Francis Picabia Research Articles

Dancing through Dada: Suzanne Duchamp’s Scottish Espagnole

: This article addresses the role of vernacular forms of dance and music within Suzanne Duchamp’s art. Focusing on her watercolor Scottish Espagnole (1920), it considers the interrelated concepts of dance, drawing, and diagrammatic language. The title refers to the dance of the schottische espagnole and a contemporaneous song by André Perchicot. Duchamp’s engagement with dance is positioned in relation to her peers, especially Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Loïe Fuller. This reading explores how dance functioned as a medium within Dada, as well as a path to abstraction more broadly.

HISTORY OF THE USE OF WASTE MATERIALS IN VISUAL ARTS: CONCEPT AND ROOTS

Today the whole world is struggling with the problem of waste materials and their proper maintenance. Examples of the use of waste material are also found in art. An artist always needs a medium to create their artwork, and also, in contemporary art, many artists are creating artwork from waste materials and beautify their environment and make people aware of its reuse. The process of making artwork from waste material is today known as ‘Scrap Art’ or ‘Junk Art’. An early example of the use of waste materials in art comes from the ‘Dadaism’ Art Movement, which started in France in the 20th century, when artists started exhibiting industrially produced objects as artwork, along with their titles. From here, a question mark was raised regarding the idea of ‘Readymade Art’ and its aesthetics. Behind this was the main artist ‘Marcel Duchamp’ whose work 'Fountain' in 1917. The other two major Artists were Man Ray and Francis Picabia. The second developed form was seen in Picasso's 'Bull Head' artwork in 1942, where Words like ‘Found objects’ and ‘Ready-mades’ became popular in the history of art. Many artists in contemporary art are creating artworks using these waste materials. This is not only enhancing the beauty of our public places but also making people aware of their reuse and also showing a new dimension of art creation. This research paper analyses what new changes have taken place in terms of style and thought due to the use of waste material in art from the beginning till today.

Les manifestes dadaïstes et l’art de la répétition ou comment “dire” qu’on n’a rien à dire

This article examines one of the major roles played by repetition in the Dadaist manifestos. While the goal of a manifesto, by definition, is to convey a message, the Dadaist manifestos suggest, through the use of the repetition, that they have no intention of proposing or communicating anything. Radically self-referential, this type of repetition, as demonstrated in this article analyzing several texts by Hugo Ball, André Breton, Francis Picabia, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon…, reflects Dada’s nihilistic program.

Hybridity and the Unifying Space of Painting: Larry Abramson in Conversation with Theolonius Marx

Abstract While the drive toward homogeneous and pure visual languages was at the foundation of early twentieth-century utopian modernist art systems, the Dadaist and Surrealist reaction to this utopianism took the form of extreme and often violent hybridity. Marcel Duchamp's 1913 “readymade” of a bicycle wheel placed atop a kitchen stool is a paradigmatic manifestation of the linguistic hybridity characteristic of post-utopian twentieth-century art. In the 1920s Francis Picabia made paintings constructed of separate and discrete layers of images, which, when viewed together, produced an unsettling visual “monster.” Picabia's practice of superimposition was a significant forerunner of prevailing contemporary practices in postmodern painting. In his essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” philosopher Fredric Jameson (1991) identifies pastiche as one of the main characteristics of cultural production in the age of postmodernism. Pastiche is defined as a work of art consisting of motifs borrowed from one or more sources, an incongruous hodgepodge of materials, forms, and images. In this age of pastiche, what are the options open to artists—to endlessly quote, imitate, or parody existing images and styles, or to construct a new and significant system of meaning? To discuss the centrality of the principle of hybridity in postmodern art—and in my own artistic practice of the past fifty years—I summoned Theolonius Marx, a fiction of my imagination who helped me handle the dilemmas of conceptual art in the 1970s. In this “conversation,” Theolonius and I ponder how hybridity has placed a challenge to utopian modernist concepts, and what the conditions are for it to thrive today as a relevant and sustainable medium.

