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The same year Paris dadaists gave a "Festival" in the respectable Salle Gaveau Concert Hall. The program bore the announcement: "Personal Appearance of Charlie Chaplin. The dadaists will pull their hair out in public." Neither event occurred, nor did such promised attractions as the first performance of Symphonic Vaseline by Tristan Tzara to be played by an orchestra of 20. Instead, young conservatives in the pit turned dadaists themselves, hurled tomatoes and hunks of raw meat (procured from a nearby butcher shop) at the stage while the dadaists volleyed back the missiles with delighted gusto. The owner of the building, Mme Gaveau, shouted furious protests from her box.
The black felt head with the zipper eyes, the stuffed parrot on the hollow log that appeared at the Modern Museum are typical dadaist artifacts, incorrigibly senseless but regarded by their owners as good examples of a movement that still has vivid memories.
Surrealism. An art movement without hope or object cannot last long. Dadaist Max Ernst in his desire to spit in the eye of the world was experimenting about this time with what he calls his collages: fantastic pictures made by cutting apart old engravings and rearranging them to make bustled ladies with lions' heads, assassins with angels' wings, strange trees growing from horses' backs, etc. Examining these and other dadaist creations, Poet Andre Breton, who frequently dresses entirely in green, smokes a green pipe, drinks a green liqueur and has a sound knowledge of Freudian psychology, discovered behind all this a newer and better ism. In the autumn of 1924 he wrote his Manifesto of Surrealism, and a word and a school were born.* Excerpt: "Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected heretofore ; in the omnipotence of the dream and in the disinterested play of thought. . . . We who have not given ourselves to processes of filtering, who through the medium of our work have been content to be the silent receptacle of many echoes . . . are perhaps yet serving a much nobler cause." Surrealism in plainer language is an attempt to explore the subconscious mind and to evoke emotional reactions through the illogical juxtaposition of objects. The difference between the cubists and present day abstract painters on one hand, and dadaists and surrealists on the other is basic, easily grasped. Abstract painters think of their pictures and statues as objects devoid of meaning, sufficient unto themselves. Surrealist art is still based on reproduction, one reason that its ablest exponents cling to the finicky technique of Victorian miniature painters.
Not all surrealists are serious. Some strive diligently to apply the Breton esthetic, while others are merely frivolous daubers and assemblers of miscellaneous junk. Nevertheless, one thing almost all surrealists have in common is an instinct for dramatic titles. Thumbing through the catalog last week gallery goers lifted eye brows at the following items : Melancholy and Mystery of a Street (de Chirico).
The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes (Marcel Duchamp).
Bewitched in the Zoo (Paul Klee).
Leaves and Navels (Hans Arp).
The Little Tear Gland that Says Tic Tac (Max Ernst).
Object which does not Praise Times Past (Francis Picabia).