Art of the 20th Century



A Revolution in the Arts

 

Art Styles in 20th century Art Map

 

The Great Avant-garde Movements

Surrealist Art   Preface CHAPTER ONE Precursors CHAPTER TWO Anti-art CHAPTER THREE Conquest of the marvellous CHAPTER FOUR Surrealism and painting CHAPTER FIVE Towards a revolutionary art CHAPTER SIX Across the world CHAPTER SEVEN The object CHAPTER EIGHT Festivals of the imagination CHAPTER NINE In the United States CHAPTER TEN Surrealist architecture CHAPTER ELEVEN The post-war period CHAPTER TWELVE Occultation

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see also:

Surrealism - 1924

Max Ernst "A Week of Kindness" (A surrealistic novel in collage)

EXPLORATION: Rene Magritte "Thought rendered visible"

EXPLORATION: Salvador Dali

EXPLORATION: Surrealism  "The Dream of Revolution"

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CHAPTER TWO

Anti-art


(Dadaism)

Raoul Hausmann
Kurt Schwitters
Hans Richter
Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Marcel Duchamp
Francis Picabia

Arthur Cravan
 

Before surrealism became a concept of beauty which spread to all the plastic arts, it was a revolt against aesthetics in the name of total freedom of inspiration. This revolt started in Paris in 1919, with the foundation of the anti-literary review Litterature. The founders of Litterature were three young poets, Andre Breton, Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, who were brought together largely by their devotion to Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet who had died the year before. They came under the influence of the spontaneity of his 'poem-conversations', of his stories, which he called 'philtres of fantasy', and of his quest for 'the new spirit' which he was nevertheless able to reconcile with his love for curiosities of the past.

Apollinaire showed them that the poet must always be the accomplice of the painter, a firm ally in the conquest of the unknown. He himself had led a vigorous battle against the aftermath of impressionism, particularly in his column 'La Vie artistique' in L'Intransigeant from 1910 to 1914. In an article on the Salon des Independants in 1910, subtitled 'Prenez garde a la peinture', he wrote : 'If we were to interpret the overall meaning of this exhibition, we would say readily - and with great delight - that it means the rout of impressionism.' He took an active interest in all the new movements which arose : he became a patron of Robert Delaunay's post-cubist 'orphism', and published a book on the 'futurist antitradition' (L'Antitradition futuriste, 1913)- He saw in every new movement a chance of superseding the lessons of the impressionists. In the programme for the ballet Parade, which was performed on 18 Mау 1917, he used the word 'sur-realisme' in print for the first time. He used it again on 24 June of the same year when he put on Les Mamelles de Tiresias ('The Breasts of Tiresias'). It seemed that he foresaw the use to which it would be put, for he spoke to Paul Dermee of 'the need, in the near future, for a period of organization of lyricism'. He drew the attention of artists to contemporary life : 'Today drawing, oil painting, watercolour and so on no longer exist.

Tristan Tzara
Page of Dada, 1919

There is painting, and there is no doubt that illuminated signs are more a part of painting than most of the pictures exhibited at the National.'

The first contemporary painters whom the future surrealists admired were those whom Apollinaire pointed out to them. Chirico and Picasso were among them, of course, but so were Chagall, Braque, Derain and Matisse. Aragon made an allegorical eulogy of Matisse in his Le Libertinage, in which he personified his painting in the form of a pretty woman called Matisse.

Andre Breton and his friends - who were soon joined by Paul Eluard, Jacques Rigaut, Benjamin Peret, and other poets - were anxious to take further and further steps towards originality; they lay in wait for the signs which would reveal the age. From the appearance of fauvism in 1905 until the debut of purism in 1918, school after school came into being. Expressionism, cubism, orphism, rayonism, the earlier constructivism, suprematism, vorticism, futurism, all claimed to renew the techniques of creation and its aims. Faced with all these sects, some individuals developed a streak of militant cynicism. Of these the most gifted was Arthur Cravan, who was proud of his athletic physique and wanted to be a 'boxer-poet'. He once said that 'every great artist has a feeling for provocation'.

Cravan ran a review, Maintenant, which he edited single-handed and which he sold from a costermonger's barrow. In 1914 Maintenant carried a virulent review by Cravan of the Salon des Independants, lashing every exhibitor with ferocious sarcasm in an unparalleled example of critical brutality. He said of one picture : 'I would rather spend two minutes under water than in front of this painting. It would be less suffocating. The values of this work are arranged with the aim of doing good, whereas in a painting which is the product of a vision the values are nothing but the colours of a luminous sphere.' Arthur Cravan organized a show in Paris, on 5 July 1914, during which he fired a pistol, boxed, danced and delivered a lecture, punctuated by insults to the audience, in which he maintained that sportsmen were superior to artists. Cravan's statement that 'genius is an extravagant manifestation of the body' heralded the dadaist insurrection.

