When Art Deco-dence Blossomed Full Flower In The Fin-de-Siècle World Before World War I-A Magical Realistic Moment  

By Sarah Le Moyne  

Not all irony should be left on the historical cutting room floor. Sometimes what today is called the interpersonal, or maybe the ravishing rages given the cast of characters ant the times they floated on the earth, on the always with us culturati front should get their dime’s worth put into the mix. Take the case of two famous artists whose names I will not mention for now for my own reasons from different countries, cultures and frankly classes who after their love affair died (Jesus, don’t ask either if that is what they had or we will never get to the ironic part) had not seen each other for years finally re-met under third party auspices and started that crazed ravishing rage business all over again. The last I had heard the endless ravishing rages had not changed and they were to be legally separated amid some talk about restraining orders and who gets custody of the paintings and sketches done by each respective side during their affair, ah, recent time together. (Don’t even ask either about who gets what on the royalty breakdown since even their respective lawyers would be hard-pressed to unravel the judge’s order or we will really never get to that vaunted ironic part).      

It is fortunate that we don’t have to depend on history in the round, their personal histories, or for that matter the histories of their respective times, about how they met and what happened to break up what one Parisian wag of the time called “an affair made in heaven.” The old catch-all of rumor, innuendo, lies, press agent baloney, what is now called alternate facts and best of all fake news will see us through. History stands humbled before the rising storm.

Rumor, and rumor will stink this whole piece up to the high heavens, variously had him, the well-noted Parisian artist, meeting her, the equally well-known Arte Popular Sonora artist in the famous Tampico Cantina down in sunny Mexico where she was hustling for dough, they called it in those days the Spanish equivalent of bar-girl, whore is probably closer to the nub, before she got that famous Arte Popular accolade business. He was there for his health but mainly to see if he could break than serious lanadum habit cooling out on some high end weed (marijuana) but according to some sources to make a big score of cocaine and pay some back rent in those high-end Parisian apartments he kept getting bounced out of for non-payment. A few, maybe savvier that the rest who believed whatever his publicists at Goncourt put out, said he was fascinated by the idea of soft Mexican women unlike the bony skinny Paris dolls when he heard about a famous junkie whore in a book by Jack Kerouac. The twine that held this version together was that what attracted him to her was that she was taller than he was, his diminutive five foot statue and that what attracted her (other than he was a foreigner, and had the look of money, dinero about him despite his obvious jones look and unattractive appearance) was that she was taller than him by an inch.

Of course  that was all art world press agent bullshit , probably from the Shane Gallery whose main claim in the art world was that it had Sal Dino as its paid flak-catcher who could have hyped Marcel Duchamp as anything from the cutting edge of modern art to the mastermind behind the latest from American Standard in toilet fixtures, produced later to go along with whatever joint exhibitions they trying to sell stuff at. The cash nexus ruled even in those precincts.

Here is where it gets weird. Rumor, again, around Paris was that this painter who loved to hang around the Parisian demimonde smoking from his famous opium bong pipe carried everywhere in the days when nobody gave a fuck what you smoked, drank, inhaled in those precincts least of all the coppers, the gendarmes had been having an affair with the writer Colette (one name only) who was working in the Moulin Rouge on an act with her lesbian girlfriend, some dubious nobility fluff named I believe Missy, when she noticed him after she, Colette,  had finished kissing said Missy which caused a scandal even in those liberal airs. He was the only one who applauded, and she aimed headfirst for her “little man” with the bong pipe. Furthermore, the story went, he had set up “house” with Colette, Missy and whoever came running around thinking that he was the second coming of her Willy who had left Colette high and dry when the money spicket ran out from sales of her teenage romance novels. With such high overhead he had incurred in order  to make the bills for a while he had put together a million posters with her and Missy strolling like man and wife (you figure that one out, figure who was man and who was wife when both donned mannish boy attire) for all of proper Paris to see and gaze, male gaze at.         

Weirder still was the rumor, always rumor, that the sunny Sonora senorita at that time, the same time was having an affair with depending on the source, usually some scumbag from the Hearst newspaper chain before Charles Foster Kane took over and made it a fashion rag for his next mistress, the photographer Edward Weston, the muralist David Siqueiros and most likely as far as I am concerned the ancient Diego Rivera who had picked her up in Viva Sampone’s Gallery in Acapulco after remarking coyly about her eyebrow. (Yes one eyebrow or so it looked, she made it look too, with that Mex-Tex, metizo, look which drove men from Parisian artists to Mexican banditos crazy, loco okay. The wildest rumor of all, the one that I discredited the most was that she had gotten her hooks into the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and only his death at the hands of a Stalinst agent broke off the affair right there in the Blue House with Diego painting some big ass mural about obreros and braceros down in his own studio. (As it turned out that affair actually had happened  but had been buried in the archives until the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s by even the most hardened Stalinists since they all, all the old Russian revolutionaries from Lenin on down kept their ten million affairs and dalliances private, very private.)            

[Let me make this make the following an aside because there were seven million other rumors all murky, very murky, like our Parisian painter when down and out was pimping for the famous Madame La Rue near the Versailles Palace on the avenue to make rent money, that he was having an affair with the husband of some weird Russian countess whom he had met through Missy who she had been having an affair with while with Colette, that he was shipping high-grade opium from China on barges in the Thames provided, the barges, by his junkie friend James Whistler who took his payment in kind. A little less weird since he actually was there at the time was that he was running on the sly a whorehouse, bordello they called it, in Buenos Aires. It goes on and on and who is around to separate it out or why since he was not a guy who defended his reputation very well. Who knows half the stuff was probably bullshit since he was close friends with Leon Le Blanc the society columnist for Le Figaro. Any mention of his name would jack up the prices for his original art and cause a run on the posters every college kid wanted for their lonely garret walls.

