Professor David Peimer
Zurich in 1914: An Artistic and Political Explosion
Professor David Peimer - Zurich in 1914: an Artistic and Political Explosion
- Okay so once again, thanks so much to Lauren and to everybody. I hope everybody is well and keeping safe and okay. I’m going to look at something a little bit different today which is slightly tangential to, we’d be looking at Vienna and aspects coming out of Vienna during that particular period, the first couple of decades of the century and the end of last, the 19th century. But allied to that, looking at Zurich, during the similar period is what’s interesting and the reason why is because Zurich, in 1914 and the period of the First World War, up until the end of the 19 teens if you like, the end of the War, into the early 20s. What’s fascinating is because of the terrifying slaughter of the wall, the artists and refugees and revolutionaries and political leaders and thinkers and cultural personalities who fled to Zurich, obviously neutral Switzerland during the war and who fled to Zurich and the reasons why are fairly obvious. But then what they actually, how they coalesced and the kind of work they did which sparked a number of artistic revolutions which are still with us today. So I think it’s extraordinarily powerful that within that very short period of a couple of years, gathered in Zurich as a kind of safe haven, away from the absolute grotesque horror of the War, reflect and get what they continued to create and produce. And I would argue that the effects are very powerfully still with us today as to what these small number of people really did in this period and yet, how the influence has spanned over the century into our times today.
I’m sure some of this, quite a lot of everybody knows about you know, about surrealism, the Dadaists and others but I’m trying to bring it together with a sense of, I think if they, they had a real, a sense of urgency, politically, artistically and in revolution, because of the situation that they had fled. I mean if we can imagine for a moment the extreme horror of that First World War and obviously the trenches but the mud and the dirt and the disease and just the endless slaughter. The first day of the Battle of the Somme alone, 28,000 British soldiers had been killed before morning tea as the generals put it. So it’s an extraordinary number and figures, if one thinks really back to that period and the reasons why and how this whole you know, this terrifying war really happened. We all know “All Quiet on the Western Front” and you know, some of the other great novels and literature that captures it but I don’t think it can be underestimated for a second. I don’t want to get into history too much but as we know, the First World War really, in a fair number of ways, was unfinished and in a sense, led to aspects of the Second World War. Not everything obviously but an armistice really and then the treaty to settle it all and what happened afterwards. Not only with Germany but other countries. So I think it’s so crucially foundational in human history and I think can be underestimated when one looks so hugely at the Second World War obviously which is the greatest catastrophe of human history but the role of the seeds of that second one planted in the first and similarly for me, artistically. And that these artists, writers, musicians, composers, poets, felt the need to respond in some way to that horror of the war.
And I think you know, looking at this, in a way I’ve been taken back to when I had long hair and at university, I used to have all these passionate, very late night discussions. As I’m sure many others did. Time period. And feeling that this sort of vague sense of inspiration and passion as a university student and in a way, really looking at it now, with benefit of decades of, I guess, age and yet having a bit of a deeper sense of understanding of what these people, and really a small number were really trying to do. And I want to try and look at the question today, was this just a bunch of childish refugee artists, writers, painters and others who fled to the obvious safe haven of Zurich? Immature, childish? Was this purely a, or primarily just a formal or aesthetic innovation in art? Does it really resonate today over 100 years later? What does that we could still take from it? Was it innovative? How does it respond to the political and artistic zeitgeist of our times? How they were responding in their times. These are some of the questions which percolate in me, to share today and try and get a sense of what still resonates. ‘Cause I do think that there are some things which very powerfully can resonate for us. Beyond the sense of, the is it childishness? There is a certain naive sense of freedom. But when we look at what they were running away from, I think it becomes a lot less naive and actually quite profound. What they understood about the so-called heights of Western civilization and the absolute downfall within a very short period, how far into the abyss Western civilization could really sink and I think they had a, if not a fully conceptual but at least, as with many artists, an intuitive sense of what they were dealing with.
I think they realised that art needed a revolution. That parts of Europe needed a revolution. Not only Russia perhaps. That their lives, literature, art, the thought, out of it came Dadaism, surrealism, futurism, cubism. Incredible amount of artistic innovation. The obvious revolutions of Russia elsewhere. You know, what was going on? They couldn’t comprehend in a way, that such, the height of such wisdom and thought could come crashing down so quickly all around them. And I think perhaps after the Second World War, if we imagine even the more devastating effects, far more devastating than the first. So it’s kind of obvious in a way that Beckett in “Waiting for Godot”, in Theatre of the Absurd and so many other movements and kind of writers in literature and theatre and art should, should arise after the Second World War becomes in a way, so much simpler and clearer perhaps and I think these profound impulses are still very much with us. Because it’s a shattering, a catastrophic shattering of the Enlightenment. Of all the dreams and hopes of rationality, of human rights, democracy, civilization, all these dreams shattered in a pretty short period of time. So, and I think that we are faced with a similar challenge. Nothing nearly as extreme obviously but everybody knows we’re in times of creeping fascism, what’s going on, not only America or England but in many parts of the democratic countries of the world and the profound challenges that I think we all experience. So this is all part of the overall, I guess, you know, the avant garde movement. The very phrase avant garde, a lot of these phrases are perhaps kitsch and cliched by now. But I think it’s helpful to go back to the origin and the word avant garde itself came from a French, from the military, the French military. And avant garde were regarded as the shock troops, the commanders if you like. Or the first troops to be sent out in a battle and these artists and writers saw themselves as that.
The necessity to do that, given the canvas, the backdrop which they were responding to, of the war. If we think of it as well, the technology. The electricity, the car, flight, medicine. The Enlightenment, the height of reason. In education, probably a more literate group than any other time in human history. More educated probably. People were more, had access to at least some education at this point. The beginnings of the feminist movement, suffragettes, the beginning of equality for women and others, the beginning of a greater awareness perhaps of democracy, human rights. So it’s all of these things culminating towards the end of the 19th Century, into the early part of the 20th. And then completely shattered. So one can imagine, I feel it almost in my body, a visceral sense if one imagines trying to be in some of these characters’ shoes who were part of fleeing to Zurich and the artistic and political explosion. We can never forget that they also started to be very aware of the underside, the underbelly of the great heights of achievement of European civilization. We just have to think of King Leopold of Belgium and 10 million Congolese, Black people, slaves, et cetera, slaughtered, chopped, arms, hands, everything, et cetera. The extreme ravages of colonisation in various continents and parts of the world. We can think of the birth of concentration camps, of the British in South Africa.