Another refractory individual was Jacques Vache, a young cynic who expressed his scorn ror art in his Lettres de guerre. Vache did some sketching, but turned down Breton's invitation to illustrate some of his poems. He did not particularly want to be an artist, but longed to be 'a member of a Chinese secret society, with no purpose, in Australia'. Cravan and Vache both died in 1919, but the memory of Vache, in particular, was to hover over the Litterature group, and it was Vache's nihilist humour that Breton was to seek to recapture in his temporary involvement with dadaism.

Tristan Tzara
 

Dada was not a movement added to all the other movements. Rather it was an anti-movement which opposed not only all the academicisms, but also all the avant-garde schools which claimed to be releasing art from the limits which confined it. Dada was a detonation of anger which showed itself in insults and buffoonery. 'Dada began not as an art form, but as a disgust' was Tristan Tzara's definition : disgust with a world racked by war, with boring dogmas, with conventional sentiments, with pedantry, and the art which did nothing but reflect this limited universe. Dada was born in a neutral country at the height of the war, and it appeared as a declaration of the rights of fantasy.

Its starting point was the opening in Zurich of the Cabaret Voltaire. This was run by the German writer Hugo Ball, who issued a press release on 2 February 1916, stating his aim as 'to create a centre for artistic entertainments'. The presence of Tzara, a born dis-organizer, brought subversive energy to the musical and poetry meetings held in the cabaret. Readings of phonetic or simultaneous poetry, performed in horrific costumes and masks, hurled defiance at the public. There was a review, Dada, in which Tzara propagated the principles of derision. Dada had no programme, wanted nothing, thought nothing, and created only with the intention of proving that creation was nothing. In a mocking attack on systems, Tzara proclaimed 'Pure Idiocy', and announced : 'Intelligent man has become an absolutely normal type. The thing that we are short of, the thing that is interesting now, the thing that is rare because it possesses the anomalies of a precious being, the freshness and the freedom of the great anti-man, that thing is the Idiotic. Dada is using all its strength to establish the idiotic everywhere. Doing it deliberately. And is constantly tending towards idiocy itself.
 

Tristan Tzara

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

born 1896, Moinesti, Rom.
died December 1963, Paris


Romanian-born French poet and essayist known mainly as the founder of Dada, a nihilistic revolutionary movement in the arts, the purpose of which was the demolition of all the values of modern civilization.

The Dadaist movement originated in Zurich during World War I, with the participation of the artists Jean Arp, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp. Tzara wrote the first Dada texts—La Première Aventure céleste de Monsieur Antipyrine (1916; “The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine”) and Vingtcinq poèmes (1918; “Twenty-Five Poems”)—and the movement's manifestos, Sept Manifestes Dada (1924; “Seven Dada Manifestos”). In Paris he engaged in tumultuous activities with André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon to shock the public and to disintegrate the structures of language. In about 1930, weary of nihilism and destruction, he joined his friends in the more constructive activities of Surrealism. He devoted much time to the reconciliation of Surrealism and Marxism and joined the Communist Party in 1936 and the French Resistance movement during World War II. These political commitments brought him closer to his fellowmen, and he gradually matured into a lyrical poet. His poems revealed the anguish of his soul, caught between revolt and wonderment at the daily tragedy of the human condition. His mature works started with L'Homme approximatif (1931; “The Approximate Man”) and continued with Parler seul (1950; “Speaking Alone”) and La Face intérieure (1953; “The Inner Face”). In these, the anarchically scrambled words of Dada were replaced with a difficult but humanized language.

Raoul Hausmann
Tatlin at Home
1920




Kurt Schwitters
Interior of Hanover Merzbau
1925-1936
 

Dada filled its statements with incoherence, on the grounds that life itself is incoherent, and played havoc with art because art lovers had lost the idea of art as a game. 'All pictorial or plastic art is useless; art should be a monster which casts servile minds into terror' was Tzara's cry in his 1918 Manifesto, which 'attracted the attention of Andre Breton.

To achieve the destruction of art by artistic means, Tzara advocated that oil painting and all aesthetic demands should be abandoned. 'The new artist protests; he no longer paints (this is only a symbolic and illusory reproduction). He creates directly in stone, in wood, in iron or in tin. He creates rocks, locomotive organisms which can be turned in any direction by the limpid wind of momentary sensation.' Thus, Marcel Janco, who made dadaist posters and masks, also made plaster reliefs which he sometimes encrusted with mirror fragments.

