Book

Paris and the Roaring Twenties so dear to Francis Scott Fitzgerald constitute another world, mythical, oniric, in love with freedom, sensuality and joy. An artistic profusion which, in the aftermath of the Great Slaughter of 14-18, reshuffled all the cards of taste – the good and the bad. This gave rise to the creative paths that were to nourish the entire 20th century. The composer Cole Porter (who, with Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers, made up the Big Five of the Broadway golden age) was one of the stars of this ebullient Paris. He was the most Parisian of the Americans who had settled in the capital, along with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, George Gershwin, Man Ray, Josephine Baker, John Roderigo Dos Passos, and the Lost Generation who gathered around Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co. His songs, with an autobiographical flavour often linked to his interwar Parisian life, sketch the portrait of a brilliant mind with an exquisite and sophisticated nature. On paying attention, the contours of a secret, tender, elegant and tormented soul are revealed; they also reveal a character of great freedom, who assumed his complex desires despite the moral constraints of his time.

Cole in Paris is conceived as a picture book, a fresco of sound and vision that transports us into the Roaring Twenties, evoking the personal journey of the man and the artist as much as the new breath of life that irrigated Paris after the Great War.

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