28,000 Afrikaans women and children, as we all know, in the concentration camps herded with British policy, British military policy of scorched earth and the effect that had. Not only in South Africa with the Boer and Afrikaners but that it had back home in England as word got out more and more. You know, of some of the really brave people who went out and did amazing work and the word got back. So the underbelly started to come home, to the shores of the colonial home if you like. With Belgium, with France, with England and many of the other countries. The Germans in Namibia, we all know about the slaughters they did there. Hermann Goring’s father ran some of the concentration camps in Namibia. So these are just a few examples. There are many. So these artists and writers, I think, started to look seriously at what was really going on at the great heights of European civilization together with this catastrophic war. So we had many of the artists fleeing. The Dadaists, Tristan Tzara and many others and out of that comes the surrealist movement a little bit afterwards. James Joyce and the whole stream of consciousness and the whole Joycean approach of writing novels and stories. We have Vladimir Lenin, you know. Lenin is in Zurich at the same time. I mean, extraordinary thinking about it in this whole way. That within a couple of miles radius, you have some of the great figures of artistic and political revolutions. So in a way, it’s a small version of Vienna. I think there was much more in terms of Vienna if we look at the broader perspective of scientific, psychological, cultural, historical, so many changes. Certainly in terms of Jewish history as well.
So in a way, I see it as a kind of small, well not so small. But a satellite to Vienna, in a sense and what we’ve been looking at with the Hapsburgs there. Okay, I want to go on to first talk about here. In Zurich at the time is the beginning with the Dadaists and then later then out through them, as I said, the surrealists. Joyce and others and Lenin. Here we have, in the same moment, in the same two or three years, the Dadaist movement begins and I want to talk a little bit, why I feel it’s still so relevant today. Although to a large, to some degree, it’s a cliche or it’s a has-been. It’s kind of there, it happened 100 years ago. Goodbye. But I think the spirit of Dada, has an urgency to come back and will. I think the spirit of surrealism never left. It’s with us even more powerfully. It’s the impact of Joyce and this kind of writing and obviously you know, people like Lenin and others. So in the same time, within a couple of kilometres radius, in Zurich, Tristan Tzara here on the left. You can see there’s three pictures of him. James Joyce up on the top right and on the bottom right, Vladimir Lenin. This is around the time when they’re all in, or Tzara, it’s just before he’s in Paris and coming to Zurich and these are pictures of Joyce and Lenin there. Also Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Disharika, Max Ernst and others came and went and so on. Many, many others. Okay, Tristan Tzara is for me, really interesting. And not only interesting as this kind of childish, dilettantish character that I think he’s quite often perhaps perceived as. When you look into the actual life that he lived, you see this guy did a hell of a lot and I think inspired many artists afterwards. His original name, to go into him a little bit and by the way, I’m just going to talk a bit afterwards later.
This is the Tom Stoppard play. For me, one of Stoppard’s finest plays, “Travesties”. And he writes the play set in Zurich. It’s really one of the great, great plays of “Travesties” and it’s been performed absolutely globally. It’s almost, I would say, a second or third most-performed play and it’s translated, performed everywhere. And it’s basically about this period in Zurich and the characters are Henry Carr who’s a British ambassador and Vladimir Lenin, Joyce and Tristan Tzara. And how they are brought together by this British ambassador to stage Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”. And this is a scene from a fairly recent production of Stoppard’s “Travesties”. So I’m going to come onto that a bit later and the parody and the understand the art are things supporting it. And why he chooses this period as well and where Stoppard speaks about it as being so fundamental in, if you like, modern Western, the development of modern Western art and literature. Okay, so Tristan Tzara first. His original name, Sammy Rosenstein. He’s a nice Jewish boy from Romania and his parents spoke Yiddish to a large degree at home. These are the pictures of him here you see on the left. And during the First World War, he was part of this sort of hodgepodge of refugees, racketeers, pacifist revolutionaries, artists and anarchists who fled to Zurich. They set up this place, the Cabaret Voltaire, a small little place which has gone down in folklore and artistic history hugely. Now I remember back to so many of us at, when we were at university being obsessed and fascinated with this period. Again, talking endlessly about this particular period. Perhaps feeling faced with the madness and the militarization of apartheid and the murder of apartheid, feeling well, a bunch of a few artistic-minded people in Johannesburg, Cape Town, wherever, connecting with each other, what the hell could we do?
Some sort of semi-conscious link to this period and others. You know, I know you know, that some link in Prague in the late 80s, mid-late 80s, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reference to this period in so many other times of great political turmoil. So these guys come 100 yards from the Voltaire, Lenin arrives and takes out a room on the Cabaret Voltaire. Just around the corner of Cabaret Voltaire, around the corner from that Joyce, Tzara and others are living. Lenin goes to the Cafe Odeon and most likely, that’s where Joyce went and Tzara. So we can imagine he’s, before they became anything of what they became afterwards, they’re all having coffee in the same cafe. Quite an amazing thought actually and when we think back to some of the cafes in Vienna, we’ve spoken about with Freud, Jung and many of the others, we can imagine a similar artistic buzz if you like. Then of course comes 1917 and the Swiss are probably pretty keen to get Lenin safely across the border and we all know the story of how he goes through Germany and the train and gets to the station in Finland, et cetera. But in this Cabaret Voltaire, we have the birth in a way of Dada and what does it mean, the very word? Really, I think the leader was Tristan Tzara. The story of how he came up with the name is fascinating in itself and he changed his name legally to be Tristan Tzara, not Sammy Rosenstein. But the way they came up with the name, Dada, it’s not perfectly clear. The stories being passed down through the decades are you know, da is yes in Russian.
