Surrealism. Nathalia Brodskaya
Читать онлайн книгу.
once again offended bourgeois taste with his ensemble painting. A furry stuffed animal, an ape, was attached to the canvas, surrounded by Picabia’s: Portrait of Cezanne, Portrait of Rembrandt, Portrait of Renoir and Still Life.
Salvador Dalí, The Old Age of William Tell, 1931.
Oil on canvas, 98 × 140 cm.
Private Collection.
A Dada festival was held two months later, on May 26, 1920, in the spacious Salle Gaveau on the Rue La Boétie. It was their most sensational event in Paris. There were music and sketches, and plays by Breton and Soupault were staged. The unusual dynamism of Dada shows in 1920 attracted new and younger disciples to their ranks, among whom were the poets Robert Desnos and Benjamin Peret, and the artist Serge Charchoune. The last sensational performance of 1920 was held in December. Picabia once again organised a provocative exhibition, and Jean Cocteau led a jazz band in which random performers played on random instruments. Tzara read out his manifesto with the instructions on how to compose poems. In 1920, Marcel Duchamp, whose works were shown under the pseudonym of Rrose Sélavy (in French, sounds like “Eros, c’est la vie”, in English, “Eros is life”), exhibited his famous L. H. O.O.Q., one of his Ready-Mades – a reproduction of the Mona Lisa to which the artist had added a beard and a moustache in pencil. It contained all the Dadaist denial of the classics and all their contempt for art in general. However, the excessive strain, the incredible rhythm of the performances, and the clashes among the incompatible personalities called for a breathing-space in their activity.
The year 1921 was marked by a new outburst of Dadaist activity. The year started with the implementation of the “visits” project, conceived by Breton – a Dadaist parody of the traditional code of polite society in past times. However, the act near the church of Saint-Julien-le-pauvre virtually came to nothing on account of rain. Nor did the trial of the writer Maurice Barres have the success they expected of it. A tribunal chaired by Breton found him guilty of the nationalism and extremism of the war years. The song sung by Tristan Tzara, “Dada Song”, livened up the event.
The song of a Dadaist
Who had Dada at heart
Overtired his motor
Which had Dada at heart
The lift was carrying a king
Heavy fragile enormous
He cut off his big right arm
And sent it to the Pope in Rome
This is why
The lift
No longer had Dada at heart
Eat chocolate
Wash your brain
Dada
Dada
Drink water.[33]
Toyen (Marie Cermínová), The Sleeper, 1937.
Private Collection.
More interesting still, in the context of the gestation of Surrealism, was the exhibition of Max Ernst which opened on May 2. Until then, the main figure from the visual arts that had made an appearance under the aegis of Dada was Picabia. Around that time, he was distancing himself more and more from Breton and Aragon’s company. Ernst was invited, to a large extent, out of a desire to play a joke on Picabia. They rented the bookshop Sans Pareil on the Rue Kleber for the exhibition. The invitation – the so-called “Pink Prospectus” – was couched in a half-nonsensical, derisive tone: “Entry is free, hands in pockets. The exit is guarded, painting under the arm.”[34] Everybody who mattered attended the viewing. One of the Dadaists, who had hidden himself in a cupboard, shouted out absurd phrases from inside it, along with the names of famous people: “Attention. Here is Isadora Duncan”, “Louis Vauxcelle, André Gide, van Dongen.” As it happened, both Gide and van Dongen were among those who attended. The stage was in the basement, all the lights were turned out, and heart-rending cries could be heard coming from a trap-door. …Breton struck matches, Ribemont-Dessaignes repeatedly shouted out the phrase “It’s dripping onto the skull”, Aragon meowed, Soupault played hide-and-seek with Tzara, while Peret and Charchoune spent the whole time shaking hands. As always, poems were read.
Even Parisians who had seen many sights were surprised by the exhibition itself. Ernst showed the most varied pieces: there were “mechano-plastic” works inspired by mechanical forms, objects, painted canvasses and drawings. Ernst’s collages were fundamentally different from the collages in which the Cubists had already given lessons – they had a poetic quality and provoked numerous associations. Ernst gave inexplicable titles to his works – for example, the Little Eskimo Venus, The Slightly Ill Horse, Dada Degas – and accompanied them with “verbal collages”. His poems were close in spirit to those of Breton’s circle. Indeed, it was after this exhibition of Max Ernst that Breton worked out a few fundamental principles of Surrealism for his later manifesto.
Yves Tanguy, Landscape with Red Cloud, 1928.
Private Collection.
Roland Penrose, Seeing is believing, 1937.
Oil on canvas, 100 × 75 cm.
The Roland Penrose Collection, Sussex.
The next exhibition was that of the Salon Dada which opened on June 6, 1921 on the Champs-Elysees, and lasted until June 18, extending over all the evenings which entered into the Salon Dada programme. In the exhibition hall, a very wide range of objects hung from the ceiling: an opened umbrella, a soft hat, a smoker’s pipe, and a cello wearing a white tie. Since the exhibition was advertised as an international one, invitations were sent out to Arp in Switzerland, Ernst and Baargeld in Germany, Man Ray in America, as well as other artists. Ernst exhibited his Cereal Bicycle with Bells for the first time. One picture by Benjamin Peret showed a nutcracker and a rubber pipe, and it was called The Beautiful Death, while another showed the Venus de Milo with a man’s shaven head. Under a mirror belonging to Philippe Soupault and reflecting the visitor’s own face was the inscription: Portrait of an Unknown Figure. Other works by Soupault were titled The Garden of My Hat, Sympathy with Oxygen, and Bonjour, Monsieur. In addition to all the other absurd inscriptions, a placard hung in the lift-cage which read “Dada is the biggest swindle of the century”. This exhibition already clearly pointed to Surrealism.
Despite the very serious contradictions between the strong individual personalities in the Dadaist movement, Breton designed one further “big swindle” in 1922. The Dadaists decided to hold their own Paris Congress – “The International Congress for the Determination of Directives and the Defence of the Modern Mind”. Despite almost six months of preparation, a wealth of publications, and a lively correspondence between Tzara, Picabia, Breton and others, this plan experienced a setback. André Breton was forced to admit that the movement was already dead and buried, and that there was no point in trying to resurrect it. However, just at that moment, in the spring of 1922, an event took place heralding the birth of Surrealism from within the Dadaist movement. A new number of Littérature, a journal which had not come out for some time, appeared on March 1, 1922. In it were published Breton’s “Three Tales of Dreams”, and his article entitled “Interview with Professor Freud in Vienna”. In 1921, at the time of his visit to Vienna, Breton failed to get an interview with Freud, but both publications testified to the author’s interest in using psychoanalysis for the expression of the unconscious in art. From the fourth number of the journal onwards, Breton took the entire management of the journal on himself. Appealing to those who remained in his camp, Picabia, Duchamp, Picasso, Aragon and Soupault, Breton wrote: “It cannot be said that Dadaism served any purpose other than to support us in a state of lofty emancipation, which we now reject, being of
Tristan Tzara,
Quoted in Michel Sanouillet,