The composer of Parade — furniture music, typewriters in the orchestra, and the driest wit in French music; Cocteau's accomplice in dragging the avant-garde onto the stage.
Erik Satie was a French composer, born in Honfleur in 1866, who wrote the three Gymnopédies and the score for Parade, the 1917 ballet made with Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso that put the Paris avant-garde on a popular stage. He earned his living for years as a cabaret pianist in Montmartre, founded a church with a membership of one, owned seven identical suits, and spent his last twenty-seven years in a room in the suburb of Arcueil that no visitor ever entered. After Parade, the young composers of postwar Paris claimed him as their model.
His importance runs past the eccentricities. At a time when prestigious European music aspired to Wagnerian scale and intensity, Satie repeatedly moved the other way — toward brevity, repetition, understatement, popular tunes, dry humor, and finally music the listener was not supposed to listen to. What looked like simplicity or incompetence was usually a deliberate refusal of the musical values around him, and later generations kept discovering that he had arrived somewhere first: composers from Les Six to John Cage treated him as an ancestor, and he is now routinely discussed as a precursor of minimalism and ambient music.
Satie was born Éric Alfred Leslie Satie on 17 May 1866 in Honfleur, on the Normandy coast, to a French father and a British mother of Scottish background, and was baptized in the Anglican church. The childhood was marked by loss. His mother died in 1872, when he was six, and Erik and his younger brother Conrad were sent back to Honfleur to be raised Catholic by their paternal grandparents. Music arrived there through the local organist Gustave Vinot, who had been trained in early sacred music; the Gregorian chant and church modes Satie absorbed as a boy stayed in his harmony for good, and the archaic, suspended atmosphere of the Ogives, Gymnopédies, and Gnossiennes did not come from nowhere.[1]
His grandmother died in 1878 and the twelve-year-old returned to Paris to live with his father, who the next year married a piano teacher, Eugénie Barnetche. She arranged for her stepson to enter the Paris Conservatoire. It went badly. His teachers found some ability and no diligence, dismissed him for poor progress, readmitted him, and were unimpressed a second time; he left without a diploma. In 1886 he escaped in the most drastic direction available and volunteered for the 33rd Infantry Regiment, discovered he disliked military discipline as much as the academic kind, and — by the standard biographical account — stood bare-chested in winter weather until bronchitis got him discharged. Around this time Éric began signing himself Erik.
By 1887 he was living in Montmartre and working as second pianist at the Chat Noir cabaret. The three Gymnopédies, slow and spare piano pieces, followed in 1888; they are now his most familiar music, and Claude Debussy orchestrated two of them in 1897. The Gnossiennes, begun around the turn of the 1890s, pushed further — some dispense with bar lines and time signatures entirely, their harmonies circling rather than progressing. The materials were simple; the organization was radical. Long before anyone had the words for it, Satie was writing music that established an atmosphere and let the listener stay inside it, rather than driving toward a climax.[2]
The cabarets were his income for years — he accompanied singers and wrote for the commercial stage, including the songs Je te veux, La Diva de l'Empire, and Le Piccadilly. He was later dismissive of the material, but the music hall taught him economy, timing, parody, and a durable disrespect for the wall between serious art and popular entertainment. All of it resurfaced in Parade.
The Montmartre years produced the eccentricities he is still known for. In the early 1890s he wrote ceremonial music for the mystic Joséphin Péladan's Rosicrucian circle, then broke away and, in the mid-1890s, founded his own church, the Église Métropolitaine d'Art de Jésus Conducteur, served as its only member, and issued attacks on his critics from its headquarters, which was his room on the rue Cortot. In 1895 he spent a small legacy on seven identical chestnut-coloured corduroy suits with matching hats, and wore little else for years. Montmartre called him the Velvet Gentleman.
In January 1893 Satie began an affair with the painter Suzanne Valadon, a former artists' model who had taught herself to paint between sittings. She took the room next to his on the rue Cortot and painted his portrait that year; in April he wrote her a four-bar song, Bonjour Biqui, Bonjour!, on the pet name he had given her.[3]
After about six months she left, and he was devastated. It is the only love affair of his that is documented; as far as the record shows, he never had another. One object survives in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: a lock of Valadon's hair that Satie kept, mounted on card, with the beginning and end of the relationship recorded in his own hand.
