MODERN ART
HAD I arrived two days sooner in Paris I should have seen the décor that Juan Gris made for the Ballet Russe charity performance in the Salle des Glaces at Versailles. Gertrude Stein had a card to see it privately in the afternoon and could have taken me. Gertrude liked it very much. From the description it certainly was new in idea—quantities of tin being used, covering the floor, I believe, and the steps to the platform, and gilt joining in—but startling only to those capable of being startled by ideas, for the passionately fashionable charitable folk who paid immense sums to attend seemed unaware that there was a décor there at all, taking the setting casually as a part of the original salle. Alice Toklas said it was not objectionable to walk upon—though any one who has ever attempted to walk upon a tin roof would recoil from dancing upon tin. But those Russians really are very expert and recoil from nothing.
That Juan Gris should be known to Diaghilev and that Braque, Picasso, and he should do décors for him is merely one hint that the pre-war receptivity is still on. Indeed the receptivity is almost frantic, but beyond the admittance of our own Man Ray to the ranks of the magicians there seems to be no new name to be learned. The Parisians are just dying to have an affair with some new artist, but the boldness of the blandishments they offer seems to frighten rather than attract, and young geniuses, if they exist, are incredibly coy. One does not hear of them even at the Café du Dôme. Speaking of blandishments, the Ballet Russe projects one of Molière's pieces with musique by Gounod re-arranged by Erik Satie and with a décor by Juan Gris. It is a project and not a certainty, but merely to think of such a combination is going some in the way of liberality; is it not?
Pascin gave me a miniature banquet—moi qui vous parle. That is, there were at least twenty at table and that, I think, entitles it to be called a banquet. I had supposed I was dining seul, but when I reached the top of the almost endless series of stairs on the Boulevard de Clichy I found ladies, exuberant children, a solid bourgeois who had been rendered more distingué by the loss of one eye
