#Africa shape collage full

IX” (1929), “Streit” (circa, 1940), “Untitled, From an Ethnological Museum” (1924), and many other suggestions of an indeterminate, mutational, revolutionary tumult courtesy of Berlinische Galerie’s extensive Höch holdings. Höch is the most literal of the two artists in this regard - gluing fragments of Western figures together with pictures of African sculpture, as in the fervid “From the Collection of an Ethnographic Museum No.

Likewise, Janco’s tribal-like masks and (later) Hannah Höch’s chiding collages looked to African objets d’art for a new formal art language. (He gleefully presented his African treasures alongside fresh Dada works as early as 1917.) Their faux contact with Africa was as dominant as it was deceptive, and it took hold of the demented Dada spirit, as we see in Tzara’s 1926 Negro Poems and Note on Negro Art. Never having visited Africa they relied solely on their impressions of imported works, images, and ethnographic studies that Cory collected and showed in Zurich.

#Africa shape collage full

Though full of chutzpah, the Dadaists were theoretically unsophisticated by our standards. However, soon under Huelsenbeck’s driving search for new directions of art, the cabaret became more of a mental playground particularly inspired by an imagined Africa as simulated by gallerist Han Coray.

RMN-Grand Palais / Thierry Olivier)Īt first, in 1916, the founders and the other early club members - Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp - focused on the Western cultural products of several artists and writers: composer Igor Stravinsky, poet and editor Filippo Marinetti, Bohemian novelist and poet Franz Werfel, poet Jules Laforgue, poet and art critic André Salmon, novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars, playwright Frank Wedekind, the writer and critic Max Jacob, the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, and the painter Wassily Kandinsky. “Nkisi n’kondi magical personage” (pre-1892) Vili Kingdom of Loango, Congo, wood, metal, glass, textiles, vegetable fibers, color pigments and resin, 64 × 38 × 34 cm (courtesy of musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, don de Joseph Cholet © musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Dist. Placed within the range of vertiginous possibilities and improbabilities released by the effort to end polite society, Cabaret Voltaire’s mischief club took up the theme of transmigration that they perceived in non-Western systems of thought and creation, leading many avant-garde artists to study and adopt radically different types of artistic production. The cabaret soon became the epitome of bohemianism by rejecting the conventional Western mores described as “civilized” that had led to such blood-soaked discord. PARIS - Following on the heels of the Dada centennial, curator Cécile Debray of the Musée de l’Orangerie, in cooperation with the ethnological Museum Rietberg in Zurich and the Berlinische Galerie, double down on the Discordian pychodelic aspects of Dada with Dada Africa, an exhibition that exhumes the collision between the Dadaists’ preconceived notions of Africa and actual African cultural artifacts.Ĭoncurrent with the appalling butchery of World War I, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings’s Cabaret Voltaire opened its doors on February 5th, 1916, and the tumultuous Dada revolt ensued. Man Ray, “Noire et Blanche” (Black and White) (1926) gélatino-argentique photograph, 21 × 27,5 cm Paris, Centre Pompidou, musée national d’Art moderne (© Man Ray Trust © Adagp, Paris, 2017, courtesy Adagp Image Bank)