Surreal Lives: Ruth Brandon

Picabia seems to have fallen into obscurity at this point in time compared to Surrealist artists such as Dalí, Ernst, and de Chirico. If this is true, why do you think this is the case?

A couple.

1) Picabia was a Dadaist, through and through. So he simply got left behind. And 2) he was a tart. He tried this, then he tried that — you only rarely (as with the wonderful New York paintings) had the sense — that you always get with Dalí, Ernst, or de Chirico — that he was really channeling his deep thoughts and emotions through his brush. So he lost significance. The machine paintings, for instance, are intellectually amusing, with their clever puns. But not much more than that.

Why do you think Breton was so obsessed with poets like Valéry, who wrote no poetry for fifteen years, or like Vaché, who wrote almost nothing during the course of his short life? Or an artist like Duchamp who produced a small amount of work during his long life?

In my view, the key is Vaché’s early death by suicide. After that, suicide, or any other early death, (e.g. Lautréamont) became an icon for Breton. And ceasing artistic activity could be seen as a sort of artistic suicide — as with Rimbaud, who just stopped writing poetry while still in his twenties.

As for Duchamp, the whole business of conceptual art and the revolt against ‘the retinal’ can be seen in a similar light. People invest in his conceptual objects, like the famous urinal, a huge artistic significance. But if you see it as a reaction to his rejection by the French art establishment in 1912, when they turned down his Nude Descending a Staircase (following which he became a librarian), then conceptual art in general, and the urinal in particular, looks very much like Duchamp raising a finger to the whole art establishment — literally, pissing on art. It all chimes with his extremely nihilistic mood at that time. Also, Breton was very keen on puns, and Duchamp was a master punster, most of them filthy, which was even better.

What exactly is Vaché’s notion of “Umour”?

You have to remember that Breton was entirely humourless. Not a vestige of it. If he hadn’t been, he could never have driven Surrealism as he did: his force came from the fact that he took even its greatest absurdities wholly seriously. ‘Umour’, so far as I can make it out, has very little to do with humour, but was a black, nihilistic and cynical take on life generally and the war in particular. It was a take Breton could never have produced himself, and as it came from Vaché, with whom he was in love (though he would never have admitted it, he was very homophobic), he revered it. In the same way, Dalí’s humour — his ability to make jokes— always left Breton at an admiring loss.

You seem a bit critical of William Carlos Williams in Surreal Lives; is this an accurate observation or am I exaggerating what you’ve written about him?

You’re exaggerating. I was amused at the contrast between the earnest, public-spirited, rather puritanical Williams and the wholly cynical, wholly irresistible, Duchamp.

Did Arthur Cravan really die, was he ever real?

Who could tell? He couldn’t, that’s for sure.

What were the core differences between New York Dadaism and German Dadaism? How was Parisian Dada different from both?

Both German Dada and Zurich Dada were shaped by the inescapable consciousness that while they laughed, savagery was going on just round the corner. In that rather hysterical sense they were life-affirming. New York Dada was different. New York, until 1917 and even after that, was a long way from the war. It was a sort of dance of death, a deeply decadent whirl taking place in a vacuum. Paris Dada was a dead end, an attempt to import the Zurich vitality to postwar Paris. It was largely a matter of Tzara and Picabia shouting the same things louder and louder, until quite soon everyone had heard them and wanted to move on.

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