He’s got rhythm

One evening before the first world war, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, fired by drink, tried out such then-fashionable dances as the cakewalk and the tango, ‘his eyes burning — his hair wild’. What was funny about this spectacle, his companion Sophie Brzeska confided to her diary, was not so much the dances as the sight of the dancer himself, ‘the young bear like nothing on earth with his seven league boots jumping in the air like an extraordinary buffoon’. It is a description that evokes many works displayed in a delightful little exhibition, New Rhythms, at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. This marks the centenary of Gaudier-Brzeska’s death; he was killed in action on 5 June 1915, aged 23. But it is not exactly a memorial show. Instead it examines an intriguing subject: how crazy early modern artists were about music and movement. This phenomenon was not limited to the early years of the 20th century, nor to Gaudier and his circle (a young French expatriate living in London, he added ‘Brzeska’ to his name in homage to Sophie). Piet Mondrian, the austere master of geometric abstraction, was one of art history’s most improbable swingers — in the musical sense, at least — being an avid dancer to the sounds of jazz and boogie-woogie. But Gaudier was particularly explicit about the importance of rhythm in the arts. It was, he believed, the crucial factor. ‘The great thing’, he wrote to Sophie, ‘is that sculpture consists in placing planes according to a rhythm’. And the same, he added, applied to all the other arts: in painting you had to place colours rhythmically, in literature stories. Or, as the title of a Duke Ellington piece proclaimed, ‘it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing’. Gaudier and Ellington had a point. Often it seems to be lack of a compelling rhythm that makes prose, for example, fail to flow.