Francis Picabia Research Articles

Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, by R. Bruce Elder

Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, by R. Bruce Elder. Film and Media Studies Series. Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. x, 765 pp. $85.00 US (cloth). In this companion volume to his earlier Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century (Waterloo, 2013), experimental filmmaker R. Bruce Elder counts Dada and Surrealism among the vanguard movements that heralded cinema as the ottima arte or top In his formulation, Dada and Surrealism were dissident movements whose activities sought to discover conduits that would convey the powerful of their age, a vital, life-enhancing, occult irrationalism (p. 15). The goal was less to create modernist aesthetics or experiment with forms, than to explore the variety of ways in which an objectively heterogeneous world imposes itself upon the human psyche. In this regard, Elder's conception is similar to Breton's notion of passer le pont, whereby phantoms cross the bridge to greet the wayfarer in the same way that projected celluloid images illuminated upon a movie screen force themselves upon the theatre viewer. For Elder, this makes cinema the most powerful pneumatic art. His book is not limited to film studies, however, and Elder more broadly examines a wide range of effects across Dadaist and Surrealist art, literature, and criticism. The formidable size of Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, organized into three chapters and with several appendices that constitute the final third of the book, produces its own circuitous and imposing journey. Before delving into considerations of Dada and Surrealism, Elder opens with a brief chapter on the crisis in the authority of reason engendered by the proliferation of mathematical systems, pluralities of physics, and the modern rediscovery of primitivism in the early twentieth century. In the chapter on Dada, Elder moves beyond its historical contextualization in response to the traumas of the Great War and its characterization as an anti-art movement, to emphasize its vital life principles in the construction of new art and literature. In keeping with the emphasis upon cinematic effects, Elder weaves Dadaist collage and paracinematic performance art (such as the Lautgedichte sound poem) together with film as related expressions of pneuma or induced thought. The third chapter addresses various ways that the Surrealists sought out hallucinatory aspects of reality that could be formulated into poetic images of a sur-realite (higher reality), through such notions as the occult, objective chance, the marvellous, the uncanny, and psychic automatism. In these chapters, Elder analyzes and provides commentary on various Dadaist and Surrealist films. He finds instantaneous impulses unleashed through the imagery of Francis Picabia and Rene Clair's film Entr'acte (Intermission, 1924), a blurring of distinctions between dream and waking states in May Ray's Emak Bakia (Leave Me Alone, 1926), a surreal supersession of dream and reality in Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel's Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), and heterogeneous combinations of the sacred and the profane in Bunuel's ethnographic documentary, Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread, 1933). …

Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère: Francis Picabia's Anti-Art Anti-Christ

This article analyses the imprint of Nietzschean philosophy on Picabia's negotiation of embodiment, art and religion in Jesus-Christ Rastaquouere (1920). Presenting this text as a critically neglected masterwork of avant-garde literature, this article demonstrates how Picabia enlisted Dadaist suspicion of organized religion as the vehicle for his disavowal of the official art world. Picabia and Nietzsche were united in their scorn for Christ and the disembodying pieties of Christian morality. However, whereas Nietzsche proffers art as redemptive antithesis to religion, Picabia launches an all-out attack on the sanctity of art and, with it, on the notion of the artist as redeemer. Via close textual and comparative analysis, this innovative reading of Jesus-Christ Rastaquouere exposes its significance as a philosophical treatise which exists in formal and conceptual dialogue with a constellation of Dadaist artworks. It uncovers how Picabia co-opts and, ultimately, exceeds Nietzsche's Anti-Christ rhetoric in his idiosyncratic prose modelling of Dada's Anti-Art revolution.

