T H E

S U R R E A L I S T S L O O K A T

A R T

E L U A R D A R A G O N

S O U P A U L T B R E T O N

T Z A R A

P O N T U S H U L T E N

L o u r s A R A G O N

T H E C H A L L E N G E T O P A I N T I N G

It does not appear that man is endowed with an infinite capacity for astonishment. Otherwise, his most commonplace modes of thought would only begin to astound him. He says “The bread is on the table,” to announce that he has just put it there or to offer a grammatical illustration, without hearing that strange and distant sound these same wotds yield. And if by chance everything that is thus extraordinarily ordinary does reach someone who can experience its strangeness, its paralyz- ing strangeness, this person will be considered ill; the doctors summoned will murmur “p~ychasthenia,~’ and the one who ’had been speaking will reply, “I simply said that the bread was on the table.”

The Gauls all the same feared that the sky would fall on their heads, and it is fortunate that from time to time you can calm an insufferable brat by telling him about the ogre while loudly grinding your teeth. Likewise, poets exhausted from habitual scorn will suddenly brandish thunderbolts of stu- pefaction. The marvelous arises where laughter subsides. No, the bread is no longer on the table, or it’s no longer a table and it‘s certainly no longer bread. “The marvelous: intervention of supernatural beings in the poem” (Larousse). It is with the true nature of the marvelous that man is undoubtedly least en- chanted. It suffices him to think that this or that falls with the marvelous” for everything to be in order and for him to go to

sleep. We have drawn up catalogues of marvels. We have never asked ourselves what these marvels had in common.

LG

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To anyone who takes the time to consider it carefully, it is certain that the marvelous will reveal itself as a dialectical event born of another, lost event. The marvelous stands in opposition to that which exists mechanically, to that which exists in such a way as to pass unnoticed, and thus we gener- ally believe that the marvelous is the negation of reality. This somewhat cursory view is conditionally acceptable: it is certain that the marvelous is born from the refusal of a reality, but also from the emergence of a new rapport, of a new reality which this refusal has liberated. I would like to propose a hypothesis addressing the true nature of this rapport. Should this hypothe- sis prove insufficient, it will still have made room for an inex- plicably neglected problem. Therefore, I will hazard the fol- lowing: the rapport born of the negation of the real by the marvelous is essentially ethical in character, and the mar- velous is always the materialization of a moral symbol in vio- lent opposition to the morals of the world in which it surges forth. This must be explained through examples.

The Greeks and the Romans, who had not suffered the moral repression Christianity brought, understood the mar- velous solely in the form of the exceptional-exceptional beauty or fort-the exceptional case, such as incest. Meta- morphoses: a man who had admired himself immoderately changed into a plant. The gods became swans in order to magnify our bestial nature. The marvelous was intertwined with life and through it alone searched for the appearance of those supernatural beings it animated. After the Christian darkness had fallen on the Western world, man hardly dared think any more. He was no longer master of his body. His instincts were condemned to hell. Everything now deprived of the right to express itself in this befrocked universe passed into another world, that of the supernatural. Thus were born the demons, fairies, and giants, and a vast sheltering forest began to grow. All of human imagination took refuge in this legendary

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country, where nothing quotidian could enter, where virtues were foreign and where the sorcerers, however hideous, be- came beautiful at the threshold of pious consciousness. In this realm, dryads died away, ceding the bleeding heart of the enchanted trees to the myth of Vivien and Merlin; for many years kings married shepherdesses, indeed for so many that-the day arrived when elsewhere the heads of kings began to roll. Throughout these centuries terrorized by hell and the cross, the marvelous is the cZinicaZ image of human liberty. All who had experienced the Christian lie, all who had evaded the flames of the Inquisition and the imbecility of the priests, took refuge in this enchanted wood. There Cornelius Agrippa can be found beside Arthur, Perrault, Swift, the divinely possessed, Armida, and the Cagliostros, whose legend inaugurates the ’ Age of Revolution.

Shot through with contradictory currents, the nineteenth century will be forced to reassume the heritage of remote ages. It is the site of a struggle which resists once again the libera- tion of its monsters, its dream-visions. All romanticism will inhabit this land of escape. There, among deconsecrated signs, minds still fogged by the rays from stained-glass windows and the church’s deceptions took refuge. What is the value of these cathedrals to minds who no longer believe in their purpose, cathedrals which they are enamored of in themselves, legends which they dwell on continually out of love for art? The mar- velous contemporary with the great reaction following the French Revolution finds its highest expression the day it man- ifests itself within the confines of a work and a life-the Rim- baudean marvelous. Rimbaud’s flight disappears into a new unknown. It summarizes and negates what precedes it. Then arrives the voice first heard with Sade who wished for the triumph of crime (“It immortalizes me; it must be made to rule the world’,) and of the devil (“a being more powerful than this vile God”). This voice predicts the appearance of a new mar-

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velous, “beautiful as the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table,” with Lautrkamont i& true inventor. Yes, to this offensive return of the devil we owe the descent of the marvelous among us. It will no longer be the attribute of a distant, enchanted world; it enlivens our sur- roundings, it sits beside us in a cafk, it asks us politely to pass the sugar. Around 1880, amidst those surprising, convulsive women, Professor Charcot2 and his assistants will observe its energies being harnessed to an extraordinary enterprise, mate- rialization of the miracle. The new century will dawn over Sigmund Freud, who focuses the scandalous eyes of sexuality on the incomprehensible. He is the first to recognize the strange mechanism of sublimation, and in the images of dream, madness, and poetry, he teaches us to read the moral claims of humanity.