Word, Image, and (Re)Production in Francis Picabia’s Mechanically Inspired Abstractions

Francis Picabia’s Bobinage (Bobbin, Winding or Coil) is a pencil and ink work produced on gouache-painted paper between 1921–1922. The free-floating forms in this piece appear, at first glance, to be studies in geometric abstraction. Yet, they, and the work’s title, make both semiotic and real-world references. The admixture of perspectives is notable, for it retains traces of the Cubist visual language that motivated Picabia and his peers as well as the imagery of the early twentieth-century technical diagrams that, as has been demonstrated by scholars, inspired his work. Examining Coil and other of Picabia’s artworks in tandem with the scholarship that has investigated these influences, this article explores the artist’s engagement with the very issue of representation. Through this investigation, this paper considers the ways in which Picabia’s work alludes to gender in a manner that privileges masculinity yet calls attention to the destabilizing effects of modernity—and modern representations—on notions about gender and, even, what it means to be human. Contextualized thusly, Coil represents not an abstract divergence but rather a continuation of the artist’s technical, gender, and, one could say, even cyborg investigations, revealing his engagement with new and innovative ways of perceiving, conceiving, and depicting modern experience.

Universal Prostitution: Francis Picabia's Diagrams of Proletarianization

Abstract This essay argues that the diagram and mechanomorph, those idioms for which Francis Picabia is most known in the history of the avant-garde, pushed past representation on the one hand and aesthetic abstraction on the other to access and articulate the historical specificity of the emergent proletarian subject position. Split between human labor bearer and source of abstract labor, the worker becomes both appendage and analog to productive technology as a node in the circulation of value. Borrowing language from Marx, who used the term “universal prostitution” to describe surplus-value-productive, or modern, labor that not only internally divides but also pits the worker against her or his own interests, Picabia's work investigates the advent of the post-human as a function of value. In this sense, his work is indicative of “real,” or concrete, abstraction.

Suzanne Duchamp's Readymade Paintings

Suzanne Duchamp pushed the boundaries of painting by incorporating unorthodox, machine-made materials within interconnected material geometries. Focusing on Un et une menaces (1916), Radiation de deux seuls eloignes (1916–20), and Le Readymade Malheureux de Marcel (1920), this article describes Duchamp’s particular way of integrating readymades into her artwork and reveals her ability to transform modern, store-bought elements into interwoven pictorial structures. Drawing Duchamp into dialogue with the Dada group, this article examines the geometric forms and materials of her artworks as a body of work in their own right and in conjunction with those made by her peers, particularly her husband Jean Crotti, her brother Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Beatrice Wood, and Man Ray. It positions Radiation as Suzanne Duchamp’s major work from this period, which she worked on in a durational manner in line with the approach taken up in Marcel Duchamp’s making of The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelor’s, Even (1915–23) in New York. This close consideration of Duchamp’s distinct way of combining unorthodox materials with traditional pictorial mediums makes it possible to contextualize her within early explorations of the readymade taking place between New York, Zurich, and Paris. A better understanding of Duchamp’s individual approach will shed greater light on her own work and on the ideas that she shared with other Dadaists. This is because the particular way that Duchamp integrated readymades within the mediums of painting, drawing, and poetry arguably had an effect on the broader movement.

“What is 291?”

Abstract “What is 291?” The results of this survey, issued in 1914 by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz to artists, writers, and patrons of his gallery, known by its address at 291 Fifth Avenue, were published in his magazine Camera Work (1903–1917). However, just as Stieglitz was issuing the questionnaire, his associates—Marius de Zayas, Paul Haviland, Agnes Ernst Meyer, and Francis Picabia—were already planning a magazine called 291 (1915–1916), thereby transforming the question even as it was being asked. Read as a response to the questionnaire, the publication 291 destabilizes and amplifies the community Stieglitz had established, while visually embedding its history into the pages of the new magazine. Taking 291 as a case study of the avant-garde and its legacies, this essay traces the origins of the magazine from its predecessors—that is, the periodical Camera Work and the gallery 291—to consider “What is 291?” and its afterlife. Emerging from the intersection of a magazine and gallery as a new iteration of print culture, 291 worked to expand the American avant-garde and to reimagine the magazine as a medium.

