Political Melancholy

Marcel Duchamp: List of works John Cage: I Ching.

Rauschenberg ABOUT DUCHAMP’S WORDPLAY RELIEF 10

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Περιεχόμενα Περιεχόμενα ............................................................................................................................... 3 John Cage ................................................................................................................................ 6

........................................................................................................... 6 I Ching ......................................................................................................................................... 9 Structure......................................................................................................................... 10 Hexagrams .......................................................................................................................... 11 I Ching divination................................................................................................................... 12 T A G : J O H N C A G E ........................................................................................................ 40 ‘Wimshurst, Factory, Rube Goldberg and Francis Picabia’ 2016 ................................... 40 ‘Side Effects’ Performance – photography by Christopher Fernandez .......................... 45 John & Merce’s Bob............................................................................................................. 49 MINIMALIST ART ....................................................................................................................... 58 T H E D E V E L O P ME N T O F M I N I M A L IS M ......................................................... 59 Q U A L IT IE S O F M I N I M A L IS T A R T .................................................................... 60 M I N I M A L IS M A N D E A R L Y A B S T R A C T IO N .................................................. 64 Minimalism (visual arts) ........................................................................................................ 65 Minimal art, minimalism in visual art .............................................................................. 65 History ................................................................................................................................. 66 Monochrome revival .......................................................................................................... 68 Footnotes............................................................................................................................. 71 External links[edit].............................................................................................................. 72 ABSTRACT ART .......................................................................................................................... 74 Abstract art ............................................................................................................................. 74 3

Abstraction in early art and many cultures ...................................................................... 75 19th century ........................................................................................................................ 76 20th century ........................................................................................................................ 78 Music ................................................................................................................................... 81 Russian avant-garde ........................................................................................................... 82 The Bauhaus ....................................................................................................................... 83 Abstraction in Paris and London ....................................................................................... 83 America: mid-century ........................................................................................................ 84 Later developments ............................................................................................................ 85 Causation............................................................................................................................. 85 Gallery ................................................................................................................................. 86 See also ................................................................................................................................ 88 References ........................................................................................................................... 89 Sources[edit] ........................................................................................................................ 91 External links[edit].............................................................................................................. 91 Robert Rauschenberg ................................................................................................................ 94 "Neo Dadaist" ........................................................................................................................... 95 Poems .................................................................................................................................. 97 References ........................................................................................................................... 98 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................ 98 Rauschenberg ....................................................................................................................... 99 1 APOLLO 11 LUNAR MISSION, SATURN V ROCKET CLEARS THE LAUNCH PAD, CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA, JULY 16, 1969 ........................................... 100 Marcel Duchamp: List of works - All Artworks by Date 1→10 ............................................... 119 Marcel Duchamp: List of works ........................................................................................... 128 Bert Jansen MORE ABOUT DUCHAMP’S WORDPLAY RELIEF 10 (1), 2016 ................................. 131 Studies in Gender and Sexuality .............................................................................................. 147

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John Cage

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Born

September 5, 1912

Los Angeles, California, U.S. Died

August 12, 1992 (aged 79)

Manhattan, New York, US Nationality

American

Education

Pomona College

Occupation

Composer and music theorist

Signature

John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the postwar avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.

Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is often assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the 7

audience during performance. The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

Today MIM honors the centennial of the birth of John Cage (September 5, 1912--August 12, 1992).

Cage is acknowledged by Grove Music Online to have had "a greater impact on music in the twentieth century than any other American composer." MIM has chosen to perform Cage's best-known piece, his 1952 composition 4'33" (read as "Four minutes, thirty-three seconds"). The piece was premiered

by David Tudor, an American pianist, on August 29, 1952. In its sixtieth year, the piece remains controversial and is seen as challenging the very definition of music. Cage's masterpiece teaches us to really listen and to appreciate sounds. Join us to discover "the most extraordinary museum you'll ever hear." "There's no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn't know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds."—John Cage

His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951.

The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text decision-making tool, which uses chance operations to suggest answers to questions one may pose, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living".

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I Ching

Title page of a Song dynasty (c. 1100) edition of the I Ching

Original title

易 *lek [note 1]

Country

Zhou dynasty (China)

Genre

Divination, cosmology

Published

Late 9th century BC

I Ching Book of Changes / Classic of Changes "I (Ching)" in seal script (top),[note 1] Traditional (middle), and Simplified (bottom) Chinese characters

Traditional Chinese

易經

Simplified Chinese

易经

Hanyu Pinyin

Yìjīng

Literal meaning

"Classic of Changes"

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"The Book of Changes" redirects here. For other uses, see The Book of Changes (disambiguation).

For other uses of "I Ching" or "Yijing", see I Ching (disambiguation) and Yijing (disambiguation).

The I Ching or Yi Jing (Chinese: 易經; pinyin: Yìjīng; Mandarin pronunciation: [î tɕíŋ] ( listen)), usually translated as Book of Changes or Classic of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination text and the oldest of the Chinese classics. With more than two and a half millennia's worth of commentary and interpretation, the I Ching is an influential text read throughout the world, providing inspiration to the worlds of religion, philosophy,[1] literature, and art. Originally a divination manual in the Western Zhou period (1000–750 BC), over the course of the Warring States period and early imperial period (500–200 BC) it was transformed into a cosmological text with a series of philosophical commentaries known as the "Ten Wings".[2] After becoming part of the Five Classics in the 2nd century BC, the I Ching was the subject of scholarly commentary and the basis for divination practice for centuries across the Far East, and eventually took on an influential role in Western understanding of Eastern thought.

The I Ching uses a type of divination called cleromancy, which produces apparently random numbers. Six numbers between 6 and 9 are turned into a hexagram, which can then be looked up in the I Ching book, arranged in an order known as the King Wen sequence. The interpretation of the readings found in the I Ching is a matter of centuries' debate, and many commentators have used the book symbolically, often to provide guidance for moral decision making as informed by Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The hexagrams themselves have often acquired cosmological significance and been paralleled with many other traditional names for the processes of change such as yin and yang and Wu Xing.

Structure

Oracle turtle shell featuring the ancient form (

) of zhēn (貞) "to divine"

The basic unit of the Zhou yi is the hexagram (卦 guà), a figure composed of six stacked horizontal lines (爻 yáo). Each line is either broken or unbroken. The received text of the Zhou yi contains all 64 possible hexagrams, along with the hexagram's name (卦

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名 guàmíng), a short hexagram statement (彖 tuàn),] and six line statements (爻辭 yáocí).

The statements were used to determine the results of divination, but the reasons for having two different methods of reading the hexagram are not known, and it is not known why hexagram statements would be read over line statements or vice versa.

The book opens with the first hexagram statement, yuán hēng lì zhēn (元亨利貞). These four words, translated traditionally by James Legge as "originating and penetrating, advantageous and firm," are often repeated in the hexagram statements and were already considered an important part of I Ching interpretation in the 6th century BC. Edward Shaughnessy describes this statement as affirming an "initial receipt" of an offering, "beneficial" for further "divining".[16] The word zhēn (貞, ancient form ) was also used for the verb "divine" in the oracle bones of the late Shang dynasty, which preceded the Zhou. It also carried meanings of being or making upright or correct, and was defined by the Eastern Han scholar Zheng Xuan as "to enquire into the correctness" of a proposed activity.[17] The names of the hexagrams are usually words that appear in their respective line statements, but in five cases (2, 9, 26, 61, and 63) an unrelated character of unclear purpose appears. The hexagram names could have been chosen arbitrarily from the line statements,[18] but it is also possible that the line statements were derived from the hexagram names.[19] The line statements, which make up most of the book, are exceedingly cryptic.

Each line begins with a word indicating the line number, "base, 2, 3, 4, 5, top", and either the number 6 for a broken line, or the number 9 for a whole line. Hexagrams 1 and 2 have an extra line statement, named yong.[20] Following the line number, the line statements may make oracular or prognostic statements.[21] Some line statements also contain poetry or references to historical events.

Hexagrams Main article: Hexagram (I Ching) For a more comprehensive list, see List of hexagrams of the I Ching.

In the canonical I Ching, the hexagrams are arranged in an order dubbed the King Wen sequence after King Wen of Zhou, who founded the Zhou dynasty and supposedly reformed the method of interpretation. The sequence generally pairs hexagrams with their upsidedown equivalents, although in eight cases hexagrams are paired with their inversion.[51] Another order, found at Mawangdui in 1973, arranges the hexagrams into eight groups sharing the same upper trigram. But the oldest known manuscript, found in 1987 and now held by the Shanghai Library, was almost certainly arranged in the King Wen sequence, and it has even been proposed that a pottery paddle from the Western Zhou period contains four hexagrams in the King Wen sequence.[52] Whichever of these arrangements is older, it is not evident that the order of the hexagrams was of interest to the original authors of the Zhou yi. The assignment of numbers, binary or decimal, to specific hexagram, is a modern invention.

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A diagram of I Ching hexagrams sent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from Joachim Bouvet. The Arabic numerals were added by Leibniz.

The *k-lˤeng (jing 經, "classic") appellation would not have been used until after the Han dynasty, after the core Old Chinese period.

2. ^ The word tuan (彖) refers to a four-legged animal similar to a pig. This is believed to be a gloss for "decision," duan (斷). The modern word for a hexagram statement is guàcí (卦辭 ). Knechtges (2014), pp. 1881 3. ^ Referred to as yao (繇) in the Zuo zhuan. Nielsen (2003), pp. 24, 290 4. ^ The received text was rearranged by Zhu Xi. (Nielsen 2003, p. 258) 1.

I Ching divination Among the many forms of divination is a cleromancy that is applied to the I Ching (易經, yì jīng) or Book of Changes. The text of the I Ching consists of sixty-four hexagrams—six-line figures—and commentaries upon them. By using one or another of several methods, one randomly generates the

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six lines; one then studies the commentaries in the I Ching associated with the generated hexagram.

The meanings derived from such study can be interpreted as an oracle.

Oracular uses of the I Ching—changing lines and resulting changed hexagrams—are documented before and around the Warring State period. The practice is earlier than many schools of Chinese philosophy, including that of Confucius (he himself, or in any event his school, studied the I Ching and tried to interpret it). The I Ching was also used by later schools, such as the School of Yin-Yang. As the I Ching was one of only a few books that were not burnt, and it enjoyed for more than two millennia the status of one of the five key books that had to be studied as preparation for the examinations of government officials, the traditions of its rules and interpretation have continued to the present.

Throughout China's region of cultural influence (including Japan, Korea, and Vietnam), scholars have added comments and interpretations to the I Ching. It has also attracted the interest of many thinkers in the West; historical and philosophical information, as well as a list of English translations, can be found here. The text is extremely dense reading—in fact, the original interpretation of the oracle is based not only on the groupings of six lines (the hexagrams), but also on groups of three lines (trigrams, in terms of which each hexagram can be analysed) and even pairs of lines (bigrams).

Yarrow Stalks prepared for regular usage

Two heads and one tail of the original IChing Divination Coins.

Yarrow stalks[edit]

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A bunch of 50 yarrow (Achillea millefolium subsp. millefolium var. millefolium) stalks, used for I Ching divination.

Hexagrams may be generated by the manipulation of yarrow stalks. These are usually genuine Achillea millefolium stalks that have been cut and prepared for such purposes, or any form of wooden rod or sticks (the quality ranging from cheap hardwood to very expensive red sandalwood, etc.) which are plain, lacquered, or varnished. When genuine Achillea is used, varieties local to the diviner are considered the best, as they would contain qi closer to, and more in tune with, the diviner, or they may come from a particularly spiritual or relevant place, such as on the grounds of a Confucian temple. When not in use, they are kept in a cloth or silk bag/pouch or a wooden case/box.

Fifty yarrow stalks are used, though one stalk is set aside at the beginning and takes no further part in the process of consultation. The remaining forty-nine stalks are roughly sorted into two piles, and then for each pile one stalk is initially "remaindered"; then the pile is "cast off" in lots of four (i.e., groups of four stalks are removed). The remainders from each half are combined (traditionally placed between the fingers of one hand during the counting process) and set aside, with the process then repeated twice (i.e., for a total of three times). The total number of stalks in the remainder pile will necessarily (if the procedure has been followed correctly) be 9 or 5, in the first count, and 8 or 4, in the second. 9 or 8 is assigned a value of 2; 5 or 4, a value of 3. The total of the three passes will be one of just four values: 6 (2+2+2), 7 (2+2+3), 8 (2+3+3), or 9 (3+3+3)—that value is the number of the first line.[1] The forty-nine stalks are then gathered and the entire procedure repeated to generate each of the remaining five lines of the hexagram.

The yarrow-stalk method produces unequal probabilities[2][3] for obtaining each of the four totals, as shown in the table. Compared to the three-coin method discussed next, the probabilities of the lines produced by the yarrow-stalk method are significantly different.

