Editing Pierrot (section)

==Pierrot and modernism==
{{Main|Cultural references to Pierrot}}
Pierrot played a seminal role in the emergence of [[modernism]] in the arts. He was a key figure in every art-form except architecture.

With respect to '''poetry''', [[T. S. Eliot]]'s "breakthrough work",<ref>{{harvnb|Kerrigan|2015|p=66}}.</ref> "[[The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock]]" (1915), owed its existence to the poems of [[Jules Laforgue]], whose ''"ton 'pierrot'"''<ref>"Pierrot-like tone": Taupin, p. 277. 
 Cf. the words of critic [[Arthur Symons]]: "His [i.e., Laforgue's] laughter, which [[Maurice Maeterlinck|Maeterlinck]] has defined so admirably as 'the laughter of the soul', is the laughter of Pierrot, more than half a sob, and shaken out of him with a deplorable gesture of the thin arms, thrown wide. He is a metaphysical Pierrot, a ''Pierrot lunaire'' ..."  ([https://archive.org/stream/symbolistmovemen00symouoft#page/304/mode/2up/search/Pierrot p. 304]). Eliot read these words in his 1908 edition of Symons' ''Symbolist Movement in Literature'', which [[The Symbolist Movement in Literature#Influence|introduced him]] to Laforgue.</ref> informed all of Eliot's early poetry.<ref>"The form in which I began to write, in 1908 or 1909, was directly drawn from the study of Laforgue ...": Eliot, in his Introduction to the ''Selected Poems'' of Ezra Pound; cited in Storey, ''Pierrot: a critical history'', p. 156.</ref> (Laforgue, he said, "was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech.")<ref>Lecture at the Italian Institute in London, 1950; cited in Storey, ''Pierrot: a critical history'', p. 156.</ref> Prufrock is a Pierrot transplanted to America.<ref>See Storey, ''Pierrot: a critical history'', pp. 163-66.</ref>  Another prominent Modernist, [[Wallace Stevens]], was undisguised in his identification with Pierrot in his earliest poems and letters—an identification that he later complicated and refined through such avatars as Bowl (in ''Bowl, Cat and Broomstick'' [1917]), Carlos (in ''Carlos Among the Candles'' [1917]), and, most importantly, Crispin (in "The Comedian as the Letter C" [1923]).<ref>See Storey, ''Pierrot: a critical history'', pp. 167-93.</ref>

As for '''fiction''', [[William Faulkner]] began his career as a chronicler of Pierrot's amorous disappointments and existential anguish in such little-known works as his play ''The Marionettes'' (1920) and the verses of his ''Vision in Spring'' (1921), works that were an early and revealing declaration of the novelist's "fragmented state"<ref>"Pierrot was Faulkner's fictional representation of his fragmented state": Sensibar, p. xvii.</ref> (some critics have argued that Pierrot stands behind the semi-autobiographical [[Nick Adams (character)|Nick Adams]] of Faulkner's fellow-[[Nobel Prize in Literature|Nobel]] laureate [[Ernest Hemingway]],<ref>Green and Swan, p. 52.</ref> and another contends that [[James Joyce]]'s [[Stephen Dedalus]], again an avatar of his own creator, also shares the same parentage).<ref>Dick, pp. 69-80.</ref>

In '''music''', historians of modernism generally place [[Arnold Schoenberg]]'s 1912 song-cycle ''[[Pierrot lunaire]]'' at the very pinnacle of high-modernist achievement.<ref>"Wherever we look in the history of its reception, whether in general histories of the modern period, in more ephemeral press response, in the comments of musical leaders such as [[Igor Stravinsky|Stravinsky]] or [[Pierre Boulez|Boulez]], in pedagogical sources, or in specialized research studies, the overwhelming reaction to ''Pierrot'' has been an awestruck veneration of its originality": Dunsby, p. 1.</ref> And in '''ballet''', [[Igor Stravinsky]]'s [[Petrushka (ballet)|Petrushka]] (1911), in which the traditionally [[Pulcinella]]-like clown wears the heart of Pierrot,<ref>{{harvnb|Clayton|1993|p=137}}; see also "[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x42PyU3SM6U Two Clowns: Pierrot meets Petrushka]" by the Israeli Chamber Project.</ref> is often argued to have attained the same stature.<ref>"... [A]s one of the greatest ballets [''Petrushka''] remains unassailed": Robert, p. 231.</ref>

Students of modernist '''painting''' and '''sculpture''' are familiar with Pierrot (in many different attitudes, from the ineffably sad to the ebulliently impudent) through the masterworks of his acolytes, including [[Pablo Picasso]], [[Juan Gris]], [[Georges Rouault]], [[Salvador Dalí]], [[Max Beckmann]], [[August Macke]], [[Paul Klee]], [[Jacques Lipchitz]]—the list is very long (see '''[[#Visual arts|Visual arts]]''' below).

As for the '''drama''', Pierrot was a regular fixture in the plays of the [[Little Theatre Movement]] ([[Edna St. Vincent Millay]]'s ''Aria da Capo'' [1920], Robert Emmons Rogers' ''Behind a Watteau Picture'' [1918], Blanche Jennings Thompson's ''The Dream Maker'' [1922]),<ref>For direct access to these works, go to the footnotes following their titles in [[#Plays, playlets, pantomimes, and revues|Plays, playlets, pantomimes, and revues]] below.</ref> which nourished the careers of such important Modernists as [[Eugene O'Neill]], [[Susan Glaspell]], and others.

In '''film''', a beloved early comic hero was the [[Little Tramp]] of [[Charlie Chaplin]], who conceived the character, in Chaplin's words, as "a sort of Pierrot".<ref>{{harvnb|Chaplin|1966|p=224}}.</ref>

As the diverse incarnations of the 19th-century Pierrot would predict, the hallmarks of the modernist Pierrot are his ambiguity and complexity.

One of his earliest appearances was in [[Alexander Blok]]'s ''The Puppet Show'' (1906), called by one theater-historian "the greatest example of the harlequinade in Russia".<ref>{{harvnb|Clayton|1993|p=145}}.</ref> [[Vsevolod Meyerhold]], who both directed the first production and took on the role, dramatically emphasized the multifacetedness of the character: according to one spectator, Meyerhold's Pierrot was "nothing like those familiar, falsely sugary, whining Pierrots. Everything about him is sharply angular; in a hushed voice he whispers strange words of sadness; somehow he contrives to be caustic, heart-rending, gentle: all these things yet at the same time impudent."<ref>Cited in Green and Swan, p. 91.</ref>