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Author: Nathalia Brodskaïa

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ISBN: 978-1-78310-776-6

Nathalia Brodskaïa

SURREALISM

Genesis of a Revolution

Contents

SURREALISM

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO: THE CATALYST OF SURREALISM

THE WAR – THE STIMULUS FOR DADA

DADA – THE CRADLE OF SURREALISM

DADA OUTSIDE ZÜRICH

DADA IN PARIS

THE BAPTISM OF SURREALISM

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SURREALISM

THE SURREALISTS BEFORE SURREALISM

MAX ERNST 1891-1976

YVES TANGUY 1900-1955

JOAN MIRÓ 1893-1983

ANDRÉ MASSON 1896-1987

RENÉ MAGRITTE 1898-1967

SALVADOR DALÍ 1904-1989

PAUL DELVAUX 1897-1994

SURREALISM WITHOUT FRONTIERS

INDEX

NOTES

Giorgio de Chirico, Premonitory Portrait of
Guillaume Apollinaire, 1914. Oil and charcoal

on canvas, 81.5 x 65 cm. Centre Georges-Pompidou,

Musée national d’art moderne, Paris.

SURREALISM

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO: THE CATALYST OF SURREALISM

The history of Surrealism maintains a beautiful legend. After a long voyage, a sailor returned to Paris. His name was Yves Tanguy. As he was riding in a bus along the Rue La Boétie, he saw a picture in the window of one of the numerous art galleries. It depicted a nude male torso against the background of a dark, phantasmal city. On a table lays a book, but the man is not looking at it. His eyes are closed. Yves Tanguy jumped out of the bus while it was still in motion and went up to the window to examine the strange picture. It was called The Child’s Brain, and was painted by the Italian Giorgio de Chirico. The encounter with the picture determined the sailor’s fate. Tanguy stayed on shore for good and became an artist, although until then he had never held either a pencil or a paintbrush in his hands.

This story took place in 1923, a year before the poet and psychiatrist André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto in Paris. Like any legend, it does not claim to be exact in its details. One thing cannot be doubted: Giorgio de Chirico’s painting produced such an unforgettable impression that it became one of the sources of the art of Surrealism as it began to develop after the First World War. The Child’s Brain had a wonderful effect on someone else besides Yves Tanguy. “Riding along the Rue La Boétie in a bus past the window of the old Paul Guillaume Gallery, where it was on display, I stood up like a jack-in-the-box so I could get off and examine it close up”, André Breton later recalled. “For a long time I could not stop thinking about it and from then on I did not have any peace until I was able to acquire it. Some years later, on the occasion of a general exhibition of de Chirico [paintings], this painting returned from my home to where it had been before (the window of Paul Guillaume), and someone else who was going that way on the bus gave himself up to exactly the same impulse, which is exactly the reaction it still provokes in me all this time after our first encounter, now that I have it again on my wall. The man was Yves Tanguy.”[1]

The consistency and details of the events are not as important as the basic fact that de Chirico’s pictures had an unusual effect on the future Surrealists. The artists themselves guessed at its reasons. However, explanation became possible only with the passage of time, once the painting of European Surrealists had become an artistic legacy, and when the time arrived to render an account of it and interpret its language. The closed eyes of de Chirico’s figure were associated with the call of the Romantics and Symbolists to see the world not with the physical but with the inner eye, and to rise above crude reality. At the same time, the artist depicted his figure with a prosaic naturalism. His typical-looking face, his protruding ears, fashionable moustache, and the sparse hairs on his chin, in combination with a body which is by no means unathletic but which has filled out a bit too much, are material and ordinary. The sense of mystery and abstraction from life that the painting carried within it is made frighteningly real by this contradiction. De Chirico’s metaphysical painting gave his contemporaries an example of the language of Surrealism. Later on, Salvador Dalí defined it as “the fixation in trompe l’oeil of images in dreams”[2]. Each of the Surrealists realised this principle in his own way; however, it is in this quality of their art, taken outside the bounds of realism, that Surrealism lies. Surrealism would never have occurred at any given moment had it not been for Giorgio de Chirico.

