Picasso at the Lapin Agile Notes on the Production
Einstein and Picasso walk into a bar…
In this Steve Martin comedy, it can be difficult to discern what is based on reality and what was created for comedic effect. Obviously, Einstein, Picasso, and our mysterious "Visitor" all existed and made monumental contributions to their fields. As you will read below, Sagot, Freddy, and the Lapin Agile are also based on historical people and places. The other characters exist as either archetypes of typical turn-of-the-century Paris barflies, or they were born from the silly, surreal mind of Steve Martin's stand-up days.
Martin has said that this play is aimed at explaining "the similarity of the creative process involved in great leaps of imagination in art and science" (1). While there is no evidence that Picasso and Einstein ever met at the Lapin Agile, and it is impossible that the Visitor ever sat down for a drink with them in 1904, it certainly does make for the beginning of a very funny joke. Below, you can gain some insight into the play by reading some non-fictitious information about the time, place, and people that you are about to experience through Steve Martin's playful eyes.
La Belle Époque: Paris at the Turn of the Century
Paris in the "fin de siècle" was a place of innovation that set the stage for the work of Picasso and his "bande" of friends. After the Treaty of Versailles of 1871, which ended the Franco-Prussian War, the Third Republic of France entered an era of prosperity, and Paris was reinstated as the cultural capital of Europe. The city hosted the World Exposition in 1889 and again in 1900, inviting the world to enjoy French society and engage in cultural exchange. Cabarets and cafés sprung up, providing a democratic counterpoint to the more exclusive and academic salons. At dance halls, the passionate tango was all the rage; on the streets outside dance halls, duels afforded a bit of street theater.
The Parisians enjoyed dance and music to a degree, but ultimately Paris was a place for literature and art. Small art galleries and upstart literary journals multiplied at the turn of the century, creating ruthless competition to find the next new thing. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that the writers and artists who ruled Paris were known as much for their big personalities as for their work. Gertrude Stein came to Paris with her brother Leo and soon held people in awe of both her intense friendships with cutting edge artists and her raucous, idiosyncratic writing style. Alfred Jarry, the writer of the pioneering surrealist play Ubu Roi, loved brandishing his revolver almost as much as riding his new bicycle. The writer Guillaume Appolinaire enjoyed widespread readership of his poetry and art criticism. He also became a figure of small scandals through his biting bits in the society columns and had a role in large-scale scandals like the theft of The Mona Lisa from the Louvrein 1911 (2).
Painting was also at the center of Parisian passions. Many artists at the height of their talent and potential came to Paris. Matisse and Braque were among the giants who made their mark on the field during "La Belle Époque," challenging realistic representation of objects and conceiving the movements of Fauvism and Cubism. All were subject, however, to the praise and criticism of the Parisian patronage. These aficionados were known for immediate and drastic reactions to what they saw, prompting celebrations or brawls. Mostly, they rejected art that assaulted the "relentless optimism" of Parisians in their "belle époque" (3).
Pablo Picasso
Enter young Pablo Picasso, who would soon be at the center of this unrest. He was only 19 when he first came to Paris in 1900. He rejected his last name, Ruiz, as too ordinary, preferring the Italian flourish of his mother's maiden name. As a little boy, Pablo was a compulsive sketcher and painter, creating countless pieces based on places and people he loved. In his early art education, he happily copied the styles and techniques of old masters; one of these early academic pieces was included in the Paris Expo of 1900 (though he later painted over the canvas) (4). Picasso and his friend Carlos Casagemas were on their way to London when they stopped in Paris and met the characters living in the artists' neighborhoods of Monmartre and La Butte. Monmartre had become a haven for revelers and artists. The lower hills were the homes of clubs such as Le Chat Noir and Moulin Rouge, but the steep upper hills of La Butte were untamed, with charming vineyards, vegetable gardens, and cheap accommodations.
On Picasso’s first visit to Paris, he sold three paintings depicting bullfights to a small gallery and was courted by other connoisseurs. Clovis Sagot, "an old fox" (5) and the most miserly art dealer of the day, also took a liking to Picasso and his work. Over the next three years, Picasso would travel between Spain and Paris, selling what he could and exhibiting in solo shows. His first solo show of 100 paintings, while not a commercial success, received kind praise from critics. He was an "inspired borrower" from the innovations of the masters (2).
In these years, Picasso made some very good friends, notably Guillaume Apollinaire and poet Max Jacobs, who housed Picasso when he was in town. Picasso and his "bande," as they came to be called, loved cafés, women, and mischief. Picasso was known for making stinging and brilliant quips about someone as they left the room that would put people in hysterics. He did not seem to believe that a person's personality was a one-dimensional, fixed entity. He was always looking at the many facets of a person, even when he was satirizing them.
The Lapin Agile
The Lapin Agile was situated in La Butte, on the corner of Rue St. Vincent and Rue des Saules with an exterior drenched in vines, a sunny terrace for warm evenings, and a cozy interior for cold evenings. It was christened Lapin a Gill, for the artist who painted the sign which hung above the door, and soon after was nicknamed Lapin Agile. Frédé Gerard, who ran the establishment, was a colorful character, who kept animals, including his beloved donkey Lolo, on the terrace. He sang and played his guitar in a corner on nights he feared his customers would become too rowdy, and he made a famous cocktail of cherry brandy and grenadine. Best of all, he extended credit to poor artists like Picasso and his "bande" (5).