It is up to surrealism to take stock of the marvelous in 1930. Modern poetry is essentially atheist. That is, one task is sacred to it: dechristianizing the world by its particular means, whose efficacy, strangely, this world undoubtedly underesti- mates. Attacking symbols is not a childish undertaking, though it can easily appear to be. There is room for hope that everywhere, be it in the shadow of a hobgoblin or at an iron- works for church railings, a handful of fanatics will succeed in erasing all allusions to the infamous cross, and I dare to be- lieve that traffic engineers will be found who can invent a way for roads to meet without crossing. So much for the old dreams: those who borrowed the accent and the pretext of the Jesus- Marys to express themselves must be annihilated. Today the most beautiful painting in the world is incomprehensible to me, as painting, if it presents a religious subject. The subject hides it. 1 would prefer the stupidest and stillest of still lifes. But starting now, the new imaginary seizes upon everything within reach. It thus mocks the hypocritical words of resigna- tion which for so long have enabled priests to lay their slaves

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with bound wrists at the feet of kings and industrialists: M y kingdom is not of this world. On the contrary, the kingdom of visions is of this world, today it is this world, and serious, derisive men who have worked loose the creaking gates are opening them to new apparitions who bear strange rays of light in their footsteps and in the folds of their cloaks. Take note of the era to come! This world is already splitting open, it con- tains a principle of negation that’s been ignored, it‘s cracking. Follow the rising plume of smoke, the whiplash of the appari- tions in the midst of the bourgeois universe. A lightning flash is smouldering beneath the bowler hats. Devilry really is in the air.

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You-youi-e astonished by all the tricks they attribute to the conjurer from Nazareth? Turning water into wine undoubtedly will always meet with greater success than its opposite. Yet how impoverished is all that poetry which employs a chalice as its reed pipe and empty thunder from heaven as its refrain. As soon as the human imagination turns elsewhere, how much greater everything is, more monstrous, closer to the miracle. By itself the helmet descending into the courtyard of the Castle of Otranto is large enough to overshadow Golgothah trivial c~ntr ivances.~ This said, we can speak of the m i r a ~ l e . ~