Number

Yarrow-stalk probability

Three-coin probability

yin or yang

Signification

Symbol

6

1/16

2/16

old yin

yin changing into yang

---x---

8/16

8/16

8

7/16

6/16

young yin

yin, unchanging

--- ---

9

3/16

2/16

old yang

yang changing into yin

---o---

young yang

yang, unchanging

--------

8/16 7

5/16

8/16 6/16

Note that the Yarrow algorithm is a particular algorithm for generating random numbers; while it is named after the yarrow-stalk method of consulting the I Ching, its details are unrelated to it.

The three-coin method came into use over a thousand years after the yarrow-stalk method. The quickest, easiest, and most popular method by far, it has largely supplanted yarrow stalks, but produces outcomes with different likelihoods. Three coins are tossed at once; each coin is given a value of 2 or 3, depending upon whether it is tails or heads, respectively. Six such tosses make the hexagram. Some fortune-tellers use an empty tortoise shell to shake the coins in before throwing them on a dish or plate.

Modified Three-coin method[edit] The three-coin method can be modified to have the same probabilities as the yarrow-stalk method by having one of the coins be of a second coin type, or in some way be marked as special (i.e., be distinguishable from the other coins). All three coins are tossed at once. The results are counted just

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as in the original three-coin method, with two exceptions: one to make yin less likely to move, and one to make yang more likely to move. (The probability for 6/8/9/7 in the coin method is 2/6/2/6, but in the yarrow-stalk method is 1/7/3/5; hence, 6 has to occur less often, and 9 has to occur more often.)

In the case where the special coin is tails and the other two are both tails—which would normally produce a 6—re-flip the marked coin: if it remains tails, then treat it as a 6 (moving yin); otherwise, it remains an 8 (static yin). As a 6 can become a 6 or an 8, it reduces the probability of the moving 6. In other words, it makes the old yin less likely to change (or move).

In the case where the special coin is heads and the other two are both tails—which would normally produce an 7—re-flip the marked coin: if it remains heads, then treat it as a 7 (static yang); otherwise, it remains an 9 (moving yang). As a 7 can become a 7 or an 9, it reduces the probability of the static 7.

In other words, it makes the young yang less likely and hence more yangs change as a result.

This method retains the 50% chance of yin:yang, but changes the ratio of moving yang to static yang from 1:3 to 1:7; likewise, it changes the ratio of moving yin to static yin from 1:3 to 3:5, which is the same probabilities as the yarrow-stalk method.

Two-coin method[edit] Some purists contend that there is a problem with the three-coin method because its probabilities differ from the more ancient, yarrow-stalk, method. In fact, over the centuries there have even been other methods used for consulting the oracle.

The two-coin method involves tossing one pair of coins twice: on the first toss, two heads give a value of 2, and anything else is 3; on the second toss, each coin is valued separately, to give a sum from 6 to 9, as above. This results in the same distribution of probabilities as for the yarrow-stalk method.

Four coins[edit] With tails assigned the value 0 (zero) and heads the value 1, four coins tossed at once can be used to generate a four-bit binary number, the right-most coin indicating the first bit, the next coin (to the first's left) indicating the next bit, etc. The number 0000 is called old yin; the next three numbers—0001, 0010, and 0011 (the binary numbers whose decimal equivalents are 1, 2, and 3, respectively)—are called old yang, with a similar principle applied to the remaining twelve outcomes. This gives identical results to the yarrow-stalk method.

Coins

Binar Decim Lin y al e

Decim Coins al

Lin e

Decim Coins al

Lin e

Decim Coins al

Lin e

TTT T

0000

0

--x---

4

THT T

------

8

HTT T

------

12

HHT T

--- --

TTT H

0001

1

--o---

5

THT H

------

9

HTT H

--- --

13

HHT H

--- --

TTH T

0010

2

--o---

6

THH T

------

10

HTH T

--- --

14

HHH T

--- --

TTH H

0011

3

--o---

7

THH H

------

11

HTH H

--- --

15

HHH H

--- --

The two-coin method described above can be performed with four coins, simply by having one pair of coins be alike—of the same size or denomination—while the other two are of a different size or denomination; the larger coins can then be counted as the first toss, while the two smaller coins constitute the second toss (or vice versa).

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Six coins[edit] Six coins—five identical coins and one different—can be thrown at once. The coin that lands closest to a line drawn on the table will make the first line of the hexagram, and so on: heads for yang, tails for yin. The distinct coin is a moving line. This method has the dual failings that (1) it forces every hexagram to be a changing hexagram, and (2) it only ever allows exactly one line to be changing.

Cage was born September 5, 1912, at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. His father, John Milton Cage Sr. (1886–1964), was an inventor, and his mother, Lucretia ("Crete") Harvey (1885–1969), worked intermittently as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. The family's roots were deeply American: in a 1976 interview, Cage mentioned that George Washington was assisted by an ancestor named John Cage in the task of surveying the Colony of Virginia. Cage described his mother as a woman with "a sense of society" who was "never happy", while his father is perhaps best characterized by his inventions: sometimes idealistic, such as a diesel-fueled submarine that gave off exhaust bubbles, the senior Cage being uninterested in an undetectable submarine; others revolutionary and against the scientific norms, such as the "electrostatic field theory" of the universe.[n 1] John Milton Sr. taught his son that "if someone says 'can't' that shows you what to do." In 1944–45 Cage wrote two small character pieces dedicated to his parents: Crete and Dad. The latter is a short lively piece that ends abruptly, while "Crete" is a slightly longer, mostly melodic contrapuntal work.

Cage's first experiences with music were from private piano teachers in the Greater Los Angeles area and several relatives, particularly his aunt Phoebe Harvey James who introduced him to the piano music of the 19th century. He received first piano lessons when he was in the fourth grade at school, but although he liked music, he expressed more interest in sight reading than in developing virtuoso piano technique, and apparently was not thinking of composition. During high school, one of his music teachers was Fannie Charles Dillon. By 1928, though, Cage was convinced that he wanted to be a writer. He graduated that year from Los Angeles High School as a valedictorian, having also in the spring given a prize-winning speech at the Hollywood Bowl proposing a day of quiet for all Americans. "By being hushed and silent, he said, 'we should have the opportunity to hear what other people think'," anticipating 4′33″ by more than thirty years.[citation needed]

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Figure #1: Fontana Mix (1958) | By: John Cage.

Cage enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont as a theology major in 1928. Often crossing disciplines again, though, he encountered at Pomona the work of artist Marcel Duchamp via professor JosĂŠ Pijoan, of writer James Joyce via Don Sample, of philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy and of Cowell. In 1930 he dropped out, having come to believe that "college was of no use to a writer" after an incident described in the 1991 autobiographical statement: I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.

Cage persuaded his parents that a trip to Europe would be more beneficial to a future writer than college studies. He subsequently hitchhiked to Galveston and sailed to Le Havre, where he took a train to Paris. Cage stayed in Europe for some 18 months, trying his hand at various forms of art. First he studied Gothic and Greek architecture, but decided he was not interested enough in architecture to dedicate his life to it. He then took up painting, poetry and music. It was in Europe that, encouraged by his teacher Lazare LĂŠvy, he first heard the music of contemporary composers (such as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith) and finally got to know the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which he had not experienced before.

After several months in Paris, Cage's enthusiasm for America was revived after he read Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass – he wanted to return immediately, but his parents, with whom he 17

regularly exchanged letters during the entire trip, persuaded him to stay in Europe for a little longer and explore the continent. Cage started traveling, visited various places in France, Germany and Spain, as well as Capri and, most importantly, Majorca, where he started composing. His first compositions were created using dense mathematical formulas, but Cage was displeased with the results and left the finished pieces behind when he left. Cage's association with theater also started in Europe: during a walk in Seville he witnessed, in his own words, "the multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together in one's experience and producing enjoyment."

Figure #2: Sound notation of sounds in UTS library | Photo by: Susan Nghiem 1931–36: Apprenticeship Cage returned to the United States in 1931. He went to Santa Monica, California, where he made a living partly by giving small, private lectures on contemporary art. He got to know 18

various important figures of the Southern California art world, such as Richard Buhlig (who became his first composition teacher) and arts patron Galka Scheyer. By 1933 Cage decided to concentrate on music rather than painting. "The people who heard my music had better things to say about it than the people who looked at my paintings had to say about my paintings", Cage later explained. In 1933 he sent some of his compositions to Henry Cowell; the reply was a "rather vague letter", in which Cowell suggested that Cage study with Arnold Schoenberg— Cage's musical ideas at the time included composition based on a 25-tone row, somewhat similar to Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.[30] Cowell also advised that, before approaching Schoenberg, Cage should take some preliminary lessons, and recommended Adolph Weiss, a former Schoenberg pupil.

Following Cowell's advice, Cage travelled to New York City in 1933 and started studying with Weiss as well as taking lessons from Cowell himself at The New School. He supported himself financially by taking up a job washing walls at a Brooklyn YWCA. Cage's routine during that period was apparently very tiring, with just four hours of sleep on most nights, and four hours of composition every day starting at 4 am. Several months later, still in 1933, Cage became sufficiently good at composition to approach Schoenberg.[n 2] He could not afford Schoenberg's price, and when he mentioned it, the older composer asked whether Cage would devote his life to music. After Cage replied that he would, Schoenberg offered to tutor him free of charge.

Cage studied with Schoenberg in California: first at USC and then at UCLA, as well as privately.

The older composer became one of the biggest influences on Cage, who "literally worshipped him", particularly as an example of how to live one's life being a composer. The vow Cage gave, to dedicate his life to music, was apparently still important some 40 years later, when Cage "had no need for it [i.e. writing music]", he continued composing partly because of the promise he gave. Schoenberg's methods and their influence on Cage are well documented by Cage himself in various lectures and writings. Particularly well-known is the conversation mentioned in the 1958 lecture Indeterminacy:

After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, 'In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.'

Cage studied with Schoenberg for two years, but although he admired his teacher, he decided to leave after Schoenberg told the assembled students that he was trying to make it impossible for them to write music. Much later, Cage recounted the incident: "... When he said that, I revolted, not against him, but against what he had said. I determined then and there, more than ever before, to write music." Although Schoenberg was not impressed with Cage's compositional abilities during these two years, in a later interview, where he initially said that none of his American pupils were interesting, he further stated in reference to Cage: "There was one ... of course he's not a composer, but he's an inventor—of genius." Cage would later adopt the "inventor" moniker and deny that he was in fact a composer.

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At some point in 1934–35, during his studies with Schoenberg, Cage was working at his mother's arts and crafts shop, where he met artist Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff. She was an Alaskanborn daughter of a Russian priest; her work encompassed fine bookbinding, sculpture and collage. Although Cage was involved in relationships with Don Sample and with architect Rudolph Schindler's wife Pauline when he met Xenia, he fell in love immediately. Cage and Kashevaroff were married in the desert at Yuma, Arizona, on June 7, 1935.

1937–49: Modern dance and Eastern influences See also: Works for prepared piano by John Cage The newly married couple first lived with Cage's parents in Pacific Palisades, then moved to Hollywood. During 1936–38 Cage changed numerous jobs, including one that started his lifelong association with modern dance: dance accompanist at UCLA. He produced music for choreographies and at one point taught a course on "Musical Accompaniments for Rhythmic Expression" at UCLA, with his aunt Phoebe. It was during that time that Cage first started experimenting with unorthodox instruments, such as household items, metal sheets, and so on.

This was inspired by Oskar Fischinger, who told Cage that "everything in the world has a spirit that can be released through its sound." Although Cage did not share the idea of spirits, these words inspired him to begin exploring the sounds produced by hitting various non-musical objects.

In 1938, on Cowell's recommendation, Cage drove to San Francisco to find employment and to seek out fellow Cowell student and composer Lou Harrison. According to Cowell, the two composers had a shared interest in percussion and dance and would likely hit it off if introduced to one another. Indeed, the two immediately established a strong bond upon meeting and began a working relationship that continued for several years. Harrison soon helped Cage to secure a faculty member position at Mills College, teaching the same program as at UCLA, and collaborating with choreographer Marian van Tuyl. Several famous dance groups were present, and Cage's interest in modern dance grew further. After several months he left and moved to Seattle, Washington, where he found work as composer and accompanist for choreographer Bonnie Bird at the Cornish College of the Arts. The Cornish School years proved to be a particularly important period in Cage's life. Aside from teaching and working as accompanist, Cage organized a percussion ensemble that toured the West Coast and brought the composer his first fame. His reputation was enhanced further with the invention of the prepared piano—a piano which has had its sound altered by objects placed on, beneath or between the strings—in 1940. This concept was originally intended for a performance staged in a room too small to include a full percussion ensemble. It was also at the Cornish School that Cage met a number of people who became lifelong friends, such as painter Mark Tobey and dancer Merce Cunningham. The latter was to become Cage's lifelong romantic partner and artistic collaborator.

