DALI PAINTING RHINOCEROS FULL
If it only had Van Gogh and Cézanne too, Midnight in Paris would include a full history of the birth of modern art from the 1890s to 1920s. All Dali wants to talk about is the horn of the rhinoceros.Ī second time shift takes the hero back to the 1890s where he meets three of the great painters who moved beyond impressionism to create the visionary, intense works out of which modernism was born: Degas, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec are all exquisite cameos. In fact, the best work Dali ever did is the film Un Chien Andalou, which he created with Buñuel, a fast-moving and hilarious juxtaposition of shocking scenes from the psyche. In the film it is represented by the American photographer Man Ray, the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel and, naturally, a young Salvador Dalí. The surrealist movement saw itself as putting modernism to the service of revolution. In the 1920s, as the film shows, the first wave of modernist art was giving way to a more political and wilfully provocative style. This is also the jazz age, signalled by some of Allen's favourite jazz on the soundtrack as well as appearances by legendary dancer Josephine Baker, a hero to modern artists, and the era's definitive songwriter, Cole Porter. " with contemporary Californian when Wilson tells Eliot his poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock "is practically my mantra". There's a funny contrast of Eliot's beautiful use of the English language - "I should have been a pair of ragged claws.
The American modernist exiles glimpsed in the film include the novelist Djuna Barnes, whose novel Nightwood was hailed as a modern masterpiece by TS Eliot, as well as Eliot himself, St Louis-born author of The Waste Land. In the 1920s, as the film wittily shows, he was in a second golden period, painting visceral images of sex. His portrait of Gertrude Stein is one of the works in which he created the abstractionist freedom of modern art. Picasso painted his most revolutionary works in the 1900s and 1910s. Picasso is young and intense, Matisse more like an old professor – just as in life. Picasso and Matisse, the two greatest artists of the 20th century, flit in and out of Stein's salon in the film, just as they did in life. Wilson's meeting with them is one of the film's funniest moments as, fresh from the future and not yet knowing he has time travelled, he puzzles over the coincidence that a man who happens to be named F Scott Fitzgerald also happens to have a wife called Zelda. The film however does not get far beyond his tragic marriage to Zelda – once the subject of an old Woody Allen joke about the Zelda Fitzgerald Award for Emotional Maturity. In his first scene in the film he asks Owen Wilson if he can box – Hemingway was a man's man – and he is last seen, drunk, pleading for someone to fight him.į Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night is the most haunting account of the international culture of 1920s France.
It was Hemingway who truly created a modern American voice in literature, tough, heightened yet direct, and he had to go to Paris with its bohemian freedom to do it.
Stein embodies, in her own writings and Picasso's painting, the severity of high modernism.Įrnest Hemingway needs no introduction if you see the film because in it he speaks as he writes, in bold, authoritative sentences that contrast hilariously with hero Owen Wilson's flaccid Californian English. She wears a mask of her own in her modernist literary classic that portrays herself through the eyes of her lover Alice B Toklas. Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude Stein, which hangs on her wall in the film, gives her the face of a stone idol. She was undoubtedly one of Picasso's boldest collectors, his only real female friend (her being gay got him past his normally tyrannous libido) and the object of one of his most revolutionary paintings. Gertrude Stein was a wealthy American art collector and writer who – by her own account in The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas – dominated the Paris avant garde in the days of Picasso.
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