The Bohemians: The Birth of Modern Art, Paris 1900-1930
Dan Franck
430pp, Weidenfeld, £20
This book is a house built on sand. It purports to retell the story of the development of modern art in Paris in the early decades of the 20th century from the Bohemian point of view (whatever that may be), but it fails to deliver. All the great names are here, of course - the artists, the models, the hangers-on. The Moulin Rouge and the Moulin de la Galette of Toulouse-Lautrec's Montmartre from the previous century gradually give way to the Montparnasse of Picasso, the old Latin Quarter and the Boulevard St Germain.
The famous writers entwined in the art scene - Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau - pop up at the right moments like figures in a pantomime whom we cheer or jeer. So too the wily art dealers - Ambroise Vollard, Berthe Weill, Kahnweiler. "He's behind you!" "Oh no, he isn't!" We hear the babble of foreign languages and curiously accented French in this polyglot Paris - the Russian of Soutine, the Italian of Modigliani, the Spanish of Picasso and Gris, the Rumanian of Brancusi. Artists are drunk or rude or feckless; women are plucky and hard-done by. The smell of oil and turps, unwashed flesh and Gitanes, guttering candles and suspiciously filled casseroles rises from the page as stale as the author's prose.
Dan Franck, it seems, is essentially a novelist; and that is at the root of all the problems of his book. The Bohemians has neither the authority of a historical narrative based on wide-ranging research and documents (no desire to get to the truth) nor the imaginative conviction that one might expect from a novel. It is "faction", yes, but worse than that. "Faction" usually presents invented characters alongside historical ones in a fairly believable place and time. This book, with its conversations and piquant details, happens to deal with some of the most remarkable creative people grouped together in one city at a given moment. The "faction" approach trivialises them and their work. Although Franck is not insensible to the amazing strides they made in reinventing the visual world, their achievements frequently seem secondary to their quarrels, affairs and goings-on. He asks no fresh questions, supplies no new insights.
A further problem is that Franck's research - what there is of it - seems almost wholly limited to French-language sources. Even when he does list in his bibliography works by non-French writers - Ernest Hemingway, for example - French editions are given. Not to list John Richardson's life of Picasso seems an extraordinary omission for a book about art and Bohemia in Paris, for Richardson's first volume is superbly detailed on the Spaniard's early career and sorts out fact from myth. Franck obviously deals with money - the lack of it and the joys of a windfall when a painting or sculpture is sold. But he doesn't mention, for example, Michael Fitzgerald's illuminating study, Making Modernism, which is specifically about the Parisian art market and Picasso in the period he covers. He much prefers the romantic rags-to-riches attitude beloved of Hollywood via Puccini.
Admittedly, two of his heroes are dead ringers for such bio-pic treatment - the handsome Modigliani, destroyed by drink, drugs and consumption in 1920; and Chaim Soutine, who, though less personally glamorous than his Italian friend, achieved legendary status when the great American collector, Albert Barnes, swept into Paris in 1922, bought a mass of Soutine's work and changed his life. Franck's novelettish account of this is touching, but there's almost nothing on Soutine's extraordinary art, save that he injected ammonia into the dead animals he was painting to stop the stench of rot.
The author's inability to look beyond his own back yard means that obvious sources are missing - Hier, the memoirs of the Polish artist Alicia Halicka, married to Louis Marcoussis; or Laughing Torso, the autobiography of the British painter Nina Hamnett, with its wry account of Montparnasse and portraits of Modigliani and others whom this "Queen of Bohemia" knew well; or the evocative reminiscences of Jimmy the Barman, This Must Be the Place. Mistakes abound. Picasso's early lover and fellow Bohemian, Fernande Olivier, was never Madame Picasso; Le Douanier Rousseau was a widower, not a bachelor; a photo of Clive Bell is captioned as being of André Derain; another group shot makes Ezra Pound into a Jockey Club waiter.
The book proceeds like a slide-show - click, click, click - each brief chapter having its distinctive setting or characters: a Saturday at Gertrude Stein's; the famous banquet for Rousseau; the theft of the Mona Lisa; Man Ray meeting his muse, Kiki; the horrible suicide of the painter Jules Pascin. But nothing really connects this over-full carousel of images. It is all higher gossip, and if some of it is quite vivid in the telling, anyone familiar with the period will have heard it - more accurately - before.