Cage left Seattle in the summer of 1941 after the painter László Moholy-Nagy invited him to teach at the Chicago School of Design (what later became the IIT Institute of Design). The composer accepted partly because he hoped to find opportunities in Chicago, that were not available in Seattle, to organize a center for experimental music. These opportunities did not materialize. Cage taught at the Chicago School of Design and worked as accompanist and 20

composer at the University of Chicago. At one point, his reputation as percussion composer landed him a commission from the Columbia Broadcasting System to compose a soundtrack for a radio play by Kenneth Patchen. The result, The City Wears a Slouch Hat, was received well, and Cage deduced that more important commissions would follow. Hoping to find these, he left Chicago for New York City in the spring of 1942.

Excerpt from The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942) Performed in 1958 by Arline Carmen (voice) and John Cage (closed piano). This is one of the rare recordings of Cage performing his own instrumental music.

In New York, the Cages first stayed with painter Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim. Through them, Cage met numerous important artists such as Piet Mondrian, AndrĂŠ Breton, Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, and many others. Guggenheim was very supportive: the Cages could stay with her and Ernst for any length of time, and she offered to organize a concert of Cage's music at the opening of her gallery, which included paying for transportation of Cage's percussion instruments from Chicago. After she learned that Cage secured another concert, at the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim withdrew all support, and, even after the ultimately successful MoMA concert, Cage was left homeless, unemployed and penniless. The commissions he hoped for did not happen. He and Xenia spent the summer of 1942 with dancer Jean Erdman and her husband Joseph Campbell. Without the percussion instruments, Cage again turned to prepared piano, producing a substantial body of works for performances by various choreographers, including Merce Cunningham, who had moved to New York City several years earlier. Cage and Cunningham eventually became romantically involved, and Cage's marriage, already breaking up during the early 1940s, ended in divorce in 1945. Cunningham remained Cage's partner for the rest of his life. Cage also countered the lack of percussion instruments by writing, on one occasion, for voice and closed piano: the resulting piece, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942), quickly became popular and was performed by the celebrated duo of Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio.

Like his personal life, Cage's artistic life went through a crisis in mid-1940s. The composer was experiencing a growing disillusionment with the idea of music as means of communication: the public rarely accepted his work, and Cage himself, too, had trouble understanding the music of his colleagues. In early 1946 Cage agreed to tutor Gita Sarabhai, an Indian musician who came to the US to study Western music. In return, he asked her to teach him about Indian music and philosophy. Cage also attended, in late 1940s and early 1950s, D. T. Suzuki's lectures on Zen Buddhism, and read further the works of Coomaraswamy. The first fruits of these studies were works inspired by Indian concepts: Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, String Quartet in Four Parts, and others. Cage accepted the goal of music as explained to him by Sarabhai: "to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences".

Early in 1946, his former teacher Richard Buhlig arranged for Cage to meet Berlin-born pianist Grete Sultan, who had escaped from Nazi persecution to New York in 1941. They became close, lifelong friends, and Cage later dedicated part of his Music for Piano and his monumental piano cycle Etudes Australes to her.

1950s: Discovering chance 21

After a 1949 performance at Carnegie Hall, New York, Cage received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, which enabled him to make a trip to Europe, where he met composers such as Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez. More important was Cage's chance encounter with Morton Feldman in New York City in early 1950. Both composers attended a New York Philharmonic concert, where the orchestra performed Anton Webern's Symphony, op. 21, followed by a piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Cage felt so overwhelmed by Webern's piece that he left before the Rachmaninoff; and in the lobby, he met Feldman, who was leaving for the same reason. The two composers quickly became friends; some time later Cage, Feldman, Earle Brown, David Tudor and Cage's pupil Christian Wolff came to be referred to as "the New York school."

In early 1951, Wolff presented Cage with a copy of the I Ching—a Chinese classic text which describes a symbol system used to identify order in chance events. This version of the I Ching was the first complete English translation and had been published by Wolff's father, Kurt Wolff of Pantheon Books in 1950. The I Ching is commonly used for divination, but for Cage it became a tool to compose using chance. To compose a piece of music, Cage would come up with questions to ask the I Ching; the book would then be used in much the same way as it is used for divination. For Cage, this meant "imitating nature in its manner of operation": His lifelong interest in sound itself culminated in an approach that yielded works in which sounds were free from the composer's will: When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound ... I don't need sound to talk to me.

Although Cage had used chance on a few earlier occasions, most notably in the third movement of Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950–51), the I Ching opened new possibilities in this field for him. The first results of the new approach were Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radio receivers, and Music of Changes for piano. The latter work was written for David Tudor, whom Cage met through Feldman—another friendship that lasted until Cage's death.[n 3] Tudor premiered most of Cage's works until the early 1960s, when he stopped performing on the piano and concentrated on composing music. The I Ching became Cage's standard tool for composition: he used it in practically every work composed after 1951, and eventually settled on a computer algorithm that calculated numbers in a manner similar to throwing coins for the I Ching.

Despite the fame Sonatas and Interludes earned him, and the connections he cultivated with American and European composers and musicians, Cage was quite poor. Although he still had an apartment, at 326 Monroe Street (which he occupied since around 1946) his financial situation in 1951 worsened so much that, while working on Music of Changes, he prepared a set of instructions for Tudor as to how to complete the piece in the event of his death. Nevertheless, Cage managed to survive and maintained an active artistic life, giving lectures, performances, etc. In 1952–53 he completed another mammoth project—the Williams Mix, a piece of tape music, which Earle Brown helped to put together. Also in 1952, Cage composed the piece that 22

became his best-known and most controversial creation: 4′33″. The score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece—four minutes, thirty-three seconds—and is meant to be perceived as consisting of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed. Cage conceived "a silent piece" years earlier, but was reluctant to write it down; and indeed, the premiere (given by Tudor on August 29, 1952 at Woodstock, New York) caused an uproar in the audience. The reaction to 4′33″ was just a part of the larger picture: on the whole, it was the adoption of chance procedures that had disastrous consequences for Cage's reputation. The press, which used to react favorably to earlier percussion and prepared piano music, ignored his new works, and many valuable friendships and connections were lost. Pierre Boulez, who used to promote Cage's work in Europe, was opposed to Cage's use of chance, and so were other composers who came to prominence during the 1950s, e.g. Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis.[failed verification] Dream Interpretation of a piano piece that Cage composed in 1948, with sound synthesis and digital instruments (4:50) During this time Cage was also teaching at the avant-garde Black Mountain College just outside Asheville, North Carolina. Cage taught at the college in the summers of 1948 and 1952 and was in residence the summer of 1953. While at Black Mountain College in 1952, he organized what has been called the first "happening" (see discussion below) in the United States, later titled Theatre Piece No. 1, a multi-layered, multi-media performance event staged the same day as Cage conceived it that "that would greatly influence 1950s and 60s artistic practices". In addition to Cage, the participants included Cunningham and Tudor.

From 1953 onward, Cage was busy composing music for modern dance, particularly Cunningham's dances (Cage's partner adopted chance too, out of fascination for the movement of the human body), as well as developing new methods of using chance, in a series of works he referred to as The Ten Thousand Things. In the summer of 1954 he moved out of New York and settled in Gate Hill Cooperative, a community in Stony Point, New York, where his neighbors included David Tudor, M. C. Richards, Karen Karnes, Stan VanDerBeek, and Sari Dienes. The composer's financial situation gradually improved: in late 1954 he and Tudor were able to embark on a European tour. From 1956 to 1961 Cage taught classes in experimental composition at The New School, and from 1956 to 1958 he also worked as an art director and designer of typography. Among his works completed during the last years of the decade were Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58), a seminal work in the history of graphic notation, and Variations I (1958).

1960s: Fame Cage was affiliated with Wesleyan University and collaborated with members of its Music Department from the 1950s until his death in 1992. At the University, the philosopher, poet, and professor of classics Norman O. Brown befriended Cage, an association that proved fruitful to both.[citation needed] In 1960 the composer was appointed a Fellow on the faculty of the Center for Advanced Studies (now the Center for Humanities) in the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wesleyan, where he started teaching classes in experimental music. In October 1961, Wesleyan 23

University Press published Silence, a collection of Cage's lectures and writings on a wide variety of subjects, including the famous Lecture on Nothing that was composed using a complex time length scheme, much like some of Cage's music. Silence was Cage's first book of six but it remains his most widely read and influential.[n 4] In the early 1960s Cage began his lifelong association with C.F. Peters Corporation. Walter Hinrichsen, the president of the corporation, offered Cage an exclusive contract and instigated the publication of a catalog of Cage's works, which appeared in 1962.

Cage Edition Peters soon published a large number of scores by Cage, and this, together with the publication of Silence, led to much higher prominence for the composer than ever before—one of the positive consequences of this was that in 1965 Betty Freeman set up an annual grant for living expenses for Cage, to be issued from 1965 to his death. By the mid-1960s, Cage was receiving so many commissions and requests for appearances that he was unable to fulfill them.

This was accompanied by a busy touring schedule; consequently Cage's compositional output from that decade was scant. After the orchestral Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62), a work based on star charts, which was fully notated, Cage gradually shifted to, in his own words, "music (not composition)." The score of 0′00″, completed in 1962, originally comprised a single sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action", and in the first performance the disciplined action was Cage writing that sentence. The score of Variations III (1962) abounds in instructions to the performers, but makes no references to music, musical instruments or sounds.

Many of the Variations and other 1960s pieces were in fact "happenings", an art form established by Cage and his students in late 1950s. Cage's "Experimental Composition" classes at The New School have become legendary as an American source of Fluxus, an international network of artists, composers, and designers. The majority of his students had little or no background in music. Most were artists. They included Jackson Mac Low, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, George Brecht, and Dick Higgins, as well as many others Cage invited unofficially.

Famous pieces that resulted from the classes include George Brecht's Time Table Music and Al Hansen's Alice Denham in 48 Seconds. As set forth by Cage, happenings were theatrical events that abandon the traditional concept of stage-audience and occur without a sense of definite duration. Instead, they are left to chance. They have a minimal script, with no plot. In fact, a "happening" is so-named because it occurs in the present, attempting to arrest the concept of passing time. Cage believed that theater was the closest route to integrating art and real life.

The term "happenings" was coined by Allan Kaprow, one of his students, who defined it as a genre in the late fifties. Cage met Kaprow while on a mushroom hunt with George Segal and invited him to join his class. In following these developments Cage was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud's seminal treatise The Theatre and Its Double, and the happenings of this period can be viewed as a forerunner to the ensuing Fluxus movement. In October 1960, Mary Bauermeister's Cologne studio hosted a joint concert by Cage and the video artist Nam June Paik, who in the course of his Etude for Piano cut off Cage's tie and then washed his coperformer's hair with shampoo.[citation needed] 24

In 1967, Cage's A Year from Monday was first published by Wesleyan University Press. Cage's parents died during the decade: his father in 1964, and his mother in 1969. Cage had their ashes scattered in Ramapo Mountains, near Stony Point, and asked for the same to be done to him after his death.

1969–87: New departures Cage's work from the sixties features some of his largest and most ambitious, not to mention socially utopian pieces, reflecting the mood of the era yet also his absorption of the writings of both Marshall McLuhan, on the effects of new media, and R. Buckminster Fuller, on the power of technology to promote social change. HPSCHD (1969), a gargantuan and long-running multimedia work made in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller, incorporated the mass superimposition of seven harpsichords playing chance-determined excerpts from the works of Cage, Hiller, and a potted history of canonical classics, with 52 tapes of computer-generated sounds, 6,400 slides of designs, many supplied by NASA, and shown from sixty-four slide projectors, with 40 motion-picture films. The piece was initially rendered in a five-hour performance at the University of Illinois in 1969, in which the audience arrived after the piece had begun and left before it ended, wandering freely around the auditorium in the time for which they were there.[citation needed] Also in 1969, Cage produced the first fully notated work in years: Cheap Imitation for piano. The piece is a chance-controlled reworking of Erik Satie's Socrate, and, as both listeners and Cage himself noted, openly sympathetic to its source. Although Cage's affection for Satie's music was well-known, it was highly unusual for him to compose a personal work, one in which the composer is present. When asked about this apparent contradiction, Cage replied: "Obviously, Cheap Imitation lies outside of what may seem necessary in my work in general, and that's disturbing. I'm the first to be disturbed by it."Cage's fondness for the piece resulted in a recording—a rare occurrence, since Cage disliked making recordings of his music—made in 1976. Overall, Cheap Imitation marked a major change in Cage's music: he turned again to writing fully notated works for traditional instruments, and tried out several new approaches, such as improvisation, which he previously discouraged, but was able to use in works from the 1970s, such as Child of Tree (1975).

Opening bars of Cheap Imitation (1969) Performed by the composer in 1976, shortly before he had to retire from performing.