As for her, as for the Flower of Tampico, her sudden rise in the art world left little room for investigation since even rumors have to have an edge of truth or did in those days, now longed for in an age when such “quaint” ideas are out the window. A lot of it centered on her relationship with the Soviet Ambassador but such things are tricky especially in light of what happened to Leon Trotsky later with some agent with a trusty ax and some very murky stuff around her personage, her role in the whole affair and what she told the federales (all bullshit but again not known until they yanked open the Soviet KGB archives). Mostly, despite a good Catholic girl upbringing, she tramped around, had been a bar-girl maybe did a stint at some Sonora whorehouse and headed to Mexico City where she started to paint in her off-hours and where she would meet Diego Rivera who already had some “cred” in the art world. The whole Rivera episode is murky, some say they were married others that she was living with some Matilde lover in what in America in those days would be called a Boston marriage and showed up when Diego was exhibiting exhibited as his marida. Let’s leave it that they knew each other, they shared space in the big ass Blue House together and he was sad when she passed away and left him with some vieja mistress to console him. So you can see the need for an aside right here.]               

If you follow this story, tall tale if you like, that Parisian painter, hell, let’s give him a name since everybody knows the shortest painter in Paris who also was a junkie and had about a dozen social diseases  was Toulouse-Lautrec had made a “connection,” had gotten some high-grade cocaine and offered it to the Sonora senorita, hell, let’s give her a name too because although there were many short Arte Popular Mexican  women artists only one had one eyebrow and worked her way up the art world via the Tampico Cantina, Frida Kahlo. She accepted and once they found out they both liked James Abbott McNeil Whistler’s moody paintings they got along very well.

All she knew of him at the time was that he was a degenerate (having read Le Figaro and its social columns too closely) who did posters for various, let’s call them entertainers, in the Paris nightlife. She did not know that he actually painted. All he knew of her was that she was the best bar-girl in Tampico and that she drew very strange but beautiful in a weird way drawings and paintings of, well, of herself, of her indigenous people and of the flora and fauna around sunny Mexico with a specialty on death masks and monkey faces. They got along famously until she wanted to go to Paris and he was afraid that his ill-defined past would catch up with him once she landed and found a welcoming committee of Colette and Missy and who knows who else on the docks. He was fine with the arrangement until she started getting recognition as a famous Mexican artist who could out-paint him six, two and even. Those earth shattering plates would move far apart until he blew town leaving a huge hotel bill in the name of the French ambassador (which was paid by the way by the French government after some wrangling and threats since now he was a “national treasure” just like the degenerate Degas) and she took up without the next best thing (which is all I can say since I don’t know who was next on her dance card except it wasn’t Trotsky that was later).      

   

They say that no good deed ever goes unpunished, intentionally or not. A million years later some hungry, maybe from hunger but I don’t think I have seen one yet unlike artists, curator trying to move up the food chain in the art cabal decided since their had been a dramatic shift in American demographics with an upswing in the Latino population around the country and around Boston that a nice exhibit centered on Frida Kahlo and her circle would be a good idea once the Museum of Fine Arts grabbed her famous Two Peasant Women painting on the cheap. Done. That success fueled a mini-Frida craze and that very same now certainly not from hunger curator cadged the idea a of bigger exhibit, a few more Frida paintings, some Mex-Tex, metizo arts and crafts filler and the inevitable works of that hard-pressed circle of friends. Bingo, the cash nexus boomed.      

The mix? That exhibit idea got another very hungry curator thinking after some research about the twisted love affair between the two that the museum should “exploit” with an exhibition of Toulouse’s material, the usual half dozen paintings, a million posters and the usual suspects, circle of friends and contempories as filler. Sounded great from the art cabal to the well-heeled patrons to the average goer. Except when Frida heard that “he” was coming (she refused to dignify him using his name) she started crying, screaming to the high heavens (in Spanish so watch out) that he was an unreconstructed) junkie whose art world was full of hopheads, lunatics and airheads (English translation). More-he couldn’t draw worth a damn and what he drew was not art, not the people’s art anyway but for the Mayfair swells who hadn’t a clue to what art really was except it wasn’t those silly posters he kept putting out for his friends in the gutters of Paris. Worse, worst of all she invoked what had happened to Leon Trotsky as his fate as well all for Comrade Stalin and the beautiful Russian Garden of Eden. (She apparently had not heard the news of the demise of both Stalin and that Garden.)

He, well, he when he heard he would have to play second fiddle to his Flower of Tampico started to get all misty-eyed at first, reached for his big ass bong pipe and sailed into a dream. Then a few days later when he heard that she cursed him, that she put the pox on him, mentioned that Trotsky stuff and then that he was nothing but a parvenu hustling poor women out on the avenue and drew like a second-grade student with erratic crayons flipped out. Started calling her whore and whore’s offal. Said the day of the dead stuff was strictly out of some silly John Donne poem which she probably had never read and that ao called monkey of the people and endless self-portrait stuff was beneath art. So they parted, parted with that final acrimonious lawsuit that in the end only enriched the art cabal and the fucking lawyers.