THE USE OF RIPOLIN BY PICABIA IN THE FIG LEAF (1922)

From both anecdotes and the appearance of many works, Francis Picabia—like Pablo Picasso—is believed to have used Ripolin house paint. La Feuille de Vigne (The Fig Leaf) (1922 Tate), variously described as painted in enamel, oil, and Ripolin, has many visual characteristics associated with household paint: large areas of unmodulated color, minimal evidence of brushstrokes, and a glossy surface. An earlier work, Les Yeux Chauds (Hot Eyes) of 1921, was already known to exist beneath the surface. A study of documentary sources on Picabia was combined with an exploration of this earlier image through extensive technical examination, which identified paint characteristics, including the presence of Ripolin paints in both, and accounted for strikingly obvious localized wrinkling in areas of The Fig Leaf. The color range of Les Yeux Chauds was found to consist of bold complementary colors, not black and white as previously assumed. The evolution of the two images is explored, and both Picabia's techniques and his use of specific materials are discussed; the materials in both paintings correspond closely to referenced Ripolin samples. Examination revealed a playful relationship between the two images painted by Picabia, and has contributed new evidence about the lost image of Les Yeux Chauds.

Oil-Based House Paints from 1900 to 1960: An Examination of Their History and Development, with Particular Reference to Ripolin Enamels

This article outlines the traditional oil-based house paints and enamels available in the first half of the 20th century and includes a discussion of the natural oils, gums, and resins used in their manufacture. These paints are examined in the context of the Ripolin enamels used by, among others, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, and Sidney Nolan. Ripolin is the first house paint to have undergone extensive scientific analysis, which allows comparisons to be made between these analytical findings and the historical literature. The research to date indicates that Ripolin enamels are typical of the traditional high-grade enamels and gloss paints available in the first half of the 20th century in that they comprise drying oils, often with some resin, and are formulated with good-quality pigments.

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde and Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde and Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters

Kodak Modernism: Avant-Garde Poetry in the Age of Popular Photography

In June 1924 Blaise Cendrars was visiting Brazil when he received the first edition of his latest collection of poems, Kodak. Published by Stock with a cover design by Frans Masereel and frontispiece portrait by Francis Picabia, Kodak comprised sixty-three poems that looked like simple vignettes caught by the poet during his travels to the U.S. and beyond, and put down on paper with the apparent immediacy and directness of a tourist’s photographic record. The poems’ easy charm was, however, lost on the makers of the Kodak. At the publication of the book, Stock received ‘a notarised letter from the American firm of Kodak Co’ which objected to the unauthorised use of their registered trademark. The publishers replied that they believed it acceptable ‘to use a commercial name once that name has acquired the sense of an object in everyday language’, and that the company itself had made of the commercial name ‘the synonym of the photographic apparatus that accompanies the traveller’.1 Their position was that the appearance of ‘Kodak’ on Cendrars’s title-page was effectively providing free publicity for the company. For the Kodak lawyers, though, such unlicensed use of their trademark was ‘on the contrary detrimental to it, because it distracted customers from the precise uses of the products sold by their company’. While the company did have the legal power to request that the publication be withdrawn from sale, it eventually settled for a commitment that any subsequent editions of the poems would be published under a different title.

Stieglitz and his artists: Matisse to O'Keeffe: the Alfred Stieglitz Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

A master photographer, Alfred Stieglitz was also a visionary promoter and an avid collector of modern American and European art from the first half of the twentieth century. Operating a succession of influential Manhattan galleries from 1905 to 1946, he exhibited many of the most important artists of the era, including Constantin Brancusi, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Vasily Kandinsky, John Marin, Henri Matisse, Georgia O'Keeffe, Francis Picabia, and Pablo Picasso. The collection he assembled of their works-by purchase, gift, and happy accident-was of exceptional breadth and depth and has since become the cornerstone of the Metropolitan Museum's holdings of modern art since 1949. This volume is the first catalogue of the Metropolitan's unparalleled Alfred Stieglitz Collection: more than four hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints made between the 1880s and the 1940s. After an illuminating introduction that traces the collection's formation and surprising denouement, thirty-one short essays serve as focused biographies of the dealer and each of the artists he cultivated and collected, demonstrating the intense and often intimate relationships that affected artistic direction, financial well-being (or its opposite), and social and professional prestige. These discussions are enriched by new scholarship, technical analysis, and archival research, and many works in the colleciton are published here for teh first time. Seen together in splendid color reproductions, they present a portrait of a supreme connoisseur-a man who acted as midwife in the creation of twentieth-century art.

