Appalled, today we look
all around us at what remains of the modern-style, that is to say the decorative art of 1900:the Maxim's restaurant (which looks like, says Valéry, to an old submarine which would have sunk with all its period decor), the retrospective room of the Museum of Decorative Arts, the entrances to the metro, the goldsmith Téterger's shop, the palace of the French Embassy in Vienna. This decor is the expression of an era endowed with great means - money, technique, material, labor - but capable only of a pretentious, delirious, anarchic genius. of a lymphatic obscurity in its search for the strange. Never has the taste gone so low. Mr. Dagnan-Bouveret is elected to the Institute.
Coming from Vienna, a wave of error is sweeping over Europe, perhaps marking its twilight. It is a lethargy, a syncope. What Mr. Arsène Alexandre then called the profound charm of serpentines agitated by the wind. it is the octopus style, the green and badly fired ceramics, the forced lines stretched in sprawling ligaments, the material tortured in vain.
The squash, the pumpkin, the marshmallow root, the volute of smoke inspire an illogical furniture on which come to rest the hydrangea, the bat, the tuberose, the peacock feather, invention of artists in the grip of passion wrong symbol. The furniture resembles those diseases studied by clinical psychologists of the time.
We believe we are inspired by nature - umbels, shells, bones or seeds - and we have never been so far from it. It is offended by insane fabrications:mosaic crystals, colored glass paste, translucent canopies, latescent enamels on porcelain for tomb lamps, hot inlays on wood or glass, pyrography, monochromes on a lemony background strewn with cabochons simulating turquoise.
In an era of light and electricity, what triumphs is the aquarium, the greenish, the submarine, the hybrid, the poisonous.
Research into the alchemy of color in 1900 left even fewer results than the alchemy of words. It looks like a train has crushed the most common objects, that the jewels are flattened dum-dum balls. We rehabilitate tin, sad as lead, which can be stretched and rolled; they are made into ciboriums, bezels, inkwells, chalices.
An armchair from 1750 has a deep meaning; a chaise longue in nickel-plated steel tubes from 1930 fills a need:but a resting place for the Chosen and “flavescent” Damsel, no one needs it and in a thousand years there won’t be any more.
Yes! at the Maison du Rire, hearing the young Dranem in It disgusted me, / am gone.
Not for young girls.
You have to take care of your underwear for the ascent of the tower!
No! at the Upside Down Manor!
Oh! the beard!
The street that intrigues me the most, the one where I am not allowed to walk in the evening, is the rue de Paris, on the site of Cours-la-Reine, a street full of "bouibouis", of “next door” theaters, of cocc of actresses, of “heady divas”, of “complacent bs”, of “entertainers”, of “n ciennes of love”, of “followers”, of unrepentant hearts”, old "markets" and Parisian personalities that I reborn for having seen them in Sem's pre album.
Towards evening, the whole IV Marten, the whole Boulevard des Italiens:arrange to meet.
Tents moored with chestnut trees, fairground trestles, lantern parades, posters of magazines with bouis, of theaters "next door", of cocc of actresses, of "heady divas", of "complacent b's", of "entertainers", of “n iennes of love”, of “followers”, of unrepentant hearts”, of old “marches and Parisian personalities that I reborn for having seen them in Sem's pre album. Towards evening, the whole of Marten, the whole of the Boulevard des Italiens:arrange to meet. Tents moored with chestnut trees, fairground trestles, lantern parades, magazine posters with