‘Cobra after Cobra’ and the Alba Congress

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Jean‐Clarence Lambert, Cobra, Sotheby Publications, London, 1983, p 222 2 The Alba Congress was a reaction to the failure of the Marseille exhibition in August 1956. Organised with the support of the Ministry of Reconstruction and Urban Planning and various official bodies promoting tourism, it was supposed to be an avant‐garde arts festival and was held in Le Corbusier’s ‘La Cité Radieuse’. That alone was enough to link its participants to the most retrograde tendencies of modernity. The Lettrist International boycotted it (Potlatch, no 27, 2 November 1956). See Ken Knabb, ed and trans, Situationist International Anthology, Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, 1981, p 78. The congress in Alba, self‐financed, was to be an answer by the ‘Free Artists’ to those seen as part of the Establishment who had attended the arts festival in Marseille. 3 Dotremont, one of Cobra’s founder members, had not been invited because of his relationship with the publisher Nouvelle Revue Française, which was judged as reactionary. 4 Hence the name, which is an acronym for Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. 5 The common interest among the Dutch artists within Cobra (Constant, Corneille, Appel) was in children’s art. 6 In the ‘Linien’ exhibition (of 1939) catalogue, re‐published by Statens Museum for Kunst, København, 1988. 7 Géographie nocturne, Editions de la Main à Plume, Paris, September, 1941, p 1 8 La conquête du monde par l’image, Editions de la Main à Plume, Paris, April, 1942, p 18 9 The Resistance review Helhesten (the ‘horse of hell’ is a figure of Nordic mythology) was published by Jorn and his companions during the Nazi occupation in Denmark. In the first issue in 1941, Egill Jacobsen explained that, for him, Social Realism and Constructivism were equally ‘intellectual’ (in the pejorative sense), inasmuch as they each underestimated the emotive moment and psychological content. Many of these artists were Communist Party members or sympathisers. 10 The ‘poor woman buying fish’ is a reference to Parisiennes au marché by the Socialist Realist painter André Fougeron (1913–98), a leading artist associated with the French Communist Party in the early 1950s. 11 In a letter quoted by Jean‐Clarence Lambert, op cit, p 165 12 Reproduced in Knabb, op cit, p 84 13 The creation of the Institute of Design in Ulm (1953–68) coincides with Jorn’s foundation of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus the same year. Under Max Bill, the school developed distinct conceptions of design. The designer’s main task, according to him, was in re‐enchanting the objects of everyday life (as had been the Surrealist goal) but in the name of ‘the good, the beautiful, and the practical’. See Jeannine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend, eds, Bauhaus, Könemann, Cologne, 1999, p 74 14 This was the spirit (if not the letter) of the first Bauhaus and indeed of most avant‐garde movements of the twentieth century. 15 Originally appeared as a leaflet published after the Congress of Free Artists held in Alba, 2–8 September 1956 and was signed by J Calonne, Constant, G Pinot‐Gallizio, Jorn, J Kotik, P Rada, P Simondo, E Sottsass Jr, E Verrone and G J Wolman. Drawn up by Jorn together with others and later printed in Potlatch, no 27, November 1956. See Ken Knabb, op cit, p 78 16 Simon Sadler, The Situationist City, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999, p 121 17 Les lèvres nues, no 8, reprinted in Berreby, Documents, pp 302–9, translated as ‘Methods of Détournement’ in Knabb, op cit, pp 8–14 18 André Breton, ‘Sur certaines possibilités d’embellissement irrationnel d’une ville’, Le surréalisme au service de la révolution, no 6, May, 1933, Paris, p 18, cited in Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Secker and Warburg, London, 1989, p 410. 19 Sadler, op cit, p 109 20 Ibid 21 Anon, ‘Projet d’embellissements rationnels de la ville de Paris’, Potlatch, no 23, Paris, October, 1955 and in Lipstick Traces, op cit, pp 410–11 22 Asger Jorn, ‘Notes on the formation of the Imaginist Bauhaus’, first published as a leaflet in Italy in 1956 and in Eristica. Bolletino d’informazione de Movemento Internazionale per una Bauhaus Imaginista, no 2, translated and reprinted in Knabb, op cit, p 72 23 ‘Opening Speech of the Congress of Free Artists in Alba’, in Knabb, op cit, p 77 24 Ibid