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Art of the 20th Century
A Revolution in the Arts
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Art Styles
in 20th century Art Map
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The Great Avant-garde Movements
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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
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Anti-art
(Dadaism)
Raoul
Hausmann
Kurt
Schwitters
Hans Richter
Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Marcel
Duchamp
Francis
Picabia
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Arthur Cravan
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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.
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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.
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Tristan Tzara
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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.
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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.
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Raoul
Hausmann
Tatlin at Home
1920

Kurt
Schwitters
Interior of Hanover Merzbau
1925-1936
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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.

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

Hans Richter
(German, 1888-1976)
Visionary
portraits, 1917 |
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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Marcel
Duchamp
Apolinere Enameled
1917
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Marcel
Duchamp
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Even (The
Large Glass).
1915-1923
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Marcel
Duchamp accumulated notes, drawings and experiences
-documents subsequently collected in his Valise and
Green box - for the construction, over a period of eight years, of
his 'Large Glass', The Bride stripped bare by her bachelors,
even (1915-23, Philadelphia, Museum of Art). This is not, as some
people think, an unfinished work, but an unfinishable work. This
distinction is vitally important. He was in search of an ideal which
he defined as 'painting of precision and beauty of indifference'. Like
Picabia's
Girl born with no mother,
Duchamp's
Bride is the Machine, seen as the key element of the modern
world,
Duchamp starts from the principle
that a new machine in operation for the first time is like a virgin at
the moment she is deflowered, and makes a constant play on this
ambiguity. He does this to such effect that it is not possible to tell
whether his satire is aimed at the cult of the machine or at physical
desire. He developed the plan of a weird machine, constructed with a
maximum use of error and chance. The outline of the panel includes an
invisible motor, comprising, above, the Hanging Female Object (or the
Bride) and below, nine 'Malic Moulds' in which a 'gas' is cast into
the form of nine Bachelors. Then there is a Chariot, enclosing a
Watermill whose to-and-fro movements recite a Litany, a Chocolate
Grinder and so on. When
Duchamp abandoned painting, in
1923, he retained his influence over the avant-garde, who treated him
as a reteree to decide who should join them; this was not because of
what he had done but because of what he had chosen not to do.
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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.
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Francis
Picabia
Girl Born without a Mother
1916
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'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.
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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.
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Francis
Picabia
Optophone
1918
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.'
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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.
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