Fate linked Giorgio de Chirico’s life to the places and the landscapes which fed his imagination. He was born in 1888 in Greece, where his father built railways. His birthplace was the town of Volo, the capital of Thessaly, from which, according to legend, the Argonauts had set out on their quest for the Golden Fleece. For the whole of his life Giorgio de Chirico retained the vivid impression of the Classical architecture of Athens. “All the magnificent sights that I saw in Greece in my childhood (I have never seen such beautiful ones since) certainly impressed me deeply and remain firmly imprinted in my soul and in my mind”, he wrote in his memoirs.[3] There are recollections of Classical architecture and of the sculpture of ancient Greece in almost every one of his paintings. In Greece he received his first lessons in drawing and painting. At the age of twelve, de Chirico began to study at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Athens. At the age of sixteen, after the death of his father, he left for Italy with his mother and brother. De Chirico then discovered the wonderful Italian cities in which the spirit of the Middle Ages still survived – Turin, Milan, Florence, Venice and Verona. Together with his memories of Greece, these cities lay at the basis of his own private world, the one that he created in his painting. The paintings of de Chirico’s youth, in his so-called “Arcade Period”, are fascinating because they possess a quality which avant-garde painting often lacked. De Chirico built the city of his dreams. A white city stood on the shore of a dark-blue sea. Its straight streets were lined with arcades, as in Turin or Ferrara. The streets open out onto the area of a square, decorated with ancient sculpture. But this town was completely empty, uninhabited. Only occasionally could a man be seen in the perspective that was formed by a street; sometimes it is not even a man but only his shadow. In some places a cane that somebody had forgotten was still leaning against a wall. Sometimes a little girl ran about in the street, alone in the empty town. Any man might well have dreamed of such a strange town: it was marvellous. The stone of its buildings and the falling shadows were frighteningly real. And at the same time a secret lived there, a notion of the other world, at whose existence we can try to guess, but which only a select few are privileged to see. The Surrealist poet Paul Éluard devoted these lines to Giorgio de Chirico:

A wall announces another wall

And the shadow protects me from my fearful shadow

O tower of my love around my love

All the walls were running white around my silence.

You, who were you protecting? Impervious and pure sky

Trembling, you sheltered me. The light in relief

Over the sky which is no longer the mirror of the sun

The stars of the day among the green leaves

The memory of those who spoke without knowing

Masters of my weakness and I am in their place

With eyes of love their over-faithful hands

To depopulate a world of which I am absent.[4]

Life gave Giorgio de Chirico another marvellous opportunity: he spent two years in Munich where he studied not only painting, but also classical German philosophy. “In order to have original, extraordinary, perhaps immortal ideas”, wrote Schopenhauer, “it is enough to isolate oneself so completely from the world and from things for a few moments that the most ordinary objects and events should appear to us as completely new and unknown, thereby revealing their true essence.”[5] In Munich he saw a kind of painting which awakened the craving for mystery that lay sleeping in his soul – he got to know [Arnold] Böklin. In 1911 Giorgio de Chirico arrived in Paris and settled in the Montparnasse district, on the Rue Campagne-Premiere. When his paintings appeared at the Salon d’automne, the Parisian artists saw the de Chirico who would later impress them with his Brain of the Child, and who wrote: “What I hear is worth nothing, the only thing that matters is what my eyes see when they are open, and even more when they are shut.”[6] Giorgio de Chirico himself called his art “metaphysical”.

Giorgio de Chirico, Spring in Turin, 1914.

Oil on canvas. Private Collection.

Giorgio de Chirico, Melancholia, 1912.

Oil on canvas. Estorick Foundation, London.