So they opened a dictionary, put their finger on a page. Da, yes in Russian, Dada. Or hobby horse, another meaning of it and others. But the very, the word has somehow managed to burn into Western consciousness pretty powerfully. 1916, Tristan Tzara takes a distance and rejects the Italian Futurists because he sees the approach of fascism stance and their militarism of Marinetti and others. So that the buzz going on is talk about a Communist revolution. Talk about a European revolution. A visceral hatred for the War. European colonialism, European nationalism. What has led to this war that is going on? Of course the October Revolution, the German revolts of 1918 and so on. So the political and artistic conversations and discussion which Stoppard satirises so brilliantly in his play, are all going on around the time they’re trying to come up with a new approach to art. Because in the Dadaist mind, what’s the point of carrying on with the old ways of writing? You know, the well-developed novel, beginning, middle and end. The well-developed short story. The beautifully crafted poem. The you know, certain kinds of painting, music, et cetera. It all just seems complete nonsense and absurd. Given the horror of the war, of the First World War. So you know, they’re, I think, almost scrambling around to find what on earth can replace it. Dadaism is spirit of negativity, of a spirit of, and yet not only, it’s a spirit of artistic, anarchic freedom, challenge everything. Nothing, hold up no sacred cows. Artistically or in a literary context, what is poetry?
What is a book, what is a play and so on. No sacred calves, do whatever you want. Because that’s what’s happened with the height of European civilization, with the War. So these are our, I think, you know, it’s something perhaps going on a little bit at the moment. Where the inherited tropes, inherited approaches, given what many people sense is the zeitgeist in the West now, well what do you do? Do you carry on trying to write in the same way? Poems, novels, stories? Do you look for other approaches? Do you carry on making painting and music? You know, what, you know, many people I think sense a hunger for something to begin afresh. You know, as we look seriously at what’s going on in political discourse and deeper than that. In a philosophical sense, what’s going on in life in many countries. It has to be said that Dadaism probably lasted five years. 1922 and back in Paris, after the war, the Dadaists staged their own funeral. Because of course once you negate and attack and critique everything, well where do you go next? There’s nowhere further to go. Once everything is absurd or crazy or anarchic and there’s no, you know, making sense of it, where’s the next step? It went into surrealism for me and other aspects of literature but you know, it has to have its own natural ending in a way. But the shock impact is profound. For me, one of the most important leads to Marcel Duchamp whose art I still look at today and I’m still half bewildered, stunned, intrigued by what Duchamp did and I’m going to show a little interview of him shortly.
Okay, so we have, different flirtations with different kinds of theories. We have Tristan Tzara, he goes briefly to Spain. He fights in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans. He has an affair with Nancy Cunard of the shipping magnate fame. Then later in the Second World War, Tzara, he’s Jewish, let’s not forget. And he flees to Vichy, we all know the south of France. And he’s trying to take refuge ‘cause he knows what’s going to happen. He’s in Marseilles in late 1940, early 1941. He joins a group of antifascist and Jewish refugees, some of them protected about the American diplomat, Varian Fry. I’m sure many people know that story. Shortly after being in Marseilles, Tristan Tzara joins the French Resistance. Similar to Samuel Beckett. He broadcasts for the Free French Forces, a clandestine radio. 1944, five months after the liberation of Paris, he becomes the editor, he becomes a columnist sorry for the newspaper edited by Jean-Paul Sartre. 1945, under the provision government of the French Republic, he becomes a representative of the French National Assembly. 1949, 1950, he answers a call by Aragon, one of the French poets of the time and writers.
Becomes active with the international campaign to liberate some Turkish writers and activists. Who’ve been trying to promote modernist culture. 1949, he reads Samuel Beckett’s remarkable “Waiting for Godot”. And Tristan Tzara facilitates the play’s staging by what he called young emancipated Jewish writers. Together with Beckett. It becomes a passion for him. So he’s involved with Beckett. He’s involved with other young Jewish writers who’ve survived. So this is quite extraordinary for me. Then at home, if we think about it, Tristan Tzara, he’s attacked and persecuted or at least attacked with anti-Semitic vitriol in Romania. Now through academic studies, the articles attacking him in Romania, he’s depicted with the Dadaists as part of Judeo-Bolsheviks. That’s the phrase that some academic called Emilean in Romania comes up with and becomes a bit of a catchphrase in parts of Eastern Europe. They are seen as Judeo-Bolsheviks who have corrupted Romanian and East European culture and Tzara is seen as the main proponent of literary anarchism. I mean, we look at the breadth of this guy’s life. It’s not a life of a dilettante, the life of a fantasist, creating a little bit of fun, childish, immature, a little bit of Dada only. There’s a hell of a lot more going on. He has this poem where he depicts a Jewish cemetery in which graves crawl like worms on the edge of a town. Heavy-laded with people returning from hospitals where the wind is wailing. With the hopelessness of an orphanage. I just want to give you just one or two phrases from Tristan Tzara from some of his poetry. It’s not great poetry but it’s evocative and he’s going way beyond Dada here because he obviously understand what’s happened in the War. It’s believed that between 1915 and 1916, he played chess in the coffeehouse where Lenin was. Probably played with Lenin.
So going back to Zurich, in this one little cabaret, Tristan Tzara and others come up with the idea of taking telephone books. Taking the great works of literature, cutting them up with cutouts, putting the words into a hat, pull them out at random and that’s a poem. Because what is poetry these days? It’s performances where nonsense sounds are performed with chanting and other things. A complete, if you like, almost Charlie Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy or Basikim approach to ridiculing. In the great tradition of satire. Ridiculing and parodying, so-called great poetry, great art, great literature. Cut it up and throw it in and you have a poem, words from anywhere. This leads to we all know the ready-mades and the found objects with Marcel Duchamp and others later. So this for me is part of the conceptual art but the conceptual questioning of what is art, what is literature faced with all of this. You know, similar to what I believe many of the artists faced often in the Second World War. Not so much later. Especially given the legacy and the tradition that they are inheriting of Western, of European civilization of their times. Okay, this is here. Going on to the play of Stoppard’s, of Travesties which is, it’s a remarkable play. I mean it’s got vaudeville in it, he’s got tricks, he’s got actors doing all sorts of things on stage and in a classic Stoppard tradition, the play is an intellectual jigsaw and you try to put, or scrabble, try to put all the words and the pieces and ideas together.