Cheap Imitation became the last work Cage performed in public himself. Arthritis had troubled Cage since 1960, and by the early 1970s his hands were painfully swollen and rendered him unable to perform. Nevertheless, he still played Cheap Imitation during the 1970s, before finally having to give up performing. Preparing manuscripts also became difficult: before, published versions of pieces were done in Cage's calligraphic script; now, manuscripts for publication had to be completed by assistants. Matters were complicated further by David Tudor's departure from performing, which happened in the early 1970s. Tudor decided to concentrate on composition instead, and so Cage, for the first time in two decades, had to start relying on commissions from other performers, and their respective abilities. Such performers included Grete Sultan, Paul Zukofsky, Margaret Leng Tan, and many others. Aside from music, Cage 25

continued writing books of prose and poetry (mesostics). M was first published by Wesleyan University Press in 1973. In January 1978 Cage was invited by Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press to engage in printmaking, and Cage would go on to produce series of prints every year until his death; these, together with some late watercolors, constitute the largest portion of his extant visual art. In 1979 Cage's Empty Words was first published by Wesleyan University Press.

1987–92: Final years and death See also: Number Pieces In 1987, Cage completed a piece called Two, for flute and piano, dedicated to performers Roberto Fabbriciani and Carlo Neri. The title referred to the number of performers needed; the music consisted of short notated fragments to be played at any tempo within the indicated time constraints. Cage went on to write some forty such Number Pieces, as they came to be known, one of the last being Eighty (1992, premiered in Munich on 28 October 2011), usually employing a variant of the same technique. The process of composition, in many of the later Number Pieces, was simple selection of pitch range and pitches from that range, using chance procedures; the music has been linked to Cage's anarchic leanings. One11 (i.e. the eleventh piece for a single performer), completed in early 1992, was Cage's first and only foray into film.

Another new direction, also taken in 1987, was opera: Cage produced five operas, all sharing the same title Europera, in 1987–91. Europeras I and II require greater forces than III, IV and V, which are on a chamber scale.

John Cage (left) and Michael Bach in Assisi, Italy, 1992 In the course of the 1980s, Cage's health worsened progressively. He suffered not only from arthritis, but also from sciatica and arteriosclerosis. He suffered a stroke that left the movement of his left leg restricted, and, in 1985, broke an arm. During this time, Cage pursued a macrobiotic diet. Nevertheless, ever since arthritis started plaguing him, the composer was aware of his age, and, as biographer David Revill observed, "the fire which he began to 26

incorporate in his visual work in 1985 is not only the fire he has set aside for so long—the fire of passion—but also fire as transitoriness and fragility." On August 11, 1992, while preparing evening tea for himself and Cunningham, Cage suffered another stroke. He was taken to St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, where he died on the morning of August 12. He was 79.

According to his wishes, Cage's body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Ramapo Mountains, near Stony Point, New York, at the same place where he had scattered the ashes of his parents. The composer's death occurred only weeks before a celebration of his 80th birthday organized in Frankfurt by composer Walter Zimmermann and musicologist Stefan Schaedler. The event went ahead as planned, including a performance of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra

by David Tudor and Ensemble Modern. Merce Cunningham lived a further 17 years, dying of natural causes in July 2009.

Music See also: List of compositions by John Cage Early works, rhythmic structure, and new approaches to harmony Cage's first completed pieces are currently lost. According to the composer, the earliest works were very short pieces for piano, composed using complex mathematical procedures and lacking in "sensual appeal and expressive power." Cage then started producing pieces by improvising and writing down the results, until Richard Buhlig stressed to him the importance of structure. Most works from the early 1930s, such as Sonata for Clarinet (1933) and Composition for 3 Voices (1934), are highly chromatic and betray Cage's interest in counterpoint. Around the same time, the composer also developed a type of a tone row technique with 25-note rows.[77] After studies with Schoenberg, who never taught dodecaphony to his students, Cage developed another tone row technique, in which the row was split into short motives, which would then be repeated and transposed according to a set of rules. This approach was first used in Two Pieces for Piano (c. 1935), and then, with modifications, in larger works such as Metamorphosis and Five Songs (both 1938).

Rhythmic proportions in Sonata III of Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano 27

Soon after Cage started writing percussion music and music for modern dance, he started using a technique that placed the rhythmic structure of the piece into the foreground. In Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) there are four large sections of 16, 17, 18, and 19 bars, and each section is divided into four subsections, the first three of which were all 5 bars long. First Construction (in Metal) (1939) expands on the concept: there are five sections of 4, 3, 2, 3, and 4 units respectively. Each unit contains 16 bars, and is divided the same way: 4 bars, 3 bars, 2 bars, etc.

Finally, the musical content of the piece is based on sixteen motives. Such "nested proportions", as Cage called them, became a regular feature of his music throughout the 1940s. The technique was elevated to great complexity in later pieces such as Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (1946–48), in which many proportions used non-integer numbers (1¼, ¾, 1¼, ¾, 1½, and 1½ for Sonata I, for example), or A Flower, a song for voice and closed piano, in which two sets of proportions are used simultaneously.

In late 1940s, Cage started developing further methods of breaking away with traditional harmony. For instance, in String Quartet in Four Parts (1950) Cage first composed a number of gamuts: chords with fixed instrumentation. The piece progresses from one gamut to another. In each instance the gamut was selected only based on whether it contains the note necessary for the melody, and so the rest of the notes do not form any directional harmony. Concerto for prepared piano (1950–51) used a system of charts of durations, dynamics, melodies, etc., from which Cage would choose using simple geometric patterns. The last movement of the concerto was a step towards using chance procedures, which Cage adopted soon afterwards.

Chance

I Ching divination involves obtaining a hexagram by random generation (such as tossing coins), then reading the chapter associated with that hexagram.

A chart system was also used (along with nested proportions) for the large piano work Music of Changes (1951), only here material would be selected from the charts by using the I Ching. All of Cage's music since 1951 was composed using chance procedures, most commonly using the I Ching. For example, works from Music for Piano were based on paper imperfections: the imperfections themselves provided pitches, coin tosses and I Ching hexagram numbers were used to determine the accidentals, clefs, and playing techniques. A whole series of works was 28

created by applying chance operations, i.e. the I Ching, to star charts: Atlas Eclipticalis (1961– 62), and a series of etudes: Etudes Australes (1974–75), Freeman Etudes (1977–90), and Etudes Boreales (1978). Cage's etudes are all extremely difficult to perform, a characteristic dictated by Cage's social and political views: the difficulty would ensure that "a performance would show that the impossible is not impossible"[84]—this being Cage's answer to the notion that solving the world's political and social problems is impossible.[85] Cage described himself as an anarchist, and was influenced by Henry David Thoreau.[n 5] Another series of works applied chance procedures to pre-existing music by other composers: Cheap Imitation (1969; based on Erik Satie), Some of "The Harmony of Maine" (1978; based on Belcher), and Hymns and Variations (1979). In these works, Cage would borrow the rhythmic structure of the originals and fill it with pitches determined through chance procedures, or just replace some of the originals' pitches.{{sfn|Pritchett|1993|loc=197 Yet another series of works, the so-called Number Pieces, all completed during the last five years of the composer's life, make use of time brackets: the score consists of short fragments with indications of when to start and to end them (e.g. from anywhere between 1′15″ and 1′45″, and to anywhere from 2′00″ to 2′30″).

Cage's method of using the I Ching was far from simple randomization. The procedures varied from composition to composition, and were usually complex. For example, in the case of Cheap Imitation, the exact questions asked to the I Ching were these: Which of the seven modes, if we take as modes the seven scales beginning on white notes and remaining on white notes, which of those am I using?

Which of the twelve possible chromatic transpositions am I using?

For this phrase for which this transposition of this mode will apply, which note am I using of the seven to imitate the note that Satie wrote?

In another example of late music by Cage, Etudes Australes, the compositional procedure involved placing a transparent strip on the star chart, identifying the pitches from the chart, transferring them to paper, then asking the I Ching which of these pitches were to remain single, and which should become parts of aggregates (chords), and the aggregates were selected from a table of some 550 possible aggregates, compiled beforehand.

Finally, some of Cage's works, particularly those completed during the 1960s, feature instructions to the performer, rather than fully notated music. The score of Variations I (1958) presents the performer with six transparent squares, one with points of various sizes, five with five intersecting lines. The performer combines the squares and uses lines and points as a coordinate system, in which the lines are axes of various characteristics of the sounds, such as lowest frequency, simplest overtone structure, etc. Some of Cage's graphic scores (e.g. Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Fontana Mix (both 1958)) present the performer with similar difficulties. Still other works from the same period consist just of text instructions. The score of 0′00″ (1962; also known as 4′33″ No. 2) consists of a single sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." The first performance had Cage write that sentence.[90] 29

Musicircus (1967) simply invites the performers to assemble and play together. The first Musicircus featured multiple performers and groups in a large space who were all to commence and stop playing at two particular time periods, with instructions on when to play individually or in groups within these two periods. The result was a mass superimposition of many different musics on top of one another as determined by chance distribution, producing an event with a specifically theatric feel. Many Musicircuses have subsequently been held, and continue to occur even after Cage's death. The English National Opera became the first opera company to hold a Cage Musicircus on 3 March 2012 at the London Coliseum. The ENO's Musicircus featured artists including Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and composer Michael Finnissy alongside ENO Music Director Edward Gardner, the ENO Community Choir, ENO Opera Works singers, and a collective of professional and amateur talents performing in the bars and front of house at London's Coliseum Opera House.

This concept of circus was to remain important to Cage throughout his life and featured strongly in such pieces as Roaratorio, an Irish circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), a many-tiered rendering in sound of both his text Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake, and traditional musical and field recordings made around Ireland. The piece was based on James Joyce's famous novel, Finnegans Wake, which was one of Cage's favorite books, and one from which he derived texts for several more of his works.

Improvisation Since chance procedures were used by Cage to eliminate the composer's and the performer's likes and dislikes from music, Cage disliked the concept of improvisation, which is inevitably linked to the performer's preferences. In a number of works beginning in the 1970s, he found ways to incorporate improvisation. In Child of Tree (1975) and Branches (1976) the performers are asked to use certain species of plants as instruments, for example the cactus. The structure of the pieces is determined through the chance of their choices, as is the musical output; the performers had no knowledge of the instruments. In Inlets (1977) the performers play large water-filled conch shells – by carefully tipping the shell several times, it is possible to achieve a bubble forming inside, which produced sound. Yet, as it is impossible to predict when this would happen, the performers had to continue tipping the shells – as a result the performance was dictated by pure chance.

Visual art, writings, and other activities

30

Variations III, No. 14, a 1992 print by Cage from a series of 57.

Although Cage started painting in his youth, he gave it up in order to concentrate on music instead. His first mature visual project, Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, dates from 1969. The work comprises two lithographs and a group of what Cage called plexigrams: silk screen printing on plexiglas panels. The panels and the lithographs all consist of bits and pieces of words in different typefaces, all governed by chance operations.

From 1978 to his death Cage worked at Crown Point Press, producing series of prints every year.

The earliest project completed there was the etching Score Without Parts (1978), created from fully notated instructions, and based on various combinations of drawings by Henry David Thoreau. This was followed, the same year, by Seven Day Diary, which Cage drew with his eyes closed, but which conformed to a strict structure developed using chance operations. Finally, Thoreau's drawings informed the last works produced in 1978, Signals.

Between 1979 and 1982 Cage produced a number of large series of prints: Changes and Disappearances (1979–80), On the Surface (1980–82), and Déreau (1982). These were the last works in which he used engraving. In 1983 he started using various unconventional materials such as cotton batting, foam, etc., and then used stones and fire (Eninka, Variations, Ryoanji, etc.) to create his visual works. In 1988–1990 he produced watercolors at the Mountain Lake Workshop.

31

John Cage: Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marce/

32

The only film Cage produced was one of the Number Pieces, One11, commissioned by composer and film director Henning Lohner who worked with Cage to produce and direct the 90-minute monochrome film. It was completed only weeks before his death in 1992. One11 consists entirely of images of chance-determined play of electric light. It premiered in Cologne, Germany, on September 19, 1992, accompanied by the live performance of the orchestra piece 103.

John Cage created his only feature-length film in the year he died. A sublime performance for camera person and light, One11 is a film without subject, in black and white. There is light but no persons, no things, no ideas about repetition and variation.