What characterizes the miracle, what proclaims the miracle, that quality of the miraculous, is doubtless in part surprise, as it has been feebly observed. But it is much more like an extraordinary estrangement* in all the senses of the word. The dead estranged from the grave, giants estranged by size, sylphs by lightness, roses by the season. The miracle is

~~~ ~

““Surreality, moreover, will be a function of or will toward

estrangement [de‘puysement] of everything.” AndrC Breton, “Note to

the Reader,” in La Femme 100 tstes.

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an unexpected disorder, an astounding disproportion. And it is in that regard that it negates the real and that once accepted, it becomes a miracle, the reconciliation of the real and the mar- velous. The new rapport thus established is surreality, defined a thousand times and always differently definable, that actual line binding together all the virtual images that surround us. All the preceding was necessary in order to begin to speak of surrealism’s action in our time-in order to make clear the general significance of an undertaking which offers itself ini- tially in a manner so particular, artistic, and I suppose pic- torial, as a technical consideration.

It is curious that virtually no one seems to have noticed a singular occupation certain people are now systematically undertaking, which recalls more the procedures of magic than those of painting. Further, it brings into question personality, talent, artistic proprietorship, and all kinds of other ideas which had been complacently warming their toes in imbecilic skulls. I would like to speak of what for simplicity’s sake is called collage, even though the use of paste [colle] is only one characteristic of this procedure, and not even an essential one. Doubtless, this subject contained something intimidating since, in all the voluminous critical work dedicated to cubism after its birth, one finds for example only a few superficial words indicating the existence of papiers coll&, as they were then known. These are meant to designate the first appearance of collage through which, from 1911 on, the anxiety of Braque and Picasso reveals itself. At this point, it is necessary to specify that collage as one understands it today is something entirely different from the papier collk of Cubism. But the latter already posed certain questions which the former still asks. It is significant to note this critical oversight regarding an activity which absorbed a good part of the thought of a generation’s most admired painters; the few words devoted to it, more as excuse than explication, do not even suffice to

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establish the plastic interpretation one had the right to expect in an epoch when such considerations were fashionable among the commentators. To better understand what has taken place over almost the last twenty years, and preferably following the course of history, we must begin by speaking of papier coll6 as it appeared at birth.

I don’t know whether Braque or Picasso was the first (perhaps desperate for materials) to use wallpaper, newspaper, or a postage stamp, as found, to complete or begin a painting which must have made the dilettantes tremble, or whether it actually was from a desperation of means. It is probably use- less to question these two contemporaries about a priority which is less important than the spirit that resorted to paste and to the reality of borrowed materials. Do these two remem- ber?5 I’ve heard Braque speak of what he called “a certitude,” the thing pasted on, around which the painting had to con- stitute itself in an entirely different perspective than if that thing had itself been copied. In the wretched room of the H6tel Roma with its beautiful view of the factories of the north Paris suburb where Braque painted, I have studied the drawings which filled out the chance effects of the dilapidated wall; so I know what emotion must have attended this painter’s sudden preference for a piece of paper over paint. I am not sure whether the justification he then offered really accounted for that emotion. I will never believe, in any case, even were Picasso to contradict me,* that the same preoccupations, the

*To imitate the grooves of a chair, Picasso first of all intro-

duced a piece of paper he covered with paint exactly where the

wood of the chair was represented. He found it useless to copy la-

boriously what had already been thoroughly copied or to copy an

object if you could use the object itself. He also liked to paste

down a scrap of old newspaper, add a few charcoal strokes, and

that was that-the painting. Extreme and arrogant poverty of mate-

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same rigor, or the same arbitrariness guided the hand of Pica- sso and that of Braque at that instant, when for me two men declare themselves so entirely different and so irreducible one to the other. It seems in any case that only Picasso persisted in a direction that many others have since taken. Anyhow, the paintings he is doing now, which derive from the collage aes- thetic, no longer address the original plastic concerns. We will return to these later.

From those first works issue two utterly distinct catego- ries of work, one where the element pasted on is valued for its form, or more precisely for its representation of the object, and the other where it is employed for its material. It is certain that the latter constitutes nothing more than pictorial work where a problem of color is at issue, where everything comes down to an enrichment of the palette, and at times a critique of the palette, a quip. By contrast, the former anticipates the collage to come, where the expressed triumphs over the manner of expression, where the object depicted plays the role of a word. It is in any case to this category just mentioned that the poems written around 1917 relate. These were improp-erly labeled cubist poetry, though they had nothing to do with cubism. They presented an analogy with papier coll6 through the use of

rials has always enchanted him. Therein lies the greatness of cub-

ism at that time: without worrying whether it is perishable,

anything at hand will do for these painters to express themselves,

and all the better if it’s worthless and disgusts its audience. Later,

people will become accustomed to papiers collCs because they will

choose to see in them the rough sketches for future paintings to

come or, as Picasso recently said to me, the anatomy of the paint-

ing. Nothing could be more false. Papier coll6 is an end in itself.

Picasso regrets that painters subsequently copied the effect of pa-

pier collC in paint. And the attraction of this is such that one can

hardly be astonished.

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found phrases as a lyrical element; and this analogy proclaims a possibility beyond cubism to be realized later, when painting that is still qualified as “literary”) will finally be considered as a genuine language and no longer simply as a question of taste.* How much of what they were doing did these explorers understand at first, who experimented with fake wood, playing cards, sand, emery paper, fragments of mirror? It matters little. They had come a long way since that first appearance of paste, some through playing, some through defiance. The plastic pre- text had allowed them to make light of preconceptions and numberless hesitations. The principle of collage once admit- ted, painters had unknowingly passed from white to black magic. It was too late to retreat.

One can imagine a time when the problems of painting, those for example that made for the success of Ckzannism, will seem as strange and as ancient as the prosodic torments of poets may appear now. One can imagine a time when the painters who no longer mix their own colors will find it infantile and unworthy to apply the paint themselves and will no longer consider the personal touch, which today still constitutes the value of their canvases, to possess anything more than the documentary in- terest of a manuscript or autograph. One can imagine a time