For me, Stoppard is, you know it’s an intellectual, it’s a fascinating game of intellectualism as a way of trying to understand history. As a way of trying to understand culture, politics, art and history in this play. In the guise of parody and satire, of the links between politics and art. He understands but he also sees the self-importance that Joyce and Tzara and others have towards their work and Lenin and these revolutionaries, and they’re all trying to be revolutionaries in a way and reacting to what’s going on with the War. And what in the play, is Henry Carr is a British ambassador and he’s obsessed with trying to stage Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” in the British Embassy. So he ropes in Joyce to play, he ropes in Tzara, he ropes, he tries to get all of these people in. And we see them coming to rehearsals and they’re frustrated because they’re not going to really rehearse, learn their lines, what are they doing? You know, so you get actors portraying these iconic figures of history and culture trying to rehearse Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”. But obsessed with their own work. And their own self-importance as artists. Art for art’s sake, bit of Joyce, bit of Wilde. What’s that idea in relation to what’s going on in the War? The Dadaists trying to destroy everything with Tzara and negate everything, conceptually question. Well, you know, what’s that, how’s that going on in the British Embassy and of course, Lenin obsessed with his own revolutionary ambitions. So it’s in the play, I see a lot of attitudes beautifully parodied and satirised. But also looked at seriously. What happens when so-called revolutions in art and politics try to, or they almost inevitably overlap.
And in Stoppard’s brilliant way, trying to penetrate inside it, incisively through theatre. As Tristan Tzara, as Carr constantly complains, “Tzara you’re late, you’re always late to rehearsals. "What’s been keeping you?” And Joyce is also cross and the others, you can imagine this kind of thing going on. And Tzara replies with one of the immortal lines. “What’s been keeping me? "Pleasure, what else should keep anybody, any time "but pleasure Mister Carr?” There are all these lines which Stoppard has put into these characters, showing the iconic image and how we receive them today. And Henry Carr himself says, “Well if Lenin didn’t exist, "it would be unnecessary to invent him.” So it’s Stoppard playing with all these, these great images and putting them down to earth again. You know, so passionate about revolution of all different kinds. Joyce worships art as a recorder and enabler of mankind and complains that the war was interrupting with him writing his great magnum opus, “Ulysses” in the play. There’s anecdote that Joyce said these kind of things, we can’t prove it. His art is more important than the War because his art lasted. So this kind of passion for, for their self importance but nevertheless, what they’re really doing in revolutionising art and literature in the face of the broader European context of the slaughter.
As he said, Stoppard said, “Travesties is anything but just the farcical goings on "of actors trying to rehearse Oscar Wilde’s play.” And then he goes into more detail about the politics and art and what he’s trying to do in the play. So again, we have this idea of, and the reason why I’m harping on the play is because I do think it’s one of the plays of Stoppard’s that really holds today and lasts so powerfully because of this extraordinary interconnection of so many different forces at the same time.
Is it, do you very information on?
Okay, in addition, we have, I want to go on to here. This is Marcel Duchamp and I’ll play a brief interview with him in a moment. Now I’m sure everybody knows his work. This is Duchamp, an image of him on the left. A classic sort of image if you like. But I think, and I’m still intrigued, is he just part of again, this childish, immature, Dadaist impulse? Of challenging, questioning the whole rise of conceptual art, what is art at base? What isn’t it and so on. But there’s something about this guy’s life and his attitude which we have to revisit again and again. I really believe. And the revolution that comes out of the Dadaists, through Duchamp, through the century to us and why he is so central for me, and I know many others as well, still today and resonates. There’s the Mona Lisa and the great little moustache he’s painted on Mona Lisa. With a tiny little few brushstrokes. What he’s doing to the great height of Western art, a little massage. One little moustache, such a subtle little act and yet what it’s doing and what it’s saying, it’s fairly obvious but it’s an unforgettable image and when one thinks of art today, I cannot help anyway, but look at, think of what Duchamp did with the Mona Lisa. And it pulls everything down to earth. The urinal on the top right, called the “Fountain”.
You know which he submitted to be exhibited as a ready-made found object which he originated all these ideas coming out of Dadaism. A urinal, that’s art. What is this saying about a culture that years later can almost, can sit as part of, great part of the canon. That is what art has become in early parts of the 20th Century. A bicycle wheel, a bottle rack. All of these things that he chose and did, and the effect compared to the art being made 20, 30 years before, I think is really revolutionary and massive in trying to give a comment on life today, life then. For him and other artists and other people at the time. Leading obviously to Andy Warhol, the “Campbell’s Soup Cans” and many other things much later. So the ideas of Duchamp, I think, resonate eternally. I want to play a short few bits of interview with Duchamp here. And this is him being interviewed much later after the Second World War.
CLIP BEGINS
[Narrator] Philadelphia Museum of Art is a collection of paintings and objects by a man whose unique view of life has greatly influenced modern art.
[Interviewer] So here you are Marcel, looking at your big glass.
Yes. And the more I look at it, the more I like it. I like the breaks, the way they come, the cracks. Do you remember how it happened in 1926?
[Interviewer] Yes I remember hearing.
In Brooklyn, they put the two panes on top of one another, on a truck, flat, not knowing what they were carrying and bouncing for 60 miles, in traffic. So that’s what happened. But the more I look at it, the more I like the cracks because they’re not like shattered glass. They have a shape. There’s a symmetry in the cracking. The two crackings are symmetrically disposed and there’s more, almost an intention there and an extra, have, curious intention that I’m not responsible for. Ready-made intention in other words that I respect and love.
[Interviewer] But it is, it was one of your biggest undertakings. Most ambitious.
By far it is and I worked eight years on it and it is not finished.
Oh.
And I don’t know whether it will ever be finished. But now I’ll show you some finished things, come along.
[Interviewer] There’s the Chocolate Grinder.
[Marcel] Yes, one of the two I made. And the third one is on the glass itself.
[Interviewer] You had several versions of the a “Nude Descending a Staircase” too didn’t you?
Yes, three. Three but this one is the real, the first one that was shown at the arm -
The one the newspaper man called an explosion in a single factory.
Yes, it was a really, a great line even.
You could say this has gone down you know?
You can see it’s gone down, yes. This is a boxing match. A drawing that I never used in fact, it’s for the glass. I never used it, I felt it’s not quite what I wanted.
It must be a great satisfaction to you to have so many versions and so much of your work in one collection such as you find here in the Philadelphia Museum.
Oh wonderful, it is. No it’s just I always felt that showing one painting in one place and another place is just like amputating one finger each time or leg. Here I feel at home, my house. And I’ve never had such, really a feeling of complete satisfaction.
Well I can understand how an artist would feel about that.
Yeah.
[Interviewer] Also these don’t seem, your earliest work. For sure.