Tristan Tzara, Cabaret Voltaire and Dada: A Theatrical Avant-Garde, 1916-1924

This essay examines Dada in its performative and theatrical form as practised in Zurich from 1916 by Cabaret Voltaire and subsequently by Tristan Tzara in post-war Paris from 1920. Amongst Cabaret Voltaire personnel, Hugo Ball's 'sound poetry' performances and Richard Huelsenbeck's political variation of Dada in Berlin are also considered, alongside the influence of F. T. Marinetti and Futurism on Dada in its early phases. Tzara's 'Dada Manifesto 1918' is analysed as an exercise in non-determination of Dada as a coherent movement, even as it functioned as a calculated piece of self-promotion. As Tzara took Dada to Paris, his association with André Breton and Francis Picabia is traced through notable Dada 'manifestations' and selected publications, with the legacy of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi commemorated by both Tzara and Breton. Dada was a short-lived sensation in the Parisian avant-garde; the fracturing of the collaboration between Tzara and Breton is detailed in the mock-trial of Maurice Barrès and the disastrous second performance of Tzara's The Gas Heart in 1923. Breton's subsequent ‘Manifesto of Surrealism‘ of 1924 has often been seen to override Dada, with Breton's tight definition and policing of the movement demonstrating very different priorities from Tzara's. In conclusion, Antonin Artaud is considered as a proponent of surrealism in theatre with The Spurt of Blood (1925), and it is suggested that a combination of Artaud's and Tzara's versions of Dada still speaks to and influences many forms of contemporary performance.

The Music of Dada: A Lesson in Intermediality for Our Times by Peter Dayan

Reviewed by: The Music of Dada: A Lesson in Intermediality for Our Times by Peter Dayan Joseph Acquisto Dayan, Peter. The Music of Dada: A Lesson in Intermediality for Our Times. Routledge, 2019. ISBN 978-1-138-49186-1. Pp. 182. This well-researched, well-documented study challenges what we think we know about Dadaist music, i.e., that it was noisy and unconventional, driven mostly by drumming and instrument smashing, and provoked riots on a regular basis. This is an inaccurate picture, but one promoted by Dadaists themselves. Dayan explains why it is inaccurate by examining points of continuity and rupture in performance of, and discourse about, music among Dadaists in Zurich, Paris, Berlin, New York, and Holland. Zurich Dada "had music," Paris "had both music and anti-music," whereas Berlin "had, it seems, no music; at least no composed music" (151). The Dadaists' anti-music "called itself music, in order to challenge every verbal definition of music" (106). Anti-music co-existed alongside more conventional Western art music to an extent far greater than the Dadaists themselves let on in their writings. Dayan demonstrates that in Zurich and Paris conventional tonal Western art music was often featured on Dadaist programs, performed (most often on the piano by women) and appreciated by the audience. To understand why the Dadaists essentially edited this tonal piano music out of their accounts of the movement, Dayan appeals to two kinds of music: on the one hand, audible music, about which we can say nothing because it "demands to be surrounded by silence" (14). On the other hand, "an imaginary ideal music. We cannot hear it; it cannot be performed. But we are free to talk about it, and indeed to present it, in our words, as an imaginary backdrop to all the arts" (14). By enacting these unwritten assumptions, the Dadaists participate in an aesthetic that goes back at least as far as the Symbolists, who upheld an unheard, silent music as a vehicle for talking about music. Dayan insightfully links this erasure of music to the way in which music is gendered in Dada: while male Dada poets refrain from talking about music in order to prevent it from losing its status as music by being transformed into discourse, "Dada's women, being under less of an obligation to protect that art since they do not create it, are freer to talk about music. Hence the fact that our only descriptions of Dada improvised simultaneous rhythmic poetry are from women: Suzanne Perrottet and Hannah Höch" (168). Dayan accounts for the contested place of music in Paris Dada by appealing to its "dual ancestry," Zurich's musically rich movement and New York pre-Dada, which "cast [music] out" (50). The book is rich in quoted published and archival material from many artists, writers, and musicians including Tristan Tzara, "one of the prime movers behind the presence of music at the Dada soirées in Zurich, Paris, and Weimar" (158), André Breton, Francis Picabia, [End Page 218] and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. It gives a well-rounded portrait of music in both theory and performance in the international Dada movement and is essential reading for those interested in the intersection of the arts in the early twentieth century and beyond. Joseph Acquisto University of Vermont Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Superrealistas. Rayos X y vanguardias artísticas by Ana Lamata Manuel

