On the Fall of Paris
Harold Rosenberg
T...
LARORATORY
of the twentieth
century
has been shut down.
Let us admit, though, the rapping of the soldier's fist did not inter·
rupt the creation of fresh wonders. For more than a decade, there
had been a steady deflation of that intellectual exuberance which
had sent out over the earth the waves of cubism, futurism, vorticism
-and, later, dadaism, the "Russian" ballet, surrealism. Yet up to
the day of the occupation, Paris had been the Holy Place of our
time. The only one. Not because of its affirmative genius alone, but
perhaps, on the contrary, through its passivity, which allowed it
to be possessed by the searchers of every nation. By Picasso and
Juan Gris, Spaniards; by Modigliani, Boccioni, Severini, Italians;
by Brancusi, Roumanian; by Joyce, Irishman; by Mondrian,
Dutchman; by Lipchitz, Polish Lithuanian; by Archipenko, Kan·
dinsky, Diaghillef, Larionov, Russians; by Calder, Pound, Ger–
trude Stein, Man Ray, Americans; by Kupka, Czechoslovak; by
Klee, Lehmbruck, Max Ernst, Germans; by Wyndham Lewis and
T. E. Hulme, Englishmen ... by all artists, students, refugees.
Tbe
Style of Today
The hospitality of this cultural Klondike might be explained
as the result of a tense balance of historical forces, preventing any
one class from imposing upon the city its own restricted forms and
aims. Here, life seemed to be forever straining towards a new
quality. Since it might be the sign of what was to come, each fresh
gesture took on an immediate importance. Twentieth-century Paris
was to the intellectual pioneer what nineteenth-century America
had been to the economic one. This world beat a pathway to the
door of the inventor-not of mousetraps, but of perspectives.
Thus Paris was the only spot where necessary blendings could
be made and mellowed, where it was possible to shake up such
"modem" doses as Viennese psychology, Mrican sculpture, Ameri·