*It would have been desirable if, parallel to the considera-

tions of painting, the author of this article had sketched at least in

gross outline the history of collage in literature. It is certain that

the author does not here intend to examine one form of expression,

but expression in general and its ends. Therefore, he regrets limit-

ing himself to painting and reserves the right to return more me-

thodically to the problem of literary collage in a study which will

complete the present article and which will permit broader

generalizations.

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when painters will no longer even have their color applied by others and will no longer draw. Collage offers us a foretaste of this time. It is certain that writing is moving in the same direction. This brooks no discussion.

In the dada period, and actually a bit earlier, this in- sight about the future of painting comes to light quite precisely thanks to two spirits even more different from each other than Braque and PicasseMarcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. And an individual who passed for an eccentric before mys- teriously disappearing: the now legendary Arthur Cravan,6 des- erter from seventeen countries. The process of painting then was taken so far, the negation of painting so violently declared, that the impossibility of painting imposed itself on the painters. It is perhaps vexing that the sterilizing influence (and here this word is meant in the best sense) of Marcel Duchamp did not purely and simply put an end to painting, instead of applying itself with its utmost rigor against Duchamp himself; but that is what happened. Nevertheless, the example of Du- champ, this silence irritating to those who speak, has made an entire generation ill at ease and perhaps has shamed many canvases which would otherwise have been politely painted. What is certain is that on the day following cubism’s re-creation of the beautiful, a beautiful as special and as defined as its predecessors, Duchamp and Picabia, having watched that crystal- lization appear before their eyes, having considered the un- wavering mechanism of taste, will assault a fundamental ele- ment of art, and particularly of painting, by putting personality on trial. The significant stages of this trial: Duchamp adorning the Mona Lisa with a mustache and signing it; Cravan signing a ~ r i n a l ; ~ Picabia signing an inkblot and titling it the Sainte Vierge (Blessed Virgin). To me these are the logical conse- quences of the initial gesture of collage. What is now main- tained, is on the one hand, the negation of technique, as in collage, as well as of the “technical personality”; the painter, if

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we can still call him that, is no longer bound to his canvas by a mysterious physical relationship analogous to procreation. And from these negations an affirmative idea has emerged which has been called “the personality of choice.” A manufactured object can equally well be incorporated into a painting, it can constitute the painting in itself. An electric lamp becomes for Picabia a young girl. We see that here painters are truly begin- ning to use objects as words. The new magicians have rein- vented incantation. And for those who continue to paint, all sentimentality concerning material has now been abandoned. To Picabia it doesn’t matter who spreads the enamel. As for Duchamp, he has just invented a system for playing roulette, and his last work will be a limited edition “plate” for the exploitation of this system, an engraved certificate which is a collage containing the author’s photograph.

To be sure when Picabia spoke of the inkblot he had signed, he didn’t neglect to draw attention to the inimitability of such splatters. He congratulated himself that his inkblot was more difficult to copy than a Renoir. In this way such under- takings reveal themselves as an essential critique of painting from its origins to our own times. The cubists as well had collided with the inimitable but had thought they could tame it. The monster, all at once, claimed sole residence in its cage.

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Painting has not always existed. An origin can be assigned to it, and our heads are always being stuffed with its development and its periods of greatness, so that we can infer not only temporary declines but, as with all other concepts, a termina- tion. Nothing at all would be different in the world if painting ceased, yet such a view startles the spirit of preservation deeply held by art lovers. Let them be reassured: we are not optimistic enough to predict that the day will come when no one will paint, but what can be suggested is that painting, with

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its carpetbag of superstitions, from subject matter to materials, from the spirit of decoration to that of illustration, from com- position to taste, etc., will soon enter a period of soothing diversion restricted to young girls and aging provincials, as in the case of verse making today and novel writing tomorrow. There is reason for such a prediction, since it appears that writers have already understood that today the word Literature can no longer be used except pejoratively. In contrast, the painters, and those very ones who, by their works, most hasten this transformation of which they are unconscious or only partly conscious, the painters are still enraptured with painting and apt to return, through some uncertainty, to their old re- ligion. Look at what happened to Chirico. The museum, the spirit of comparison, waylays them. This becomes as odd and fascinating as the awaited symptom of an illness on the pre- dicted day of its manifestation. When the painter who spent his life giving the impression that what he did was not painting (and for Chirico, of whom it was said that he painted like a house painter, that reached its height with the metaphysical interiors where he truly imitated the effect of collage, and anticipating a procedure which was not to be met with until much later, he even reproduced color prints, not daring to paste them on), when this painter returns to his craft,* he

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*Perhaps the time has come to explain my loathing for

Giorgio de Chirico's recent painting. Having made this known, I've

found myself being told by recent converts that I was incapable of

understanding it, incapable of following it, if one is to believe a

certain Waldemar George, or more simply that I must own older

Chiricos and feared the competition of the new ones. The truth,

however, is that I detest the latter. Chirico alone will understand

me: just as for him serving oneselfa breakfast of fresh f i g s coated

with crushed ice is an act so serious that according to his code it

would deserve a sentence of ten to fifteen years imprisonment, so for

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causes painting to reenter in the form of a minuscule tremor, a gradation which reveals touch. Even today it is certain that all the collagists, without exception, paint, besides, pictures that are nothing but reproductions of the discoveries they made with scissors and paste. But the tragedy unfolds: soon we will watch the fifth act.