Reviewed by: Superrealistas. Rayos X y vanguardias artísticas by Ana Lamata Manuel Daniel Pérez Zapico (bio) Superrealistas. Rayos X y vanguardias artísticas By Ana Lamata Manuel. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2017. Pp. 424. Art historian Ana Lamata Manuel offers an outstanding analysis of the echoes of X-rays in continental Europe’s artistic and literary practices of the early twentieth century. Although interaction between the history of science and technology and the history of literature and the arts is not new in the Spanish-speaking world, few works in Spanish have analyzed with such depth and richness the impact of radiology on the artistic avant-gardes. Lamata shows how X-rays were linked to the epistemological and aesthetic model embraced by artists and writers working under the “super realist” banner. A closer look at the cultural context in which Roentgen’s discovery was embedded reveals X-rays alongside a whole set of scientific research and technological innovations: the gramophone, film, aviation, relativity theory, and so on. Radiology thus encapsulated the emergence of a new way of thinking about and representing reality, epitomizing the avant-garde desire to capture reality in depth. The author starts by presenting a set of “radiological myths,” combining several socially constructed cultural hopes and anxieties surrounding Roentgen’s discoveries, with some scientific and pseudoscientific practices overlapping. Lamata traces the transfer of radiological technologies from hospitals to showrooms, exhibitions, popular newspapers, department stores, and households. Her aim is to show how these public perceptions of X-rays informed the artistic avant-gardes’ reflections. Indeed, she builds a convincing cultural history of X-rays based on a detailed analysis of diverse transnational sources, such as novels, the daily press, scientific popularization journals, graphic humor, and even the spiritualist press. The remaining chapters, presented as a “constellation of autonomous and interdependent scenes” (p. 15), focus on authors and artists such as: Guillaume Apollinaire (chapter 2), Pablo Picasso (chapter 3), Marcel Duchamp (chapter 4), Giorgio de Chirico (chapter 5), and Francis Picabia (chapter 6), while chapter 7 describes Italian Futurism and Russian Rayonism. Each chapter features a compilation of artwork and graphic material. My concern, however, is that the author conveys the circulation, transfer, and appropriation of scientific theories and radiological technologies rather vaguely. This is especially true of chapters 2, 3, and 5, where X-rays seem to become a mere metaphor for explaining these artists’ “radioscopic gaze.” Chapter 2, for example, explores Apollinaire’s desire to see reality “radiologically” through what he defines as a “super realistic eye” (p. 73). Yet evidence on how X-rays influenced him rests on weak clues, such as his library containing dissertations on X-rays by Gérard Encausse and Charles Henry, and his friendships with Victor Goloubeff or Alfred Jarry. We might wonder about Lamata’s inclusion criteria, since Jarry, who explicitly incorporates X-rays by using scientific imagery in his texts (see note 29, p. 305), [End Page 975] appears only tangentially. By contrast, chapter 3 discusses how X-rays influenced Picasso’s work, although Lamata acknowledges his “scientific readings were rather scarce” (p. 122). Much more convincing are chapters 4, 6, and 7, where Lamata insightfully analyses the artists’ experiments with X-rays and the aesthetic reflections they triggered. In chapter 4, the reader learns how a rich network of contacts, examinations, and engagement with popular physics nurtured Duchamp’s assimilation of his nude paintings with X-ray images. Artworks such as his Large Glass aimed to reflect reality by dividing the objects as in X-ray articles at the time. Finally, chapter 7, arguably the most compelling of the book, presents the Italian futurists’ desire to shape universal vibrations and advocate other explorations of reality. This chapter similarly explores Russian Rayonism, whose followers present the universe “as a web of electromagnetic radiations from which the painting should be the surface, registration and catalyst” (p. 271). Although this is ostensibly a history of art—with lengthy discussions on artists’ aesthetic and philosophical views and no reference to current history of science and technology literature—it encourages us to move beyond our disciplinary boundaries and establish new dialogues. Lamata’s analytical depth and richness of detail will help...