Giorgio de Chirico turned up in the right place at the right time. For the young people of Montmartre and Montparnasse he became an inspiration and almost a prophet. In 1914 de Chirico depicted Apollinaire in profile against the background of a window. On the poet’s temple he drew a white circle. When Apollinaire went off to the front soon afterwards, he was wounded in the left temple, in the place shown in the picture. The artist had become a visionary for them, with the power to see into the future. Guillaume Apollinaire himself, an ardent advocate of Cubism, a theoretician of art, colour and form, was overwhelmed by the romantic mystery of de Chirico’s paintings. He dedicated a poem to him which was a prototype for the future development in Surrealist literature, and called it “Ocean of Land”.

I have built a house in the middle of the Ocean

Its windows are the rivers that pour out of my eyes

Octopi teem everywhere where the high walls stand

Hear their triple heartbeat and their beak knock against the windows

Damp house

Burning house

Fast season

Season that sings

The aeroplanes lay eggs

Look out they are going to drop anchor

Watch out for the anchor they are dropping

It would be nice if you could come from the sky

The honeysuckle of the sky is climbing

The octopi of the land quiver

And then we are so many and so many to be our own gravediggers

Pale octopi of chalky waves O octopi with pale beaks

Around the house there is this ocean which you know

And which never rests.[7]

Giorgio de Chirico summoned to the surface what had been hidden deep within the art of the beginning of the twentieth century. In the course of the following decades, the spirit of de Chirico found its way into the painting of all the Surrealist artists. References to his pictures turned up in their canvases, mysterious signs and symbols born from his imagination; the mannequins he invented prolonged their lives. However, for the seed of the art of Giorgio de Chirico to be really able to germinate, the young generation of the twentieth century would have to experience a vast upheaval.

Carlo Carrà, The Enchanted Room, 1917.

Oil on canvas, 65 x 52 cm. Private Collection, Milan.

THE WAR – THE STIMULUS FOR DADA

The art of Surrealism was the most direct outcome of its time. Those who created it, literary men and artists, date from the generation that was born in the last decade of the nineteenth century. At the start of the First World War, each of them was about twenty years old. After the monstrous crimes of the Second World War, after the extermination of millions of people in concentration camps and the destruction of Japanese cities with the atomic bomb, previous wars seemed only like distant historical episodes. It is difficult to imagine what a disaster, and in fact what a tragedy, the First World War was. The first years of the twentieth century were marked by outbreaks of conflict in various parts of the world, and there was a sense that people were living on a volcano. Nevertheless, the start of the war came as a surprise. On June 28, 1914, in the Serbian city of Sarajevo, the student Gavrilo Princip killed the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. A war began in the Balkan; events developed swiftly. On the 1st of August, Russia joined the war against Germany, and on the 3rd and 4th of of the same month, France and Britain declared war on Germany. It was only the defeat of the Germans on the Marne from September 5 to 10 that saved Paris from destruction. At the same time, this led to a drawn-out positional war which turned into a nightmare. Many thousands of young people from every country who took part in the war never returned home, but fell victim to shrapnel, died in the trenches from illnesses, or were poisoned by the gas which the Germans used in the war for the first time in 1916. Many returned as invalids and were later to die as a result of their war wounds. And it was exactly this generation that would create the art of the twentieth century and carry on from the boldest beginnings of its predecessors.

Before the war, the artistic life of Paris reveled in the most complete and entrancing freedom. The Impressionists and the masters of the period of Post-Impressionism untied artists’ hands. A sense of the barriers in art established by a tradition or a school had vanished. Young artists could permit themselves everything that was possible or impossible. The boldness of the late-nineteenth century generation drew them into the field of the study of colour and form. In 1890, the young painter and theoretician of art, Maurice Denis, put into words for the first time what they had come to realise from the work of their predecessors: “A painting, before it is a warhorse, a nude woman or some sort of anecdote is essentially a flat surface covered with colours put together in a certain order.”[8] The most important thing in painting was colour, and it required special investigation. In the 1880s, Seurat and Signac had already turned to chemists and physicists with the aim of establishing a science of colour which they could use for themselves. The texture of the paint that was applied to the canvas contributed to the force of the colour. The nervous expressiveness of the colourful strokes in Van Gogh’s paintings enraptured young artists at exhibitions held after his death.