The final impression is of another, timeless place - freely roaming the clouds or, perhaps, under the sea. Chance operations were used with respect to the lighting, camera shots and the editing of the film. The light environment was designed and programmed by John Cage and Andrew Culver. The orchestral work 103 musically accompanies One11. Like the film, 103 is 90-minutes long, divided into seventeen parts - its density varies from solos, duos, trios to full orchestral tuttis. Cage started to address the perception of emptiness and at the same time the random quality of what happens in a prescribed space as early as 1952 in his piece 4:33, which consisted entirely of silence. Forty years later he said: "Of course the film will be about the effect of light in an empty space. But no space is actually empty and the light will show what is in it. And all this space and all this light will be controlled by random operations." This simple concept was implemented professionally and with a great deal of technical input in a Munich television studio under the direction of Henning Lohner. The film One11 and the musical piece ("soundtrack") 103 are of the same duration and run in parallel, without relating directly to each other, but each has 17 parts. Each of the parts is based on approx. 1200 random operations devised by a computer and determining how the lighting is controlled and the movements of a crane-mounted camera. The result, aided by the distinguished cameraman Van Theodore Carlson, is a film entirely without plot or actors, which Cage hopes will enable viewers to find themselves. Two distinct soundtracks are offered of 103 for large orchestra to accompany the film: one taken from the premiere of the piece by the 33

prestigious WDR Symphony Orchestra of the German Radio in Cologne, the other by the Spoleto Festival Orchestra.

Throughout his adult life, Cage was also active as lecturer and writer. Some of his lectures were included in several books he published, the first of which was Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961). Silence included not only simple lectures, but also texts executed in experimental layouts, and works such as Lecture on Nothing (1949), which were composed in rhythmic structures. Subsequent books also featured different types of content, from lectures on music to poetry—Cage's mesostics.

Cage was also an avid amateur mycologist. He co-founded the New York Mycological Society with four friends, and his mycology collection is presently housed by the Special Collections department of the McHenry Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Reception and influence Cage's pre-chance works, particularly pieces from the late 1940s such as Sonatas and Interludes, earned critical acclaim: the Sonatas were performed at Carnegie Hall in 1949. Cage's adoption of chance operations in 1951 cost him a number of friendships and led to numerous criticisms from fellow composers. Adherents of serialism such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen dismissed indeterminate music; Boulez, who was once on friendly terms with Cage, criticized him for "adoption of a philosophy tinged with Orientalism that masks a basic weakness in compositional technique." Prominent critics of serialism, such as the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, were similarly hostile towards Cage: for Xenakis, the adoption of chance in music was "an abuse of language and ... an abrogation of a composer's function."

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An article by teacher and critic Michael Steinberg, Tradition and Responsibility, criticized avantgarde music in general: The rise of music that is totally without social commitment also increases the separation between composer and public, and represents still another form of departure from tradition.

The cynicism with which this particular departure seems to have been made is perfectly symbolized in John Cage's account of a public lecture he had given: "Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen." While Mr. Cage's famous silent piece [i.e. 4′33″], or his Landscapes for a dozen radio receivers may be of little interest as music, they are of enormous importance historically as representing the complete abdication of the artist's power.

Cage's aesthetic position was criticized by, among others, prominent writer and critic Douglas Kahn. In his 1999 book Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Kahn acknowledged the influence Cage had on culture, but noted that "one of the central effects of Cage's battery of silencing techniques was a silencing of the social."

While much of Cage's work remains controversial,[citation needed] his influence on countless composers, artists, and writers is notable.[citation needed] After Cage introduced chance,[clarification needed] Boulez, Stockhausen, and Xenakis remained critical, yet all adopted chance procedures in some of their works (although in a much more restricted manner); and Stockhausen's piano writing in his later Klavierstücke was influenced by Cage's Music of Changes and David Tudor. Other composers who adopted chance procedures in their works included Witold Lutosławski, Mauricio Kagel, and many others.[citation needed] Music in which some of the composition and/or performance is left to chance was labelled aleatoric music—a term popularized by Pierre Boulez.[citation needed] Helmut Lachenmann's work was influenced by Cage's work with extended techniques.

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Cage's rhythmic structure experiments and his interest in sound influenced a number of composers, starting at first with his close American associates Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff (and other American composers, such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass), and then spreading to Europe.[citation needed] For example, almost all composers of the English experimental school acknowledge his influence:[citation needed] Michael Parsons, Christopher Hobbs, John White, Gavin Bryars, who studied under Cage briefly, and Howard Skempton. The Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu has also cited Cage's influence.

Following Cage's death Simon Jeffes, founder of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, composed a piece entitled CAGE DEAD, using a melody based on the notes contained in the title, in the order they appear: C, A, G, E, D, E, A and D. Cage's influence was also acknowledged by rock acts such as Sonic Youth (who performed some of the Number Pieces) and Stereolab (who named a song after Cage), composer and rock and jazz guitarist Frank Zappa, and various noise music artists and bands: indeed, one writer traced the origin of noise music to 4′33″. The development of electronic music was also influenced by Cage: in the mid-1970s Brian Eno's label Obscure Records released works by Cage. Prepared piano, which Cage popularized, is featured heavily on Aphex Twin's 2001 album Drukqs. Cage's work as musicologist helped popularize Erik Satie's music, and his friendship with Abstract expressionist artists such as Robert Rauschenberg helped introduce his ideas into visual art.

Cage's ideas also found their way into sound design: for example, Academy Award-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom cited Cage's work as a major influence. Radiohead undertook a composing and performing collaboration with Cunningham's dance troupe in 2003 because the

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music-group's leader Thom Yorke considered Cage one of his "all-time art heroes".

John Cage's recently rediscovered 1990 painting, “New River Rocks and Washes" debuted April 11 at Bob Rauschenberg Gallery.

BOB RAUSCHENBERG GALLERY @FSW

Centenary commemoration In 2012, amongst a wide range of American and international centennial celebrations, an eightday festival was held in Washington DC, with venues found notably more amongst the city's art museums and universities than performance spaces. Earlier in the centennial year, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas presented Cage's Song Books with the San Francisco Symphony at 37

Carnegie Hall in New York. Another celebration came, for instance, in Darmstadt, Germany, which in July 2012 renamed its central station the John Cage Railway Station during the term of its annual new-music courses. At the Ruhrtriennale in Germany, Heiner Goebbels staged a production of Europeras 1 & 2 in a 36,000 sq ft converted factory and commissioned a production of Lecture on Nothing created and performed by Robert Wilson. Jacaranda Music had four concerts planned in Santa Monica, California, for the centennial week. John Cage Day was the name given to several events held during 2012 to mark the centenary of his birth.

A 2012 project was curated by Juraj Kojs to celebrate the centenary of Cage's birth, titled On Silence: Homage to Cage. It consisted of 13 commissioned works created by composers from around the globe such as Kasia Glowicka, Adrian Knight and Henry Vega, each being 4 minutes and 33 seconds long in honor of Cage's famous 1952 opus, 4′33″. The program was supported by the Foundation for Emerging Technologies and Arts, Laura Kuhn and the John Cage Trust.

In a homage to Cage's dance work, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in July 2012 "performed an engrossing piece called 'Story/Time'. It was modeled on Cage's 1958 work 'Indeterminacy', in which [Cage and then Jones, respectively,] sat alone onstage, reading aloud ... series of one-minute stories [they]'d written. Dancers from Jones's company performed as [Jones] read."

Archives The archive of the John Cage Trust is held at Bard College in upstate New York.

The John Cage Music Manuscript Collection held by the Music Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts contains most of the composer's musical manuscripts, including sketches, worksheets, realizations, and unfinished works.

The John Cage Papers are held in the Special Collections and Archives department of Wesleyan University's Olin Library in Middletown, Connecticut. They contain manuscripts, interviews, fan mail, and ephemera. Other material includes clippings, gallery and exhibition catalogs, a collection of Cage's books and serials, posters, objects, exhibition and literary announcement postcards, and brochures from conferences and other organizations The John Cage Collection at Northwestern University in Illinois contains the composer's correspondence, ephemera, and the Notations collection.

See also http://www.moderecords.com/catalog/174cage.html Works for prepared piano by John Cage List of compositions by John Cage An Anthology of Chance Operations The Organ²/ASLSP (a.k.a. As Slow as Possible) project, the longest concert ever created.

The Revenge of the Dead Indians, a 1993 documentary about Cage by Henning Lohner.

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https://eu.news-press.com/story/entertainment/2019/04/15/john-cagepainting-debuts-at-fort-myers-rauschenberg-gallery-on-fsw-campus-afterbeing-rediscovered/3377005002/

έργα του:

http://thewardenstoday.blogspot.com/2014/03/gerhard-richter-cage-16.html

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TAG: JOHN CAGE

‘Wimshurst, Factory, Rube Goldberg and Francis Picabia’ 2016

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‘Wimshurst, Factory, Rube Goldberg and Francis Picabia’ 2016 In the bottom left, note the Wimshurst machine being wound – this is a repeated motif in my three-dimensional, video and drawn work I was thinking about Dadaism again for this piece – the work of Francis Picabia and linking it with more contemporary artists such as Fischli and Weiss and Roman Signer. The mechanisms depicted here are not concieved to function as mere conventional machines. They seem to operate in a manner ‘liberated from function’ . (The Machinist Style of Francis Picabia, Camfield, W.) There is something absurd about many of the placements of the hands and the mechanisms. Dadaism calls for leaving the sensible and letting desires flourish, with all the turmoil and chaos that implies.

Speaking of Picabia’s work, his machines – ‘They do not function in an ordinary manner because their contacts are psychological, not mechanical… When viewed in this way, Picabia’s machines do work’ (Infinite Regress book) Perhaps the connections and the mechanisms here are psychologically linked somehow.

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There is the question that are the sea of arms working communally – are they functioning, or are they entangling each other – these physically impractical machines, if left to their own devices, may question the role of destruction as a creative act.

Duchamp, Picabia and later, John Cage produced avant-garde piano music that questioned how chance has a role to play in artwork. Duchamp conceived his Erratum Musical as notes drawn at random from a hat, and in the second, Rube-Goldbergian setup, balls are dropped through a channel into carriages drawn by a toy train. John Cage conceived Music of Changes, one of his first ‘fully indeterminate’ instrumental works; it was composed applying decisions made using the I Ching.

In the drawing, there is also the aspect of all-overness and omnipresence. (also see dissertation for more) John Cage sought to emphasise the field in his work, rather than relying on a specific beginning and end. This was something I wanted to echo with this piece.

I don’t seem to want to leave any spaces without detail. The work is at odds with Dadaism in some senses – there was supposed to be less emphasis on heavily detailed ‘retinal’ work. It is, however, my interpretation of these artist’s work.

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POSTED ONNOVEMBER 20, 2016

‘Side Effects’ Performance – photography by Christopher Fernandez

Myself and Robert Whitman, photograph by Christoper Fernandez Robert Whitman’s revisitation of the ‘9 Evenings’ event that happened 60 years ago would seem to be a departure from the piece he presented. Whitman presented ‘Two Holes of Water’ created in collaboration with the engineer Robby Robinson and including a dance component by Trisha Brown. In Whitman’s performance, seven automobiles were driven wrapped in huge sheets of plastic. they were parked towards a wall.

This piece was more concerned with everyday, mundane actions being performed

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with ‘disruptions’ – small diversions from these actions that would end up marking it as performance art. There is a humour to it, and an element of surprise – most actions start normally, but then food is thrown on the floor, clothes get ripped and eaten (reminiscent of Werner Herzog or even Chaplin eating his shoe) or a wig is used instead of hair.

In conversation with Whitman, he mentioned to me the film ‘Russian Ark’ – the 2002 film by Alexander Sokurov, filmed entirely in the Winter Palace of the Russian State Hermitage Museum. The most memorable aspect of the work is that it is filmed in one take – a while feature length film (99 minutes). It utilises over 2,000

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actors and three orchestras. Whitman wanted to eschew the Aristotelian narrative form of much Western drama with a climax (coda from the Latin cauda ‘tail’) and a preface or foreword.

(Coda symbol) This style of performance and producing work was in vogue at the time of the ‘9 Evenings’ performance – Cage sought to ‘take away the center of interest, emphasising instead the field’ (From the book ‘Composed in America’).

Even though the performance had been worked out, for the final performance, Whitman decided to lengthen some passages and allow sound effects to be played at times that had not been planned. There was an element of uncertainty and even though Whitman was very specific with his plans, he would also frequently change his mind, and he also allowed us to improvise and respected our positions

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as artists.

There was a live streaming aspect – participants walked around the city, specifically, to recognizable sites, but also those that were not too recognizable – we decided the Barbican might be suitable. This element of the utilization of new technology was important for the original performance – iPhones and Skype were used this time instead of old radio receivers. In 1864 James Clerk Maxwell showed mathematically that electromagnetic waves could propagate through free space. The effects of electromagnetic waves (then-unexplained “action at a distance” sparking behavior) were actually observed before and after Maxwell’s work by many inventors and experimenters including Luigi Galvani (1791). Galvani was ever the pioneer, and I have previously referenced his bioelectricity experiments in some of my drawings.

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Cage set up many radios in his work for ‘9 Evenings’ entitled ‘Variations VII’ and picked up all these invisible electromagnetic waves and had the sounds of electromagnetic noise played through the space. I believe, at least partially, Whitman was referencing this aspect through the live streaming aspect. gs.

