National Post (National Edition)
The struggle that inspired modern art.
HOW EUROPEAN POWER AND AUTHORITY FUELLED MODERN ART
Absurdity and satire came bursting into modern art a century ago, in 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. In retrospect it’s often been treated as a whimsical gesture, but in truth it was fuelled by the anger of artists who rejected every aspect of European power and authority. They decided to rebel against nation-states waging a terrible war, paid for by the blood of countless young men.
Tristan Tzara, a Romanian poet, organized the first meeting in Zurich. He called it Dada because the word had no meaning and his goal was anti-meaning. He wanted to explode the rationalism that had driven a whole continent to catastrophe. He later moved Dada to Berlin and then Paris. His strategy was to laugh at power, to make art that exploded the solemnity of a corrupt system.
The surprising results of Tzara’s project are the main subject of Lost Profiles: Memoirs of cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism by Phillipe Soupault (City Lights), a book by a participant, newly translated into English.
Soupault was a poet and novelist (1897-1990) who worked with André Breton in creating a version of Dada in Paris. As little-known artists, they realized that this idea demanded a powerfully arrogant approach. “We were learning arrogance,” Soupault wrote. “But it was still only an apprenticeship.” Dada, Soupault saw, was trying “to destroy all the established values, the literary practices, and the moral bias that the great captains of literature and journalism wanted to continue imposing.”
In Paris, Tzara persuaded his French colleagues to stage a public performance and they gathered a good crowd for the occasion. Poets read their poems, painters showed their paintings.
Then Tzara took the stage. He announced that he would improvise a poem on the spot. As Soupault recalled, he began “picking words written on scraps of paper thrown into a hat that he withdrew at random. This was too much. People hissed. And the event ended in disarray.” This initial scandal impressed on the Dadaists that “if we wanted to articulate and spread our rebellion, we had to systematically cause scandal.”
Respectable newspapers considered Dada a publicity stunt by upstart scribblers to draw attention to themselves. The Dadaists didn’t let that stop them. They began meeting in Montparnasse cafés where they soon made themselves unwelcome. Dadaists had a way of enraging other cultural factions, so fights sometimes broke out. “I was even accused of a swinging from a chandelier to sweep the plates and glasses off the table,” he wrote later. He didn’t say whether the accusation was true.
Dada may or may not have disturbed the general public, which had many other reasons for hating European politics. But its effect on the future of art was unmistakable. Under its influence, irrational notions became acceptable. Marcel Duchamp’s art (signing and exhibiting a urinal, for example) was celebrated by critics and museums rather than dismissed as a brief, eccentric gesture. This was the triumph of Dada, the destruction of revered art tradition.
The severity of the Dadaists was outrageous when they dealt with elder artists they were trying to replace. When the poet Anatole France died in 1924, Dadaists distributed a pamphlet at his funeral explaining “with fierce insolence” their scorn for his life and work.
After several decades, Dada and its influence were written into the history of art. Much of this was accomplished in Canada, where an ambitious young scholar, Michel Sanouillet (1924-2015), came from France to teach at the University of Toronto. During two decades there he founded a French film society, a French film company and a French bookstore (on Gerrard Street, right around the corner from the first the Av Isaacs gallery). While teaching and running his various projects he worked on his monumental account of Dada, which became the definitive history, published in four languages.
Soupault and Breton were partners not only in bringing Dada to Paris but also in creating Surrealism. They were good friends but fractious collaborators. As Soupault says, Breton “wanted to systematize, to impose rules and directives.” An individualist, Soupault moved on when Breton’s intentions became clear. To Breton, Surrealism wasn’t just a style or an artistic inclination. It was an organization that excommunicated members if their poems, painting or films deviated from Breton’s views of true Surrealism.
But what was that? To Breton, the essence of the new art was “pure psychic automatism,” or automatic writing.
Breton, the organization man, joined the Communist Party in the 1920s. Louis Aragon, another of the Surrealist poets, was also a Communist, but for much longer. Whatever their politics, a collection of remarkable artists associated themselves with Surrealism — the painter Max Ernst, the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, the painters Joan Miro and Salvador Dali. Soupault remembers Dali “wavering between the careers of clown, painter and businessman.” Dali’s fate was his classification as a minor figure by artists and critics, but he was such a dazzling advertisement for himself that he became by far the most famous Surrealist painter.
Wandering away from his main subject now and then, Soupault also includes portraits of others he knew, including James Joyce and Marcel Proust. These turn out to be as charming as the rest of the passages in this book, a brief account by a perceptive writer who was on the scene when modernity was young.