What is important to grasp, as one follows the chain of aesthetic reflections of the last twenty years, is the general sense of the evolution of what must be called art. Nothing can be deduced from the attitude of one man, and the contradic- tions of a Derain, even more than those of a Chirico, are useless for purposes of generalization. What matters with each artist is the discovery he makes superseding previous discov- eries yet along the same path (even if at first sight it appears to be nothing and must await new men and new audacities in order to be comprehended as part of the same pursuit). It is in this sense that I understand the thought of Isidore Ducasse, “Poetry must be made by everyone. Not by one. Poor Hugo! Poor Racine! Poor Coppke! Poor Corneille! Poor Boileau! Poor Scarron! twitch, twitch, twitch,’’ and I invite you to adapt it to painting. Moreover, it is time to comprehend that the hour has come when everything which passed for a quip in the Podsies of Ducasse must be considered the prophetic expression of an upheaval we serve as blind laborers. But let’s move on. Enough

me, the fact of painting like this after having painted like that de-

serves, according to my penalty system, fifteen to twenty years of

confinement and amputation of the right hand. This last punish-

ment would give him the leisure in his cell to dictate an endlessly

beautiful work like Hebdomeros. The painter’s genius within the

writer, it says on the dust jacket, and in fact the genius of today’s

painter expresses itself wonderfully through writing once he aban-

dons the gimmicks and delights of painting and entrusts himself to

the intellect instead of returning to his craft.

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that we retain from all this that art has truly ceased to be individual, even when the artist is a die-hard individualist, since, leaving aside individuals per se, we can trace through the instances of their thought a vast reasoning which only uses people as intermediaries in an entirely transitory way. If nothing more than this fragmentary part of what I am writing reaches the journalists’ ears-“art has truly ceased to be indi- vidual”-I will not be displeased.

So it is that the discoveries belong in no way to their discoverers and that there is no use in exaggerating the busi- ness of questions of priority, as painters so often are inclined to demand from historians. Even though it has been stated that in Germany and Switzerland (since 1915, says someone; since 1914, interjects another), collage has been occasionally em- ployed, I have no interest in such futile endeavors which only concern the encyclopedia.* We could play at seeking out age- old precursors of collage and find many among the curiosities of hoaxes, caricaturists, and forgers. Contemporary collage does not demand one’s attention by means of this trivial heritage. It demands it by being concerted, by being in abso- lute opposition to painting, and beyond painting. By the human possibility it represents. By substituting for a degraded art a means of expression of unknown power and range. By restoring its true meaning to the ancient pictorial act, making it impossi- ble for the painter to abandon himself to narcissism, to art for art‘s sake, and leading him back to magical practices, origin and justification of that plastic representation forbidden by

*I would rather point out that at Nantes in 1916 Jacques

VachC made collages with scraps of cloth on postcards, editions of

twelve of which he sold for two francs each. These depicted scenes

of contemporary military life with extremely elegant people and

voguish Parisian women. It would be useful if the persons who pos-

sess them would come forward.

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many religions. There will be no shortage of monomaniacs, painters, or aesthetes to ascribe to me I know not what dark designs against painting and painters. They will have com- pletely misunderstood me. Besides the fact that I could not be responsible for the evolution of art, which one could only vainly attempt to falsify, who does not see that as I think the problem can be posed, these considerations tend to reveal an altogether higher destiny for painters than that little enter- tainer's career to which routine and dealers would seek to confine them? It is certain that the social game we live in is leading painters progressively to that state of servitude, of prostitution, to which the artists of Venice were reduced in the sixteenth century. Today, patrons rarely have their portraits executed or have their martial adventures retraced in mile-long compositions. However, they display side by side their furni- ture and the paintings with which they brighten their walls. The style of the Caf6 du D8me or of the bourgeois apartment now necessitates the inclusion of a Brancusi or a Mir6. This is strange and unjust, but impossible to deny. Painting is becom- ing soothing and flatters the man of taste who paid for it. It is a luxury item. The canvas is a jewel. So now it becomes possible for painters to break from that moneyed domestication. Collage is poor. For a long time to come its value will be denied. It appears to be freely reproducible. Everyone believes they can make their own. And if painters, by a continuous act of will, can perpetuate and increase this discredit, perhaps they will succeed in realizing what is now simply said from stupidity; their works will truly no longer be worth anything, absolutely nothing, to those who believed it their right to adorn their walls with human thought, living thought, reviving those slave deco- rations one hardly sees anymore except at the Folies-Bergkre where a dinner with Pai'va is being recreated.8

Yes, without attributing any importance to them, painters mechanically repeat the gestures and magic rituals

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whose meaning has been forgotten. They are only interested in the beauty of the ceremonial. There isn’t a great mental dif- ference between Braque and Soutine and an English Pre- Raphaelite. And since they easily resign themselves to the fact that their paintings will ultimately embellish Primaverds dis- play rooms, Citroen’s home, and the depths of American stu- pidity, there is no longer any distinction to be made between the modern painters and those of the worst epochs, from Ver- onese to La Gandara. Everything takes place as though a great secret had been lost. Isn’t that what Andrk Derain meant to say, speaking to Andrk Breton, with that business about the “white point”?* Like Chirico, with whom at a certain moment he can be compared, he searched in the realm of magic for that secret he felt nearby. Perhaps he grasped it in the hands of that Chevalier X,9 now in Moscow, who is as lifeless and unreal as anyone could ask the representation of a human being to be, and who is holding, pasted on, an open newspaper so that we will know all the better what a mannequin he is. This collage, one of the oldest known, seems to speak to a preoccupation diametrically opposite that of the cubists, and it should un- doubtedly be compared with those wax dolls that casters of spells put pins into. Andrk Derain was not destined to go further. He has now taken to painting little ladies, like Fa- biano, perhaps a little better. Is there really for every man a minute when everything wobbles, when the most demanding,

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*“Derain speaks emotionally of this ‘white point’ with which

certain Flemish and Dutch painters of the seventeenth century

highlighted a vase or a print. The point, always mysteriously and

perfectly placed, cannot have been perceived by them. It is indeed

without connection to either the color of the object or the bril-

liance of light, and nothing regarding composition justifies its

presence. (It is known that the artists in question frequented al-

chemical laboratories.) This observation is essential. If you light a

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the most penetrating, the most clairvoyant as well as the blind- est, the most confused and the most trivial suddenly lose sight of the two or three truths that guided them and are transformed into flute players practicing their trills? Too bad . . . any- thing of value precedes that minute.

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Words that express evil are destined to take on a utilitarian significance. Ideas improve. The meaning of words takes part in this.

