Gaston de Pawlowski

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Gaston de Pawlowski

Gaston William Adam de Pawlowski (born June 14, 1874 in Joigny ( Yonne ), † February 2, 1933 in Paris ) was a doctor of law, writer, literary, theater and art critic, sports reporter, humorist, publisher of several newspapers and co-founder of first French cycling association. He is best known today for his satirical science fiction novel Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension ( Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension ) from 1912 , which exposes Marcel Duchamp's work The Bride from her bachelors, even influenced ( The Great Glass ) Has. Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire were among his friends . He was one of the first critics to comment positively on Marcel Proust's work .

Life

Pawlowski attended the Lycée Condorcet in Paris and studied at the École des Sciences politiques . He frequented the artistic circles of Montmartre , where the now forgotten artists Georges Bottini and Fabien Launay were among his friends. In 1901 he earned a doctorate in law with the work La philosophie du travail ( The Philosophy of Work ). However, he preferred journalism to a legal career. At the age of twenty, he was already writing for various bicycle and motor sport magazines, some of which he founded himself, such as Le Vélo , Le Sport and L'Auto-vélo . In 1907, together with Henri Desgrange , he founded Comœdia , the Parisian daily newspaper for culture and theater with the highest circulation before the First World War . Under his editorship, the newspaper opened up to the latest avant-garde tendencies of the time, such as Cubism . With the outbreak of World War I Pawlowski was mobilized, but continued to write articles for the humorous magazines Le Canard enchaîné and La Baïonnette . In 1921 he married Maguerite Magnin and worked primarily as a theater critic. On February 2, 1933, Pawlowski died of a heart attack in his Paris domicile on rue de la Faisanderie. His grave is in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in the twenty-third division.

Journey to the land of the fourth dimension

couverture de livre
Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension, 1912.

In addition to an extensive journalistic work, Pawlowski wrote almost a dozen novels, most of which he initially published in the form of episodes in various newspapers. This is how his main work, Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension , came about , the episodes of which appeared in Comœdia between 1908 and 1912 . In this novel, Pawlowski uses the discussion about a possible fourth dimension, popularized at the time by Charles Howard Hinton , Hermann von Helmholtz and Henri Poincaré, as a background for his often surreally exaggerated speculations about the course of the future and the nature of consciousness. The themes of the novel are the merging of man and machine, the abolition of work through mechanization, the androgyny of the sexes and the universal networking of consciousness. At the end of 1912 the work was published in book form by the Paris publishing house Fasquelle. In 1923 the same publisher organized an expanded edition with illustrations by the symbolist painter Léonard Sarluis . Since then, the work has been reissued in France again and again.

In a conversation with the art critic Pierre Cabanne in 1966 , Marcel Duchamp said the following about Pawlowski, whose name he obviously remembers incorrectly: “Have you ever heard the name Povolowski or something like that? [...] I don't remember his name exactly, but he had published popular science articles on the fourth dimension in a newspaper, in which he stated that there are flat beings who have only two dimensions, and so on. Absolutely At that time I tried to read the things of this Povolowski. He explained the units of measurement, the straight lines and the curves, etc. And that kept going through my head while I was working, although I hardly made any calculations in the large glass. I only thought of the possibility of a projection, an invisible fourth dimension that cannot be grasped with the eyes.
I found out that the shadow of a three-dimensional object constitutes a two-dimensional form - just as the sun produces two-dimensional projections on the earth - and concluded from this, analogously, that the fourth dimension can project a three-dimensional object, that is, all three-dimensional objects that we look at so innocently are projections of unknown four-dimensional shapes.
A sophistic argumentation, but within the realm of the possible. In this spirit I created the newlyweds in the large glass as a projection of an invisible four-dimensional shape. "

Harald Szeemann listed Pawlowski as a “manufacturer and writer of bachelor machines ” alongside Jules Verne , Alfred Jarry , Raymond Roussel and Franz Kafka : “The trip contains a lot of bachelor machines, including the ingenious machinery with rooms in third, fourth or n dimensions that influenced Duchamp when he tackled his large glass . "

List of Pavlovski's works

  • On se moque de nous (1898)
  • La philosophie du travail (1901)
  • Aristote à Paris (as a series in Comœdia 1912)
  • Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension (1912; extended edition 1923)
  • Inventions nouvelles et dernières nouveautés (1916)
  • Dans les rides du front (1917)
  • Polochon: Paysages animés (1918)
  • Ma voiture de course (1923)

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ This thesis was initially represented by Jean Clair . See, for example, his article “Les vapeurs de la mariée”, in: L'Arc (1974), pp. 44-51 . A more detailed presentation, which gathers the most important biographical data of Pavlovsky, can be found in Clair's work Marcel Duchamp ou le grand fictif , Paris: Galilée, 1975, pp. 28-32.
  2. ↑ Alastair Brotchie: Alfred Jarry. A pataphysical life , translated by Yvonne Badal, Bern / Vienna: Piet Meyer Verlag, 2014, p. 72
  3. ↑ See Marcel Proust: Correspondance , tome 13, texte établi, présenté et annoté par Philip Kolb, Paris: Plon, 1985, pp. 54–55.
  4. ↑ On the importance of the fourth dimension for the classical avant-garde, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson: The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art , Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, in particular p. 50 ff. On Pawlowski.
  5. ^ Pierre Cabanne: Conversations with Marcel Duchamp , translated by Harald Schmunk, Cologne: Verlag Galerie Der Spiegel, 1972, pp. 52–53.
  6. ↑ Hans Ulrich Reck, Harald Szeemann (Ed.): Junggesellenmaschinen , Vienna: Springer, 1999, p. 286.
personal data
SURNAME Pawlowski, Gaston de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author
DATE OF BIRTH June 14, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Joigny
DATE OF DEATH February 2, 1933
Place of death Paris