Jean Arp, and Sophie Taeuber who lived with him, produced automatic drawings, collages made 'according to the laws or chance', and even tapestries. They combined very simple forms without making any deliberate choice of arrangement. Hans Richter did not abandon the picture form, but painted his  Visionary portraits (1917) in the halt-light or evening, when he could no longer distinguish the colours on his palette or on the canvas. The Berlin dadaists, led by Raoul Hausmann, invented photomontage, making up works from scraps of photographs. Soon after this, Kurt Schwitters, in Hanover, was to initiate 'Merz', his own personal version of Dada, which involved collecting rubbish to make pictures or sculptures.
 

Kurt Schwitters The Proposal

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976) Visionary portraits, 1917

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976) Visionary portraits, 1917

 

Had not two exceptional men, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, pushed anti-art to its furthest limits, nothing would have remained of the Dada revolt but the memory of an ephemeral agitation. Duchamp, the ascetic of non-sense, turned all his finds into the result of an exercise in meditation. In tact, what he did was not exactly anti-art, but what he described as 'dry art', by which he meant an art from which every aesthetic sentiment, even emotion or judgment, was excluded. 'The worst danger is that one might arrive at a form of taste', he said; to avoid both good and bad taste, he set about the 'dehumanization' of art. To this end he used 'the irony of affirmation', in which he put forward, with a glacial wit, absurd propositions intended to disturb rather than to provoke laughter.

Duchamp's imperturbable severity in rejecting the easy course, and his power of intellectual concentration gave his actions their real value. It anyone but he had drawn a moustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and entitled it L.H.0.0.Q. (1919), it would have been mere facetiousness. (L.H.0.0.Q. - Elle a chaud аu cul - She has hot pants.) It would have had no more effect than the grimacing Beethoven who appeared on the cover of the Dada Almanach. With Duchamp, every pun was a charge of mental dynamite placed under a convention to be exploded.
 

The small number of pictures which he condescended to paint have no aim other than that or dismantling the pictorial process like a clock mechanism. In the Chess players (1911, Philadelphia, Museum of Art), he analysed cubism; in Sad Young Man in a Train (1911, Venice, Peggy Guggenheim collection), a painting with a black border like a death announcement, he gave subtle expression to an inner state; in the Coffee mill (1911), the way he showed the rotation of the handle brought a still life to real life. He examined the effects of movement of a body in Nude descending a staircase (1912, Philadelphia, Aluseum of Art), which made his reputation in New York, and in King and Queen surrounded by swift nudes (1912, ibid.) For Passage from Virgin to Bride (1912, New York, Museum of Modern Art) and The Bride (1912, Philadelphia, Museum of Art), he abandoned the brush and applied his colours with his fingers. Finally, in the work which was his last painting on canvas, Tu m' (1918, New Haven, Yale University), he showed a trompe-l'ail tear in the canvas, held together with real pins, among the shadows cast by objects in the painting.

Marcel Duchamp
Bicycle Wheel, 1913

Duchamp tried to destroy traditional ideas of painting and sculpture by employing plays on words and plays on objects. Sometimes he put forward entirely unprecedented creations : 'Take a cubic centimetre of tobacco smoke and paint its interior and exterior surfaces with waterproof paint.' Sometimes he defined new art forms : 'Painting or sculpture. Receptacle, glass dish - all manner of coloured fluids, pieces of wood, iron, chemical reactions. Shake the receptacle and look through it as through a transparency.' He sought the collaboration of chance, and submitted his work to the ' regime of coincidence'. Beyond this, he examined the way in which a common object could become something rare by the addition of some personal detail.

This he called the readymade. His first readymade, Bicycle wheel (1913), was followed by others whose quality was a result of their title or of the way in which they were presented. Apolinere enameled was based on a paint advertisement; Fresh widow (1920, New York, Museum of Modern Art) was a window with black leather panes.

The inverted urinal, with the title Fountain, which he sent to the committee of the 'Independents' exhibition, of which he was a member, in New York in 1917, was a supreme act of defiance, which brought with it his resignation not merely from the committee but also from that kind of art which is criticized and which is bought and sold. Although he could have turned out any number of readymades, Duchamp established a strict rule - 'Limit the number of readymades per year' - and used a kind of moral algebra in their selection : 'to dissociate the readymade, mass produced, from the invented - this dissociation is an operation.'