Stratigraphy of Andromeda: Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Origins, and Originality

Stratigraphy of Andromeda: Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Origins, and Originality Alessandro Giammei (bio) vivam, parsque mei multa superstes erit —Ovid, Amores1 A large, cropped wheel with six bolstered spokes is bolted, firmly, to nothing (fig. 1). It looks ready to transfer the energy produced by a grounded pneumatic apparatus (an engine? a plinth?) to some other invisible mechanism, out of view to the right. It is impossible to understand how the slender system of pistons and levers is meant to work. While an aesthetic fascination for the absolute plastic quality of machinery is undeniable, this image does not represent actual technology. It seems that to produce it Francis Picabia used an engineering illustration as an objet trouvé and painted over it, highlighting some details while obliterating most of the functional context with his brush.2 As a result, the machine has no evident function. The two dominant hues underline the artist’s estranging gesture. The metallic body of the mechanical object is green, like the patina that surrounds antique bronze statues, while the background evokes the same ineffable golden flatness that abolishes space and time in Byzantine mosaics, Gothic altarpieces, and icons. Its two-dimensional, yet infinitely profound splendor isolates and absolutizes the enigmatic subject, eradicating it from history. Such a visual oxymoron is encapsulated by the title: Fille née sans mère (“girl born without a mother”).3 Critics agree on the material source of this title, which appears among the locutions latines et étrangères of the early twentieth-century encyclopedic dictionary Petit Larousse Illustrée: another [End Page 21] objet trouvé, a readymade-locution that echoes the modern dream of non-biological birth expressed in Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s early science fiction or in F. T. Marinetti’s Mafarka le futuriste (1909). However, I believe that its literary origin—Prolem sine matre creatam, a line from book II of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—should be considered more carefully. The same Ovidian line is also the epigraph of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, and therefore opens the foundation of modern political theory with the same bold implications (this work is unprecedented, there are no comparable models or sources) that informed Picabia’s title. Exactly in the same year in which Picabia painted his Fille, 1917, Guillaume Apollinaire coined the very term “surrealist” for the rewriting of an episode of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Les mamelles de Tirésias. Another episode of the Metamorphoses gave the title, a year later, to Alberto Savinio’s multilingual and vanguardist literary debut, Hermaphrodito, while Giorgio de Chirico had been obsessed with the sleep of Ariadne (book VII of Ovid’s poem) since at least 1912.4 Even Marinetti, right before the publication of the Futurist Manifesto, blended his modernist imagery with the mythical one of the Metamorphoses by naming his own car after the winged horse born from Medusa’s blood: mon Pegas, “my Pegasus.” In the prime of Europe’s avant-garde, decades before Picasso’s famous illustrated edition, Ovid’s myths were a privileged interlocutor for modernity: a paradoxical influence that is perfectly visualized in the green bronze patina of Picabia’s machine, eternalized on its gilded untimeliness. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Francis Picabia, Fille née sans mère (Girl Born without a Mother), 1917, gouache and metallic paint on printed paper, 50 × 65 cm, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London 2016. Photo © Antonia Reeve, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, UK. [End Page 22] Within the wide field of studies related to modernist reception of the classics, this article intends to interrogate the paradox embodied by the motherless mechanomorphic girl envisioned by Picabia: a fetishized emblem of modernity rendered as an ancient statue in an iconizing background, a work that claims to escape genealogies through a quotation from ancient poetry. The aim is to overcome the temptation of historicizing late modernity as the theater of a binary opposition between classicism and vanguardism, tradition and newness. Through Ovid, I will explore the problem of origins and originality in the multimedia work of Giorgio de Chirico...