Dada in Paris. Revised and expanded by Anne Sanouillet. Translated by Sharmila Ganguly (review)

Reviewed by: Dada in Paris. Revised and expanded by Anne Sanouillet. Translated by Sharmila Ganguly Luca Somigli (bio) Michel Sanouillet. Dada in Paris. Revised and expanded by Anne Sanouillet. Translated by Sharmila Ganguly. The MIT Press. 2009. xii, 705. US $39.95 Few texts have played as seminal a role in reconstructing the history of the avant-garde as Michel Sanouillet’s Dada à Paris, first published in 1965, revised and expanded by Anne Sanouillet in 1993 and 2005,and now finally translated into English. Writing at a time when Dada was seen as little more than a phase in the prehistory of surrealism, Sanouillet conducted extensive archival research and interviewed many of the protagonists of that brief but groundbreaking cultural moment to provide a detailed account of the complex network of relations that, over a period of less than four years, from 1920 to 1923, brought together many of the protagonists of the European and North American avant-garde in the Dada adventure. A concise but comprehensive introduction sketches the genesis of the movement in Zurich and its rapid dissemination throughout Europe and in New York. The book then shifts its focus to the French capital, where a group of young writers – the ‘three musketeers’ André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault – formed in the poetic environment of Apollinaire’s ‘new spirit,’ found a new direction for their literary research in the works of Dada co-founder Tristan [End Page 774] Tzara and in particular in his ‘Dada Manifesto 1918.’ By January 1920, Tzara was himself in Paris, where he had been preceded by Francis Picabia, and soon they, Breton and his friends, and several other artists (mostly writers) joined forces. Sanouillet chronicles in minute detail, sometimes literally day by day, the public initiatives of the group – art exhibits, publications, and most especially public ‘performances’ – meant to challenge and undercut the cultural values of their mainstream audiences. He also describes the rivalries that opposed Dada to other avant-garde factions (Cocteau was especially detested) and the internal divisions that eventually and perhaps predictably tore the movement apart. The narrative is well-known. By mid-1921, two antagonistic conceptions of Dada emerged: one, embodied by Tzara, identified its spirit in the pure undermining of all positive values and in the immediacy of the gratuitous gesture. The other, with Breton as its main proponent, sought to channel that destructive impulse toward the articulation of ‘a line of direction, if not a goal,’ and would eventually result in the emergence of a full-fledged avant-garde formation, namely surrealism. As the author rightly notes, in Paris, a city that by the early 1920shad seen and heckled and finally accepted every possible artistic avant-garde, Dada found itself confined to the sphere of literature (visual artists such as Picabia or Max Ernst had been formed outside France) and for the most part did not push its revolution into the wider artistic field, as in New York, or into the domain of politics, as in Germany. In its struggle with Dada, the institution of literature proved its remarkable resilience. I said that the narrative is well-known, but it is so precisely because Sanuillet’s book has played a crucial role in shaping it. Indeed, one of the reasons why Dada in Paris remains of such interest almost half a century after its initial publication is that, even in this updated edition with its references to the international consecration of Dada in the last twenty years, one can perceive behind the impeccable historical reconstruction the passions and antagonisms that in 1965 still divided the protagonists of this cultural season and of which the historian himself was by no means a neutral witness. (In one of his most scathing but also revealing comments, Sanouillet describes Breton and his faction as ‘champions of a respectful avant-garde, apprentice mandarins committed to playing out the futile game that would lead them from a juvenile revolution to the sanction of the Nouvelle Revue Française.’) Dada in Paris is a book that deftly balances critical rigour and militant passion, the detachment of the historian and the proximity of the witness. With its immense apparatus, including some 250 letters and...