Plagiarism is necessary. Progress involves it. It adheres closely to an author’s words, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, replaces it by a correct one.

To be well made, a maxim does not need to be corrected. It needs to be developed.

For me, these phrases of Isidore Ducasse contain all the moral- ity of expression. For everyone, the morality of collage.

Where and when did collage appear? Despite the at- tempts of several of the very first dadaists, I think we must pay homage to Max Ernst, at least for the two forms of collage that are furthest from the principles of papier coll&the pho- tographic collage and the collage of illustrations. Immediately, , this discovery came into general use, and the German dada

candle in the dark and move it away from my eye until I can no

longer make out its flame, the shape of the flame and its distance

will elude me. It is no longer anything but a white point. The ob-

ject I am painting, the being before me, only comes to life when I make that white point appear on it. Everything lies in the place-

ment of the candle.” AndrC Breton, Les Pas perdu: “Idkes d‘un

peintre.”

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publications in particular contain collages signed by at least ten authors.1° But the success of this procedure resulted more from the astonishment of mastering a new system than from the need to express oneself at all costs. Quickly, the use of collage became limited to a few men, and it is certain that the entire feeling of collages then being made derived from the thought of Max Ernst and Max Ernst alone. For that matter, the German dadaists were split over crucial problems. It is known that social issues put an end to their union after the Revolution of 1918 and to their activity after the Revolution’s defeat during the great inflation. At that time, several believed they could resolve the problem of art’s inutility by adapting artistic means to the ends of propaganda. Thus in Russia and central Europe, collage gave birth to those photomontages particularly em- ployed by the constructivists. It is not my place to gloss over a phenomenon against which the pure painters assuredly passed disdainful judgment, but which marks one of the oscillations of painting in our time, and which is above all a symptom of the need to signify characteristic of the evolving forms of thought at our current stage of human reflection.

The 1920 exhibition of collages by Max Ernst in Paris is perhaps the first event allowing us to visualize the resources and multiple means of an entirely new art.ll In that very city, Picasso has never been allowed to show the constructions of wire, cardboard, scraps of cloth, etc., he has been making all along (utterly disregarded), pursuing in a manner worth study the concept initially expressed by papier coll6. We would have to make an inventory of the procedures used by Max Ernst to understand the state of collage at that time. Ernst employed: the photographic detail pasted onto a drawing or painting, drawing or painting added to a photograph, the image cut up and incorporated into a painting or another image, photogra- phy, pure and simple, of an arrangement of objects rendered

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incomprehensible by photography. * This doesn’t suffice to characterize his collages: one must take account of the fact that the borrowed elements were used in various ways, accord- ing to whether they were made to represent things they had already represented or whether, by an entirely new kind of metaphor, to represent something completely different. Thus were born those strange flowers made of gears and those complex anatomical scaffoldings. So it is that an embroidery pattern here excellently represented a racetrack and that else- where hats formed into a caravan. Max Ernst‘s thought must be grasped at that point where, with a bit of color, some sketch- ing, he tries to acclimate the specter he has just hurled into an alien landscape, or at that point where he places in the new arrival’s hand an object the other cannot touch. One should take account too of those collages where the painting gets the better of what is already there, where everything is painted over, where perhaps the scenery is entirely painted. It is prob- ably not chance that brings me here to the language of the theater: the actors play a role on a stage where flats containing several possibilities have been placed. I have often thought that a huge and wonderful drama would result from the arbi-

*Not to forget the written component. The title, elevated

beyond the descriptive for the first time by Chirico and becoming

in Picabia’s hands the distant term of a metaphor, with Ernst takes

on the proportions of a poem. “Proportions” is to be understood lit-

erally: from the word to the paragraph. No one as much as Max

Ernst has caused it to be said of his pictures, “This is no longer

painting.” Doubtless it is because painting knows now how to avoid

being painting, with all that is disconcerting about this: to be

painting and then to cease to be. I will quote a few examples of ti-

tle poems. The first two are to be read with the collage, if you ap-

proach it; they are written on the collage or in its margin. The third

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trary succession of those tableaux, just as a city whose plan could be drawn up would result from juxtaposing early Chi- ricos. By publishing La Femme 100 tgtes at the end of 1929, is it not true that Max Ernst brought to life that thought which came to me at the Sans pared exhibition? The painter borrows a character from an old illustration, just as a dramatic author makes use of a flesh and blood actor whom he did not feel initially obliged to bring to life. But the drama is this conflict of disparate elements brought together in a real framework where their actual reality becomes alienated. The one was drawn to resemble a man, but only through its own violation can the other, a benign landscape, accept the haunting pres- ence of that man. It is notable that, since the collages of 1918 to 1920, Max Ernst has made only so to speak pure collages for Eluard’s poems and for Les Malheurs des immortels; and that La Femme 100 tgtes results from a single technique, where nothing is drawn by the author.

This too is significant, that all the painters who can be called surrealists have used collage, at least momentarily. If

is written on the back; you don’t see it with the collage. I am not

pointing out this difference from love of detail. I think it pertains

to considerations we would like Ernst to explain:

. . . The dog who shits the dog so perfectly

coiffed despite difficulties of terrain caused by a

great snowfall the woman with beautiful breasts the

song of the flesh.

. . . That makes the twenty-second time

Lohengrin has abandoned his fiancCe for the first

time / there where the earth has spread its crust

over four violins / we will never see each other

again / we will never do battle with the angels I the

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collage for several of them is closer to papier coll6 than to what we encounter with Max Ernst, since it is little more than a modification of the paint can, still for most it plays an impor- tant role, and it appears at a decisive moment in the evolution it designates. Closer to his spirit, Arp, who under the title Fatagaga had made collages in collaboration with Max Ernst, sought first to paste on elements of paper randomly, then made use of paper cutouts. The appearance of his collages and his painting is similar because the simplified character of the latter owes nothing to paint texture or touch which stand for personality among so many painters. Arp has his reliefs made by a carpenter; it is purely a concession on his part if he colors them himself, and if they get dirty you can repaint them with- out troubling their creator. These pictorial manners are new, and it is the purist idiocy to be astonished by them. This being the case, why use color? A pair of scissors and some paper, that is the only palette which doesn’t lead us back to our school desks. In this fashion Man Ray* made Revolving Doors, an entire book of cutout colored papers. Around 1926, papier

