Collecting Texts: Marguerite’s Aesthetic and Modernist Practice
During her long career in the arts, Marguerite Chapin-Caetani witnessed the unfolding of multiple manifestations of the complex cultural movement known as modernism.108 While she never embraced any of its various “-isms” – surrealism, futurism, imagism, vorticism, etc. – Marguerite contributed to this unique period of artistic development by creating two international literary reviews, Commerce and Botteghe Oscure, which belong to the same modernist legacy. In this last chapter of my work I wish to relate Marguerite’s editorial philosophy back to the “collecting aesthetic” that informed her previous activity as patron of the arts.
Marguerite’s transition to publishing constituted a natural step in her artistic development. In shifting her focus between different artistic genres – music, visual art, and literature – Marguerite applied the same criteria to different types of aesthetic objects. By excluding rubrics, advertisements, and critical essays – beside a few relevant exceptions – Marguerite aimed to communicate a message based on her artistic
sensitivity. In this sense, the anthology becomes an itinerant gallery in which the aesthetic value of each work is complemented by a collective value determined by the
108 After WWII the US government began to support modernist art as a tool to counter the Communist
influence among European intellectuals. While the movement lost some of its early connotations, including a relative independence from political power, I will continue to refer to it as “modernism” throughout this chapter.
processes of selection and assemblage. Hence, the “message” is the anthology itself as a cultural product aiming to establish an alternative canon and to propagate the editor’s views.
This objective was especially evident in Botteghe Oscure, which targeted the main nodes of cultural diffusion like universities and public libraries. Commerce featured works covering a wide chronological range, but the review’s circulation was limited; on the contrary, Botteghe Oscure focused on contemporary production and reached a broader audience. Moreover, translation played an important role in Commerce, whereas its use in Botteghe Oscure was reduced to a minimum. Despite these differences, both reviews were examples of a “super-art” practiced by the collector-editor to assert her authority in the relationship between writers and their audience.
By the time Marguerite Chapin-Caetani began her career in publishing (1924), the redefinition of basic concepts like space, time, and identity had fostered the development of new cognitive models that affected traditional ways of experiencing art and life. Men and women of the new century visited universal expositions and shopping malls, browsed catalogs, took the subway and drove cars; it was as if the world was shrinking and soon everything would be within reach – including the past. Age-old empires and exotic destinations inspired the artists-decorators of modernity; they adorned skyscrapers – new landmarks of the West – with geometric patterns reminiscent of Assyrian friezes and Egyptian tombs. In a more intimate setting, wealthy patrons and patronesses posed for portraits in the opulent comfort of their bourgeois homes, surrounded by everyday objects and souvenirs from recent travels.
As modernist instances spread in both Europe and USA, the urgency of
negotiating new canons for the arts collided with the conservative structure of museums and academies; the timeliest response to modernity’s changes came from an
unprecedented expansion of the publishing industry. Reviews like Gordon Craig’s The Mask and John Middleton Murry’s Rhythm attempted to bridge the gap between drama, visual arts, and poetry; dynamic authors-editors like Ezra Pound and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti used reviews as sounding boards to further their artistic agenda; women like Harriet Monroe (Poetry) and Margaret Anderson (The Little Review) were instrumental in creating a platform for the diffusion of modernist verse.109
Rapid technological advances in the field of printing combined with a general increase in the level of instruction led to an invasion of magazines of every kind. To build up exposure for their merchandise, storeowners printed brochures and catalogs that addressed customers in a simple and powerful way, using big fonts and bright colors to attract attention from the first glance. The same techniques were employed by avant- garde reviews like Blast, the official publication of the Vorticist movement, not to mention Marinetti’s “liberated words” (parole in libertà).
As modernism scholar Robert Scholes remarked in the book Modernism in the Magazines, the semantic connection between publishing and collecting/storing was established early on. In 1731 the French word for “storeroom” (magazine) appeared in the title of the British periodical Gentleman’s Magazine to indicate a “monthly
collection” whose goal was “storing, as in a magazine,” interesting pieces on a wide
109 Reviews and anthologies played a major role in the diffusion of new literary and artistic trends. Since
the difference between “review” and “anthology” was not always defined clearly, it would be unwise to attempt any generalization; one can observe, however, that while reviews were more concerned with the “here and now” and less with the long term effects of their action, modernist anthologies tended to adopt a stronger transformative stance as “provisional institutions” (Braddock 2012).
range of topics. In another review called Monthly Museum the focus shifted to the
collection as display of notable items (Scholes 46). Clearly, activities such as storing and displaying objects – be they stamps, paintings, sculptures, or texts – could not be defined as inherently modernist; it cannot be denied, however, that the assemblage of pre-existing materials constituted an important aspect of modernist aesthetic.
