“If an important impulse behind experimentation in the arts at the turn of the century was a quest for liberation, a break, in aesthetic and moral terms, from central authority, from patriarchy, from bourgeois conformity, from, in short, a European tradition that had been dictated to a large extent from Paris, then it was no surprise that much of the psychological and spiritual momentum for this break came from the peripheries, geographical, social, generational, and sexual. The emphasis on youth, sensuality, homosexuality, the unconscious, the primitive, and the socially deprived originated in large part not in Paris but on the borders of traditional hegemony. The modern movement was full of exiles, and the condition of exile or the battle on the frontiers…became central themes of the modern mentality….  By 1913, France, as a secure arbiter of taste, was a thing of the past. In that year, while the Germans and Russians celebrated the centenary of the first Napoleon’s defeat, the French were reminded of their decline. ‘In Paris, uncertainty rules,’ wrote Jacques-Emile Blanche. The memorable evening of May 29, 1913, at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees was to provide a vivid expression of that uncertainty.”            M. Eksteins, Rites of Spring