The Steins collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian avant-garde

A fascinating, in-depth exploration of the groundbreaking art collections of Gertrude Stein and her family As American expatriates living in Paris, the writer Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael's wife Sarah were absolutely pivotal in shaping the city's vibrant cultural life in the early 20th century. They hosted Saturday evening salons at which the brightest artists, writers, musicians, and collectors convened to discuss the latest developments. They aggressively promoted and collected emerging painters and sculptors, particularly their close friends Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. And along the way they developed unparalleled holdings in modernist work by such figures as Paul Cezanne, Juan Gris, Francis Picabia, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Lavishly produced and featuring more than 600 images, The Steins Collect is the first comprehensive exploration of the Steins' extraordinary collections and their enduring cultural influence. The book explores the Steins' impact on art-making and collecting practices in Europe and the United States; the intense sibling rivalries that developed around key artists and ideas; the roots of Leo's aesthetic theories in the thought of William James and Bernard Berenson; Sarah and Michael's role in founding the Academie Matisse; Gertrude's complex relationship with Picasso and their artistic influence on each other; Le Corbusier's radical villa design for the family; and much more. The Steins Collect not only reveals the artistic prescience of this innovative family and their important patronage, but also traces how they created a new international standard of taste for modern art.

Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories (review)

Reviewed by: Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories Linda Simon (bio) Wanda M. Corn and Tirza True Latimer. Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011. 416 pp. ISBN 978-0520270022, $45.00. Gertrude Stein’s reputation as a modernist comes as much from her prescience as a collector as from her literary experiments. At the center of a flourishing Parisian art community before and between the two world wars, Stein counted among her friends and collaborators some of the most famous artists of her time: Picasso and Matisse, most notably, and scores more that included [End Page 826] Juan Gris, Guillaume Apollinaire, Sir Francis Rose, and Pavel Tchelitchew. In 1970, New York’s Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition, Four Americans in Paris, which drew from her collections and those of her brothers, Michael and Leo, and sister-in-law, Sarah. Now, more than forty years later, Stein’s connections to art once again have been celebrated, this time (May to September 2011) in San Francisco, by two major exhibitions: The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, a companion show, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Drawing upon sources from the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian and archives at Yale, the University of Texas, and the University of California, Seeing Gertrude Stein assembled more than two hundred portraits, photographs, newspaper and magazine articles, drawings, and memorabilia to create a wide-ranging exploration of Stein’s visual world. Co-curators Wanda M. Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History at Stanford, and Tirza True Latimer, Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at California College of the Arts, organized the exhibition into five over-lapping and intersecting stories that form the sections of this beautifully produced catalogue. Each section contains illuminating essays, thirty in all, by Corn or Latimer, who write that their “initial goal was to animate Stein’s visual archive, to make it tell some new stories” (7). That goal is amply fulfilled; the stories cohere into more than a pictorial biography to reveal Stein’s intellectual and aesthetic interest in perception, and her ongoing reinvention of her personal environment and public image. Drawing upon the most recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies, and bringing a fresh critical perspective from their disciplines of art history and visual studies, Corn and Latimer offer a vibrant, insightful consideration of Stein’s identity as a writer, woman, and arbiter of the arts. The first section, “Picturing Gertrude,” depicts portraits of Stein in paint, bronze, and photographs from the time she sat as a girl for her uncle David Bachrach, founder of a prestigious Baltimore photography studio, until her death in 1946. Included are Picasso’s indelible 1906 painting; Alvin Langdon Coburn’s famous gum platinum print of a mountainous young Stein, taken in 1913; a group photograph of Stein and her embryology class from 1897; and many portraits—by Jo Davidson, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Carl Van Vechten—that no doubt will be familiar to readers of Stein biographies. Corn draws our attention to the feminized image of Stein—sensuous, dressed in flowing robes, with smooth, flawless skin—created by such artists as photographer Henri Manuel and sculptor Jacques Lipschitz. That image changed dramatically after 1926, when Stein cut her hair and adopted distinctly masculine [End Page 827] dress, giving artists “license to theatricalize her maleness and make portraits of a man-woman rather than, as earlier, of a woman who did not act like one” (53). With Toklas portrayed in “heels, hyper-feminized dresses, and flamboyant hats,” the two women, Corn asserts, “conspicuously fashioned themselves as husband and wife” (51). Certainly they played out those gender roles in their homes, where Toklas took charge of decorating, cooking, gardening, and shopping. “Domestic Stein” gives us a glimpse of the Stein-Toklas household, including some candid photographs with friends and a regal-looking Basket. The two women kept albums of snapshots, many taken by Stein, who was not interested in photographs as an art form, but rather as visual evidence of friendships and experiences. There was no lack of...