Seminal works like Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land were built upon a complex structure of citations and cross-references; these fragments from the present and the past were de-contextualized and re-assembled to form new meanings from old
materials. Such practices informed both production and display of modernist art; collages, ready-mades, thematic galleries, and interventionist anthologies all shared the same collecting aesthetic.
The emphasis on objects arranged in a series or assorted in no apparent order, regardless of their value, age, and original context, revealed the collector’s desire to take a stand and play the role of a demiurgic force. In Vuillard’s 1911 painting La
bibliotheque, for example, Marguerite embodies a sibylline character whose real nature can only be guessed by looking at the surrounding environment (fig. 7.1). Vuillard’s installed this large canvas in Marguerite’s apartment on rue de l’Université. The artist turned a rather conventional subject – tea hour in Marguerite’s library – into a perceptive study of Marguerite’s psychology.
Marguerite is standing on the right side of the canvas, wearing a dark green dress with lace inserts and black shoes. It is hard to miss the large brass buckle on the shoe, a wry reference to Marguerite’s puritan roots. A picture-in-the-picture occupies the center of the painting: we see Adam and Eve under the Tree of Knowledge. She is holding the
forbidden fruit; Adam holds her arm as if trying to stop her. The scene is based on a similar painting by Tiziano and a copy of it made by Rubens; Vuillard saw both pictures at the Prado museum in Madrid (Groom 186). The upper part of the painting consists of a frieze copied from “The Muses’ Sarcophagus” that is still preserved at the Louvre and portrays the nine muses (Groom 183).
The presence of a meta-pictorial element combined with the decorative motifs of the frieze and the patterned wallpaper deviates the viewer’s attention from the “subjects” of the painting – the characters conversing in the lower section – toward the wall and the ceiling of the large room. The real subject of the painting is Marguerite’s mysterious nature: she occupies a liminal position within the frame, part of and yet detached from the social rite that takes place in the room. In spite of her austere appearance, Vuillard seems to suggest, Marguerite’s nature partakes of the muse and the temptress.
La bibliotheque is a miniature collection consisting of the works (the Roman sarcophagus, the painting by Tiziano-Rubens) assembled to adorn the room. Marguerite cannot be fully engaged in the scene because she is the collector, the aesthetic conscience that created the social space around her. In this sense the painting allegorically represents the act of collecting itself, an act that defines Marguerite even if her enigmatic pose does not reveal anything about her. The collection is of course a staged apparatus, hence its message can be deceiving; Vuillard hints at this possibility by portraying Marguerite at the edge of two worlds, the real and the imaginary.
Once Marguerite has performed the acts of selection and assemblage, any external judgment is suspended; the collection’s value is immanent and transcends its
sculpture, or that Vuillard copied Tiziano and Rubens in painting the Fall from grace. I am now breaking up the aesthetic object to look inside, according to a “digital” attitude that did not belong to Marguerite’s image of organic cohesiveness. Marguerite’s rejection of such attitude helps explain the absence of extra-literary content from her publications. While she listened to her collaborators’ advice, in selecting works for Commerce and Botteghe Oscure she ultimately relied on her intuition and aesthetic sensibility.
Within a collecting aesthetic, the concept of time loses its meaning; a Roman sculpture can very well represent modernity.110 It is as if mankind, having reached the apex of its cultural development, could now look back and create a compilation of objects taken from anywhere in history.
Another example of this pan-historical approach to collecting comes from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Gardner was an art collector and
philanthropist known for her energy and eccentricity. The museum, inspired by Venetian Renaissance architecture, was built for the specific purpose of accommodating Gardner’s vast collection. In setting up the exhibition, the curators followed her dispositions down to the smallest detail. To this day, visitors can feel Gardner’s presence from the moment they set foot in the building; women named Isabella do not pay the admission fee, and on Gardner’s birthday anybody can enter for free. Besides a remarkable picture gallery, the collection includes furniture, tapestries, and an assortment of decorative objects coming from various places and eras. There are also empty frames hung on walls or leaning on
110 An example of modernity’s temporal paradoxes is Italo Balbo’s 1933 transatlantic flight from Italy to
Chicago in occasion of the Universal Exposition. Balbo and twenty-four seaplanes “landed” on Lake Michigan among wild cheering from the crowd in attendance at the fair. To celebrate this historic achievement, Mussolini had a Roman column taken from Ostia’s ancient seaport and shipped to Chicago. The column was put on display just across from the Italian pavilion. The link between a 2000 year-old artifact and Balbo’s transatlantic flight seems tenuous at best; and yet, the logic behind this operation reminds of the Roman frieze taken from a tomb to decorate Marguerite’s library.
other objects, which seem to underline the fact that everything around the observer constitutes the collection, not just the items conventionally recognized as “works of art.”