Comedic Modernism

Modern artists have long been fascinated with the pantomime, circus, and other comic entertainments, and since the late 19th century, many modernists have made use of the figure of the clown in advancing their avant-garde agendas. Turvey calls this strain within modernism “comedic modernism,” by which he does not mean humorous modernism, but rather the employment of the slapstick comedian as a subject and/or model in modernist theory and practice. Turvey accounts for the pervasive appeal of the clown to modernists by examining the European avant-garde's appropriation of film comics in the interwar period. He argues that comedian comedy's major conventions accorded with and sometimes shaped modernist innovations in this period, and that there was no single reason modern artists were drawn to the figure of the slapstick film comedian. Moreover, he suggests, most of the forms of assimilation of the clown by modernists were already established by the time they turned toward American popular cinema in the 1910s. Turvey identifies several features of slapstick comedy that modernists fastened on to: the de-psychologization and objectification of the comedian; the figure of the alienated, “sad clown”; incongruity in gags and narrative structures; the satire of the bourgeoisie and the carnivalesque leveling of social distinctions; the release of primitive, instinctual behavior; and the privileging of often rebellious objects. He then shows how Rene Clair synthesized some of these variants in Entr'acte (1924), the celebrated avant-garde short he made with Dadaist Francis Picabia, as well as some of his other more popular modernist films of the 1920s.

Dada's Birthday Bibliography

Dada's Birthday Bibliography Abigail Susik Dada Africa: Dialogue with the Other. Edited by Ralf Burmeister, Michaela Oberhofer, and Esther Tisa Francini. Zürich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2016. Pp. 244. $40.00 (cloth). Dadaglobe Reconstructed. Edited by Adrian Sudhalter, et al. Translated by Lisa Rosenblatt. Zürich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2016. Pp. 304. $59.00 (cloth). Genesis Dada: 100 Years of Dada Zürich. Edited by Astrid Von Asten, Sylvie Kyeck, and Adrian Notz. Translated by Michael Wolfson. Zürich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2016. Pp 246. $45.00 (cloth) Dada Presentism: An Essay on Art and History. Maria Stavrinaki. Translated by Daniela Ginsburg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. Pp xii + 108. $60.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction. Edited by Anne Umland and Cathérine Hug. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2016. Pp. 368. $75.00 (cloth). It is interesting to note that in 2016, the centenary of Dada the Merriam-Webster dictionary deemed "surreal" the word of the year.1 While Dada may be foremost on the mind of scholars of the avant-garde on this centennial of the initial Dada events in Zurich, the word itself has yet to become vernacular in the English language. The distinction is notable, I think. Despite its notoriety, this "ism" may have preserved something of its kernel of specificity—not only etymologically, but also in terms of aesthetic character. What is it about Dada that lends it this somewhat monadic or persistent—perhaps even resistant—quality in the face of historical permutation? "Surreal" is an entirely different case: in English the word has drifted so far from its inception as "surréalisme" in World War I-era France that its application in the 2016 "Word of the Year" article by Merriam-Webster might appear to a scholar of the movement (namely, me) as entirely botched.2 This disagreement about definitions comes as a disappointment, if not a surprise. As Sandra Zalman has recently shown, the history of the American reception of that avant-garde was by and large a chronicle of misapprehension until the 1970s and 80s.3 The popular elision of "surreal" with present-day connotations of terrorism, war, and wildly fraught national elections in the Merriam-Webster essay leaves the word with only the zombie dregs of politicized action: the anxious but utterly passive observation of some of the most alarming or disturbing events in contemporary life. Ironically, then, through the inevitable stray of semantics over time, the dictionary definition of "surreal" becomes precisely the opposite of the Surrealists' passionate agitation after the Great War against all forms of "miserablism." If the word "Dada," is not always colloquially on the tip of our tongue as we confront today's media morass—and this may in fact be a good thing for the posterity of Dada's experiments—its historical example has nevertheless secured a reputation of continued cogency or timeliness for the new millennium, above and beyond the salvo of exhibitions and publications launched during its centenary. This has been most palpable in the delightful wave of "birthday" scholarship that appeared in 2016, some examples of which I read in translation from French or German. As more of a present to myself than to Dada, I must admit, I eagerly perused five such centenary books in the hopes of finding fresh parallels rather than just a shared celebration of subject matter. What became readily clear was that scholars of Dada have a vested interest in asserting the contemporaneity of Dada—not just its relevance, but its often uncanny, mirror-like reflection of our own present. As a student of anachronism, I am amenable to such transtemporal harmonizing, and yet the urgency of the scholarly and artistic call for the ahistoricity/contemporaneity of Dada is striking in comparison to more sedately framed discourses of relevance about other avant-gardes. For Dada scholars like Maria Stavrinaki, the persistent contemporaneity of Dada may be less a consequence of its trenchant critique of musealization and academicization, and more representative of qualities of simultaneity and "eternal becoming" inherent in Dada itself (31). Stavrinaki's Dada Presentism: An Essay on Art and History is distinctive for its...