The filming of modern life: European avant-garde film of the 1920s

In the 1920s, the European avant-garde embraced the cinema, experimenting with the medium in radical ways. Painters including Hans Richter and Fernand Leger as well as filmmakers belonging to such avant-garde movements as Dada and surrealism made some of the most enduring and fascinating films in the history of cinema. In The Filming of Modern Life, Malcolm Turvey examines five films from the avant-garde canon and the complex, sometimes contradictory, attitudes toward modernity they express: Rhythm 21 (Hans Richter, 1921), Ballet mecanique (Dudley Murphy and Fernand Leger, 1924), Entr'acte (Francis Picabia and Rene Clair, 1924), Un chien Andalou (Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, 1929), and Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929). All exemplify major trends within European avant-garde of the time, from abstract animation to cinema pur. All five films embrace and resist, in their own ways, different aspects of modernity.

Metamorphosis in 391: A Cryptographic Collaboration by Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Erik Satie

Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Erik Satie each contributed to a page of Picabia's magazine 391, published in June 1924. Picabia contributed a drawing, Satie a polemical writing, and Man Ray a seemingly abstract poem. Metamorphosis and interpretative simultaneity are both subjects and devices of this three part collaborative effort.The page involves multiple levels of deliberate codification involving interrelated references to the Arensberg Circle, Satie's ballet Mercure, Renaissance art of Raphael and Albrecht Durer, the Morse code, as well as dadaist and futurist poetics.The mutative quality of possible interpretations suggests that the page is meant to be understood through multiple, even divergent and simultaneous, readings. The resulting interpretative flux recalls Picabia's own multi-layered approach to painting, which may serve as a model for understanding the operations of this 391 page. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings: <i>A Novelette</i> and [<i>No Title</i>

