Valentine de Saint-Point (née Anna Jeanne Valentine Marianne Glans de Cessiat-Vercell; 16 February 1875, Lyon – 28 March 1953, Cairo) was a French writer, poet, painter, playwright, art critic, choreographer, lecturer and journalist. She is primarily known for being the first woman to have written a futurist manifesto. Additionally, she was also active in Parisian salons and the associated literary and artistic movements of the Belle Epoque. Her writings and performances of La Métachorie demonstrated her theory of "a total fusion of the arts." Performed veiled, it is an exploration of the body's relationship to nature and geometric archetypes that govern physical form and movement. Finding a similar universality in Islamic art, she converted to Islam and moved to Alexandria where she also became involved in Middle Eastern politics, writing prolifically as an advocate for Egyptian and Syrian independence from French rule. She died at the age of 78. Her Muslim name was Ruhiyya Nur al-Din and she is buried next to the Imam al-Shafii.
Early life Valentine is the only child of Alice de Glans de Cessiat and Charles-Joseph Vercell, and is by maternal descent a great-grandniece of the poet Alphonse de Lamartine. The pseudonym "de Saint-Point," which she took when she entered the literary world, refers to a small town in Mâconnais, in the Cluny area where a castle of her famous ancestor was located. In 1883, her father died. Alice de Glans de Cessiat then returned to Mâcon with her daughter, who grew up there surrounded by her grandmother and her tutor.
In 1893, Valentine married Florian Théophile Perrenot, a professor 14 years her senior, whom she would follow as he was transferred. The following year, he was appointed to Lons-le-Saunier, where Valentine met Charles Dumont, professor of philosophy and colleague of her husband, who would become her lover and second husband later on. In 1897, Perrenot was appointed to Corsica, the first meeting between Valentine and the Mediterranean. A final transfer took Perrenot to Niort, where he died in the summer of 1899.
Move to Paris The 24-year-old widow moved to Paris where she reestablished her relationship with Charles Dumont, future minister of the Third Republic. The couple married 20 June 1900 at City Hall in Paris's 1st arrondissement. In 1902, she organized a literary salon where she rubbed shoulders with Gabriele D'Annunzio, who nicknamed her "the purple muse," Rachilde, Natalie Clifford Barney, Paul Fort, Gabriel Tarde, who saw her as "an amiable madness of nature," Alphonse Mucha and Auguste Rodin, for whom she posed, as well as other artists and politicians. Her friendship with the famous sculptor had importance in his artistic life, as evidenced by their correspondence. He called her the "goddess of the flesh of his inspiration in marble". She celebrated his work with poems (The Thinker and His Hands published in Poems of Pride in 1908) and an article, The dual Personality of Auguste Rodin, published in La Nouvelle Revue in November 1906. Rodin was often the guest of honor at her parties, contributing by his presence to make them prestigious.
In 1903, during a seance, which were in vogue at the time, she met Ricciotto Canudo, an Italian poet and writer born in Bari in 1877. Canudo was also the review director for Europe Artiste and Monjoie; which was a critical element in regards to Cubist studies. Additionally, Ricciotto Canudo became the author of the Manifesto of Cerebrist Art. Shortly thereafter, she filed for divorce, which was delivered on 20 January 1904. Several reasons for the divorce were circulated, including the fact that she posed almost nude for Mucha and Rodin, and the courtship of Canudo. The applicant said that she wanted to pursue her artistic vocation, and that she wanted to live independently. As Valentine de Saint-Point was heavily inspired by the innovational works of Canudo and Marinetti, she began her Futurist practice before the wave of Futurism spread between 1909 and 1914. Valentine had developed her own practice within Futurism by taking inspiration from Canudo's idea of it being "conceptual, eroticized, and sensual," and Marinetti's idea of it being "destructive, provocative, and energetic." She took the name of Valentine Saint-Point and began a common-law relationship with Canudo, who actively supported her literary debut.