The Salon des Independants was established in Paris as early as 1884, and here anyone who wanted could exhibit his creations without the usual academic jury. In 1903, those who had never taken part in the official Salon that opened in the spring founded their own Salon d’Automne. And it was there that in 1905 Matisse and his group acquired the name “Fauves” because the violence of their colours evoked an association with beasts of prey, with wild animals in the primordial jungle. In 1907, the young poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who was an admirer of Matisse’s position in art, obtained an interview with him. In his article he quoted the words of the artist: “I have paints and a canvas, and I must clearly express myself, even in a simple way, applying three or four spots of colour or drawing three or four expressive lines”.[9] The Cézanne exhibition of October 1906, immediately after the artist’s death, turned the eyes of all young painters towards the form of an object. They discovered abstract forms in the creations of primitive art, in the figurines of the masters of Africa and Oceania which had entered Europe in large quantities. The most striking result of these revelations was Picasso’s Cubism: in 1907 he showed his friends his first big Cubist picture, The Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Similar processes in the assimilation of the new expressiveness in colour and form occurred in these years in other European countries as well. In 1905 “Die Brücke” (“The Bridge”) surfaced in Dresden, rivalling the Parisians in the field of colour. Subsequently, German artists also vied with the French for the claim to be the first to discover primitive art. In 1909, the Futurist Manifesto was published in Milan and then Paris. Its author Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote: “Our poetry is courage, audacity and revolt.” The Futurists were the first to rise up against old-fashioned art and cultural tradition. “Down with museums and libraries!” wrote Marinetti. “We issue this flaming manifesto as a proclamation announcing the establishment of Futurism, because we want to deliver this country from the malignant tumour on its body – from professors, archaeologists, cicerones and antiquarians… Hurry over here! Burn down the libraries! Dam the canals and sink the museums! Ha! Let the current carry off the famous paintings. Grab the pickaxes and the hammers! Destroy the walls of the venerable cities!”[10] Form served for them as a reflection of the swiftness of movement, of the dynamic of the new industrial world. In Russia, the artist Kazimir Malevich strove to remove the fetters of literature from art, to liberate it “from all the content in which it has been held back for thousands of years.”[11] Painting and sculpture were fully liberated from literary subjects, and only the motif remained to give a push to the assimilation of colour, form and movement. In Munich, a group of artists gathered around the journal “Der Blaue Reiter”, including the Russian Wassily Kandinsky. Their painting absorbed the whole richness of colour that by that moment had been opened up to the European avant-garde. In 1910, Kandinsky painted his first watercolour, in which there was nothing apart from a spot of colour and lines. The appearance of abstract painting was the natural result of such a rapid development in art. The artistic avant-garde was ruthless in its treatment of the bourgeois aesthetic.

Giorgio de Chirico,
Hector and Andromache, 1917.

Oil on canvas, 90 x 60 cm.

Private Collection, Milan.

Salvador Dalí, Gala and the Angelus of Millet Immediately
Preceding the Arrival of the Conic Anamorphoses, 1933.

Oil on wood, 24 x 18.8 cm. The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife – Dada Through
the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919-1920.

Photomontage, 114 x 90.2 cm. Staaliche Museen zu Berlin,

Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Francis Picabia, The Cacodylic Eye, 1921.

Oil on canvas and photographic collage including

postcards and various cuts of paper, 148.6 x 117.4 cm.

Centre Georges-Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris.

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky),
Night Sun – Abandoned Playground, 1943. Private Collection.