Around the same period Satie wrote one of the strangest pieces in the history of music. Vexations is a short, harmonically unmoored motif for piano, and above it Satie left an instruction suggesting that anyone wishing to play it 840 times in succession should prepare beforehand, in profound silence and serious immobility. Played literally, it lasts many hours. He never mounted a performance, and the piece stayed unknown in his lifetime.[4]
It became famous through John Cage, who organized the first complete public performance in New York in 1963 with a relay of pianists; it ran more than eighteen hours. For the experimental composers of that generation, the obscure manuscript posed exactly their questions — what repetition does to perception, where a concert ends and a ritual begins — and its recovery turned Satie from a charming miniaturist into an ancestor of the avant-garde.[5]
In 1898 Satie moved to a single room in Arcueil, a suburb south of Paris, and kept it until his death. Most days he walked the ten kilometres into the city, umbrella under his arm, stopping at cafés along the way, and often walked back late at night. In the twenty-seven years he lived there, no visitor entered the room.
The jokes moved into the titles. Trois morceaux en forme de poire — Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, 1903, containing more than three pieces — is the most famous; the often-repeated story that it answered Debussy's advice to pay more attention to form is questioned by scholars, which is itself a warning about Satie, who was very good at turning himself into a story. The humorous piano collections of the 1910s — Desiccated Embryos, True Flabby Preludes (for a Dog), Sports et divertissements with its drawings and prose — read like absurdist literature and are controlled with complete precision. Some of the instructions written between the staves were never meant to be read aloud: a private channel between composer and performer.
In 1905, at thirty-nine, he enrolled at the Schola Cantorum to study counterpoint and composition under Vincent d'Indy and Albert Roussel — the lifelong enemy of academies going conscientiously back to school, because if he was going to refuse the rules he wanted to know exactly what they were. His mature simplicity was a choice, not a limitation. Recognition came slowly and from other composers first. In January 1911 Maurice Ravel played Satie's early piano pieces at a concert of the Société musicale indépendante in Paris, presenting the forgotten cabaret pianist as a pioneer who had written the music of tomorrow a quarter-century early.[1]
There is no single Satie style — the music kept changing — but several qualities recur across forty years:
Traditional tonal music creates tension by making listeners expect resolution. Satie weakened that expectation deliberately, and the weakening is why the Gymnopédies can sound more recent than their date. It is also why the pretty piano pieces can mislead: someone who meets them as background music imagines a dreamy miniaturist, and is then surprised by the insults, the typewriter, the 840 repetitions, and the cannon. The peaceful music and the provocations are the same artist — both refuse the demand that music behave conventionally.[6]
A traditional score is a set of instructions for making sounds. Satie made the page itself part of the work. He wrote music in a striking calligraphic hand — the Centre Pompidou describes him writing 'like a calligrapher poet,' drawing his staves by hand and swapping standard terminology for deliberately impish expressions. He dropped bar lines from some pieces, inserted prose between the staves, and addressed performers in instructions the audience would never hear — a private channel between composer and player. Some directions were expressly not to be read aloud.[7]
A Satie score can therefore exist three ways at once: as sound, as writing, and as a visual object. His prose ran on the same voice — polite, bureaucratic, mystical, deadpan, and absurd by turns, delivering jokes without signaling them. Later experimental composers explored graphic notation far more systematically; Satie was there extraordinarily early.
Jean Cocteau brought Satie the scenario for a ballet during the war, and over the next two years the two built Parade with Pablo Picasso for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Satie's score called for a typewriter and a siren alongside the orchestra; Picasso supplied a Cubist drop curtain, sets, and costumes; Léonide Massine choreographed. The premiere at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 18 May 1917 scandalized the house. In the program note, Guillaume Apollinaire called the result 'a kind of surrealism', the word's first prominent appearance in print.[8]
Satie's temper survives in the court record. When the critic Jean Poueigh published a hostile review, Satie answered with insulting postcards; Poueigh sued for libel, and Satie was convicted and sentenced to a week in jail, a punishment ultimately headed off through his friends' intervention. The gentle eccentric with the umbrella could hold a grudge and turn a disagreement into a crisis.[9]
Parade made Satie the presiding figure of postwar French music. Cocteau's 1918 pamphlet Le Coq et l'Arlequin held him up as the model for a plain, French music stripped of prewar orchestral fog, an argument later collected in Le rappel à l'ordre and attached to the Return to Order. The six young composers soon grouped as Les Six — Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre — proclaimed themselves his heirs.[10]
Cocteau also drew him. The line portrait Erik Satie was published as a plate in his 1923 album Dessins.