Just a few blocks away from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts embodies a more traditional kind of art display. This particular institution was established in 1870; most American museums, however, were still unbuilt at the beginning of the 1920s (Braddock). Compared to Europe, the American artistic canon was not as solidly anchored to society; the role of poet-laureate had not been created, and only a few literary anthologies had been compiled. “It was in this situation,” Braddock writes, “that material collections of art and literature were advanced as means not simply (or even primarily) of institutional consecration but of cultural and social intervention” (2). Braddock employs the term “provisional institution” to indicate a collection arranged and displayed by one or more individuals with the purpose of influencing public taste and triggering some kind of social or cultural response. This aspect distinguishes it from institutional collections, which are bound to take a more conservative stance.
Both of Marguerite’s anthologies fit Braddock’s definition of provisional
institutions, i.e. artifacts “intervening in and reforming cultural practice, doing so on the basis of [their] form” (6). As provisional institutions, Marguerite’s publications – especially the second one, Botteghe Oscure – aspired to represent an international community of letters informed by egalitarian and non-partisan principles, in which literature alone was the supreme form of understanding. In this sense Botteghe Oscure was a political project and it stood for the artist’s complete freedom; it aimed to fill a gap
in the existing system, providing space for unheard voices, and to find a place in real institutions – libraries, archives, even propaganda centers – to fulfill its purpose.
While Braddock specifically refers to anthologies published in the 1920s, at the peak of the modernist movement, his analysis can also apply to the period defined by the cultural Cold War, which roughly coincided with the tenure of Botteghe Oscure. By this time, art and politics were tightly connected; the USA and URSS both financed cultural initiatives for propaganda purposes on a regular basis. One could argue that, in this context, being apolitical was just as much of a strategy as it was being openly political. The freedom of artists in the West was waved around like a flag. The popularity of
abstract expressionism and twelve-tone music received a boost when they were reclaimed by Western institutions as proof of their artistic openness and independence. The verb “to reclaim” is significant in this context for its double meaning of “claiming for oneself” and “cleansing, purifying.” During the total reclamation project, fascist authorities wanted to reclaim the man with the land. In both cases, we are not talking about freedom as much as indoctrination. In both cases there is an undesired element that needs to be eradicated, like weeds in a garden, so that “beauty” may emerge. Art was put on display as a trophy, like a perfectly engineered flower, but with it came the message, and the implicit or explicit message was “we are better than the others.” It was a display of imperialistic pride.
In this context, Marguerite’s rejection of “engaged literature” acquired special significance. It is significant that in 1950 she chose to publish George Bataille’s
passionate letter to Char on the “incompatibilities of the writer” (fall 1950).111 Written in
111 Char was one of Marguerite’s favorite poets; besides including his work in Botteghe Oscure on multiple
response to a question raised by Char from the pages of the review Empédocle on the existence of “incompatibilities,” the letter is a reflection on the role of the writer in society, a particularly sensitive topic in post-fascist Italy. Bataille’s argument is often paradoxical and thought-provoking, as was Char’s question; the letter reads more like literature than criticism, which might be the reason why Marguerite decided to publish it, no doubt under Char’s auspices, even though in so doing she broke the unwritten rule of never hosting critical essays in Botteghe Oscure.
In the letter Bataille states that, “Although the debate concerning literature and ‘engagement’ appears to have subsided, its decisive nature has not yet been clearly perceived” (34). According to Bataille, any writer – as artist – holds a form of freedom not unlike that of ancient priest-kings, that is, the freedom that comes from being inside and outside society at the same time. Unbound by rules, the artist cannot and should not serve any masters, nor should he attempt to lend his writing to a specific purpose.
“Literature, when it is not indulgently considered to be a minor distraction, always takes a direction opposite the path of utility along which every society must be directed” (40). In a secular society, where religion does no longer detain absolute truths, and where the institution of power is no longer “divine,” writers have inherited the right to defy
signification, and to do away with meaning. It is a blessing and a curse at the same time, writes Bataille, because – unlike kings and popes – writers know their myths are untrue. Such knowledge brings sadness and despair, but it also entitles the writer to the privilege “of being able to do nothing and to limit himself within an active society to the paralysis
of his poetry in both the U.K. and the U.S.A. Char was Marguerite’s most trusted advisor for the French section of the magazine; this fact caused resentment in other long-time collaborators of Marguerite like Jean Paulhan, who accused her of publishing only “Char’s disciples” (Risset 33). While Paulhan’s remark seems exaggerated and was promptly rebutted by Marguerite (see note 94), it is certain that Char did bring in a good number of French authors, both known and soon-to-be-known, including Georges Bataille.