BOOKS & ARTS
Bohemian bonhomie
Richard Davenport-Hines
Creative Gatherings: Meeting
Places of Modernism
by Mary Ann Caws
Reaktion Books, £25, pp. 352
Mary Ann Caws, a retired professor of
English and French literature at the City
University of New York, published her
first book in 1966. Since then she has
written several dozen studies, many of
them about surrealism or modernism;
others with such varied subjects as the
women of Bloomsbury, Robert Motherwell,
Blaise Pascal, Provençal cooking, Dora Maar
and the wonderfully titled The Art of Inter-
ference. Now, after a career of urbane, dis-
creet academic distinction, Caws has decided
that it is time for her to put her personality
into her books as well as her name on the
title page.
Creative Gatherings gives light but care-
ful sketches of places that Caws has known
where creative people — painters, sculptors,
poets and others — have congregated, eaten,
smoked, drunk and lounged, while discuss-
ing their work, exploring their hopes, bitch-
ing about their dealers, sincerely extolling
or enviously belittling their rivals, bragging
about sex, fooling, striving and desponding.
The theme of her book is encapsulat-
ed by Joan Miró recalling his life in Paris’s
avant-garde rue Blomet in the 1920s. ‘The
rue Blomet was a decisive place,’ Miró said.
‘It was there that I discovered everything
that I am, everything that I would become.’
He and his neighbours lived the bohemian
high life as they drank copiously of cura-
cao tangerines. ‘More than anything else,’
declared Miró, ‘the rue Blomet was friend-
ship, an exalted exchange and discovery of
ideas among marvellous friends.’ Creative
innovation, ardent friendship, hard chal-
lenges, noble ideas and sickly boozing recur
throughout Creative Gatherings.
Caws muses on the Shakespeare & Com-
pany bookshop in Paris, which welcomed
and nurtured James Joyce, Gertrude Stein,
Djuna Barnes and others; on the Café
Pombo in Madrid, where Salvador Dalí, the
poet Federico García Lorca and the film-
maker Luís Buñuel used to meet; on the Café
Louvre in Prague, with its billiard room and
art gallery, where Kafka, Einstein and Karel
Capek assembled in different groupings;
and Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where the
poet-provocateur Tristan Tzara and the
painter-poet Jean Arp congregated with
other Dadaists.
Remote fishing villages are also covered
by Caws. She has a genial section on Barbara
Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Adrian Stokes,
Bernard Leach, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron
and Terry Frost living, working and talking in
St Ives. Although she has nothing new to say
about Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and their
familiar friends associated with Charlestonfarmhouse, her recapitulation of the work,
the amours and the comings and goings of
Bloomsbury people and ideas is astute and
affectionate. Invariably Caws’s quotations
are apt, as when she uses Virginia Woolf’s
diary to describe friendly artistic disputes
running at full pelt at Charleston. ‘As
usual, some book is had out,’ Woolf wrote.
‘Theories are fabricated. Pictures stood
on chairs.’
Black Mountain College in North Caro-
lina, which was started in 1933 as an Amer-
ican substitute for the Bauhaus school in
Germany and attracted such painters as Wil-lem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg and
Cy Twombly, sounds fraught and earnest in
Caws’s summary. It made me wish that she
had visited and described Donald Judd’s arts
foundation in Marfa, Texas, Bernard Beren-
son’s improvised institute of European cul-
ture at I Tatti, and Drue Heinz’s gatherings
at Hawthornden Castle and Villa Maresi on
the shores of Lake Como. She does, how-
ever, plug Le Murate, a literary café housed in
a converted Florentine women’s pris-
on, which teems with young hopefuls
scribbling, talking and feasting on free
hors d’oeuvres.
There are a few slack constructions in the
book (one twisting sentence makes the art-
ists who went to work in St Ives sound like
moths ‘attracted by the light’) and some dis-
ruptive asides and giddying free associations.
Readers may feel as if they have become
participants in a game of Consequences
when Caws mentions André Breton’s visit to
Prague and meets an architectural historian
of the city whose brother wrote the first biog-
raphy of Václev Havel, who in turn was a fan
of the Rolling Stones. This hectic dropping
of names can seem indiscriminate. I thought
of the American socialite Laura Corrigan
who, returning from a cruise round the Med-
iterranean, was asked if she had seen the
Dardanelles. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘but I did have
a letter of introduction to them’.
Reaktion has served Caws well. Crea-
tive Gatherings is a handy, portable book,
not a coffee-table slab, but illustrated with
sumptuous abundance. The pictorial high-
lights include John Ruskin’s watercolours,
a photograph of Bernard Leach at work
on a pot in his St Ives studio, and anoth-
er of Pablo and Magali Gargallo beside
the stove in their Paris atelier. Clara
Rilke, posed beside her husband Rainer
Maria Rilke, looks the personification of
a misery-guts. This is not a profound book,
but it is written in a spirit of gratitude,
admiration and contentment that will give
pleasure to all readers except latter-day
Clara Rilkes.‘Bohemians at the
Café’, by Jean-
François Raffaëlli,
1885Here were places where creative
people lounged, drank, bitched about
dealers and bragged about sex