No, no no. The earliest is this one in, the Church. That was done in my village, in 1902.
[Interviewer] How old were you?
I was 15 then and then it, I went on and derived some more but they’re not here.
[Interviewer] It’s rather Impressionist isn’t it? Is that, that was the vogue?
Yeah well it was, not the vogue. It was the only thing we talked about.
It was advanced.
Yeah it was advanced. And yet, when you see these two which are later, already Impressionist has gone down in vogue.
[Interviewer] They’re more structural.
They’re more structural and Cezanne has been recognised and Cezanne is the great man and I was introduced by Cezanne in those two paintings. See? This is my two brothers playing chess in the garden and this is my father.
Well the whole family were painters? Your sister and brother?
One sister paints, yes. But especially my brother, you know, paints.
[Interviewer] Did they bring you into this? Cezanne, Impressionist?
No, no no. It was all along, on my own.
Just in the air?
In the air. Especially, yes. Yeah, and my father was very nice about it. In fact, it was very difficult then as it is now to become a painter on your own. How can you expect to live? Et cetera, et cetera. So he was a good man.
[Interviewer] He looks patient. To have set that portrait up.
[Marcel] Yeah.
There seems to be a, quite a step between this and the Nude Descending a Staircase.
Yes, the Nude was two years later.
1912?
- And it was after these that I decided that no more obvious influences as I had before. I wanted to at least be with living in my day and my day was cubism. See 1910, 11, 12, cubism was in its childhood and I, the approach was so different from the previous movements that I was very much attracted to it and I began long and long and the other one. Right man.
CLIP ENDS
- I’m going to stop there. And move on to another part of this interview where what’s fascinating, he talks very honestly about how his father financed him and impossible today. Or you know, when he was talking about his time to make money as an artist but how his father kept financing him so he could play chess and make art, et cetera. But I mean his command of English I think is really good and also, it’s fascinating, he does some cubism, then he does some, all these different aspects from his early life and then finished, move on to the next, next, next. This is where he talks about the influence of Dadaism.
CLIP BEGINS
You were a Dadaist?
Yes. They were on, they were inspired by the Dada.
[Interviewer] And was it more of a literary movement? Perhaps than?
Yes, yes. It was more literary, that’s it. It was no more to do with plastic art as such and no more considerations of technique or you know, as the, all the schools beforehand. In fact, it was negation. A refusal to accept anything like that, to deny any preoccupation of theoretical interest. You see? So, the Dada movement in past, became completely literary and in fact became, through surrealism in 1923.
I see.
When they got of course, as usual, a group of people don’t get together very long. Two years or three years of it was enough and they began fighting together. They hated each other. So they dispersed and became another group from itself on the ashes of Dada. To the.
I love here. Just being so honest. Yeah we were all part of the Dadaists and the group got together. All fighting each other. After a short while and then hating each other and then out of Dadaism came surrealism. From his own mouth, it’s interesting to hear and the way he talks about it. It’s such a down to earth, human way of that shift and how Dadaism was the spirit of negation, of everything. And how he completely aligned himself with it. I wanted to show one last part of the interview here. Briefly, with Duchamp. Just really like the way he’s so down to earth and there’s nothing highfalutin about it.
Also, for me, it seems to indicate that you were never really dedicated to conventional painting in the ordinary sense of the word. You were happy enough to do this, you were happy enough to leave it, you were happy enough to choose bottle racks as.
Ready made.
Ready mades and fill bird cages with marble.
Yeah.
To deceive those who thought it was sugar. I imagine that there’s something broader in your concept of what art is than just painting. Is that what you feel yourself?
Yes.
[Interviewer] I don’t like to put words in your mouth on this.
No no no.
[Interviewer] But I have often thought about it.
Yes, it was really, I considered painting as a means of expression. Not an aim.
One means of.
One means of expression instead of an aim. A complete aim for life at all. The same as I consider that colour is only a means of expression. In painting, it shouldn’t be the last aim of painting. In other words, painting should be not only retinal or visual. It should be to have, to do with the grey matter of our understanding instead of purely visual. So it’s the same thing with my life in general. I didn’t want to pin myself down to one little circle and I tried at least to be as general as I could and that’s, for example, that’s where I did when I took up chess. Chess in itself is a hobby, is a game.
So from here.
When you play chess.
CLIP ENDS
- What’s fascinating is how he kept moving with the times. Different art movements, finishing one and then moving on to the next. To the next for himself. And that sense of the artistic self expression and make a huge leap. Bob Dylan in his own way talks about something similar. As when you think of the extraordinary changes in growth someone like Dylan goes through and Duchamp as well, achieve something and then look, and going in an entirely different direction and so on. Okay, I just wanted to show you that little bit there from Duchamp and now I’ll move briefly onto, obviously the revolution comes with surrealism. Extraordinary movement of influence. Obviously by Freudian psychology. Coming out of Dadaism and the unconscious dreams, the non-rational. Not only the irrational but the non-rational. Complete antithesis to the, if you like, the height of the enlightenment. Putting rationality at the top of the tree. And here, putting a surreality. Another reality coming from dreams and conscious imagination. Apollinaire was the great French poet who came up with the very word surrealism. And he said in his definition, that when man wanted to imitate walking he invented the wheel. Which does not resemble two legs walking vertically at all and that was the first great surrealist leap of the imagination according to Apollinaire. That was part of his definition of the very word. Where there’s no logical or rational link between, between walking and the circular motion of the wheel. And the vertical motion of two legs, of walking.
So it requires a surrealist leap of the imagination the one to the other. And I love that definition of Apollinaire’s because it requires a whole, a fresh way of looking at something. And you really got to look at something from a different perspective which we’re invited to do so obviously and so often with surrealism. Also the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated objects. The wheel and legs walking. The surrealist idea. Breton, Magritte, Miro and some of the other greats but I feel there’s a reemergence. It’s fascinating, just some of the students awhile ago and they’re fascinated by the surrealist movement and I keep thinking why, not only at the university I’m at but a lot of universities. Why at the age of 19, 20, they’re fascinated again with surrealism. Something again about their experience of the pandemic and other things and in England anyway, Brexit and many other things, have created a sense of strange mystery. A strange uncertainty. Perhaps an instinct where they’re drawn to the unconscious and the imagination more. These are some of the classics of Salvador Dali. Fascinating how he came up with them was sitting one night in a small town in Spain where he lived with his wife and whole lot of friends around one night for dinner and they’ve got the food and the candles and music and everything.
