The aristocratic avant-garde: Le Comte Étienne de Beaumont and “Les Soirées de Paris”

Aristocratic patronage of the historical avant-garde remains a relatively understudied phenomenon, if only because the aristocracy seemed the avant-garde’s natural enemy and what the avant-garde sought to supplant. This article examines the 1924 “Les Soirées de Paris,” a five-week-long series of commissioned ballets, plays, and performances financed by Le Comte Étienne de Beaumont. Paying close attention to the social divide in Tzara’s Mouchoir de Nuages , this article seeks to show the fraught relationship between the aristocracy and the Parisian avant-garde. Beaumont’s intervention into the Parisian cultural field was an attempt to derail the growing influence of the market but also had a more positive motivation in attempting to showcase the “best” of “new” French art. If Beaumont was bitingly satirized in Raymond Radiguet’s Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel , this “last Maecenas of the arts” was a more complex figure who deserves closer examination for the role that he played in bringing together a series of artists—Cocteau, Picasso, Satie, and Tzara—in a lavishly produced series of original works.