Paris Dada and the Transfiguration of Boredom

Paris Dada and the Transfiguration of Boredom Joyce Suechun Cheng (bio) Il n'y a pas moyen de s'ennuyer: ce serait au détriment des caresses et tout à l'heure nous n'y serons plus. (There is no way to get bored; that would be to the detriment of caresses and soon we shall be there no more.) —André Breton and Philippe Soupault, Les champs magnétiques1 By his own account, the artist Francis Picabia left the Dada movement out of boredom. In a sarcastic statement from 1921, "M. Picabia Separates from the Dadas," he writes: Everything is boring, isn't it? The falling leaves are boring, growing leaves are boring, warmth is boring, cold is boring. Clocks that don't ring are boring, those that do ring are boring. To have a telephone is boring, to not have a telephone is boring. People who die are boring, as are those who don't die.2 In little more than a week, fellow Dadaist André Breton responded with a short text entitled "Artificial Hells." Dated May 20, 1921 and unpublished in his lifetime, Breton's text criticizes Picabia for his disloyalty while issuing a circumspect defense for Dada, whose dissolution the author now saw as inevitable. But more intriguingly, Breton suggests that the very affective disposition causing Picabia's defection had initially motivated him and his friends to join Dada only two years ago: I will simply recall … the public standing of French poets in 1919: verses by Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and myself were recited daily in one hall or another to the same audience, who invariably applauded. The profound boredom that emanated from these recitals, the incomprehension that resulted from reading out loud … lastly the impossibility of reaching anything but a bewildered public of half a dozen writers, all led us to give a favorable welcome to Dada, which, for its part, promised lively polemics and large audiences.3 Picabia's and Breton's accounts suggest that the affective character of Paris Dada was distinct from that of earlier iterations of the movement. If the predominant affects of Dada in Zurich and Berlin had been rage and disgust, reflecting the Dadaists' repudiation of the meaningless brutality of World War I, Dada in Paris might be described in terms of the distinct absence of affect. The name the Paris Dadaists gave to this absence is boredom, a banal, everyday experience held to have initiated and terminated the movement. While scholars have underlined the link between the trauma of World War I and Dada's dysfunctional complexes (masochism, neurasthenia, epilepsy, schizophrenia, etc.), it is worth recalling that one of the most pervasive, though underestimated, effects of wartime is boredom.4 The Paris Dadaists, many of whom served in the war, knew this well.5 The dandy and autodidact Jacques Vaché, whom Breton befriended while serving as a neurology intern in the military hospital in Nantes in 1916, complained often of boredom during his internment in his wartime letters: "Je m'ennuie, cher ami—vous voyez … mais je vous ennuie aussi."6 In 1919, as the demobilized Dadaists struggled to transition to civilian life, boredom became their daily predicament. Recalling this pivotal period, Breton described a state of aimlessness: "My future was impossible to envision. … For hours on end I paced around the table in my hotel room. I walked aimlessly throughout Paris, and spent evenings alone on a bench in Place du Châtelet. I don't believe I was pursuing an idea or solution: no, I was prey to a kind of daily fatalism, translated by a not-unpleasant 'drifting with the tide' [à vau-l'eau]."7 It was in this condition that Breton and his friends encountered Dada, which promised a reprieve from their boredom and the absence of prospects. In July 1919, six months after Vaché died of an opium overdose, Breton and his friends published his letters in the fifth issue of their review Littérature. This same issue announces the collaboration between the Parisian poets and Tristan Tzara's Zurich-born movement in a typographically striking leaflet: "LITTÉRATURE oui mais DADA 1-2-3-4-5...