The most surprising work of his later career contains no jokes at all. Socrate (1917–18) sets passages of Plato in French translation with unusual restraint and purity — even the death of Socrates passes without an operatic climax. Scholars connect it to what Satie called his style dépouillé, the stripped-down manner: he had come to trust emotional restraint over emotional display.
The immaculate bourgeois costume concealed left politics. After the assassination of the socialist leader Jean Jaurès in 1914 Satie joined the Socialist Party, and after the split of Tours he was associated with the young French Communist Party — the avant-garde provocateur dressed like a civil servant, voting with the Arcueil working class he lived among. He resisted being reduced to a single identity from every direction at once.
The larger battle of his generation was with Richard Wagner, whose scale, chromatic intensity, and mythic ambition dominated European music. Satie became almost the exact inverse — short instead of enormous, dry instead of intoxicated, everyday instead of mythic, static instead of relentlessly developmental, funny instead of reverential — and that inversion is why younger French musicians eventually found him so useful: he was an escape route. His years in commercial entertainment made the escape possible. Satie knew popular songs from the piano bench, not the folklorist's notebook, and he never accepted a permanent wall between fine art and popular culture — the refusal that reaches full scale in Parade.
In March 1920, during the intermissions of a comedy by Max Jacob at the Galerie Barbazanges, Satie presented what he called musique d'ameublement — furniture music, written to be ignored. The audience was invited to walk about and look at an exhibition of children's drawings while it played. When people sat down and listened instead, Satie was annoyed. The experiment failed in the room and succeeded everywhere since: music designed as an environment rather than an event is now an entire genre, and its later practitioners, John Cage first among them, named Satie as the source.
His last stage work was Relâche (1924), commissioned by Rolf de Maré for the Ballets Suédois, the company's final production, with a scenario by Francis Picabia — the title is the word a French theater posts when it is closed. For its cinema interlude, René Clair's short film Entr'acte, Satie wrote a bar-by-bar score and appeared on screen with Picabia in the cannon prologue. It premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 4 December 1924.
Satie had been a heavy drinker for most of his adult life, and his health failed that winter. He was admitted to the Hôpital Saint-Joseph in February 1925 and died there of cirrhosis of the liver on 1 July 1925, at fifty-nine. He was buried in the cemetery at Arcueil on 6 July. His friends then entered the Arcueil room for the first time. Clearing it took two cartloads, and what they found included:
Several of the recovered scores were published and performed after his death. The secrecy of the room had, without anyone intending it, created an archive.
Born Éric Alfred Leslie Satie in Honfleur, on the Normandy coast, on 17 May.
His mother dies; Erik and his brother are sent back to Honfleur to be raised by their grandparents. The organist Gustave Vinot gives him his first lessons and an ear for Gregorian chant.
Enters the Paris Conservatoire at thirteen, at his stepmother's urging. His teachers call him idle; he is dismissed, readmitted, and leaves without a diploma.
Volunteers for the 33rd Infantry Regiment, dislikes it, and gets himself discharged by standing bare-chested in winter until he catches bronchitis.
Working as second pianist at the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre.
Composes the three Gymnopédies, his most familiar music.
Begins the Gnossiennes, some written without bar lines or time signatures; writes ceremonial music for Joséphin Péladan's Rosicrucian circle before breaking away.
Six-month affair with the painter Suzanne Valadon, his only documented romance; she paints his portrait, and he keeps a lock of her hair for the rest of his life. Writes Vexations, with its instruction contemplating 840 repetitions.
Spends a small legacy on seven identical corduroy suits; Montmartre names him the Velvet Gentleman.
Claude Debussy orchestrates two of the three Gymnopédies.