And he’s got these canvases ready, doesn’t know what to put in them. And anyway, so they drink and be merry and then his wife and friends go off, paint the town read. And he says, “No I’m not going.” He’s obsessed, what’s he going to put in the painting? And he’s been looking the whole night, looking at his watch and looking at these paintings. And they’re the candles, burning in the wax and so on coming down. And going through hour after hour and eventually, three, four in the morning, it dawns on him. What’s he been doing? He’s been looking at his watch, the other candle is melting and here’s the leftovers of the food and the idea hits him. In the surrealist way of thinking, to actually think like this, put the objects together of watch and time, the melting candles. Here we have the melting clocks. Okay, in “The Persistence of Memory” as they came to be called by Dali, is it how time dominates humans? It is the elasticity of space time, et cetera, et cetera. So many possible resonant meanings out of the image but Dali offers that as the origin moment of it. And it’s somebody who is actually living with his mind in a surrealist consciousness if you like. Which I find, it’s fascinating. And how they all saw themselves as part of a development of the revolutionary movement, coming out of the Zurich origins basically.
To revolutionise experience, art, culture, to loosen the restrictions of the inherited impulse of rationality coming from the Enlightenment, et cetera. Obviously we all know about Breton and a whole lot of the others who were a part of it. What I’d like to show is just a few brief examples from “Un Chien Andalou”. Now this is made by Bunuel and Salvador Dali and it’s made in, sorry I just have to get this back here. It was made in 1929 if I’m right. 1929. So that’s nearly 100 years ago. Bunuel and Salvador Dali. There’s an opening scene which shows the cutting of an eye. So I just have to say that to frame it just before. I’m sure many people know it only too well. But to watch this nearly 100 years later and to watch 19-year-olds’ response is quite something for me. Okay, if I can go ahead and show you, there’s another quick sequence from the movie. Another sequence there. So I’m sure many people know this film so well but I’m obviously about the eye, the perception, what do we really see when we’re seeing anything. The challenging of conventional ways. Made over 100 years ago. Is it merely a piece of childish, immature nonsense? Which may be a little bit surrealist, a little bit Dadaist, you know, trying to pull all these ideas together we’ve been talking about it today and it just belongs to an interesting little bit of childish artistic history. Or does it have a resonance today for us still? Something of that spirit, yes of anarchy, of satire, of playfulness, of wit, of no sacred cows. Shock and privileging shock, sometimes over meaning.
But in the context of the culture they’re living in at ours, I throw that for us to question and to ask, what’s, you know, what can this still feed us today? That light, music all the time. In contrast to the eye and this exaggerated acting of course which sets up satire and parody that Stoppard does as well. Again as I so often, at times of political horror, satire is what artists and writers come back to. And if you look carefully even at James Joyce in “Ulysses”, there’s a hell of a lot of satire and wit that he’s playing with all the time. Okay, just a couple of other quick things that I wanted to share. This we all know these images so well. Is it a pipe? The cutting of the eye going way back to conceptual art of Duchamp and of the surrealists. Well what is a pipe? Is it a word, is it an object, the link between the two. Questioning the very conceptual foundations of Western thought. To push it at a stretch, that’s really what this is all about to me. You know, post-enlightenment. The images of Magritte at the top. The eye, again the obsession. Miro on the left here. Which you know, I still love. Even after all these decades, I find myself coming back to it and thinking, “Is this mad? "Is this childish, pathetic? "Just doodles anybody could come up with?”
Are they really achieving what they dreamed of achieving or not? You know there’s something that’s alluring all the time and if it’s striking a chord which perhaps, I hope is not just cliched for me. Is it a striking a chord in some others also perhaps? The great example of contemporary times perhaps is Joseph Beuys. Who was one of the great German artists, I believe. Who linked not only his own movement, Fluxus, but conceptual art, surrealism and with some Dada. This was one of the great pieces of performance art that he did. I like America and America likes me. When he went to America, 1974, and set up in one of the galleries in New York. Arrived there by ambulance, stayed for a few days with a coyote inside a part of the gallery and these are some of the images of it. Of those couple of days. And gets in an ambulance, goes back to Kennedy airport and goes out. So even done in the late 70s, something about this pulls it all together. You know, obviously this is sort of nature, city, urban life, contemporary materialism, consumerism and nature and so on. But something much deeper in it which is surrealist-type images and a Dadaist spirit of challenging and questioning everything and looking a good performance art that the Dadaists tried to do in a way of Beuys. And just to conclude, one of the obvious influences of the surrealists, absolutely with us today, in all advertising as Freud’s son in law, Edward Bernays, you know, brought into the States. Where the idea was to, he revolutionised not only advertising for products but how to manufacture political image to sell to the voters. And the idea was don’t go on need, but go on desire.
So the desire for a cigarette and a link to the cowboy image and again, in the surrealist way is a non-rational connection between cowboys and cigarettes is actually the logical question from the Enlightenment, no rational question. So Apollinaire again, you know, the wheel and two legs walking. But put it together and you’re trying to sell according to desire. Not just through need. There’s a new car, you know, or new shoes, whatever. We buy according to desire and status, competitiveness and many other things, not just through need. You know, we don’t only buy, these aren’t necessarily the cheapest cigarettes or the shoe when it’s old and we need a new pair of shoes. Camel Cigarettes, what on earth does a camel and a desert have to do with a packet of cigarettes? Zero, logically. So in everything we take for granted in life today, there’s no rational connection between the two and I think this often goes into social media. The internet, not only advertising but the way leaders are sold to us. The way we buy leaders, in inverted commas. The way we buy, the way we structure hierarchies, institutions, organisations. To me, what people struggle with is to make a logical connection where there isn’t one and it’s set up according to desire of certain people. It’s not necessarily need. It’s a fascinating shift I think, and our advertising permeates not only marketing but you know, marketing life. And then of course, finally I wanted to show this comparethemarket.com. One of the adverts I love where they use meerkats. Meerkats to sell a very contemporary, huge, huge website. Comparethemarket.com and the meerkats who speak with these vague Russian accents and called Russian names.