The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings: A Novelette and [No Title] Antonio Ruiz One of the most famous and polemic catalogues in postmodern theory was proposed by Ihab Hassan in his study of postmodernism: Modernism Postmodernism Romanticism/Symbolism Pataphysics/Dadaism Form (conjunctive, closed) Antiform (disjunctive, open) Purpose Play Design Chance Hierarchy Anarchy Mastery/Logos Exhaustion/Silence Art Object/Finished Work Process/Performance/Happening Distance Participation Creation/Totalization Decreation/Deconstruction Synthesis Antithesis Presence Absence Centering Dispersal (Dismemberment 267–68) These often quoted dichotomies have always attracted my attention, particularly the first one, as it represents a Damocles sword constantly threatening the claim of originality promoted by the high priests of postmodernism. Even Hassan himself has recognized the avant-garde spirit of the concept he is trying to define: “But if much of modernism appears hieratic, hypotactical, and formalist, postmodernism strikes us by contrast as playful, paratactical, and deconstructionist. In this it recalls [End Page 101] the irreverent spirit of the avant-garde, and so carries sometimes the label of neoavant-garde” (Postmodern Turn 121). The case of Dada’s inclusion in the cataloguing of postmodern traits is significant. Dada was a movement of reaction against the rationalist tradition of Western thought (Rubin, 1967). Tzara said that “Dada doubts all” (Tzara 92). Similarly, deconstructive postmodern thought is seen by some as nihilistic: “it partakes of uncertainty and doubt, and accepts ambiguity” (Sanouillet 226). Like Dada, postmodernism is defined by rejection: “The rejection of all-encompassing, teleological theories of human and social change associated with Enlightenment ideas about reason and progress” (Locher, 1999). Postmodernism also strives to achieve other major goals: “linking claims about social life, human nature, and criteria of truth and validity with strategies of power; and replacing the emphasis on subject and consciousness with an emphasis on language as intersubjective” (Locher, 1999). Like David Locher, I also claim that these goals were previously proposed by Dada. The Dadaists, for example, believed that meaning was arbitrary. As language signified nothing, it could be manipulated in any way desired (Richter, 1965). They also believed that there is no absolute truth and abolished the distinction between the concepts of high and low (or popular) art and culture. As a matter of fact, most of the features assigned to postmodernism can also be applied to Dadaism (paraphysics/Dadaism, chance, antiform, play, anarchy, exhaustion/silence, performance, participation, deconstruction, antithesis, absence, dispersal, combination, against interpretation . . .).1 My intention in proposing these parallels is not to suggest the lack of originality of prior proposals in the field of postmodernist theory but rather to reflect upon the debt that postmodernism, as also modernism, owes this avant-garde movement. Dada “was neither a school nor a movement but rather an essentially chaotic phenomenon that cut across art forms and national boundaries” (Tashjian xii). Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Paris, and Hanover are some of the cities that are usually mentioned in relation to Dadaism. However, “even before the highly publicized activities at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, a loosely organized collection of New York avant-garde artists offended the New York critics with their antics and their suspiciously foreign names—Benjamin de Casseres, Jean Crotti, Marius de Zayas, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia—” (Schmidt 92).2 These artists were associated with Walter Arensberg’s circle and connected with Stieglitz’s gallery and his magazine Camera Work. Eventually they founded several short-lived little magazines, including Picabia’s 391, de Zaya’s 291, Man Ray’s TNT, and Man Ray and Duchamp’s The Blind Man and New York Dada. These magazines preceded the release of other publications, edited by Americans, that flirted with Dadaism. I refer, for example, to Broom and Secession. In these magazines, writers like E. E. [End Page 102] Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Mina Loy found an ideal forum in which to publish their most radical writing. The relation of Williams and Cummings with Dadaism is complex, replete with curiosities and contradictions. In the case of Williams—although it can also be said of Cummings—the desire to affirm his American identity—Whitman’s “barbaric yawp”—led him to take on the anti-art Dadaist attitudes and use them to break from structures and conventions...

“Allow Intelligence to Survive”: Life’s Language in Williams and Tzara

“Allow Intelligence to Survive”: Life’s Language in Williams and Tzara Paul Jaussen In Mexico, since we are talking about Mexico, there is no art: things are made for use. And the world is in perpetual exaltation. —ANTONIN ARTAUD (11) There is a famous passage in William Carlos Williams’s Autobiography in which he recollects his visit to the Armory Show of 1913. Encountering Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” Williams says, “I laughed out loud when I first saw it, happily, with relief” (A 134). Writing several decades after the fact, he claims that the piece “is too hackneyed for [him] to remember anything clearly about it now,” a slight on Duchamp, perhaps (who himself had sufficiently slighted Williams at a party for the latter to bear a grudge), but the statement is also a revelation that the need for an effectively lasting or “timeless” piece of art was absent during the period of Williams’s early work (A 134). The time was now, a now of experiment, of change, of warfare and industrialization, a time accelerating into the future yet unable to completely negotiate the past. And yet a time of laughter and forgetting, when breaking into the world involved breaking from its orders and languages. Williams’s laughter can be read as not simply pleasure, but, as he says, “relief,” what Henry Sayre describes as “release,” the sense of unleashed opportunity that America inherited from the fractured and alienated Europe, the chance to make a new aesthetic practice all its own (16). New York in the years following the Armory Show was the place for that art of release and mirth, and Williams, despite the constraints of a medical practice and a young family, could not keep himself away. This was an era of the small magazines and the French immigrants (most famously Francis Picabia and Duchamp), of salons and parties, all fueled by the compelling need to create something new, not for the museums, but for the world in which they lived, the conflicted everyday [End Page 17] places and spaces that were dominated by the technology of the modern and the logic of warfare.1 Williams, in the thick of it, attended the gatherings and met the artists, aided Alfred Kreymborg in the publication of the journal Others, founded the magazine Contact in 1920, and, through it all, never stopped writing (Dijkstra 22, 109). As Sayre argues, this context of avant-garde energy is crucial for our understanding of the books Williams produced at this time, particularly Spring and All and Kora in Hell: Improvisations (Sayre 17). These works are far from formally autonomous high modernism, nor are they the expansive historical and philosophical vision of what would become Paterson; instead, they are texts that reveal American avant-garde at its conflicted nascent stages, coming from an author who resisted “both Europe and America” in an effort to create newness in his time and place (Tashijan 91). It is the radical commitment to the value of that new, its work as a source of energy in the world, that comes to the forefront of Spring and All and Kora in Hell. This energy went by many names in Williams’s texts, but consistently he refers to it as “life”—an eruptive force which outlasts the constraints of language and culture that always attempt to channel or block it. Life is the energy put into play by its correlative faculty, the imagination, without which, Williams is very clear, thinking disappears. In other words, the newness of life is a fundamental and essential ingredient for all human activities, such as language and science, even as those edifices tend to cover over it and deny its significance. Williams’s poetic goal at the time of these early writings is to make life happen, to restore it to sensibility and allow the imagination to move. Life’s importance is not unique to Williams, however; it springs forth as well in the manifestos of Tristan Tzara. A number of critics have read Dada as the avantgarde movement closest to the early Williams, and, as Peter Schmidt writes, although it is unknown whether or not Williams ever read Tzara’s...