No less important was the fact that the new art was becoming international. Paris attracted all of the insurgents, all those who were finding alternatives to the traditional, much-travelled route. In Montmartre, and later in the district of the Boulevard Montparnasse, a special artistic world sprang up. Around 1900 in Montmartre, “an uncomfortable wooden house, nicknamed the Bateau-Lavoir, housed painters, sculptors, writers, humorists, actors, laundresses, dressmakers and costermongers.”[12] The Dutchman Kees van Dongen moved in, “barefoot in sandals, his red beard accompanied by a pipe and a smile.”[13] From 1904, the Spaniard Pablo Picasso lived on the floor below with his Parisian girlfriend Fernande Olivier, while artists, sculptors and poets from Spain gathered around him. The “Fauves” from the Parisian suburb of Chatou were often seen alongside them – the giants André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. The poets Max Jacob, André Salmon and others often came into their group. The ideological inspiration of the group was Guillaume Apollinaire. He met Picasso soon after the latter’s appearance in Montparnasse, and became the most ardent defender of the Cubism Picasso had devised. In 1906, the international colony of Montmartre was reinforced by an Italian from Livorno, Amedeo Modigliani. Jews from Russia and Poland, Germans, Romanians, even emigrants from Japan and Latin America entered a variegated artistic community which the journalist from Montmartre André Varnaux wittily called “The Paris School”.

The war destroyed the picturesque world of Montmartre which in these men’s art had been an inspirational force in its own right. The war brought the ruin of all their hopes. The Parisian Germans had to go return to Germany to take up arms against their friends. The French were also mobilised: some went away to the front, others, like Vlaminck, worked in munitions factories. In December 1914, Apollinaire wrote:

All the memories of a while ago

O my friends gone to war

Where are they, Braque and Max Jacob

Derain with grey eyes like the dawn

Where are Raynal Billy Dalize

Whose names resound with melancholy

Like footsteps in a church

Where is Cremnitz who has enlisted

Perhaps they are dead already…[14]

Apollinaire’s poetry is imbued with nostalgia for everything which the war took away from them – love, romance, the beauty of nature, the endless delights of Paris. For them, the radiance of the starry night had been replaced by flashes of gunfire:

The sky is given stars by German shells

The marvellous forest where I live is having a ball

The machine-gun is playing an air in demisemiquavers…[15]

Drafted to the front, Apollinaire remained there only a short time – he was seriously wounded and came back to Paris on March 17, 1916. His old friends rallied round him, as well as poets and artists who were new arrivals in Montparnasse; those on the scene included Max Jacob, Raoul Dufy, Francis Karko, Pierre Reverdy and André Breton. The black bandage which Apollinaire wore round his head after he was wounded was interpreted as a symbol of heroism. However, for many of those who surrounded the bard of the “abandoned youth”, the unbridled patriotism which had seized France was repugnant. Distinguished figures in the arts – Anatole France, Jean Richepin, Edmond Rostand, Madame de Noialles and others – praised the heroism of the soldiers who were dying for their country, preached hatred for the Kaisier and called for victory. They called Romain Rolland a traitor for standing out against the war. André Breton, who worshipped Apollinaire, nonetheless criticised him for not talking about the frightening realities of his era, and for reacting to the horror of war only with the desire to return to childhood. However, during the war Apollinaire and other men of letters did support Modernist art.

In 1916 in Paris, the first number of the journal SIC appeared, giving modernist poets and artists an opportunity for self-expression. It ran for three years. In 1917 a competitor to it appeared – the poet Pierre Reverdy published the journal Nord-Sud which he wanted to serve as a unifying force for Modernist literature and the visual arts. “Is it any wonder”, wrote Reverdy, “if we thought that now was a good time to rally round Guillaume Apollinaire?”[16] Several future Surrealists owed the beginning of their fame to these journals: the poets Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, the artist Francis Picabia, and others. However, things became really lively in this circle with Tristan Tzara’s appearance in Paris. In the spring of 1917, Max Jacob announced the “advent of the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara”, and in an SIC article entitled “The Birth of Dada”, it was written that “In Zürich the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara and the artist Janko are publishing an artistic journal, whose content looks attractive. The second number of Dada will come out shortly.”[17]

Peter Blume, South of Scranton, 1931.

