him and other artists from across Europe working with bold, expressive color to join their ranks, declaring, "Whoever renders directly and authentically that which impels him to create is one of us." Van Dongen painted this portrait at the beginning of the year, when Modjesko, an African American singer and drag performer, was headlining at a music hall in Paris.
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Peter A. Rübel, 1955
From the Placard: MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kees_van_Dongen
www.moma.org/collection/works/79095
Kees van Dongen: A collection of 290 works (HD)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCQuPvb9Hzw
So what connection can we draw between the German-language theories of aesthetics and philosophy espoused by an Einstein or a Raphael and the anxieties felt by French society during those years? The French press, as we have seen, was rife with fear that cubism was a direct threat to the country's identity. Such fears could also be perceived in the debates of the Chamber of Deputies on December 3, 1912: "You cannot see what the cubists do and call it art!" fulminated the deputy Jules-Louis Breton. "One does not encourage garbage!" his right-wing colleague Charles Benoist added. "There is garbage in the arts as there is elsewhere." As for Marcel Sembat, a Socialist deputy from Montmartre, he firmly stated, "I have absolutely no intention [...] of defending the cubist movement! In whose name would I defend it? I am not an artist[...]. What I defend is the principle of freedom of experimentation in art." This debate was the culmination of what historians of cubism describe as the "xenophobic controversy of 1912" or the "Autumn Salon crisis of 1912." Three months earlier, on October 3, 1912, in an open letter to Léon Bérard (assistant to the state secretary for the fine arts), the photographer Pierre Lampué, recorder of the fourth commission of the Paris city council, had expressed outrage that the State had made the Grand Palais available to the Autumn Salon for an exhibition that "piles up the most banal ugliness and vulgarity imaginable." He went on to attack the cubist artists, whom he described as "a gang of miscreants who act in the world of art like the Apaches in ordinary life."
As time went on, the "Autumn Salon crisis" turned its fury on the salon's jury who, according to some, had "for the past three years [included] too many foreigners." The solution was obvious: a "restriction on foreigners." "Next year, they will be curbed and the evil will be stopped in its tracks," the xenophobes predicted. Pierre Lampué's open letter drew a response from the managing editor of the magazine Gil Blas that escalated the xenophobia to dangerous levels: "[The cubists] are foolish young people. [They] do not represent in any way the leading trends of the Salon. We were probably wrong to give them an importance they do not actually possess. We were also wrong to let the jury be invaded by foreigners. These are mistakes that will not be repeated [...]. The courageous company president [...] will take the necessary measures to prevent this happening again. And everything will return to order." Not to be outdone, the Salon's committee members declared that "foreigners will not longer control the company's destiny[...] the jury will show an intelligent severity." In Gil Blas, again, the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who had first used the term "little cubes" in 1908, launched a direct attack on Kahnweiler and Picasso: "I don't want to further invoke the nation-foreigners," he claimed hypocritically, before adding: "The fact that there are too many Germans or Spaniards in the fauvist and cubist movements or that Matisse is a naturalized Berliner or that Braque now swears by Sudanese art, or that the art dealer Kahnweiler is not exactly a compatriot of Pere Tanguy, or that that lecher van Dongen is from Amsterdam, or that Pablo is from Barcelona, none of this has any importance in itself. Van Gogh, too, was Dutch. The issue is not what language the cubists speak, but whether they have anything to say. Alas, I doubt it."
Picasso The Foreigner An Artist in France, 1900 - 1973 Annie Cohen-Solal (Translated from the French by Sam Taylor) Farrar, Straus and Giroux New York 2021. Translation 2023. Pages 206-207
Modjesko, Soprano Singer MoMA(2s)
Week 9 Picasso the Foreigner (1441-1445) 3/23 – 3/28/2025
ID 1441
Kees van Dongen French 1877- 1968
Modjesko, Soprano Singer , 1908
Oil on canvas
Van Dongen, a Dutch artist who lived in Paris, was briefly a member of the Dresden-based artist group Brücke in 1908. The group's founders, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (whose works are on view on the opposite wall), invited him and other artists from across Europe working with bold, expressive color to join their ranks, declaring, "Whoever renders directly and authentically that which impels him to create is one of us." Van Dongen painted this portrait at the beginning of the year, when Modjesko, an African American singer and drag performer, was headlining at a music hall in Paris.
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Peter A. Rübel, 1955
From the Placard: MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kees_van_Dongen
www.moma.org/collection/works/79095
Kees van Dongen: A collection of 290 works (HD)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCQuPvb9Hzw
So what connection can we draw between the German-language theories of aesthetics and philosophy espoused by an Einstein or a Raphael and the anxieties felt by French society during those years? The French press, as we have seen, was rife with fear that cubism was a direct threat to the country's identity. Such fears could also be perceived in the debates of the Chamber of Deputies on December 3, 1912: "You cannot see what the cubists do and call it art!" fulminated the deputy Jules-Louis Breton. "One does not encourage garbage!" his right-wing colleague Charles Benoist added. "There is garbage in the arts as there is elsewhere." As for Marcel Sembat, a Socialist deputy from Montmartre, he firmly stated, "I have absolutely no intention [...] of defending the cubist movement! In whose name would I defend it? I am not an artist[...]. What I defend is the principle of freedom of experimentation in art." This debate was the culmination of what historians of cubism describe as the "xenophobic controversy of 1912" or the "Autumn Salon crisis of 1912." Three months earlier, on October 3, 1912, in an open letter to Léon Bérard (assistant to the state secretary for the fine arts), the photographer Pierre Lampué, recorder of the fourth commission of the Paris city council, had expressed outrage that the State had made the Grand Palais available to the Autumn Salon for an exhibition that "piles up the most banal ugliness and vulgarity imaginable." He went on to attack the cubist artists, whom he described as "a gang of miscreants who act in the world of art like the Apaches in ordinary life."
As time went on, the "Autumn Salon crisis" turned its fury on the salon's jury who, according to some, had "for the past three years [included] too many foreigners." The solution was obvious: a "restriction on foreigners." "Next year, they will be curbed and the evil will be stopped in its tracks," the xenophobes predicted. Pierre Lampué's open letter drew a response from the managing editor of the magazine Gil Blas that escalated the xenophobia to dangerous levels: "[The cubists] are foolish young people. [They] do not represent in any way the leading trends of the Salon. We were probably wrong to give them an importance they do not actually possess. We were also wrong to let the jury be invaded by foreigners. These are mistakes that will not be repeated [...]. The courageous company president [...] will take the necessary measures to prevent this happening again. And everything will return to order." Not to be outdone, the Salon's committee members declared that "foreigners will not longer control the company's destiny[...] the jury will show an intelligent severity." In Gil Blas, again, the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who had first used the term "little cubes" in 1908, launched a direct attack on Kahnweiler and Picasso: "I don't want to further invoke the nation-foreigners," he claimed hypocritically, before adding: "The fact that there are too many Germans or Spaniards in the fauvist and cubist movements or that Matisse is a naturalized Berliner or that Braque now swears by Sudanese art, or that the art dealer Kahnweiler is not exactly a compatriot of Pere Tanguy, or that that lecher van Dongen is from Amsterdam, or that Pablo is from Barcelona, none of this has any importance in itself. Van Gogh, too, was Dutch. The issue is not what language the cubists speak, but whether they have anything to say. Alas, I doubt it."
Picasso The Foreigner An Artist in France, 1900 - 1973 Annie Cohen-Solal (Translated from the French by Sam Taylor) Farrar, Straus and Giroux New York 2021. Translation 2023. Pages 206-207