Inventing Marcel Duchamp: the dynamics of portraiture

An old genre is given a new look, as portraits and self-portraits of Marcel Duchamp invent and cover up as much as they reveal and portray. One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was a master of self-invention who carefully regulated the image he projected through self-portraiture and through his collaboration with those who portrayed him. During his long career, Duchamp recast accepted modes for assembling and describing identity, indelibly altering the terrain of portraiture. This groundbreaking book (which accompanies a major exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery) demonstrates the ways in which Duchamp willfully manipulated the techniques of portraiture both to secure his reputation as an iconoclast and to establish himself as a major figure in the art world. Although scholars have explored Duchamp's use of aliases, little attention has been paid to how this work played into, and against, existing portrait conventions. Nor has any study yet compared these explicitly self-constructed projects with the large body of portraits of Duchamp by others. Inventing Marcel Duchamp showcases approximately one hundred never-before-assembled portraits and self-portraits of Duchamp. The (broadly defined) self-portraits and self-representations include the famous autobiographical suitcase Boite-en-Valise and Self-Portrait in Profile, a torn silhouette that became very influential for future generations of artists. The portraits by other artists include works by Duchamp's contemporaries Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Francis Picabia, Beatrice Wood, and Florine Stettheimer as well as portraits by more recent generations of artists, including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Sturtevant, Yasumasa Morimura, David Hammons, and Douglas Gordon. Since the mid-twentieth century, as abstraction assumed a position of dominance in fine art, portraiture has been often derided as an art form; the images and essays in Inventing Marcel Duchamp counter this, and invite us to rethink the role of portraiture in modern and contemporary art.

Nexus New York: Latin/American artists in the modern metropolis

Between 1900 and 1942, New York City was the site of extraordinary creative exchange where artists could share ideas in a global context. The swiftly changing urban landscape before and between the World Wars inspired the erosion of artistic boundaries and fostered a new climate of modernist experimentation. Nexus New York focuses on key artists from the Caribbean and Latin America who entered into dynamic cultural and social dialogues with the American-based avant-garde and participated in the development of a new modern discourse. Featuring both celebrated and little-known figures of this period, including Carlos Enriquez, Alice Neel, Marius de Zayas, Francis Picabia, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Jose Clemente Orozco, Matta, and Robert Motherwell, contributing authors also discuss the specific environments in which they flourished, including the Art Students League, the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop, and the New School for Social Research. A fascinating look at 20th-century modernism, this book provides the first view of the important encounters between artists of the Americas.

