![]() Though several reviewers praised Sachs’ “amazingly superficial chit-chat style,” the fact is that he managed to write a book-length work by filling large gaps between his chit-chat with windy pontifications. “In all American universities,” he intones, “one worries first about the moral reasons of written works - which certainly would be the last consideration of a young Frenchman.” Good taste makes for bad paintings: “Nothing is more deplorable than a delicious arrangement.” French cinema lags far behind that of America because French film-makers lack “the American mind, less lively, more deliberate and analytical, like the German” - a statement I can’t imagine any film historian agreeing with. Maurice Sachs would have been a superstar in this world, for he tosses off judgments as other writers use punctuation. Maurice Utrillo was a drunk.Īs anyone who’s watched an hour of any American newschannel knows, the chief qualification of any successful commentator is a ready supply of opinions, well-informed or not. What appears on the screen does not interest him he closes his eyes and listens to the murmurs of the neighboring crowd.” André Derain “loves auto racing” and collects landscape paintings by Corot. It’s full of gossipy tidbits and asides: the young pianist Arthur Rubinstein, “So strong, so powerful, he was like a bull on hind legs: when he took a woman’s hand, one imagined the rape of Europa.” Henri Matisse, the movie fan: “He goes each evening, no matter what the film. Sachs’ Who’s Who is a good starting point: in the space of barely 250 pages, he manages to squeeze in enough names to fill 11 double-spaced pages in the index, for a rough total of 700 people.īut this is cultural history People magazine style. Within months, Sachs had deserted Gwladys for a handsome young man, while the couple were together, Sachs wrote, and Gwladys translated, this breakneck run through the cast of players in French culture and society of the 1920s.Īs one reviewer put it, Decade is a “kaleidoscopic parade, staged in the smart salons, attics, theatres, studios and by-ways of France (mostly Paris), which includes in its dramatis personae practically every well known painter, composer, musician, poet, politician, dressmaker, critic, author, book seller, art dealer, and publisher who has gravitated to Paris in the last ten years or so.” And as such, it’s probably still of some interest to scholars of the period. Despite being homosexual, he married a socialite and aspiring writer named Gwladys Matthews. Notice for a talk by Maurice Sachs on Proust on New York radio station WRNY.Įver the opportunist, Sachs reinvented himself as an expert on French culture and soon began appearing as a lecturer at lady’s clubs and art societies and on radio. Unfortunately, the art market had dried up as a result of the stock market crash and the two men soon parted ways. He’d come to New York City in 1931 at the invitation of his friend Lucien Demotte, who hired Sachs to run a Manhattan art gallery filled with French art. Sachs wrote the book during his stay of roughly two years, probably to cash in on his brief celebrity as a traveling lecturer. ![]() almost two decades before it appeared (posthumously) in France. Sachs’ first book, The Decade of Illusion, published in the U.S. Knew everyone, slept with many, stole from a few. As I wrote at the time of its republication, Witches’ Sabbath is not only a classic autobiography but an essential reference for anyone interested in French art and literature between the world wars: “Sachs knew everyone who was anyone in the world of French literature between the two world wars. If Maurice Sachs deserves to be remembered today, it’s almost entirely for his effusive memoir, Witches’ Sabbath, reissued last year by Spurl Editions.
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