Go Ask Alice B. Toklas

As the 20th century was drawing to a close, there was a lot of talk about the century's greatest contribution to visual art. Many were quick to say collage, while some felt it was the readymade. I slow down when it comes to the past -- I like to sleep on it, allow my dreams their say -- but eventually I too came around to collage, though for a time I was routing for its buttoned-down cousin: montage.

Montage is something that came not from filmmaking but painting. For me, Cubism is the antecedent, from Cézanne to Picasso, and then Eisenstein, Heartfield -- Jeff Wall is part of this lineage. Ah, but is montage not just collage with an idea in front of it? Hmmm. Okay, we can leave it at that. Surely there are more important things to dream about.

My reading of Susan Minot's Evening (1998) ended this week. One of Ann's last unpunctuated fever dreams (the critic Manhola Dargis likens these states to the soliloquies of Joyce's Molly Bloom) has her moving through the country on a train, where at one point "the Mississippi River had withdrawn and white farm houses sat like sugar cubes in the distance." (259) Why did that sound familiar?

A couple hours later, while tidying the books by my bed, I saw my copy of Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and remembered Toklas's early days in Paris, "based upon the rue de Fleures and the Saturday evenings and it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning." (89)

Stein's Toklas tells us of the Picassos (Pablo and Fenande) who lived on that street and of their return to it after time spent in Spain. Pablo brought wth him some canvases he'd done, and Stein's Toklas says of them: 

"... the treatment of the houses was essentially spanish and therefore essentially Picasso. In those pictures he emphasized the way of building in spanish villages, the line of the houses not following the landscape but cutting across and into the landscape, becoming undistinguishable in the landscape by cutting across the landscape. It was the principle of the camouflage of the guns and of the ships in war." (90)

And from there, the anecdote of seeing those guns moving through Paris en route to the front:

"C'est nous qui avons fait ça, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had. From Cézanne through him they had come to that. His foresight was justified."