ABSTRACT
For all its gentrified eclecticism, even campness, the drawing room at No. 2 Carlyle Square, Chelsea deserves recognition as a paradigmatic site in the paradoxical history of British modernism. This chapter draws particular attention to the visual components of the ‘Entertainment’, which have largely escaped comment. Visual art, in fact, was a key element of Façade from its inception, making the work what might at first encounter seem a multiple paradox: a pioneering English modernist Gesamtkunstwerk. The presence of a front-cloth remained a consistent feature of all the performances of Façade, public and private, from 1922 to 1942. The 1922 performance opened with a ‘haunting and sinister fanfare’, which, it was sometimes claimed, Walton had taken down ‘note for note’ from a gypsy fortuneteller in Sicily. Typical of the poems recited that evening is ‘King Pompey’.