Literary debut
In January 1905 she published an article in The New journal entitled, Lamartine Unknown (Lamartine Inconnu), the title of which alluded to her poetic lineage. Following this she published her first collection of poetry, Poems of the Sea and the Sun which had been inspired by her trip to Spain with Canudo the previous year. In 1906, A Love, the first part of a trilogy, was well received by critics. She began her collaborations with several magazines such as The Artist Europe, The Mercury, The New Review, The Age, La Plume, and Gil Blas, whose founder was the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Incest which appeared at the beginning of the year 1907 collected mixed reactions from the public and critics. The theme of a mother initiating her son to physical love was the most controversial. The year 1909 was dedicated to theater. 28 May, Valentine Theatre Arts presents a one-act drama, The Fallen which was published by The New Review. Criticism was harsh, but the work was the first part of her dramatic trilogy The Theater of Women. In 1910 she published A woman and desire, an unacknowledged autobiographical confession that enabled her to express a few truths about female psychology and women's roles in society. In 1911, she moved into a studio at 19 rue de Tourville where her art would become denser and its most popular. She participated for the first time in the Salon des Indépendants, where she exhibited paintings and woodcuts until 1914.
On 17 February 1912, she inaugurated her 'Apollonian' parties, which were reported in the press. Rachilde gave a reading of his play, The Seller of Sunshine and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti recited poems. Others who were present included, Philippe Berthelot, Saint-Pol-Roux, Boccioni, Gino Severini, Canudo, Florent Schmitt, Countess Venturini, and Mendes-Cattule.
In addition to her artistic works, Valentine de Saint-Point wrote pieces which discuss the ironic themes of love and death. To further elaborate, some of her writings compare and contrast the themes of love beside, what was at the time, a theoretical debate on the death of the avant-garde movement. Both her and Tommaso Marinetti are well known futurist artists who gave their hand at writing, particularly texts which spoke against love. There has been debate in regards to whether the writings are literal or theoretical, therefore these writings have incited a non-historical approach to examining such works. The works of Saint-Point and Marinetti have caused a stir amongst literary and art historians, in an attempt to determine the relationship between death and life in the study of the avant-garde.
Connection to Futurism In 1912 she published the Manifesto of Futurist Woman, which Saint-Point wrote in response to the misogynist ideas in Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism. It was read on 27 June at the Salle Gaveau, surrounded by the figureheads of the movement. The manifesto begins with the statement, "Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn."
Although she joined the Futurists in celebrating the virtues of virility, she also wrote: It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of femininity and masculinity. Every superman, every hero, no matter how epic, how much of a genius, or how powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and an epoch only because he is composed at once of feminine and masculine elements, of femininity and masculinity: that is, a complete being...It is the same way with any collectivity and any moment in humanity, just as it is with individuals. The fecund periods, when the most heroes and geniuses come forth from the terrain of culture in all its ebullience, are rich in masculinity and femininity. Those periods that had only wars, with few representative heroes because the epic breath flattened them out, were exclusively virile periods; those that denied the heroic instinct and, turning toward the past, annihilated themselves in dreams of peace, were periods in which femininity was dominant. We are living at the end of one of these periods. What is most lacking in women as in men is virility.That is why Futurism, even with all its exaggerations, is right.
Saint-Point advocated the concept of the woman-warrior, as opposed to the traditional sentimental feminine ideals such as the "good mother," and she conceptualized the "Überwoman" (sur-femme), as a counterpart to the Nietzschean Übermensch (surhomme). She also addressed the theme of lust, described by Saint-Point as "a force". Saint-Point would develop this theme into a second manifesto, the Futurist Manifesto of Lust (Manifeste futuriste de la luxure), which was published a year later. These writings, translated throughout Europe, were a sensation and put women at the center of the debates of the Futurist movement, which was increasingly popular. In this the Futurist Manifesto of Lust, she considered two main directions of women's existential choices in futurism. It also maintained that women represent the great galvanizing principle and that "lust when viewed without moral preconceptions and as an essential part of life's dynamism, is a force". For Saint Point, the synthesis of the sensory and the sensual leads to the liberation of the spirit. But true to her intellectual independence, Saint-Point declared in January 1914 in Hansard: "I am not a futurist, and I've never been, I do not belong to any school." Her thoughts on futurism, however, was said to have been enriched by Canudo's conceptual, eroticized, and sensual perspective and Marinetti's destructive and provocative view.
Métachorie