Oleg, et cetera with each other. So again, it’s a completely contemporary advert but it’s selling desire, not selling need and I think for me, this permeates so much of our times and linking it back to a bit of the Dadaists, the surrealists. I think there is a calling. You know, in these strange times, for something of the spirit of conceptual art. To challenge, to question, to ask and find any other new, innovative ways to make poetry, literature, theatre, other things, because of this disconnect that people feel between you know, somehow power and the ruled and the rulers. Between ordinary daily life as an employee somewhere and the rulers and how these artists are trying to grapple with it. There’s obvious ways for advertising but I think in so many other ways, artists and theatre people are still trying and I think that this is all making a comeback in a way and it’s the blessing and the curse of social media. Because it is massive in social media. The surrealist approach. I mean if you really analyse it carefully, philosophically and visually and with literature, with words. So okay, I wanted to leave it at that and I hope that struck a few chords perhaps for us today.
Hi David, hi everybody. I can jump in and just ask.
Hi, hi Wendy. How are you?
Good thank you, how are you?
[David] Okay, very well thank you. Great.
David, thank you for that excellent presentation. Is that not the role of the artist?
To what?
To be challenger?
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think it’s the spirit that comes through these artists. I think the role of the artist perhaps before, was more in Shakespeare’s phrase, to mirror human nature or to mirror something and give us insights. Not only, not necessarily primarily challenge. And I think the shift is in our times, since the, since Zurich is to challenge and show a mirror to human nature. I think that’s brought in, at least equally in our times. Okay.
David, do you have time for questions?
Yeah, sure.
Q&A and Comments:
Judith asks, yeah two Jewish Romanians began Dada in Zurich. Tzara and Marcel Janco, yes absolutely. Marcel Janco, I didn’t, I wanted to go a bit more into Tzara today. Great, Judith thank you.
Q: Elliot, was dance as an art form influenced by the Enlightenment?
A: That’s fascinating, that’s a brilliant question Elliot. I don’t know, I don’t know enough about dance. I need to check and find out, thank you.
Freida. While talking about Tzara, it would also be interesting to mention Janco, yep. One of the founders of Cabaret Voltaire and Janco later went to live in Israel. Yep, became one of the leading artists there.
There is a museum. There’s the Janco Dada Museum. In Israel and it’s worth.
Oh, in Israel?
And it’s worth visiting, yes. It’s the most fabulous museum and it’s certainly worth visiting.
Thank you.
It’s a little museum.
Thank you, thank you.
Yeah.
Okay, I’m definitely going to go.
I would recommend it.
Okay, appreciate it. James, I don’t see the need to give any prominence to Lenin alongside these great artists. Lenin was a ruthless tyrant and mass murderer. Zurich should take no pride in the fact that this political terrorist took temporary refuge. I hear what you’re saying James but we also have to recognise, I mean Stalin was in Vienna briefly. When I was looking at Freud and Jung, Stalin was there. Freud was there, Jung was there. Many others, within two, three kilometres radius. Hitler was there. You know, we have to acknowledge historically and artistically, what was going on and where people were. And yes, Lenin was a ruthless tyrant, murderer, I agree. But I think we cannot ignore, we ignore at our peril, historical truth and artistic truth. We need to understand where and why people are where they are.
Edna, Marcel Janco. Very significant role, great part in Cabaret Voltaire. Thank you, thanks for all the exclamation marks. There’s something of that joyous, fun spirit that they were, I think, also trying to resurrect in the face of the slaughter of the Wall.
Q: Romaine, it’s a comment, but it is it art?
A: That’s the absolute question Romaine. That’s what Duchamp and Dadaists and all the others. They were the first to conceptually challenge us, what is art? From ancient paintings in the caves of 5000 years ago. Painting animals or whatever to you know, the great literature coming through the centuries, you know, and that’s why I link it so much to the First World War because for them it was the collapse and the ruin of Western thought and Western culture and civilization and so what is art in that context? In that context again, because I always think context is everything. To question, well what is art? And how do you make art given the times? I think that’s what they were perhaps partly naively, but passionately trying to innovate and experiment with.
Judith, thanks for opening my eyes okay. I know, and when I look back again at “Un Chien Andalou”, I mean I watched that hundreds of times. But I’m still stunned at that light music and how they put together Dali and Bunuel. They’re playing and having fun as young artists and how they’re putting together images and you know, you feel it when you watch early silent movies. There’s a sense of free joy, of Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy and so many others. Of discovering this new form, film. You know there’s something in that, a joy and celebratory discovery. Together with the horror of which they’re emerging from. And they’re fully aware of that irony.
Bobby, “Thank you, Duchamp.” Yeah, I wanted to show some of Duchamp talking himself about his earlier work and a little bit about Dadaism and how that led to surrealism. Not only talking about the obvious iconic pieces that we all know about. That’s to me what’s fascinating in that interview. And just so simply honest about his life.
Judy, thank you. Reflecting post-modernism, yeah. I mean I do think there’s a link as what you’re saying between post-modernism and these times of 100 years ago. And I think there is a desire to find, to experiment, to innovate. Because I think artists are, as Wendy was saying, challenging and trying to put a mirror to human nature. That’s the huge advance that the avant garde gives. The Dadaists, surrealists. They’ve got to challenge status quo. Not only try to mirror human nature and I think there is that link with the post-modernist impulse. Put aside all the theory. I think there is that link in artists of today.
Tracey Emin, you know, a lot of the others. Sarah Kane for me in theatre, Mark Ravenhill. There’s a play of his called “Shopping and Fucking” where everything, whether you shop or you have sex doesn’t matter. It’s all equalised in the transactional nature of contemporary consumerism. Or Sarah Kane with “Psychosis 4.48”. There are playwrights who are doing this, absolutely. And novelists.
Laurie, once again, a Dali painting of ants. The sheep perspective of human’s behaviour. Yeah, but the ants on the hand are scary as well. This is the first time these guys are doing this. We know these so well. So they may have become banal cliches in a way but it’s the first time.
Robin, Surrealism Beyond Borders in the exhibition at The Met. Yeah it’s fascinating. And I’ve been fascinated, literally a couple of weeks ago, and I get free reign to a very large group of students. You know, choose anything to make a theme of your work. Not only my university, was talking to some other lecturers and other professors at others and a lot of them chose surrealism. Knowing very little about it. And I’m fascinated that 18 and 19-year-olds find a link knowing very little and that’s what they want to create a whole theme around in creating new theatre, in doing devising sort of modules, et cetera.