swan is completely calm 1 he pulls on the oars to

reach Leda.

. . . The chameleon’s transfiguration on

Mount Tabor occurs in an elegant limousine

whereas the angels and canaries flee the houses of

man and the blessed cloak of our Lord cries De

Profundis three times before whipping the exhibi-

tionists’ flesh.

*The method invented by Man Ray of photography without a

camera (Rayography), whose results are not foreseeable, should be

linked with collage. It is a philosophical operation of the same

sort, beyond painting, and with no real connection to photography.

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r

decoupe‘ began to figure as an element in practically all the paintings of Yves Tanguy, whether for its color or to help form actual (always, it’s true, anecdotal) object collages. Malkine has employed papier colle and object collages. Andre Masson has used sand and feather, achieving with the latter an effect which recalls ancient Peruvian fabrics. Magritte has employed papier collk and, very recently, the collaging of fabrics.* A place apart must be made for the collages of Francis Picabia.

We know that in his hands painting had so effectively disappeared that around 1920 he was content to stretch within a frame a few strings which he soon came to consider an unnecessary luxury. In him the taste for the ephemeral was so strong, so contrary to that instinct which causes painters to brood ignobly over their own work, that Picabia executed a work in chalk on a blackboard in order to be publicly erased.12 With Dada having passed like a storm, it was possible to believe that Picabia would return to more constructive inten- tions. This on the evidence of a few canvases painted in en- amel which looked as though they had been done in oil. But that was to know him poorly and misunderstand completely the extraordinary taste for mockery which possesses him. What one then saw was Picabia making objects play tricks, like trained monkeys in the circus of sham painting, objects par- ticularly ill suited for entry into the Louvre, and which will nonetheless find their way in, since everything gets classified, except for the laughter Picabia sometimes lets us hear. There were the “Pipoz” straws and their paper clothes, toothpicks, and safety pins. From bouquet of flowers to landscape, nothing was spared.

Around the same time Picasso did something terribly serious. He took a dirty shirt and sewed it to a canvas with

~ ~

“Is there a connection between collage and the use of writ-

ing in painting as practiced by Magritte? I see no way to deny it.

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needle and thread. And since with him everything turns into a guitar, this too became a guitar. He made a collage with nails sticking out of the surface. Two years ago he had a crisis, a true collage crisis: I heard him complaining because everyone who came to visit and who saw him bringing to life old scraps of embroidery, cardboard, bits of string and corrugated iron, rags found in the garbage, thought they were doing the right thing by bringing him remnants of magnificent fabrics to make paintings from. He wanted none of it, desiring instead the true waste products of human life, poor, soiled, and scorned.

A funny guy, Mir6. Any number of things in his paint- ings recall what is not paint: he does pictures on colored canvases and paints in a white spot as if he hadn’t put any paint there and the canvas was showing through. He purposely draws a trace of the stretcher on the painting, as if the stretcher has pressed inadvertently into the canvas. Perfectly naturally, last year he reached the point of doing only collages that are closer to Picasso’s collages and Mir6’s paintings than to anything else. The paper is generally not completely pasted down: its edges are free, it waves and flutters. In 1929, mineral pitch is one of Mir6’s favorite ingredients. It is difficult to say whether Mir6’s collages imitate his painting or whether instead his painting imitated in advance the effect of collage. As Mir6 slowly came to practice it, I lean toward this last interpretation.

Salvador Dali’s use of collage probably best defies inter- pretation. He paints with a magnifying glass; he knows how to imitate chromolithography so that the effect is invariably suc- cessful: the scraps of pasted-on lithograph appear painted on, while the painted areas appear to be pasted on. By this is he trying to baffle the eye, and does he rejoice in the error he has caused? It’s possible to think so, yet still find no explanation for this double game, which can be imputed neither to the painter’s despair before the inimitable, nor to his indolence before the fully expressed. It is also certain that the incoherent

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aspect of a Dali painting, seen as a whole, recalls the in- coherence specific to collages. People have tried in the past to reduce Max Ernst’s collages to plastic poems. If for psychologi- cal purposes you wanted to try a similar maneuver with Dali’s paintings, you would have to pretend that each of his paintings was a novel. In that way also Dali associates himself with that antipictorial spirit which recently caused the painters, then the critics, to scream, and which today is invading painting. This is the thing to retain from that succession of events we are witnessing which might appear chaotic to anyone not seeing the essential link.

It happens that I am considered a friend to several of the painters I am discussing here. I only recall this fact because I consider it entirely divorced from what I think. Moreover, what excites me in a man’s work is not what he excels at, what he knows how to do, but what he discovers and what he is close to discovering. This is to say I attach a higher price to painters’ faults than to their talents and that consequently, whether as friends or enemies, I am hardly disposed to extol their paint- ings. There is no reason to hide their weaknesses: the torment of Yves Tanguy’s horizon line, for example, certainly derives from a constraint, an impossibility of doing otherwise which emerges from some area of peculiarity. Should he be advised to seek some equivalent to collagefor the horizon itself? To stop painting, like the others? Having one day acquired a taste for the effects you get by rubbing a pencil across a sheet of paper after slipping a coin underneath, Max Ernst is definitely ob- sessed beyond measure by a certain graininess of surface which he laboriously depicts, whereas more than anyone he holds in his hands the instrument for scorning these rough effects. Man Ray is held captive by a very specific challenge: to imitate photography in painting and to imitate painting in

I

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!