Oil on canvas, 56 x 66 cm. The Metropolitan

Museum of Art, George A. Hearn Fund, New York.

DADA – THE CRADLE OF SURREALISM

“Dada” – this was actually the name of a journal. But Dada was something much bigger than a journal. Dada was an association of like-minded people, a movement encompassing the international artistic avant-garde. Dada was a coming to light of the tendencies and emotional reactions which were developing simultaneously in various countries of the world. Dada was a revolt against traditional art – the Dadaists advocated anti-art. And Dada was the cradle in which Surrealism uttered its first words, made its first movements – in short, grew and matured. The Dada movement was the first chapter of Surrealism.

It is usual to regard Zürich as the birthplace of Dada, although its adherents appeared at the same time in America as well. In Europe, the Dada movement gradually spread over various countries. Little Switzerland was the only officially neutral country in Europe, the only tiny island of peace amid the fires of the World War. It was there that those young people who did not want to take part in the European war found refuge. Among those whom the winds of war had blown into Zürich were the Germans Richard Huelsenbeck and Hugo Ball, the Romanians Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janko, and the Alsatian Hans Arp, and many others, including some Swiss intellectuals, joined them as well. What united them more than anything was their hatred of the existing social order, of which they saw the senseless slaughter of the war as the result. Among them were pacifists of various hues, but they did not organise anti-war demonstrations, and did not take an active part in political movements. Their protest took special forms, related only to the fields of literature, the theatre and the visual arts. They all came from bourgeois families and they were all, first and foremost, opposed to official art.

In the spring of 1915 the Romanians Tzara and Janko settled in Zürich. In 1916, on one of the little streets of old Zürich, the German Hugo Ball opened the Cabaret Voltaire. Later he told the story of how the owner of a restaurant, Jan Efraim, gave him a hall for the cabaret on Spiegelgasse, and Hans Arp offered pictures by Picasso, himself, and his friends for exhibition. Tzara, Janko and the Swiss Max Oppenheimer agreed to perform in the cabaret. On February 5th, the first concert took place there: “Madame Hennings and Madame Leconte sang French and Danish songs. Monsieur Tzara read Romanian poems. An orchestra of balalaikas played delightful Russian folksongs and dances”, Ball wrote in his memoirs.[18]

The name Dada was invented on February 8th. The godfather of the emerging movement was Tristan Tzara. Legend has it that a paper-knife fell entirely accidently onto the page of a dictionary where Tristan Tzara saw this word. “DADA MEANS NOTHING”, Tzara wrote in the “Dada Manifesto 1918”. “We learn in the newspapers that the Kru negroes call the tail of a sacred cow: DADA. Brick and mother, in a certain region of Italy: DADA. Wooden horse, nurse, double affirmation in Russian and Romanian: DADA.”[19] Declaring that he was against all manifestos, Tzara wrote: “Thus DADA was born out of a need for independence, out of mistrust of the community. Those who belong to us keep their freedom. We do not acknowledge any theory. We have enough Cubists and Futurists: laboratories of formal ideas. Does one create art to make money and to stroke the nice bourgeois?”[20] The basis of Dada was its ambition to destroy, without exception, all old art, on the grounds that it was not free and had been established by the bourgeois order they candidly despised. Dada was the negation of everything: “Every hierarchy and social equation set up as our values by our valets: DADA; … abolition of memory: DADA; abolition of archaeology: DADA; abolition of prophets: DADA; abolition of the future: DADA…” wrote Tzara.[21] His concept of freedom even extended as far as emancipation from logic: “Logic is a complication. Logic is always false. It drags the edges of notions and words away from their formal exterior towards ends and centres that are illusory. Its chains kill, enormous myriapods stifling independence.”[22]