Moves to a single room in Arcueil, south of Paris, and keeps it for the rest of his life; no visitor enters it. Most days he walks the ten kilometres into Paris, umbrella in hand.
Composes Trois morceaux en forme de poire — Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, which contains more than three pieces.
Enrolls at the Schola Cantorum, at thirty-nine, under Vincent d'Indy and Albert Roussel, and studies conscientiously.
Maurice Ravel plays his early piano pieces at a Société musicale indépendante concert in Paris, presenting him as a pioneer; recognition begins.
Parade, with Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, premieres at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 18 May. Sued for libel by the critic Jean Poueigh over insulting postcards, and convicted.
Completes Socrate, the austere Plato setting of his stripped-down late manner. Cocteau's Le Coq et l'Arlequin makes him the model for postwar French music.
Presents musique d'ameublement — furniture music — at the Galerie Barbazanges in March; the audience is asked not to listen.
Relâche, with Francis Picabia and the Ballets Suédois, premieres on 4 December with René Clair's film Entr'acte as its interlude; Satie appears on screen in the cannon prologue.
Dies of cirrhosis of the liver at the Hôpital Saint-Joseph in Paris on 1 July; buried at Arcueil on 6 July. His room, sealed to visitors for twenty-seven years, is opened — two cartloads are cleared, and lost manuscripts surface.
John Cage organizes the first complete performance of Vexations in New York — a relay of pianists, more than eighteen hours — and remakes Satie as an ancestor of experimental music.
Everyone will tell you that I am not a musician. That is correct. From the beginning of my career I classed myself, at once, among the phonometrographers. My works are pure phonometry.Tout le monde vous dira que je ne suis pas un musicien. C'est juste. Dès le début de ma carrière, je me suis, de suite, classé parmi les phonométrographes. Mes travaux sont de la pure phonométrique.
Besides, I get more pleasure from measuring a sound than from hearing it.Du reste, j'ai plus de plaisir à mesurer un son que je n'en ai à l'entendre.
The artist must regulate his life. Here is the precise timetable of my daily acts. I rise: at 7:18; inspired: from 10:23 to 11:47. I lunch at 12:11 and leave the table at 12:14.L'artiste doit régler sa vie. Voici l'horaire précis de mes actes journaliers : Mon lever : à 7 h. 18 ; inspiré : de 10 h. 23 à 11 h. 47. Je déjeune à 12 h. 11 et quitte la table à 12 h. 14.
Painting
Suzanne Valadon painted the composer Erik Satie in a black hat and pince-nez on a narrow upright canvas, around 1892–93, while the two were together in Montmartre. It is one of her earliest paintings and was exhibited in Paris in the spring of 1893. The Centre Pompidou owns it.
Drawing
Cocteau's Satie in a handful of lines: pince-nez, beard, and one finger raised as if delivering an aphorism — the composer of Parade drawn by its librettist, from the album Cocteau dedicated to Picasso.
Ballet
The one-act ballet that dragged the avant-garde onto the popular stage: Cocteau's scenario, Satie's score with its typewriter and siren, and Picasso's Cubist curtain, sets, and costumes for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes — premiered in Paris in May 1917 to a scandalized house. In his program note, Guillaume Apollinaire described it as 'a kind of surrealism' — the word's first prominent appearance in print, and the name André Breton's movement later adopted. The Rome working trip also gave Picasso his first long look at the antique, helping initiate the classical turn that became the Return to Order.
Met · 1915–1917
The Parade partnership: Cocteau brought Satie the scenario and the two built the ballet with Picasso for Diaghilev — the collaboration credited in Satie's own hand on the manuscript's title page.
Supported by · 1924
De Maré commissioned Relâche in 1924, the Ballets Suédois's final production, for which Satie wrote a bar-by-bar score. It was the last gasp of the Dada spirit in Paris.
Met · 1891
Debussy and Satie met in the Montmartre orbit of the Auberge du Clou and remained close until a rupture in 1916. Debussy later orchestrated two of Satie's Gymnopédies.
Collaborated with · 1917
Satie's only ballet score, Parade — typewriter, siren and all — was written for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and premiered under his production at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 18 May 1917, with Cocteau's scenario, Picasso's designs and Massine's choreography.