Cage set up many radios in his work for ‘9 Evenings’ entitled ‘Variations VII’ and picked up all these invisible electromagnetic waves and had the sounds of electromagnetic noise played through the space. I believe, at least partially, Whitman was referencing this aspect through the live streaming aspect.

https://nicolasstrappini.com/tag/john-cage/

greg.org the making of, by greg allen

John & Merce’s Bob

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Walter Hopps’ 1991 exhibition at The Menil, Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s, changed my art life, basically. Bob and Cy trekking around Italy. Bob and John and Merce collaborating. Bob and Jasper, whoa. Did not hear much about that at BYU’s Art History Department.

Anyway, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s art collection is now being sold at Christie’s to support the late choreographer’s foundation. Some of the stuff is fantastic, and some is slightly precious.

Here’s Clay Painting (For John Cage and Merce Cunningham), Rauschenberg’s 1992 recreation/replacement of the seminal 1953 work, Dirt Painting (For John Cage), which the artist borrowed for a retrospective and never returned. He was working on it when Cage passed away in 1992.

Rauschenberg’s original dirt painting was created after his visit to Alberto Burri’s studio in Rome. But while Rauschenberg has acknowledged Burri and his material aesthetic as a central influence on his later Combines, the original dirt painting, with its notion of growing mould defining the form and composition of the work, probably owes more to the influence of a work like Marcel Duchamp’s Dust Breeding of 1920. Duchamp was an important presence behind the creative thinking of both Cage and Rauschenberg who, in 1953, collaborated on a number of projects, most notably perhaps their Automobile Tire Print — a printed drawing made by Cage driving a truck with a painted tire over a series of paper pages laid down by Rauschenberg. In this later dirt painting, Rauschenberg has chosen to use unfired clay as the material for this newer version of his earlier self-defining painting. In this work which, like 50

many of Cage and Rauschenberg’s works is dependent on the passage of time for its resultant form, the cracks that have appeared in the dried clay this time recall more closely the later Cretti paintings made of earth that Burri was to make in the 1970s.

Can you believe Cage driving the car? Automobile Tire Print is like a Zen scroll painting, action painting, a Newman zip, and Pop Art stunt all in one.

Nov. 10, NYC, Lot 5: Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1953-1992, est. $200,000300,000 [christies.com] Also: Lot 6: No. 1, 1951, a 50+yr black painting colabo between Rauschenberg and Cage, est. $800,000-1,200,000 Related: Alberto Burri’s Cretto on greg.org

https://greg.org/archive/2009/11/04/john-merces-bob.html

https://www.artnet.com/galleries/carl-solway-gallery/artist-john-cage/

JOHN CAGE Where R=Ryoanji (R1), 1983 Price on Request Carl Solway Gallery

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JOHN CAGE John Cage was an American artist best known for his Minimalist musical compositions. Often characterized by an unorthodox use of chance and mathematical formulas, the artist’s works also incorporated non -musical objects and periods of silence. In Cage’s composition 4’33” (1952), the performer is instructed to not play their instrument for the entirety of the piece—four minutes and 33 seconds. “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time,” he once mused. “There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” Born on September 5, 1912 in Los Angeles, CA, he attended Pomona College as a theology major before leaving school in 1930. W hile travelling through Europe over the following year, he familiarized him self with the music of Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie, and Johann Sebastian Bach.

Returning to California, he studied first under the pianist Richard Buhlig and later Arnold Schoenberg at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In the late 1930s, Cage began producing musical accompaniments for dance, meeting the choreographer Merce Cunningham, who became his lifelong friend and collaborator. During his life, he was associated with a wide variety of artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollock, Buckminster Fuller , and Marcel Duchamp. Beginning in 1969, Cage turned to other media, such as painting, etching, printmaki ng, and photography, as well as writing multiple books. The artist died on August 12, 1992 in New York, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, an d W esleyan University in Middletown, CT, among others.

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Huit Têtes (Samuel Beckett; John Cage; Jean-Paul Sartre; Joseph Beuys). From the series "Hostages"1987 by Ruth Francken

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83aiGlnglQ0

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RAY KASS: JOHN CAGE’S WATERCOLOR PAINTINGS As a part of the John Cage Centennial Festival Washington, DC, Ray Kass, and members of the Mountain Lake Workshop, will present an extraordinary day of activity in the University of California’s Washington Center. Two watercolor workshops will be held (morning and afternoon) on September 10, 2012. One will be directed at interested adults, the other at Washington area high school students. The evening features two live performances of the very late Cage work, STEPS (see below), and visual documentation of a Merce Cunningham performance of this work ("danced" from a wheelchair). A question period will conclude the day. We are confident that this unique set of events will bring the larger Festival to an engaging and provocative completion.

In 1983, as a result of his pleasure with the experience he had in producing etchings at the Crown Point Press in California’s Bay Area, and the informed encouragement of artist and author Ray Kass, John Cage began work on a series of watercolor paintings at the Mountain Lake Workshop. Over the course of four visits to the Workshop in the Appalachian region of southwestern Virginia (1983, 1988, 89, and 90), he produced 125 documented watercolor paintings.

A river rock guides a feather brush.

Published here by permission, Ray Kass

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Cage’s productivity in the domain of visual art – etchings, drawings, watercolors – embraces and engages with the strategic scope of his larger aesthetic stance and the impact of egodistancing “chance” procedures. The ways in which Cage chose materials and boundary conditions in his visual art allow us to gain insight into the aesthetic predilections of his eye in strikingly revealing fashion.

Ray Kass and others associated with the Mountain Lake Workshop were inventive, and ultimately very successful in encouraging Cage’s engagement with what was for him a new medium. What began as a limited exploration evolved during subsequent working periods, towards increasingly complex and elaborate projects.

The largest of Cage’s watercolor paintings involved a 56-inch wide, specially constructed brush. This device was “loaded” by means of an even wider wooden trough that contained the ink. In performing what eventually became John Cage’s STEPS: A Composition for a Painting to be Performed by Individuals and Groups, Cage was required to dip the enormous brush into the ink trough, then step from two pans of black ink onto a vast expanse of paper, and walk backwards, pulling the brush over the imprints left by his feet. Various other individuals have subsequently realized STEPS (as Cage envisioned). Notably, dancer Merce Cunningham (participating with the inked wheels of his wheelchair) who also choreographed three versions with members of his dance company. – Roger Reynolds

John Cage delightedly assuming command of a custom-built brush. John Cage, Peter Lau, and Ray Kass.

Published here by permission, Ray Kass and Virginia Tech Photographic Services

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PLEASE NOTE: Ray Kass’ recently-published The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors, provides an engaging picture of the visual aspect of the composer-artist’s work, including elegant, meticulous documentation that allows the reader to gain a beautifully textured proximity to Cage’s working environment and processe.

Directors: Steve Antosca, Karen Reynolds, Roger Reynolds Senior Consultants: Brian Brandt, Mode Records and Laura Kuhn, Executive Director, the John Cage Trust

John Cage Centennial Festival Washington, DC Site © 2011, 2020. All Rights Reserved.

Webmasters: Karen Reynolds with Stacie Birky Greene Header artwork by John Cage, New River Watercolors, Series II, #121988 © John Cage Trust Published here by permission, Ray Kass and the Mountain Lake Workshop, and the John Cage Trust Collection: Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia Contact webmaster: stacie@staciebirkygreene.com Festival Logo by Karen Reynolds

Margin quote by John Cage John Cage, Copyright 1962 © by Henmar Press Inc. “Interview with Roger Reynolds”, p. 48

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John Cage and Mountain Lake Workshop, "Zen Ox-Herding Pictures: Set One, Number 3," 1988. Private collection. Reproduced by permission of the John Cage Trust at Bard College. | Photo: Courtesy of Pomona College Museum of Art.

https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/considering-the-sound-of-an-air-conditioner-john-cageand-zen-ox-herding-pictures

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MINIMALIST ART Minimalism is an extreme form of abstract art developed in the

USA in the 1960s and typified by artworks composed of simple geometric shapes based on the square and the rectangle.

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Robert Morris Untitled 1965, reconstructed 1971 Tate © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2020 Minimalism or minimalist art can be seen as extending the abstract idea that art should have its own reality and not be an imitation of some other thing. We usually think of art as representing an aspect of the real world (a landscape, a person, or even a tin of soup!); or reflecting an experience such as an emotion or feeling. With minimalism, no attempt is made to represent an outside reality, the artist wants the viewer to respond only to what is in front of them.

The medium, (or material) from which it is made, and the form of the work is the reality. Minimalist painter Frank Stella famously said about his paintings ‘What you see is what you see’.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MINIMALISM Minimalism emerged in the late 1950s when artists such as Frank Stella, whose Black Paintings were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959, began to turn away from the gestural art of the previous 59

generation. It flourished in the 1960s and 1970s with Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Robert Morris becoming the movement’s most important innovators.

The development of minimalism is linked to that of conceptual art (which also flourished in the 1960s and 1970s). Both movements challenged the existing structures for making, disseminating and viewing art and argued that the importance given to the art object is misplaced and leads to a rigid and elitist art world which only the privileged few can afford to enjoy

QUALITIES OF MINIMALIST ART Aesthetically, minimalist art offers a highly purified form of beauty. It can also be seen as representing such qualities as truth (because it does not pretend to be anything other than what it is), order, simplicity and harmony.

Read the image captions of the artworks below to find out about some of the key qualities of minimalist art:

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Sol LeWitt Two Open Modular Cubes/Half-Off 1972 Tate Š The estate of Sol LeWitt Geometric single or repeated forms: Minimalism is characterised by single or repeated geometric forms (see Tate Glossary definition for 'modular'). It is usually three-dimensional, taking the form of sculpture or installation, though there are a number of minimalist painters as well such as Agnes Martin and Frank Stella

Donald Judd Untitled 1972 Tate Š Donald Judd Foundation/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2020 Deliberate lack of expression: With no trace of emotion or intuitive decision making, little about the artist is revealed in the work. Minimalist artists rejected the notion of the artwork as a unique creation reflecting the personal expression of a gifted individual, seeing this as

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a distraction from the art object itself. Instead they created objects that were as impersonal and neutral as possible.

Frank Stella Hyena Stomp 1962 Tate Š ARS, NY and DACS, London 2020 Self-referential: Minimalist art does not refer to anything beyond its literal presence. The materials used are not worked to suggest something else; colour (if used) is also nonreferential, i.e if a dark colour is used, this does not mean the artist is trying to suggest a sombre mood.

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Carl Andre 144 Magnesium Square 1969 Tate Š Carl Andre/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2020 Factory-manufactured or shop-bought materials: Carl Andre frequently used bricks or tiles as the medium for his sculpture; Dan Flavin created his works from fluorescent bulbs purchased from a hardware store; Judd's sculptures are built by skilled workers following the artist's instructions

Carl Andre Last Ladder 1959 Tate 63

© Carl Andre/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2020 Space-aware: Carl Andre said 'I'm not a studio artist, I'm a location artist'. Minimalist art directly engages with the space it occupies. The sculpture is carefully arranged to emphasise and reveal the architecture of the gallery, often being presented on walls, in corners, or directly onto the floor, encouraging the viewer to be conscious of the space

MINIMALISM AND EARLY ABSTRACTION Although radical, and rejecting many of the concerns of the immediately preceding abstract expressionist movement, earlier abstract movements were an important influence on the ideas and techniques of minimalism. In 1962 the first English-language book about the Russian avant-garde, Camilla Gray’s The Great Experiment in Art: 1863-1922, was published. With this publication, the concerns of the Russian constuctivist and suprematist movements of the 1910s and 1920s, such as the reduction of artworks to their essential structure and use of factory production techniques, became more widely understood – and clearly inspired minimalist sculptors. Dan Flavin produced a series of works entitled Homages to Vladimir Tatlin (begun in 1964); Robert Morris alluded to Tatlin and Rodchenko in his Notes on Sculpture; and Donald Judd’s essays on Malevich and his contemporaries, revealed his fascination with this avantgarde legacy.

Larry Bell, Untitled (1964), bismuth, chromium, gold, and rhodium on gold-plated brass; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

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Minimalism (visual arts) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

See also: Minimalism and List of minimalist artists

Tony Smith, Free Ride, 1962, 6'8 Ă— 6'8 Ă— 6'8, Museum of Modern Art (New York City)

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1991, Israel Museum Art Garden, Jerusalemkl

Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Ad Reinhardt, Tony Smith, Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Larry Bell, Anne Truitt, Yves Klein and Frank Stella. Artists themselves have sometimes reacted against the label due to the negative implication of the work being simplistic.[1] Minimalism is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and a bridge to postminimal art practices.

Minimal art, minimalism in visual art Minimalism in visual art, generally referred to as "minimal art", literalist art [2] and ABC Art[3] emerged in New York in the early 1960s. [4] Initially minimal art appeared in New York in the 60s as new and older artists moved 65

toward geometric abstraction; exploring via painting in the cases of Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Ryman and others; and sculpture in the works of various artists including David Smith, Anthony Caro, Tony Smith, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and others.