At the Cabaret Voltaire something was always happening. At first, its organisers were content to perform poetic and musical works that were comparatively inoffensive to conventional tastes – they read the poems of Kandinsky and Blaise Cendrars and they performed Liszt’s “Thirteenth Rhapsody”. Russian and French evenings were organised. At a French evening on March 14th, Tzara read poems by Max Jacob, André Salmon and Laforgue, while Arp read out extracts from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi. In the evenings, they sang the songs of Aristide Briand. At the same time, their own individual works were performed, demonstrating Dada’s nihilist position in relation to all art of the past, even the most recent past. The idea of values that lay at the heart of the bourgeois aesthetic was something they utterly rejected. Hugo Ball wrote in his diary on 11 February: “Huelsenbeck arrived. He came out in favour of the intensification of Negro rhythm. If he had his way, he would replace the whole of literature with a drum-roll.”[23] On March 29, Huelsenbeck, Janko and Tzara read out the simultaneous poem of Tristan Tzara “The Admiral is Looking for a House to Rent”, together with Negro chants – works in which the principles of anti-art were formulated. “It is a contrapuntal recitative, in which three or more voices speak at the same time, sing, whistle or do something in the same spirit, but in such a way that the content of the thing that is put together from the intersections of their “parts” becomes melancholy, cheerful and odd”, Hugo Ball wrote of Tzara’s poem. “In this simultaneous poem the waywardness of the voice is clearly demonstrated, together with its dependence on the accompaniment. … The ‘Simultaneous Poem’ originates in the value of the voice. … It indicates … the clash of the ‘vox humana’ with the menacing and destructive world from whose rhythm and noises it cannot hide.”[24]

George Marinko,
Sentimental Aspects of Misfortune, c. 1937.

Tempera on masonite, 35.7 x 40.3 cm.

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.

Jacques Hérold, The Game, the Night, 1936.

Private Collection.

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky),
The Nice Weather, 1939. Private Collection.

Later, in 1920, the Dadaists published one of their manifestos in which there were instructions on how “To Make a Dadaist Poem”:

Take a newspaper

Take a pair of scissors

Choose from the newspaper an article of sufficient length

That you intend to give to your poem.

Cut out the article.

Then carefully cut out each one of the words which make up this article and put them into a bag.

Shake gently.

Then take out each cutting one after the other.

Copy them out conscientiously

In the order in which they came out of the bag.

The poem will be like you.

And here you will have a writer who is infinitely original and with a charming sensibility, even though it is misunderstood by the masses.[25]

Tristan Tzara himself never wrote poems using this method, a fact which clearly holds a touch of irony. However, the conception of spontaneity, and the method according to which, in his own words, “thought produces itself in the mouth”, later became, to a considerable degree, the foundation of the working methods of the Surrealists.

In July 1916, a plan for an artistic and literary journal to be called Dada was announced, but the first number did not appear until July 1917. In 1916, Tzara began to correspond with the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume, who introduced him to Max Jacob, Reverdy and Apollinaire. Apollinaire had become as much of an idol for the leader of the Dada movement, as much of an inspiration as he had been for the Paris avant-garde, “the most lively, alert and enthusiastic of the French poets”.[26] Tzara dedicated several lyrical poems to Apollinaire, full of restrained melancholy. In 1918, the Paris journal SIC published Tzara’s poem “The Death of Guillaume Apollinaire”:

We know nothing

We know nothing of grief

The bitter season of the cold

Digs long tracks in our muscles

He would have quite liked the joy of the victory

Well-behaved under the sadness calm in the cage

Nothing to be done

If the snow was falling upstairs

If the sun were to climb into our house during the night

To warm us

And the trees were hanging with their crown

Unique tear

If the birds were among us to gaze at their own reflections

In the peaceful lake above our heads

ONE COULD UNDERSTAND

Death would be a fine long voyage

And an unlimited holiday from the flesh from structures and from bones.[27]