Neville, the comments on Travesty is set in Zurich. You think that with “Leopoldstadt” is set in Vienna, Stoppard has come full circle. Wonderful idea, that’s a fantastic idea Neville. For some years I was the manager of John Wood who starred as Henry Carr in “Travesties” and John was arguably the great of Stoppard actors. Now except Antony Sher also played Henry Carr in a brilliant performance. John and Tom had a special love relationship and they were both great intellects, fantastic. The great line from “Travesties”, “My heart belongs to Dada.” And they argued forever how to play it. Neville, thank you. It’s a great idea of yours. That “Leopoldstadt” in Vienna with Stoppard and “Travesties” much earlier was Stoppard, politics and art. Politics and psychology and theory and cultural thinking, Stoppard has a knack for finding these cities, these locations. A very good friend of mine is writing a book on art and music in different cities. Paris, London, Vienna, elsewhere. And looking only at the art and the music at various times. It’s fascinating to read some early draughts of the book. What you’re saying, Stoppard, yep. In a way, has come full circle. Ron.
[Wendy] I find, sorry. David?
Yes Wendy.
Sorry, I just wanted to carry on with that. Just to say how all the time governments confiscate art and destroy art or censor art.
Absolutely. And that’s what they were talking about.
Just thinking about South Africa as well.
Absolutely, I mean Wendy.
Yeah.
I mean from “Black Beauty” being banned in South Africa because how could a Black person be beautiful, literally given as the reason for banning for the book and many, many others. And we’ve spoken you know, in these lectures, often about the banning. Enid Blyton was banned by the BBC. The Famous Five was banned, yeah et cetera, et cetera. I mean when you look at some of the crazy stuff.
And have a look with what’s going on now, with oh my God, what’s her name? J.K. Rowlings.
J.K. Rowling.
Yeah.
The book also on the Holocaust what’s it, Maus? How do you pronounce it? M-A-U-S.
Yes, yes.
In Tennessee.
Right.
They’re trying to ban it from being studied at school.
Right.
You know, because of sexual content. Not because of Holocaust content and interestingly, I’m sorry. Go for it Wendy.
But that’s political. It’s become political.
Yeah, exactly.
It’s all the, you know. Go on.
Absolutely. I mean I’ll, Wendy actually I love what you’re saying. Because it’s the eternal conflict. It’s the “Antigone” conflict again between the rights of Creon and the state and the law or how they want to interpret the law and Antigone who’s ostracised and remains. So the individual and the group and who do you put first and the first usually to be banned or censored are the artists, satirists, writers, painters and so on. Absolutely.
Ron, an interest in female artists and surrealism. Yeah, Dorothea Tanning, Frida Kahlo, I mean so many others that we would, go into be fascinating and the exhibition at the Tate Modern.
Q: Bobby, was “Un Chien Andalou” a silent film?
A: Yes, and that’s the original music? Yep. 1929 when they made it.
Q: June, have you seen the film “Little Ashes”?
A: I haven’t seen it yet. Thank you, I’ll look at it and get back to you June.
Susan, so glad you mentioned Varian Fry. His efforts are still not well known. I know, there was a movie made about his work. Not a great movie but at least it was informative. And the massive lengths that one individual went to, Varian Fry. And very underrated in terms of that whole period. Absolutely Susan.
Q: Nina, Kurt Schwitters, can you comment on Kurt Schwitters?
A: His sound poetry. It absolutely fits into Dada. The idea of randomness, of anarchic, of chance and the philosophical idea of chance as opposed to conscious choice and Croft. I think all of these things come in with Schwitters. Schwitters is fascinating, he’s often studied by theatre designers in terms of the visual and how his sound poetry inspired them with design and the visual aspect in theatre.
Q: Harriet, suddenly I see a face in the camel’s hump. Has that always been there?
A: Yes. You picked it up. Okay, I don’t have a clue. I can’t answer it other than to dive into the surrealist head space. Thank you HH. Esther, thank you for your kind comments Romaine. Appreciate Janice. Wendy just mentioned the museum of the Janco Dada Museum.
Q: Peter, was Lenin the murderer? I thought it was Stalin, after Lenin died prematurely.
A: Well, that’s a very good point. Stalin was the real murderer. I mean Lenin might have set it all up. Dictatorship with the proletariat, et cetera. But Stalin was the one who really carried you know, the slaughter of millions and millions.
Judith, thank you. Thank you for an understanding of an art that in the past, I have always ignored because it made me sick. It’s a great line Judith and I, a Dadaist, a surrealist I think would love your line okay?
Edna, the Janco Museum is located in the village Ein Hod in Israel. Oh okay, great. That’s where Janco founded the acclaimed museum. Yeah. Margaret mentions the Tate exhibition of Surrealism Beyond Borders. Again.
I can get. I can organise an exhibition. I can actually organise a talk about that exhibition. It’s just come off at The Met. I nearly.
Fantastic, Wendy.
Yeah.
That’d be wonderful.
I can do that.
It’d be wonderful because I really think surrealism is making quite a bit of a comeback.
Yeah.
And it’s fairly obvious why for me. Given our times.
Yeah.
And it’s inspiring.
And Dorothea Tanning. Yeah.
The art.
And Dorothea Tanning at Tate. It was at Tate.
Great, that’d be fantastic Wendy.
All right, I’m going to put my thinking cap on with content create.
Okay great.
I think, David I think on that note I’m going to, I think we should wrap up. Just to say thank you very much.
There’s just one or two interesting comments here.
Okay.
There’s a fascinating thing here where Laurie asks, “David would you and Dennis do a revisit "of Cry, the Beloved Country”? It’s a fascinating question perhaps. Just to add in, I’ll just see here. And that’s it. Okay.
That would be great David. If you did that, “Cry, the Beloved Country”.
Yeah I thought, maybe Dennis and I look at some of the art and the literature and film coming out of South Africa.
[Wendy] Yeah I can help you with the art then as well.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Could be interesting. Put it in a global context. Not only the South African context maybe. Okay?
Absolutely.
Wendy, sorry. Thank you so much to Wendy and to Lauren and everybody participating, really appreciate it.
Thanks David, thanks Lauren. Thanks everybody.
Thanks, take care.
Thanks for joining us today, thanks a lot.
Cheers.
Enjoy the rest of your day. Bye.