This essay discusses the work of Stéphane Mallarmé as a matrix of concepts, principles, and forms that spilled over from his arcane writings into the radically open nature of multimedia artworks around 1913. Shaw identifies these principles as simultaneity, supplementarity, identity-in-difference, chance determinism and the disappearance of the author within the collective and she traces them in three seminal works: Vaslav Nijinsky’s ballet Prélude à l'après-midi d’un faune (1912), Delaunay's and Cendrars’ La Prose du Transsibérien (1913), and Marcel Duchamp’s La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (started in 1913). The impact of Mallarmé’s poetics continues to be strong long after 1913, as seen in Duchamp’s last work, Etant donnés (1946-1966), read by Shaw as a recasting of La Mariée, like Un coup de dés was a recasting of Igitur, in a chain of influences and references that project modernism into a post-Second World War timeline.
1913: The Year of French Modernism is the first book to respond to two deceptively simple questions: “What constituted modernism in France?” and “What is the place of France on the map of global modernism?” Taking its cue from the seminal year 1913, an annus mirabilis for French modernism with the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, Alcools, La Prose du Transsibérien, among others, the book captures a snapshot of vibrant creativity in France and a crucial moment for the quickly emerging modernism throughout the world. While studies on modernism have turned increasingly toward neglected, peripheral, national traditions in order to illuminate modernism as a global phenomenon, this book offers a view of one of modernism’s central occurrences, the French. 1913: The Year of French Modernism shows that even ostensibly central manifestations of modernism remain to be explored, demonstrates how the global is embedded in the regional, and finally reconstructs and rethinks the centrality of France for modernism as well as the meaning of centrality all together for a global phenomenon. Essays from specialists on works of literature, art, photography, and cinema, that were created or made public on and around 1913 in France outline the physiognomy of French modernism: its protagonists, strategies, and genres, its dynamics, themes, and legacies.