Dadaism in Zürich was making its presence felt most strongly in literature. All the evenings at the Cabaret Voltaire were accompanied by sketches in fancy-dress, masques and productions of Dadaist plays. However, in the galleries, and even in Zürich’s biggest museum, the Kunsthaus, exhibitions were organised in which Tzara read lectures on modern art. Here, attention was focused on the Expressionists, to whom several of the members of the Zürich Dadaists belonged, and in particular on the abstract painting of Kandinsky. The Zürich Dadaists had some artists of their own as well: Marcel Janko illustrated Tzara’s poems with engravings, and Hans Arp, who also wrote poetry, was now appearing more often at the cabaret evenings in the capacity of an artist. The opening of the Dada Gallery, at which Tzara gave a lecture on Expressionism and Abstractionism, took place on 27 March 1917, and the following day Tzara gave a lecture on Art Nouveau. In the spring of 1917, after a long stay in America, Francis Picabia arrived in Switzerland. He composed poems that were very similar to those of Tzara. They began to correspond, feeling that they were soul mates. Picabia, inspired by the correspondence, went back to the work in drawing that he had long neglected, while Tzara busied himself enthusiastically on the journal Dada. Tzara invited Francis Picabia to the exhibition at the Kunsthaus. They spent three weeks together in Zürich in January and February of 1919. The association, and then the friendship, of Tristan Tzara and Picabia was the beginning of the contact between the Zürich Dadaists and their like-minded colleagues in Paris. On January 17, 1920, Tzara went to see Picabia in Paris, where he immediately became acquainted with André Breton, Paul Éluard and Philippe Soupault, and became involved in the events staged by the Paris Dadaists – the future Surrealists.

DADA OUTSIDE ZÜRICH

Francis Picabia brought to Paris the discoveries of those in America who had gone down the Dadaist road. The American avant-garde knew nothing of the Dadaists of Zürich, yet they were motivated by the same nihilism that had become a generalized feature of this artistic generation. The movement for freedom in art got under way earlier there than in Europe. In 1913, an international exhibition of modern art took place in New York, now well-known under the name of the “Armoury Show”. The modernist tendencies of European painting were represented in it; in particular, Marcel Duchamp’s picture Nude Descending a Staircase, and two pictures by Picabia, Dances at the Spring and Procession to Seville, were on display – they all provoked outrage and enjoyed success.

Francis Picabia, the son of a Cuban diplomat and a Frenchwoman, was born in Paris in 1879. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the École des Arts Décoratifs, and from 1899 he showed his work at the Salon des Indépendants. In 1909, he painted his first abstract picture, Rubber. In 1910, he met Marcel Duchamp. In the nihilist movement in the United States, along with Americans, there were Europeans who had taken refuge from the war. Several avant-garde groups arose in New York. Artists and poets gathered around journals or galleries. These centres included the gallery of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the salon of the collector Walter Conrad Arensberg, and certain chess clubs that were currently fashionable. What brought about the real turning-point in this movement was the arrival in America of two French artists – Marcel Duchamp and, following close behind him, Francis Picabia. Duchamp was exempted from his military service, and preferred to take refuge from the ostentatious patriotism of a warlike Paris in the United States. Picabia had been mobilised in the capacity of a driver to one of the generals and ordered to a post in Cuba, but he preferred to remain in New York.

André Breton, Untitled (Poem Object, for Jacqueline), 1937.

Collage, cloth on cardboard, with ribbon, sheet,

tarot card, metal mecanism, punched cardboard, ink,

place in a box (not represented here), 39.5 x 30.5 cm.

The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

Victor Brauner, André Breton,
Oscar Domínguez, Max Ernst, Jacques Hérold, Wilfredo Lam,
Jacqueline Lamba and André Masson, The Marseille Card Game,

published in VVV, N°2-3, 1943. Private Collection.