Satie's early modal harmonies, repetition and refusal of grand Romantic rhetoric offered Debussy an important Parisian example of music that could be modern by becoming simpler rather than larger.
Art movement · c. 1918–1930
The tendency's model in music, by Cocteau's own program: Le Coq et l'Arlequin (1918), later collected in Le rappel à l'ordre, held up the composer of Parade as the postwar ideal — plain, French, cleansed of prewar orchestral fog.
A French composer, born in Honfleur in 1866, who wrote the Gymnopédies, invented furniture music, and composed the score for the 1917 ballet Parade with Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso. He worked as a cabaret pianist in Montmartre, lived alone in the suburb of Arcueil for his last twenty-seven years, and died in Paris in 1925.
Three slow, spare piano pieces Erik Satie composed in 1888, now his most familiar music. Claude Debussy orchestrated two of them in 1897, and Maurice Ravel's performance of Satie's early pieces at a 1911 Paris concert helped bring them a wider audience. They sound modern because they remove what nineteenth-century music was built on — development, climax, resolution — and settle for atmosphere instead.
Background music written to be ignored — musique d'ameublement, Erik Satie's own term. At its public presentation in March 1920, played during the intermissions of a comedy by the poet Max Jacob at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris, the audience was invited to walk around rather than listen; when people listened anyway, Satie was annoyed. The idea — music as an environment rather than an event — made him an ancestor of ambient music.
A very short piano piece Satie wrote around 1893, carrying an instruction that contemplates playing it 840 times in succession, prepared for by profound silence and serious immobility. Taken literally, a performance lasts many hours; Satie never mounted one, and the piece was unknown in his lifetime. John Cage organized the first complete performance in New York in 1963 with a relay of pianists — it ran more than eighteen hours.
A one-act ballet premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on 18 May 1917, with a scenario by Jean Cocteau, music by Erik Satie, and curtain, sets, and costumes by Pablo Picasso, produced by Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Satie's score included a typewriter and a siren, and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire's program note called the work 'a kind of surrealism' — the word's first prominent appearance in print.
Because he had decided his technique needed it. After years of being mocked as an amateur, Satie enrolled at the Schola Cantorum in 1905 to study counterpoint under Albert Roussel and composition under Vincent d'Indy, and worked conscientiously. The point matters for hearing his music: the mature simplicity was a choice made with full command of the rules it refused, not a limitation.
Of cirrhosis of the liver, at the Hôpital Saint-Joseph in Paris on 1 July 1925, after decades of heavy drinking. He was fifty-nine. He was buried in the cemetery at Arcueil, and only after his death did friends enter his room there, where they found unpublished manuscripts behind the piano and in the pockets of his suits.
A room no one had entered in twenty-seven years, holding two pianos, near-identical corduroy suits, umbrellas, old newspapers — two cartloads had to be cleared before his papers could be sorted — and manuscripts believed lost, among them Vexations, Geneviève de Brabant, and Jack in the Box. Several were published and performed after his death.
No. His only documented romance was a roughly six-month affair in 1893 with the painter Suzanne Valadon, who took the room next to his on the rue Cortot in Montmartre and painted his portrait. After she left, no other relationship of his is recorded. The Bibliothèque nationale de France preserves a lock of her hair that he kept, annotated in his own hand.
First the composers around Jean Cocteau — Les Six, with Georges Auric, Darius Milhaud, and Francis Poulenc among them, treated him as their elder. Later and more broadly, John Cage and the postwar experimental composers took up his repetition, his indifference to concert etiquette, and his furniture music, and he is now standard reading in the prehistory of minimalism and ambient music.
He was born Éric Alfred Leslie Satie — the Leslie from his British mother's Scottish family. As a young composer he began signing himself Erik, and the spelling became his professional name.
Yes, from 1879, at thirteen — and badly. His teachers found some talent and no diligence, dismissed him for poor progress, readmitted him, and were unimpressed a second time; he left without a diploma. The serious schooling came much later, by his own choice, at the Schola Cantorum in 1905.
Because they remove what nineteenth-century music ran on: development, climax, and the drive toward resolution. Slow melodies float over repeating chords whose dissonances are left unresolved, creating an atmosphere rather than an argument — the approach minimal and ambient music arrived at decades later.