Judd's sculpture was showcased in 1964 at the Green Gallery in Manhattan as were Flavin's first fluorescent light works, while other leading Manhattan galleries like the Leo Castelli Gallery and the Pace Gallery also began to showcase artists focused on geometric abstraction. In addition there were two seminal and influential museum exhibitions: Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculpture' shown from April 27 to June 12, 1966 at the Jewish Museum in New York, organized by the museum's Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Kynaston McShine [5][6] and Systemic Painting, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum curated by Lawrence Alloway also in 1966 that showcased geometric abstraction in the American art world via shaped canvas, color field, and hard-edge painting.[7][8][9] In the wake of those exhibitions and a few others the art movement called minimal art emerged.

History Jean Metzinger, following the succès de scandale created from the Cubist showing at the 1911 Salon des IndÊpendants, in an interview with Cyril Berger published in Paris-Journal 29 May 1911, stated: We cubists have only done our duty by creating a new rhythm for the benefit of humanity. Others will come after us who will do the same. What will they find?

That is the tremendous secret of the future. Who knows if someday, a great painter, looking with scorn on the often brutal game of supposed colorists and taking the seven colors back to the primordial white unity that encompasses them all, will not exhibit completely white canvases, with nothing, absolutely nothing on them. (Jean Metzinger, 29 May 1911) [10][11]

Frank Stella,Die Fahne Hoch!, 1959, Whitney Museum of American Art

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Metzinger's (then) audacious prediction that artists would take abstraction to its logical conclusion by vacating representational subject matter entirely and returning to what Metzinger calls the "primordial white unity", a "completely white canvas" would be realized two years later. The writer of a satirical manifesto, possibly Francis Picabia, in a publication entitled Evolution de l'art: Vers l'amorphisme, in Les Hommes du Jour (3 May 1913), may have had Metzinger's vision in mind when the author justified amorphism's blank canvases by saying 'light is enough for us'.[11] With perspective, writes art historian Jeffery S. Weiss, "Vers Amorphisme may be gibberish, but it was also enough of a foundational language to anticipate the extreme reductivist implications of non-objectivity".[12] Monochrome painting was initiated at the first Incoherent arts' exhibition in 1882 in Paris, with a black painting by poet Paul Bilhaud entitled Combat de Nègres dans un tunnel (Negroes fight in a tunnel). In the subsequent exhibitions of the Incoherent arts (also in the 1880s) the writer Alphonse Allais proposed seven other monochrome paintings, such as Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige (First communion of anaemic young girls in the snow, white), or RÊcolte de la tomate par des cardinaux apoplectiques au bord de la Mer Rouge (Tomato harvesting by apoplectic cardinals on the shore of the Red Sea, red). However, this kind of activity bears more similarity to 20th century Dada, or Neo-Dada, and particularly the works of the Fluxus group of the 1960s, than to 20th century monochrome painting since Malevich.

Yves Klein, IKB 191, 1962, Monochrome painting. Klein was a pioneer in the development of minimal art.

In a broad and general sense, one finds European roots of minimalism in the geometric abstractions of painters associated with the Bauhaus, in the works of Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the De 67

Stijl movement, and the Russian Constructivist movement, and in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși.[13][14] Minimal art is also inspired in part by the paintings of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, and the works of artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio Morandi, and others. Minimalism was also a reaction against the painterly subjectivity of abstract expressionism that had been dominant in the New York School during the 1940s and 1950s.[15] The wide range of possibilities (including impossibility) of interpretation of monochrome paintings is arguably why the monochrome is so engaging to so many artists, critics, and writers. Although the monochrome has never become dominant and few artists have committed themselves exclusively to it, it has never gone away. It reappears as though a spectre haunting high modernism, or as a symbol of it, appearing during times of aesthetic and sociopolitical upheavals.[16]

Monochrome revival In France between 1947 and 1948,[17] Yves Klein conceived his Monotone Symphony (1949, formally The Monotone-Silence Symphony) that consisted of a single 20-minute sustained chord followed by a 20-minute silence[18][19] – a precedent to both La Monte Young's drone music and John Cage's 4′33″.

Although Klein had painted monochromes as early as 1949, and held the first private exhibition of this work in 1950, his first public showing was the publication of the artist's book Yves: Peintures in November 1954.[20][21] Artist and critic Thomas Lawson noted in his 1981 essay "Last Exit: Painting" Artforum, October: 40–47, minimalism did not reject Clement Greenberg's claims about modernist painting's [22] reduction to surface and materials so much as take his claims literally. According to Lawson minimalism was the result, even though the term "minimalism" was not generally embraced by the artists associated with it, and many practitioners of art designated minimalist by critics did not identify it as a movement as such. Also taking exception to this claim was Greenberg himself; in his 1978 postscript to his essay "Modernist Painting" he disavowed this incorrect interpretation of what he said; Greenberg wrote: There have been some further constructions of what I wrote that go over into preposterousness: That I regard flatness and the inclosing of flatness not just as the limiting conditions of pictorial art, but as criteria of aesthetic quality in pictorial art; that the further a work advances the self-definition of an art, the better that work is bound to be. The philosopher or art historian who can envision me—or anyone at all—arriving at aesthetic judgments in this way reads shockingly more into himself or herself than into my article. [22]

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Larry Bell, Untitled (1964), bismuth, chromium, gold, and rhodium on gold-plated brass; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

In contrast to the previous decade's more subjective abstract expressionists, with the exceptions of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, minimalists were also influenced by composers John Cage and La Monte Young, poet William Carlos Williams, and the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. They explicitly stated that their art was not about self-expression, unlike the previous decade's more subjective philosophy about art making theirs was 'objective'. In general, minimalism's features included geometric, often cubic forms purged of much metaphor, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and industrial materials.

Robert Morris, an influential theorist and artist, wrote a three part essay, "Notes on Sculpture 1-3", originally published across three issues of Artforum in 1966. In these essays, Morris attempted to define a conceptual framework and formal elements for himself and one that would embrace the practices of his contemporaries. These essays paid great attention to the idea of the gestalt – "parts... bound together in such a way that they create a maximum resistance to perceptual separation." Morris later described an art represented by a "marked lateral spread and no regularized units or symmetrical intervals..." in "Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects", originally published in Artforum, 1969, continuing to say that "indeterminacy of arrangement of parts is a literal aspect of the physical existence of the thing." The general shift in theory of which this essay is an expression suggests the transitions into what would later be referred to as postminimalism. One of the first artists specifically associated with minimalism was the painter, Frank Stella, whose early "pinstripe" paintings were included in the 1959 show, 16 Americans, organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The width of the stripes in Stellas's pinstripe paintings were determined by the dimensions of the lumber used for stretchers, visible as the depth of the painting when viewed from the side, used to construct the 69

supportive chassis upon which the canvas was stretched. The decisions about structures on the front surface of the canvas were therefore not entirely subjective, but pre-conditioned by a "given" feature of the physical construction of the support. In the show catalog, Carl Andre noted, "Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting." These reductive works were in sharp contrast to the energy-filled and apparently highly subjective and emotionally charged paintings of Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline and, in terms of precedent among the previous generation of abstract expressionists, leaned more toward the less gestural, often somber, color field paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Although Stella received immediate attention from the MoMA show, artists including Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Robert Motherwell and Robert Ryman had also begun to explore stripes, monochromatic and hard-edge formats from the late 50s through the 1960s.[23] Because of a tendency in minimal art to exclude the pictorial, illusionistic and fictive in favor of the literal, there was a movement away from painterly and toward sculptural concerns. Donald Judd had started as a painter, and ended as a creator of objects. His seminal essay, "Specific Objects" (published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965), was a touchstone of theory for the formation of minimalist aesthetics. In this essay, Judd found a starting point for a new territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European artistic values. He pointed to evidence of this development in the works of an array of artists active in New York at the time, including Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin and Lee Bontecou. Of "preliminary" importance for Judd was the work of George Earl Ortman,[24] who had concretized and distilled painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries. These Specific Objects inhabited a space not then comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture. That the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and that they avoided easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of their value for Judd.

This movement was heavily criticised by modernist formalist art critics and historians. Some critics thought minimal art represented a misunderstanding of the modern dialectic of painting and sculpture as defined by critic Clement Greenberg, arguably the dominant American critic of painting in the period leading up to the 1960s. The most notable critique of minimalism was produced

by Michael Fried, a formalist critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its "theatricality". In "Art and Objecthood", published in Artforum in June 1967, he declared that the minimal work of art, particularly minimal sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator. He argued that work like Robert Morris's transformed the act of viewing into a type of spectacle, in which the artifice of the act observation and the viewer's participation in the work were unveiled. Fried saw this displacement of the viewer's experience from an aesthetic engagement within, to an event outside of the artwork as a failure of minimal art. Fried's essay was immediately challenged by postminimalist and earth artist Robert Smithson in a letter to the editor in the October issue of Artforum. Smithson stated: "What Fried fears most is 70

the consciousness of what he is doing—namely being himself theatrical." Another critique of minimal art concerns a fact that many artists were only designers of the projects while the actual art works were executed by unknown craftsmen [25].

Besides Robert Morris, Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Robert Ryman, and Donald Judd other minimal artists include: Robert Mangold, Larry Bell, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Ronald Bladen, Agnes Martin, Jo Baer, Paul Mogensen, Ronald Davis, Charles Hinman, David Novros, Brice Marden, Blinky Palermo, John McCracken, Ad Reinhardt, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Patricia Johanson, and Anne Truitt.

Ad Reinhardt, actually an artist of the abstract expressionist generation, but one whose reductive nearly all-black paintings seemed to anticipate minimalism, wrote of the value of a reductive approach to art: "The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature."[26] Reinhardt's remark directly addresses and contradicts Hans Hofmann's regard for nature as the source of his own abstract expressionist paintings. In a famous exchange between Hofmann and Jackson Pollock as told by Lee Krasner in an interview with Dorothy Strickler (1964-11-02) for the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art.[27] In Krasner's words, When I brought Hofmann up to meet Pollock and see his work which was before we moved here, Hofmann's reaction was—one of the questions he asked Jackson was, "Do you work from nature?" There were no still lifes around or models around and Jackson's answer was, "I am nature." And Hofmann's reply was, "Ah, but if you work by heart, you will repeat yourself." To which Jackson did not reply at all.

The meeting between Pollock and Hofmann took place in 1942.[27]

Footnotes 1.

^ Dempsey, Amy. Styles, Schools and Movements, Thames & Hudson, 2002.] "The artists themselves did not like the label because of the negative implication that their work was simplistic and devoid of 'art content'."

2. ^ Fried, M. "Art and Objecthood", Artforum, 1967 3. ^ Rose, Barbara. "ABC Art", Art in America 53, no. 5 (October–November 1965): 57–69.

4. ^ Cindy Hinant (2014). Meyer-Stoll, Christiane (ed.). Gary Kuehn: Between Sex and Geometry. Cologne: Snoeck Verlagsgessellschaft. p. 33. ISBN 3864421098.

5. ^ Time, June 3, 1966, "Engineer's Esthetic", p. 64 6. ^ Newsweek, May 16, 1966, "The New Druids", p. 104 7. ^ Systemic Painting, Guggenheim Museum 8. ^ Systemic art, Oxford-Art encyclopedia 9. ^ Lawrence Alloway, Systemic Painting, Google books online 10. ^ Jean Metzinger, Chez Metzi, interview by Cyril Berger, published in Paris-Journal, 29 May 1911, p. 3

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11. ^ Jump up to:a b Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten: A Cubism Reader, Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, University of Chicago Press, 2008, Document 17, Cyril Berger, Chez Metzi, Paris-Journal, 29 May 1911, pp. 108–112 12. ^ Jeffrey S. Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avantgardism, Yale University Press, 1994, ISBN 9780300058956 13. ^ Maureen Mullarkey, Art Critical, "Giorgio Morandi" 14. ^ Daniel Marzona, Uta Grosenick; Minimal art, p. 12 15. ^ Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art: a critical anthology, pp. 161–172 16. ^ "The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-AvantGarde", Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, October, Vol. 37, (Summer, 1986), pp. 41–52 (article consists of 12 pages), MIT Press 17. ^ "Yves Klein (1928-1962)". documents/biography. Yves Klein Archives & McDourduff.

Archived from the original on 30 May 2013. Retrieved 12 May 2013.

18. ^ Gilbert Perlein & Bruno Corà (eds) & al., Yves Klein: Long Live the Immaterial! ("An anthological retrospective", catalog of an exhibition held in 2000), New York: Delano Greenidge, 2000, ISBN 978-0-929445-08-3, p. 226: "This symphony, 40 minutes in length (in fact 20 minutes followed by 20 minutes of silence) is constituted of a single 'sound' stretched out, deprived of its attack and end which creates a sensation of vertigo, whirling the sensibility outside time."

