Godiva

Self-Portrait with Allen Tanner, circa 1924-28 by Pavel Tchelitchew

Portrait of Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke) by Pavel Chenmuyer

Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Piano Concerto in C (Scott Dunn, piano)

But by becoming marked as the “new Diaghilev protege merging from out of nowhere Russia via the United States” of the Paris salons, Vernon Duke gained the power to move on notable terms among his kind; and that gain for a young exiled Russian pianist-composer was serious.

To speak of gain while Vernon Duke, basking in the light and sunshine of Diaghilev’s invitation to write a ballet (Zephyr et Flore), and feeling a young man’s mind spreading itself with a luxurious sense of freedom in the world to his remotest past, seems appropriate.  Everything to such a mind was gain.  All experience filtered down through layer after layer of perception and reflection, enriching and nourishing.  The utmost we can say, is that he had taken to heart the lessons of his work with George Gershwin, Rubinstein and the Piano Concerto.

Perhaps the most branded upon him was his bucolic Prokokievian sense of melody and chord voicings.  His tendency to lean upon the musical thinking and structures of his Russian peers rings out most happily in homespun Russian joys and sorrows.

Because he also was a prolific diarist, we are now able to see into a window in time to the very moment when this branding must have began.  It might have begun in his home with Allen Tanner and Pavel Tchelitchew at No. 150 Blvd. Montparnasse, as recorded in his autobiography, Passport to Paris, pgs. 109-110:

“Well, let’s hear this music that you came to conquer Paris with,” Tchelitchew said, winking good-naturedly at Tanner. I sailed into the the Concerto with gusto and was rewarded by the astonished faces of my two listeners.

“What’s gotten into you, Dima?” Allen queried, pouting no longer. “This is a really good concerto—a little too much Prokofiev, a bit of undigested Rachmaninoff here and there, but you can write music—of that there is no doubt.”

Pavlik roared with pleasure, then sat down, suddenly pensive: “Yes, you might do…for Beaumont, not for Diaghilev. Diaghilev is too great a snob and wants names. However, the Count de Beaumont is launching a ballet season with Picasso, Massine and Satie, is calling it Soirées de Paris, and we all know him. He may commission a score from you.”

Allen made a face.  “What about Valitchka?” he asked Pavlik.

“Not Valitchka Bolm, surely?” I cut in.

They both laughed.“No, silly—Nouvel, Valitchka Nouvel, Diaghilev’s business manager and business administrator—a man, not a girl. He’s crazy about Allen and who can tell, may take a fancy to you,” went on Tchelitchew. He knows a lot about music, having founded the Contemporary Music Group with Nourok in Russia. Valitchka is a crotchety old boy, but he means well.”

I expressed my delight at the prospect of meeting the the male Valitchka and Allen promised to telephone him in the morning.

Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Piano Concerto in C (Scott Dunn, piano)

Photo of Gertrude Stein seated in “Godiva,” Tchelitchew and Allen Tanner by Alice B. Toklas (Belley, France about 1927)

Self-Portrait by Pavel Tchelitchew (1925). Oil on canvas.

Excerpt, Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Zephyr et Flore, “Variation 2: Quasi toccata”

At about the same time as Diaghilev was about to commission a mythological ballet (Zephyr et Flore) from Vladimir Dukelsky, Gertrude Stein was about to ignite the equivalent of automatic writing in the painter, Pavel Tchelitchew. In Gertrude Stein Remembered, Linda Simon published a transcript of the Martin A. Ryerson Lecture at Yale University given by Tchelitchew in 1951.

Here he alludes to Stein as being a kind of Robert Gravian Mother goddess to him. Her great interest, as a student of William James, was in the functioning of the human brain, its reactions. He began a process of automatic drawing which led to thousands and thousands of drawings. He says that she knew her poetry originated in a magic of the bygone days and that the prolificness in his drawing was due to her. He gives the etymology of the word “Orpheus”–-aur (light), and rophoe (cheering health)—a healer by means of light.

“She wanted to know through the automatic writing the language of our psyche, ” he says. “Art is revealed life or psyche, through sounds, words, or forms…the sensory nerves, are for a quick, automatic, immediate reaction in our brain, in the hieratical reaction.”

He heard about Gertude Stein and about Alice Toklas from Jane Heap [then partner of Margaret Anderson of the Little Review], and met them at the Salon d’Automne. “That is the annual exhibition where you have to do it at least once in your lifetime. It is sort of an official appearance, like a debut, so I have to make that debut, too…

So I sent the picture and it was accepted, and there was among those pictures The Strawberry Basket, which you probably saw reproduced. And on the way back with Jane Heap from the vernissage on the Pont Royale just going to the Tuilleries, I saw Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. They were coming in their little car, that was, I couldn’t find out really what it was because I think it was a Model T Ford.

When she bought that car, after the war or during the war, that car was just stripped to the essences, it was naked, that’s why the car was called, ‘Lady Godiva,’ because she was naked.”