photography, thus crossing from Vu to Renoir. Even Marcel Duchamp can be reproached for a technical shortcoming: to have stopped painting without winning over everyone else. Shouldn’t he have continued to offer an expression of himself which would have limited the immodesty of others? Mir6 and Arp like much too much what they do: another technical flaw. Personal harmonies no doubt, but harmonies, idiotic harmo- nies. To paint in flat tones or not to paint in flat tones, that is also one of the questions which torments the Hamlet-painter in our time. Malkine is possessed by it, and this debate has every possibility of concluding in the triumph of sophism. What to think of the miniaturism of Salvador Dali? Francis Picabia commits a technical error by uttering at this time various re- marks about seriousness, craft, etc., which might move me if I didn’t know where they were coming from. Picasso paints not only what makes him great, but also what pleases, as if he were a different person. There are others I don’t mention here who perhaps deserve more severe treatment. But I do not share the opinion regarding confusion expressed these days by a maga- zine’s advertising circular, “Man, seeking to breathe, rebels and kicks the world in the chops, and has no need for manners and doesn’t care about confusion.” Given that an automatically pejorative word, manners, has the automatic effect of winning over readers, I do not share this magazine’s opinion about con- fusion. The “completely personal,” no longer in question for others, keeps confusion alive in the manias of our painters. Confusion is nothing but a mask for imbecilities and the sign before the fact of a quite Christian resignation to the rules of the game under the eye of the police at the bosses’ feet. Talk- ing once with Waldo Frank, I remember having faulted Charlie Chaplin for the concessions he often makes to commonplace sentimentality. “You must understand,” Frank said, “he plays the game.” It is exactly that which is unacceptable. Thought is not a sport. It cannot be the pretext for little successes re-

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warded by applause. It is not uninvolved. It is not the product of a man in isolation. The discoveries of all sustain the evolu- tion of each. It is not with impunity that something or other happens at this moment. And if painting at this moment is no longer what is termed painting, all painters must take note. Those who fail to shouldn’t be astonished when they are judged as artisans manufacturing an overpriced product rendered use- less simply by the reflection of a few contemporaries.

The marvelous must be made by all and not by one. This transcription of Ducassian thought explains and defines what has just been said here at such tedious length.

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E D I T O R ' S N O T E S

1. In addition to King Arthur, Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745), and the French writer Charles Perrault (1623 - 1703), who is best known for his col- lection of fairy tales, Aragon refers to some relatively more obscure figures. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486 - 1535) was a German writer, soldier, and physician whose works on occult subjects gained him a reputation as a magician.

by Torquato Tasso (1544 - 1595), during the final phase of the first crusade, Armida, the daughter of a wizard, was inspired by Satan to sow discord among a group of Christian soldiers. She was initially successful, but her efforts were undone by one of the soldiers, Rinaldo, with whom she fell in love.

Born in Palermo, Giuseppe Bal- samo (1743 - 1795) was a charlatan who styled himself the Count Ales- sandro Cagliostro. He practiced hypnotism and claimed to be two thousand years old and to have spent his youth studying alchemy in Alex- andria. In the company of his wife, Cagliostro traveled to Eastern Europe, spending time in London and Paris as well. After a period of great success in the latter city, he was ban- ished from France in 1786 as a result of his association with the Cardinal de Rohan at the time of the Diamond Necklace Affair. Cagliostro took refuge in Rome in 1789, where he was condemned to life imprisonment by the Inquisition for heresy.

As related in Jerusalem Delivered

2. The highly important research on hysteria performed by the French

neurologist Jean Martin Charcot (1825 - 1893) was later credited by his pupil Sigmund Freud as being essential to early psychoanalytic interpretations of this condition. Charcot developed the famous neu- rological clinic at the SalpGtrikre, which was, at the time, the most important center for diseases of the nervous system. He also legitimized the study and use of hypnotism, which became medically respectable after his presentation before the Academy of Sciences in 1882.

3. In Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), the falling of a gigan- tic helmet in the courtyard is the cat- alyst that sets a series of mysterious events into motion in fulfillment of a prophecy. This novel was revered by the surrealists, as Walpole claimed to have received inspiration for it in a dream and to have commenced writ- ing without any distinct plan or intention.

4. This consideration of the mar- velous points out an interesting devel- opment in surrealist thought. In the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) Breton defined surrealism primarily in terms of automatic activity and listed over twenty forerunners of the movement, primarily poets and painters. The Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929) did not mention automatism and dropped Sade, Poe, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire from the list of antecedents, substituting instead the medieval alchemist Flamel. Furthermore, it called for the "occultation of surrealism." Hence,

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the surrealists were preoccupied with the creation of new mythologies and magic during the 1930s and 1940s.

5 . Braque and Picasso were intro- duced by Apollinaire in 1907. From 1909 to 1914 they worked together very closely. It has been claimed that Braque’s use of a typeset phrase in Le Portugais (1911) was the first instance of collage by a modern painter. The question of who first used collage in painting is, however, a matter of definition as well as of memory.

6. Details concerning the life of Arthur Cravan are sketchy at best. Presumably, he was born Fabian Aver- nius Lloyd in Switzerland to English parents circa 1887. He traveled about Europe and the United States working at a variety of trades, among them, boxer and chauffeur. In Paris in 1912 he founded the journal Maintenant, whose irreverent tone was admired by the surrealists. Cravan is supposed to have drowned in the Gulf of Mexico circa 1920.

7. Duchamp added a mustache to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa in Paris in July 1919, entitling his work L.H.O.0.Q.-a pun in French for elle a chaud au cul (she’s hot to trot). It was also Duchamp, not Cravan, who submitted a urinal, entitled Fountain and signed R. Mutt, to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York in April 1917.

8. The Marquise de Paiva was a famous Second Empire society figure and patroness of the arts.

9. AndrC Derain had originally pinned a newspaper to the canvas of Portrait du Chevalier X (1914). For the finished work, however, he painted the newspaper. (The painting has been in the collection of the Her- mitage, Leningrad, since 1948.)

10. Hannah Hoch, Raoul Hausmann, and George Grosz were among the early German dadaists who employed collage. Hausmann had invented. a form of photomontage in 1918. Kurt Schwitters made his first Mer2 col- lages in 1919. It was Max Ernst, however, who achieved the widest range of expression in this medium. His experimentation culminated in his collage novels: L a Femme 100 tetes (1929), R2ve d’une petite f i l le qui voulut entrer au Carmal(1930), and Une Semaine de bonte‘ (1934).

11. The first Parisian exhibition of Max Ernst’s collages, Exposition Dada Max E r s t , was held May 3 - June 3 , 1921. His first collages had, however, been made in 1920, and some of them may have been shown in his Cologne exhibition of that year.

12. This event took place on January 23, 1920, at the Premier Vendredi de Litte‘rature soirCe held at the Palais des fetes. The soiree, hosted by the staff of the journal Litte‘rature, took place just after Tristan Tzara’s arrival in Paris. Picabids drawings were com- posed of curvilinear figures with the letters L.H.O.O.Q. inscribed ver- tically in their center (see above, note 7). Audience unrest increased as Breton erased the drawings, and riot- ing eventually broke out.

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