In 1904, Picasso came back to Paris, this time to stay. He settled in La Butte, at 13 Rue Ravignan, a tiny apartment with an untidy studio later known as the Bateau-Lavoir, or the laundry boat. Picasso began painting, in shades of pink and tan, the performers and clowns of a visiting circus. These new subjects were (according to Apollinaire) an extension of their group of friends and their life outside the mainstream. It was during this period that he painted Girl with a Raven, a tribute to Frédé's daughter (4). Art dealer Ambroise Vollard bought 30 of the peach-toned works for 2000 francs. An ordinary artist might pause for a while, making more of these commercially successful works, but Picasso kept looking foward. He found inspiration in the classical art of the Louvre; the art of Africa on display at the Musee Ethnologie du Trocadero; the geometry of Henri Poincare's groundbreaking La science et l'hypothèse; and, perhaps, the work of Albert Einstein (6).
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was born in Wurtemberg, Germany, in 1879. As a young boy, he had a natural talent for the sciences. His father and uncle both knew he was a bright boy and solicited his mechanical abilities for the family's electrical supply business. It was during this time that Einstein had his earliest contact with the field of physics.
Early teachers found Einstein to be a handful in the classroom. He needed an extra year of study to pass the exam for The Swiss Polytechnic School in Zurich. In order to prepare, he enrolled in a small school in Arau; luckily, his inquisitive disposition was embraced there. The positive regard teachers gave him bolstered his confidence. The system of education, based on the work of reformer Pestazolli, also encouraged students to encounter problems creatively and visually. These "gedankenexperiment" – namely, one in which young Einstein imagined himself riding alongside a light beam – became central to his Special Theory of Relativity.
At the Polytechnic, Einstein questioned the knowledge of his professors and threatened their authority in the classroom. He did, however, form a close friendship with his classmate Marcel Grossman, who shared his impeccable lecture notes with Einstein. Eintein also embarked on important independent reading to supplement his studies; he, like Picasso, was also very taken with the work of Henri Poincare. The reputation Einstein made for himself during his Polytechnic years left him with no job prospects in academia when he graduated in 1900. Once again, Marcel Grossman would come to Einstein's aid, with a connection to the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, where Einstein was hired in 1902.
At the Patent office, Einstein was buoyed by his supervisors, who encouraged him to be skeptical of each patent application. This attitude allowed Einstein to throw out some key scientific ideas, like the presence of ether that was considered "common knowledge" at the time, to make way for his new ways of thinking about light. This is the atmosphere that supported Einstein’s assertion "imagination is more important than knowledge" (7). After the period of stress and disappointment that preceded his life in Bern, this was a period of relative happiness and stability in Einstein's life. Einstein was able to do his paid work very quickly, which meant he could spend an additional few hours a day on his own work while he was at the office. His new cohort of close friends, who called themselves the Olympia Academy, nourished his mind and his sense of humor. He was ready for his "miracle year" (7).
Parallels: Picasso and Einstein
Einstein and Picasso both expressed, in their own fields, a primary concern of the twentieth century thinkers: the clash of representation versus abstraction. While the thinkers of the 1880s and 1890s were rooted in positivism, which asserted that only sensory information is "real," and naturalism, a movement concerned with the pleasures and difficulties of everyday life, turn-of-the-century thinkers were questioning the absolutes of these realities. Fauvism, Expressionism, Post-Impressionism, and, eventually, Cubism, questioned and pushed the boundaries of how a figure on a plane could be represented (8). Meanwhile, scientists were puzzled by the difficulties of standardizing time, which was a necessity for modern locomotive travelers and conductors. They were also stymied by attempts to define ether, through which they supposed light waves traveled. Einstein would soon upend all conceptions of the nature of light and time.
Picasso and Einstein broke through the boundaries of their fields by using a wide range of disciplines and accessing a range of "intelligences," or modes of thinking. The parallels continue, in that both describe a "flash" of understanding that led to their greatest works; but underneath the "flash" had been many years of incubation, in which a long-sustained free play of ideas gradually organized themselves, eventually emerging as a whole and springing onto the canvas or the paper. In 1905, Einstein wrote four articles in a very short period of time. The last of the four was his Special Theory of Relativity, describing the motion of particles moving at close to the speed of light. His explanation was immediately embraced by several academics, including Max Planck, who was partly responsible to the propagation of Einstein's work in Europe, reaching even Picasso, perhaps, by way of an actuary named Albert Princet (6). Picasso's explorations came to a crescendo in 1906. Struggling with a portrait of his friend Gertrude Stein, he took a holiday in Gosol, Spain, where he painted La Grand Nu Rose. The face of this painting was a revelation: he had painted a mask of the sort he had recently studied on Iberian statues and African masks. He went back to the Stein portrait and, "as if with one stroke," finished her face in this mask-like style (8). This would soon lead him to his first cubist work, Demoiselles D'Avignon.
As the century wore on, and political tensions mounted in Europe, abstraction gave way to nihilism. Both men, in their later years, mourned the applications of their work (6). Einstein became a vehement opponent of the atom bomb, and Picasso criticized the movement toward absolute abstraction in art. But as we meet them in Picasso at the Lapin Agile, we see them on the brink of their discoveries, probing the boundaries of space and time.
Production Notes by Liz Fenstermaker
References:
1 "Martin defends play." The Boston Globe (March 16, 2009). <http://www.boston.com/ae/celebrity/articles/2009/03/16/martin_defends_play/>.
2 Nigel Gosling. The Adventurous World of Paris 1900-1914. William Morrow and Company, 1978.
3 Alistair Horne. Seven Ages of Paris. Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
4 Vincent Cronin. Paris on the Eve: 1900-1914. St. Martin’s Press, 1990.
5 Fernande Olivier (Jane Miller, translator). Picasso and His Friends. Appleton Century, 1965.
6 Arthur I. Miller. Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty that Causes Havoc. Basic Books, 2001.
7 Walter Isaacson. Einstein: His Life and Universe. Simon and Schuster, 2007.
8 Dan Franck. Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, and the Birth of Modern Art. Grove Press, 1998.
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