The Body after Cubism

While the relationship of the body and Cubism has often been posed as one of opposition, one in which the return of the body is described as a lapse back into figuration and realism that takes place after Cubism, George Baker argues that Francis Picabia's Cubist works, those like Dances at the Spring from 1912, are evidence of the intense coupling—as opposed to dissolution—of the terms. Baker asserts that the bodily intensity of Picabia's Orphism represents a long overlooked countermodel for post-Cubist painting, with the physical movement and spatial disorientation of these works extending to their phenomenological interaction with the viewer, and it requires a revision of our understanding of Cubism itself.

Sic] Picabia: Ego, Reaction, Reuse

Against the common view that appropriation—of images, words, and machines—was the surest mark of Francis Picabia's modernism, Verdier posits that Picabia's constant reuse of visual and textual material was a melancholic symptom. Many of Picabia's pronouncements were, in fact, the very condemnation of his own system opposing the hand and the machine. Drawing from this analysis, Verdier argues that Picabia's art was never unambiguously modern nor reactionary; it was instead what Freud called “reactional.”

Gloss paints in late paintings by Francis Picabia: a multi-analytical study

In this paper, a multi-analytical approach for the study of the materials used by Francis Picabia in two paintings dating from 1949 and 1950 is reported, with a particular reference to the possible use of enamel paints. The study is complemented by analysis of paints that had the appearance of glossy enamel sampled from the artist’s easel in the collection of the Comite Francis Picabia. Analysis with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, pyrolysis gas chromatography mass spectrometry with thermally assisted hydrolysis and methylation (THM-Py-GCMS) and scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy revealed that only few paints match the composition of historical reference samples of Ripolin enamels, while the majority of the glossy paints sampled likely consist of mixtures of binders and varnishes made by the artist. This study confirms the importance of scientific testing and comparison with reference materials, when determining artists’ use of enamel paints. Results should be interpreted in the context of documentary/historical evidence, for a more informed characterization of oleoresinous paint media.

Powering Portraiture: Francis Picabia’s 291 Mechanomorphs Revived

Francis Picabia’s mechanomorphic portrait series from 1915 ranks among the French modern artist’s most important collaborations with his American colleagues. Published in the July–August 1915 issue of the avant-garde art journal 291, Picabia’s portraits depict the Alfred Stieglitz circle as mechanical devices waiting attentively for a source of power. This essay examines the role of the reader as one source of this power. It also explores the new interpretive possibilities available when we consider the portraits’ arrangement within the journal medium itself. Moving from one page to another, the reader must consider and reconsider the mechanomorphs according to the journal’s unique layout. The nature of these particular interactions between the reader and Picabia (via his portraits) suggest something larger in the making and interpreting of modern art: the necessity of playfulness, amusement, and mental flexibility.

Virginia Woolf's Cinegraphic Poetics in The Years

Abstract This article analyzes the cinegraphic quality of The Years by Virginia Woolf. It does not seek to prove direct influences but establishes correspondences between the poetics of Virginia Woolf's novel and films by Serguei Eisenstein, René Clair, Francis Picabia, and German expressionists as well as the theater of its time, which was also under the influence of cinema. Just as these films do, The Years rethinks the relationship between time and space, or “Here & Now,” one of its working titles. Its attempt to render point of view anonymous, its representation of perception as movement, and its use of anamorphosis as transition create moments that overflow their limits so that the present moment is constructed as time in exile. Such time that adheres to space too much or too little is to be read in the light of Gilles Deleuze's concept of aiôn as well as according to his theory of the “dream-image.”