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Daybreak (1922) by Maxfield Parrish.
Happy new year. 02022? Read this.
The Prodigal Son (1922) by Giorgio de Chirico.
Carousel of Pigs (1922) by Robert Delaunay.
Twittering Machine (1922) by Paul Klee.
K VII (1922) by László Moholy-Nagy.
Tag: Francis Picabia
Several more Salomés
Cover of Salome by Oscar Wilde (1903) by Modest Alexandrovich Durnov.
Gathering a few more Salomé renderings which have caught my attention recently. The biggest surprise is the one from Picabia since he’s an artist who these days is almost always associated with the Cubists and Dadaists. In the 1920s he returned to figurative painting and produced a number of pieces in this style. The overlaying of images reminds me of some of Hans Bellmer’s drawings.
Michael Zulli is an American comic artist whose work I’ve always liked a great deal. No information about his drawing, unfortunately, so I can’t say whether it’s a one-off or part of a larger project.
Salomé (1917) by John Riley Wilmer.
Salomé (c. 1928) by Francis Picabia.
Salomé Sphinx (1928) by Nicholas Kalmakoff.
Salomé (no date) by Michael Zulli.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive
Entr’acte by René Clair
One of the best—and most entertaining—films to come out of the Dada/Surrealist period, Entr’acte (1924) is also worth watching for the appearance of notable figures such as Francis Picabia (who initiated the project), Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Erik Satie.
This extraordinary early film from director René Clair was originally made to fill an interval between two acts of Francis Picabia’s new ballet, Relâche, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in 1924. Picabia famously wrote a synopsis for the film on one sheet of note paper, headed Maxim’s (the famous Parisian restaurant), which he sent to René Clair. This formed the basis for what ultimately appeared on screen, with some additional improvisations. Music for the film was composed by the famous avant-garde composer Erik Satie, who appears in the film, along side its originator, Francis Picabia. The surrealist photographer Man Ray also puts in an appearance, in a film which curiously resembles his own experimental films of this era.
Entr’acte is a surrealistic concoction of unrelated images, reflecting Clair’s interest in Dada, a fashionable radical approach to visual art which relied on experimentation and surreal expressionism. Clair’s imagery is both captivating and disturbing, giving life to inanimate objects (most notably the rifle range dummies), whilst attacking conventions, even the sobriety of a funeral march.
Entr’acte can be watched and downloaded at Ubuweb. Tate Modern is running a major exhibition of the works of three of the participants, Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, until 26 May, 2008.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alexander Hammid
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
• Short films by Walerian Borowczyk
• The South Bank Show: Francis Bacon
• Rose Hobart by Joseph Cornell
• Some YoYo Stuff
• Beckett directs Beckett
• Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren
• Not I by Samuel Beckett
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau
• Un Chant D’Amour by Jean Genet
• Borges documentary
• Film by Samuel Beckett
• Towers Open Fire
Dada at MoMA
(left) “Mechanical Head (Spirit of Our Age)” by Raoul Hausmann.
‘Dada’ at MoMA: The Moment When Artists Took Over the Asylum
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: June 16, 2006
NOW is as good a time as any for a big museum to take another crack at Dada, which arose in the poisoned climate of World War I, when governments were lying, and soldiers were dying, and society looked like it was going bananas. Not unreasonably the Dadaists figured that art’s only sane option, in its impotence, was to go nuts too.
“Total pandemonium” was how the sculptor Hans Arp reported the situation in 1916 at the great Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where Dada was born. “Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost.”
I’m sure you had to be there.