Translating 'Pure Nonsense': Walter Benjamin Meets Systran on the Dissecting Table of Dada

The international Dada movement (c. 1916–1922) sought to subvert the rational, consensual social values which it saw as the cause of the First World War, notably by undermining the conceptual patterns and assumptions embodied in everyday language. Dada texts therefore provocatively challenge 'meaning', making them problematic to translate from the conventional perspective of equivalence. Walter Benjamin's contemporary essay 'The Task of the Translator' also critiques the assumption that translation involves a search for semantic equivalence, emphasizing instead the requirement for translators to follow the rhetorical and associative (dichterisch) patterns of the original at the expense of its meaning. Although his ideological standpoint is different from that of Dada, Benjamin's advocacy of a literalist, foreignizing (Venuti) method of translation offers a theoretically-grounded approach to translating Dada texts without betraying their underlying intentions. Machine Translation is here proposed as an ideologically neutral mechanism for performing such translations and two examples of its output, texts by Francis Picabia and Tristan Tzara transcoded into English, are analysed. These automatic translations are shown to reveal strikingly different associative patterns and lacunae in the two languages, offering an ironic, negative image of Benjamin's ideal of a Pure Language founded on the supplementarity of translations in the 'afterlife' of the original.

‘The Art I Love is the Art of Cowards’: Francis Picabia and René Clair's Entr'acte and the Politics of Death and Remembrance in France after World War One

Francis Picabia and René Clair's film Entr'acte (1924), shown within the context of the ballet Relâche, undertaken in collaboration with the composer Eric Satie, is a critique by Picabia of the political and aesthetic effects of the call-to-order in France after the Great War (1914–1918), with affinities to his critical position expressed in both paintings and writings. This critique is part of a wider project by Picabia engaged with the relation of the individual subject to technology and modernity, as manifestations of industrial capitalism and of new forms of governmentality that erase subjectivity. The project deliberately satirises the post-war cult of the dead, using a Keystone Cops like chase to mock the repatriation of the French war dead from battlefield cemeteries in the early 1920s. In their satire, however, both film and ballet also establish a distinctive critique of the technology of film itself as implicated in a modernity where the individual can be easily and indifferently annihilated by the demands of the state.

Introduction: The Promise of Apathy

This essay is the journal editor's introduction to part 3 of an ongoing symposium on quietism. With reference to writings of James Joyce, Francis Picabia, J. M. Coetzee, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Elaine Pagels, and Karen King—and with extended reference to Jonathan Lear's study of “cultural devastation,” Radical Hope—Jeffrey Perl explores the possibility that the fear of anomie (“anomiphobia”) is misplaced. He argues that, in comparison with the violence and narrowness of any given social order, anomie may well be preferable, and, in any case, may be no more than another name for quietism.

A Cubism reader: documents and criticism, 1906-1914

With radical formal innovations that scandalized the European art world, cubism revolutionized modern art and opened the path toward pure abstraction. Documenting the heady first years of this profoundly influential movement, A Cubism Reader presents the most comprehensive collection of cubist primary sources ever compiled for English-language publication.This definitive anthology covers the historical genesis of cubism from 1906 to 1914, with documents that range from manifestos and poetry to exhibition prefaces and reviews to articles that address the cultural, political, and philosophical issues related to the movement. Most of the texts Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten have selected are from French sources, but their inclusion of carefully culled German, English, Czech, Italian, and Spanish documents speaks to the international reach of cubist art and ideas. Equally wide-ranging are the writers represented - a group that includes Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Leger, Francis Picabia, Andre Salmon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Henri Le Fauconnier, and many others.These diverse selections - unabridged and freshly translated - represent a departure from the traditional view of cubism as shaped almost exclusively by Picasso and Braque. Augmented by Antliff and Leighten's insightful commentary on each entry, as well as many of the articles' original illustrations, A Cubism Reader ultimately broadens the established history of the movement by examining its monumental contributions from a variety of contemporary perspectives.