Marcel Duchamp
Apolinere Enameled
1917
 

Francis Picabia, the complete opposite of his friend Duchamp, used painting as a springboard from which to make giddy and perilous leaps. Picabia, the 'aristocrat of disorder', started off by painting landscapes in the style of Sisley and Pissarro. His first exhibition in Paris in 1905 was a huge success, and he was hailed by the critics as a post-impressionist of the future. But in 1908 he turned his back on this career and broke his contract with his dealer. From then on, Picabia, who was rich, generous, witty and volatile, set off on an impassioned search for pleasure both in art and in life. 'My thoughts love everything which is against reason', he said.

Francis Picabia
Girl Born without a Mother
1916

 'There is nothing I would rather be than a man of inexperience.' When he painted Rubber (1909, Paris, Musee National d'Art Moderne), he was taking up abstractionism a year ahead of Kandinsky. On his honeymoon in Spain with Gabrielle Buffet he painted two 'orphic' pictures, Procession in Seville (1912, New York, private collection) and Dances at the Spring (Philadelphia, Museum of Art), which were a great success at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. After his exhibition in New York, he won over Paris with more 'orphic' pictures, Udnie or the dance (Paris, Musee National d'Art Moderne), and Edtaonisl (Art Institute of Chicago). But he wanted to avoid being confined to any genre, and in 1915 he moved into his 'mechanist' period. His paintings in this period are of real or imaginary machines, and are sometimes engineering drawings with humorous additions. In January 1917 he founded the review 391, in which he kept up a constant mockery of artistic circles. 'O laggardly painters, the regions you explore are ancient histories. You would do better to paint the cliffs of Dieppe in red and blue.' He played with words and images like a juggler with coloured balls, and just as swiftly and skilfully. In 1918 in Switzerland he published 'Poems and Drawings of the girl born with no mother' (Poemes et dessins de la fille nee sans mere ) and the 'Funeral Athlete' (U'Athlete des pompes funebres). During this visit Picabia met Tristan Tzara, and hurled himself, his wealth and his enthusiasm into dadaism. Picabia was almost forty, no boisterous adolescent, but he was a whirlwind of irresistible vitality.

Dada was taken up by the Litterature group, which gave it such an individual turn that a historian, Michel Sanouillet, has produced the theory that 'Surrealism was the French form of Dada'. Tzara's arrival in Paris was made the occasion, in January 1920, for the 'First Friday of Litterature' (and the last : there were no others). This 'Friday' was a poetry soiree at which Tzara read a newspaper article, under the title Роеmе, to the accompaniment of bells, and Breton, who gave a commentary on the pictures on show to the public, unleashed a row by showing a picture, Riz аu nez, which Picabia drew in chalk on a blackboard and which Breton wiped off to symbolize the inanity of art. There were other meetings, in particular that at the Theatre de Luvre on 27 March, when Tzara's La Premiere Aventure celeste de M. Antipyrine was staged in a set designed by Picabia. The set - transparent, and placed in front of the actors instead of behind - was made up of a bicycle wheel, cables and picture frames. Picabia also designed paper costumes, and wanted to include in the show a tableau vivant of a live monkey fastened to a canvas. At the last moment he had to be satisfied with a toy plush monkey. His Manifeste cannibale, read by Breton dressed as a sandwich man, produced great commotion among the audience.

Francis Picabia
Optophone
1918

For the Festival Dada on May 26 in the Salle Gaveau, which began with the appearance of the 'Sex of Dada' and which ended with a performance of Symphonic Vaseline with a twenty-voice choir, this dedicated iconoclast also designed, in his own inimitable way, the set for the playlet by Breton and Soupault Vous m'oublierez, in which Paul Eluard played the part of 'Sewing Machine'. Picabia was the moving spirit of these 'happenings', which were planned in his apartment. In this year, 1920, his fantasy knew no limits : he painted pictures in Ripolin enamel, made collages of matchsticks, toothpicks and dressmakers' tape measures (Flirt, Match woman, The Handsome Pork Butcher, etc.), wrote impertinent books like Unique Eunuque ('Unique Eunuch') and Jesus-Christ Kastaquouere ('Jesus Christ the Adventurer'), and bombarded with sarcasms anyone who took him too seriously.

Many surrealist principles were certainly developed during the Dada period. For instance the printed papillons, wall stickers, appeared first in 1920. Breton himself was the author of the papillon which read 'Dada is not dead. Watch out for your overcoat'. The publications of this period, 391, Bulletin Dada and Dadaphone, with their revolutionary typography, were forerunners of the layout of the surrealist journals. In 1920, too, we see the establishment of the principle of 'intervention' in the meetings of opponents. The dadaists burst in on a lecture by the former futurist Marinetti, who was trying to launch 'tactilism', a movement based on touch, with works intended to be fondled and caressed. They disturbed the first production of Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel (1921) by Jean Cocteau, whom they loathed, by getting up in turn and yelling 'Vive dada'. Finally, the way in which the dadaist exhibitions in Paris were organized established the climate which was to reign later in the surrealist exhibitions, particularly those of Max Ernst and Man Ray.
 