They were friends for roughly three decades, from the Montmartre years on, though the friendship had its frictions. Claude Debussy admired the early pieces enough to orchestrate two of the three Gymnopédies in 1897 — an important act of advocacy that helped move Satie's music from the cabaret into the concert hall.
The Église Métropolitaine d'Art de Jésus Conducteur grew out of a genuine fascination with ritual, medieval art, and mysticism — he had written ceremonial music for Joséphin Péladan's Rosicrucian circle before breaking away — and out of a need for an institution entirely under his own control. He was its founder, propagandist, and only member, and from its headquarters, his room, he excommunicated his critics in print.
Yes. In 1895 he spent a small legacy on seven nearly identical chestnut-colored corduroy suits with matching hats and wore little else for years — Montmartre named him the Velvet Gentleman for it. Some of the suits were found scarcely worn in his room after his death.
Satie's pet name for Suzanne Valadon. In April 1893, during their affair, he set it to music in a four-bar song, Bonjour Biqui, Bonjour! — a love token the size of a postage stamp, which was entirely in character.
The score's instruction contemplates exactly that, prepared for by 'profound silence and serious immobility' — but how literally he meant it is uncertain, and he never mounted a performance. John Cage's 1963 relay realization in New York established the literal 840-repetition tradition, and performances since have followed it.
It was cheap. He took the single room in the suburb south of Paris in 1898 and kept it for twenty-seven years, walking the ten kilometres into the city most days, umbrella in hand, and often walking back late at night. Living outside Paris never meant leaving Parisian life — only his room stayed private.
His austere setting of Plato in French translation, composed in 1917–18 — music of deliberate restraint in which even the death of Socrates passes without an operatic climax. It is the clearest example of his stripped-down late manner, the style dépouillé, and the proof that the humorist could be perfectly serious when he chose.
Yes. In the prologue of René Clair's 1924 film he appears beside Francis Picabia, firing a cannon toward the audience — the composer as Dada performer, in bowler hat and beard, a few months before his final illness.
Entirely serious, by the evidence: the voluntary counterpoint studies at the Schola Cantorum, the austerity of Socrate, and the precision of the piano writing. He rejected the idea that seriousness required solemnity — the humor was an artistic tool, not an admission that the art was unserious.
Met · 1915–1917
The Parade partnership: Cocteau brought Satie the scenario and the two built the ballet with Picasso for Diaghilev — the collaboration credited in Satie's own hand on the manuscript's title page.
Associated with · 1917–1925
The tendency's model in music, by Cocteau's own program: Le Coq et l'Arlequin (1918), later collected in Le rappel à l'ordre, held up the composer of Parade as the postwar ideal — plain, French, cleansed of prewar orchestral fog.
Frequented · 1886–1891
Satie belonged to Le Chat Noir's musical orbit and played at the cabaret's piano before moving to the Auberge du Clou in the early 1890s.
Influenced
Satie's early modal harmonies, repetition and refusal of grand Romantic rhetoric offered Debussy an important Parisian example of music that could be modern by becoming simpler rather than larger.
Depicted in · 1923
Captioned 'Erik Satie' in the album itself — Parade's composer drawn by its librettist.
Supported by · 1924
De Maré commissioned Relâche in 1924, the Ballets Suédois's final production, for which Satie wrote a bar-by-bar score. It was the last gasp of the Dada spirit in Paris.
Met · 1891
Debussy and Satie met in the Montmartre orbit of the Auberge du Clou and remained close until a rupture in 1916. Debussy later orchestrated two of Satie's Gymnopédies.
Collaborated with · 1917
Satie's only ballet score, Parade — typewriter, siren and all — was written for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and premiered under his production at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 18 May 1917, with Cocteau's scenario, Picasso's designs and Massine's choreography.
Depicted in · 1893
The Centre Pompidou titles the canvas Portrait d'Erik Satie and dates it 1892-93, to the months of the composer's affair with Suzanne Valadon. A black hat, a pince-nez, a drooping moustache and a vermilion mouth fill a canvas 22 centimetres across.
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Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Erik Satie page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Erik Satie page.
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