THE FALL OF PARIS
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can detective stories, Russian music, neo-Catholicism, German
technique, Italian desperation.
Paris represented the International of culture. To it, the city
contributed something of its own physiognomy, a pleasant gift of
sidewalk cafes, evening streets, shop signs, postmen's uniforms,
argot, discursive female janitors. But despite this surface local
color, twentieth-century art in Paris was not Parisian; in many
ways it was more suited to New York or Shanghai than to this city
of eighteenth-century parks and alleys. What was done in Paris
demonstrated clearly and for all time that such a thing as inter–
national culture could exist. Moreover, that this culture had a defi–
nite style: the
Modern.
A whole epoch in the history of art had come into being
without regard to national values. The significance of this fact is
just now becoming apparent. Ten years ago, no one would have
questioned the possibility of a communication above the national,
nor, consequently, of the presence of above-national elements even
in the most national of art forms. Today, however, "sanity move–
ments" everywhere are striving to line up art at the chauvinist soup
kitchens. And to accomplish this, they attack the value and even
the reality of Modernism and "the Paris style." National life alone
is put forward as the source of all inspiration. But the Modern in
literature, painting, architecture, drama, design, remains, in defi–
ance of government bureaus or patriotic streetcleaners, as solid
evidence that a creative communion sweeping across all boundaries
is not out of the reach of our time.
In all his acts contemporary man seems narrow and poor.
Yet, freed even for a moment, and in touch with himself, he leaps
towards the marvelous in ways more various and actual than any
generation of the past. In the "School of Paris," belonging to no
one country, but world-wide and world-timed and pertinent every·
where, the mind of the twentieth century projected itself into pos–
sibilities that shall occupy mankind during many cycles of social
adventure to come. Released in this aged and bottomless metrop·
olis from national folk lore, national politics, national careers;
detached from the family and the corporate taste; the lone indi–
vidual, stripped, yet supported on every side by the vitality of
other outcasts with whom it was necessary to form no permanent