Max Ernst The bat makes the man 1920

The group admired Max Ernst for his Fiat Modes lithographs, his Fatagagas, painted together with Arp, and his collages. His exhibition entitled 'La Mise sous whisky-marin', in May 1921, which he was not able to attend himself, brought in le Tout Paris, the high society of Paris, attracted by the programme of festive excitements which was announced for the private view. The dadaists, tieless and wearing white gloves, produced a never-ending stream of absurd gestures; a man hidden in a cupboard insulted the guests as they arrived ; then the lights were put out, and from the cellar, whose open trapdoor emitted a crimson glow, Aragon let out yells and pronounced meaningless sentences. This kind of mise-en-scene was not intended as mere propaganda : its aim was to ridicule the very idea of a private view.

Man Ray had arrived from the United States preceded by a considerable reputation. He had painted abstracts recalling those of Duchamp and Picabia - sometimes using a spray gun. He had made poetic objects such as Catherine Barometer which parodied everyday objects, and above all he had published New York Dada, in association with Duchamp. In December 1921 the poets of the Lttirature group assembled his works at Librairie Six, Soupault's bookshop in the Avenue de Lowendal, and sent out this invitation ; 'No one knows any longer where M. Ray was born. After having been a coal merchant, several times a millionaire, and chairman of the Chewing Gum Trust, he has now decided to accept the invitation of the dadaists to exhibit his latest work in Paris.' When the public arrived for the private view, the room was full of toy balloons, which completely hid the paintings. At a given signal, the organizers, with yells of 'Hurrah', burst the balloons with their cigarettes.
 

Dada was soon to burn itself out, for lack of fuel. Picabia spun on his heel away from the movement because he no longer tound Tzara amusing. He declared 'The thing I find of least interest in other people is myselr'. Breton and Duchamp refused to take part in the 'Salon Dada' presented by Tzara at the Galerie Montaigne on 6 June 1921. In order to proclaim the confusion of genres, he asked poets to send paintings and painters to send poems. He set an example himself by showing three paintings. My, Dear and Friend. Soupault, Aragon, Peret and Rigaut also showed work in this exhibition. The room was full of strange objects, and there were inscriptions all over the walls and stairs : 'This summer elephants will be wearing moustaches ; what about you?' - 'Dada is the biggest confidence trick of the century'.

Breton was no longer satisfied with this kind of manifestation. His natural seriousness needed some enterprise of greater breadth. In 1922 he decided to organize a 'Congress of Paris', at which people with varying points of view would try to define the various trends of the Modern Spirit. He wanted debates on questions such as 'Has the so-called Modern Spirit always existed?' and 'Among objects which we call modern, is a top hat more or less modern than a locomotive?'. This was followed by a breach with Tzara, who disapproved of the idea of a Congress which would not be dominated by anti-art, and subsequently by the dissolution of Paris dadaism. Tzara's counterblast to the Congress, Le Caur a barbe, was Dada's swan-song.

On March 1922, Litterature appeared under a new banner. Francis Picabia set out its programme in an editorial note. 'Do not admire yourself. Do not let yourself be shut up in a revolutionary school which has become conventional. Do not allow commercial speculation. Do not seek official glory. Draw your inspiration only from life, and have no ideal save that of the continued movement of intelligence.'
 

Without the Dada experience, surrealism would not have existed in the form in which we know it. It ran the risk of being a continuation of symbolism topped up with polemic. During the two years of Dada, the surrealists underwent a physical and spiritual training which allowed them thereafter to confront problems equipped with a knowledge of avant-garde struggle which they had not previously possessed. It is not true to say that surrealism was born after Dada, like a phoenix arising from its ashes. It was born during Dada, and became aware of its resources while it was in public action. Surrealism acquired a need to relate verbal or graphic delirium to an underlying cause, one less gratuitous than the total negation of everything. Nevertheless, some artists who took an active part in surrealism - Picabia, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Duchamp, Arp - retained the imprint of dadaism. Arp, for instance, wrote in 1927 : 'I exhibited with the surrealists because their attitude of revolt towards "art" and their direct attitude to lire were as good as Dada'. These artists were to nurture a constant reeling for nonsense, for the absurd chance discovery, which was a counterweight to the solemn speculations of the other surrealists.