19. ^ See also at YvesKleinArchives.org a 1998 sound excerpt of The Monotone SymphonyArchived 2008-12-08 at the Wayback Machine (Flash plugin required), its short description Archived 2008-10-28 at the Wayback Machine, and Klein's "Chelsea Hotel Manifesto" Archived 2010-06-13 at the Wayback Machine (including a summary of the twopart Symphony).

20. ^ Hannah Weitemeier, "Yves Klein, 1928–1962: International Klein Blue", OriginalAusgabe(Cologne: Taschen, 1994), 15. ISBN 3-8228-8950-4.

21. ^ "Restoring the Immaterial: Study and Treatment of Yves Klein's Blue Monochrome (IKB42)". Modern Paint Uncovered.

22. ^ Jump up to:a b Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, 1960 23. ^ Britannica.com 24. ^ Brooklynrail.org 25. ^ Crofton, Ian (1991). Encyklopedia Guinnessa. Biuro Uslug Promocyjnych, Universal SA. p. 554.

26. ^ Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (New York: Viking Press, 1975):[page needed] ISBN 978-0-520-07670-9.

27. ^ Jump up to:a b Lee Krasner, Archives of American Art

External links[edit]    

Article on Minimalist Art at the Dia Beacon Museum "Dia Beacon", Tiziano Thomas Dossena, Bridge Apulia USA N.9, 2003 Tate, Definition of Minimal Art Tate Glossary: Minimalism MoMA, Art terms Minimalism

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Naum Gabo Model for ‘Construction in Space ‘Two Cones’’ 1927 Tate The Work of Naum Gabo © Nina & Graham Williams / Tate, 2020

Constructivism (c.1917): Developed by the Russian avant-garde, the constructivists were influenced by the cubist three-dimensional abstract still lifes made from scrap materials. The constructivists made their own constructions made from industrial materials to reflect the dynamism of the modern world.

ABSTRACT ART

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ABSTRACT ART

Abstract art From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Delaunay, 1912–13, Le Premier Disque, 134 cm (52.7 in.), private collection

Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.[1] Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.[2] Abstract art, non-figurative art, non-objective art, and non-representational art are closely related terms. They are similar, but perhaps not of identical meaning.

Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art. This departure from accurate representation can be slight, partial, or complete.

Abstraction exists along a continuum. Even art that aims for verisimilitude of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at least theoretically, since perfect representation is likely to be exceedingly elusive. Artwork which takes liberties, altering for instance color and form in ways that are conspicuous, can be said to be partially abstract. Total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable. In geometric abstraction, for instance, one is unlikely to find references to naturalistic entities. Figurative art and total abstraction are almost mutually exclusive. But figurative and representational (or realistic) art often contain partial abstraction.

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Both geometric abstraction and lyrical abstraction are often totally abstract.

Among the very numerous art movements that embody partial abstraction would be for instance fauvism in which color is conspicuously and deliberately altered vis-a-vis reality, and cubism, which alters the forms of the real life entities depicted.[3][4]

Abstraction in early art and many cultures Main articles: Prehistoric art and Eastern art history Much of the art of earlier cultures – signs and marks on pottery, textiles, and inscriptions and paintings on rock – used simple, geometric and linear forms which might have had a symbolic or decorative purpose. [5] It is at this level of visual meaning that abstract art communicates. [6] One can enjoy the beauty of Chinese calligraphy or Islamic calligraphy without being able to read it.[7]

Immortal in splashed ink, Liang Kai, China, 12th century

In Chinese painting, abstraction can be traced to the Tang dynasty painter Wang Mo (王墨), who is credited to have invented the splashed-ink painting style.[8] While none of his paintings remain, this style is clearly seen in some Song Dynasty Paintings. The Chan buddhist painter Liang Kai (梁楷, c. 1140–1210) applied the style to figure painting in his "Immortal in splashed ink" in which accurate representation is sacrificed to enhance spontaneity linked to the nonrational mind of the enlightened. A late Song painter named Yu Jian, adept to Tiantai buddhism, created a series of splashed ink landscapes that eventually inspired many Japanese Zen painters. His paintings show heavily misty

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mountains in which the shapes of the objects are barely visible and extremely simplified. This type of painting was continued by Sesshu Toyo in his later years.

Mountain market, clearing Mist, Yu Jian, China

Another instance of abstraction in Chinese painting is seen in Zhu Derun's Cosmic Circle. On the left side of this painting is a pine tree in rocky soil, its branches laced with vines that extend in a disorderly manner to the right side of the painting in which a perfect circle (probably made with help of a compass [9]) floats in the void. The painting is a reflection of the Daoist metaphysics in which chaos and reality are complementary stages of the regular course of nature.

In Tokugawa Japan, some Zen monk-painters created Enso, a circle who represents the absolute enlightenment. Usually made in one spontaneous brush stroke, it became the paradigm of the minimalist aesthetic that guided part of the Zen painting.

19th century Main articles: Romanticism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, and Spiritualist art Patronage from the church diminished and private patronage from the public became more capable of providing a livelihood for artists. [10][11] Three art movements which contributed to the development of abstract art were Romanticism, Impressionism and Expressionism. Artistic independence for artists was advanced during the 19th century. An objective interest in what is seen, can be discerned from the paintings of John Constable, J M W Turner, Camille Corot and from them to the Impressionists who continued the plein air painting of the Barbizon school.

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James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1874), Detroit Institute of Arts. A near abstraction, in 1877 Whistler sued the art critic John Ruskin for libel after the critic condemned this painting. Ruskin accused Whistler of "ask[ing] two hundred guineas for throwing a pot of paint in the public's face."[12][13]

Early intimations of a new art had been made by James McNeill Whistler who, in his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The falling Rocket, (1872), placed greater emphasis on visual sensation than the depiction of objects. Even earlier than that, with her 'spirit' drawings, Georgiana Houghton's choice to work with abstract shapes correlate with the unnatural nature of her subject, in a time when abstraction” isn’t yet a concept (she organized an exhibit in 1871).

Expressionist painters explored the bold use of paint surface, drawing distortions and exaggerations, and intense color. Expressionists produced emotionally charged paintings that were reactions to and perceptions of contemporary experience; and reactions to Impressionism and other more conservative directions of late 19th-century painting. The Expressionists drastically changed the emphasis on subject matter in favor of the portrayal of psychological states of being. Although artists like Edvard Munch and James Ensor drew influences principally from the work of the Post-Impressionists they were instrumental to the advent of abstraction in the 20th century. Paul Cézanne had begun as an Impressionist but his aim – to make a logical construction of reality based on a view from a single point,[14] with modulated color in flat areas – became the basis of a new visual art, later to be developed into Cubism by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.

Additionally in the late 19th century in Eastern Europe mysticism and early modernist religious philosophy as expressed by theosophist Mme. Blavatsky had a profound impact on pioneer geometric artists like Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky. The mystical teaching of Georges Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky also had an important influence on the early 77

formations of the geometric abstract styles of Piet Mondrian and his colleagues in the early 20th century.[15] The spiritualism also inspired the abstract art of Kasimir Malevich and Frantisek Kupka.[16]

20th century

Francis Picabia, c. 1909, Caoutchouc, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris

Henri Matisse, The Yellow Curtain, 1915, Museum of Modern Art. With his Fauvist color and drawing Matisse comes very close to pure abstraction.

Main articles: Western painting, Fauvism, and Cubism Post Impressionism as practiced by Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne had an enormous impact on 20th-century art and led to the advent of 20th-century abstraction. The heritage of painters like Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Seurat was essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several 78

other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. With his expressive use of color and his free and imaginative drawing Henri Matisse comes very close to pure abstraction in French Window at Collioure (1914), View of Notre-Dame (1914), and The Yellow Curtain from 1915. The raw language of color as developed by the Fauves directly influenced another pioneer of abstraction, Wassily Kandinsky.

Although Cubism ultimately depends upon subject matter, it became, along with Fauvism, the art movement that directly opened the door to abstraction in the 20th century. Pablo Picasso made his first cubist paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube, sphere and cone. With the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Picasso dramatically created a new and radical picture depicting a raw and primitive brothel scene with five prostitutes, violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal masks and his own new Cubist inventions. Analytic cubism was jointly developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear manifestation of cubism, was followed by Synthetic cubism, practiced by Braque, Picasso, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and others into the 1920s. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé and a large variety of merged subject matter. The collage artists like Kurt Schwitters and Man Ray and others taking the clue from Cubism were instrumental to the development of the movement called Dada.

František Kupka, Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs (Fugue in Two Colors), 1912, oil on canvas, 210 x 200 cm, Narodni Galerie, Prague. Published in Au Salon d'Automne "Les Indépendants" 1912, Exhibited at the 1912 Salon d'Automne, Paris.

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Robert Delaunay, 1912, Windows Open Simultaneously (First Part, Third Motif), oil on canvas, 45.7 × 37.5 cm, Tate Modern

The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Manifesto of Futurism in 1909, which later inspired artists such as Carlo Carra in Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells and Umberto Boccioni Train in Motion, 1911, to a further stage of abstraction that would, along with Cubism, profoundly influenced art movements throughout Europe.[17] During the 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or, where František Kupka exhibited the abstract painting Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs (Fugue in Two Colors) (1912), the poet Guillaume Apollinaire named the work of several artists including Robert Delaunay, Orphism.[18] He defined it as, "the art of painting new structures out of elements that have not been borrowed from the visual sphere, but had been created entirely by the artist...it is a pure art."[19] Since the turn of the century, cultural connections between artists of the major European cities had become extremely active as they strove to create an art form equal to the high aspirations of modernism. Ideas were able to cross-fertilize by means of artist's books, exhibitions and manifestos so that many sources were open to experimentation and discussion, and formed a basis for a diversity of modes of abstraction. The following extract from The World Backwards gives some impression of the inter-connectedness of culture at the time: "David Burliuk's knowledge of modern art movements must have been extremely up-todate, for the second Knave of Diamonds exhibition, held in January 1912 (in Moscow) included not only paintings sent from Munich, but some members of the German Die Brücke group, while from Paris came work by Robert Delaunay, Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger, as well as Picasso. During the Spring David Burliuk gave two lectures on cubism and planned a polemical publication, which the Knave of Diamonds was to finance. He went abroad in May and came back determined to rival the almanac Der Blaue Reiter which had emerged from the printers while he was in Germany". [20] From 1909 to 1913 many experimental works in the search for this 'pure art' had been created by a number of artists: Francis Picabia painted Caoutchouc, c.

1909,[21] The Spring, 1912,[22] Dances at the Spring[23] and The Procession, Seville, 1912;[24] Wassily Kandinsky painted Untitled (First Abstract Watercolor), 1913,[25] Improvisation 21A, the Impression series, and Picture with a Circle (1911);[26] František Kupka had painted the Orphist works, Discs of Newton (Study for Fugue in Two Colors), 1912[27] and Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs (Fugue in Two Colors), 1912; Robert Delaunay painted a series entitled Simultaneous Windows and Formes Circulaires, Soleil n°2 (1912– 13);[28] Léopold Survage created Colored Rhythm (Study for the film), 1913;[29] Piet Mondrian, painted Tableau No. 1 and Composition No. 11, 1913.[30]

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Wassily Kandinsky, untitled (study for Composition VII, Première abstraction), watercolor, 1913[31]

Wassily Kandinsky, On White II, 1923

And the search continued: The Rayist (Luchizm) drawings of Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, used lines like rays of light to make a construction. Kasimir Malevich completed his first entirely abstract work, the Suprematist, Black Square, in 1915. Another of the Suprematist group' Liubov Popova, created the Architectonic Constructions and Spatial Force Constructions between 1916 and 1921. Piet Mondrian was evolving his abstract language, of horizontal and vertical lines with rectangles of color, between 1915 and 1919, Neo-Plasticism was the aesthetic which Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg and other in the group De Stijl intended to reshape the environment of the future.

Music As visual art becomes more abstract, it develops some characteristics of music: an art form which uses the abstract elements of sound and divisions of time. Wassily Kandinsky, himself an amateur musician,[32][33][34] was inspired by the possibility of marks and associative color resounding in the soul. The idea had 81

been put forward by Charles Baudelaire, that all our senses respond to various stimuli but the senses are connected at a deeper aesthetic level.

Closely related to this, is the idea that art has The spiritual dimension and can transcend 'every-day' experience, reaching a spiritual plane. The Theosophical Society popularized the ancient wisdom of the sacred books of India and China in the early years of the century. It was in this context that Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint and other artists working towards an 'objectless state' became interested in the occult as a way of creating an 'inner' object. The universal and timeless shapes found in geometry: the circle, square and triangle become the spatial elements in abstract art; they are, like color, fundamental systems underlying visible reality.

Russian avant-garde

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1923, The Russian Museum

Main articles: Russian avant-garde and Futurism (art) Many of the abstract artists in Russia became Constructivists believing that art was no longer something remote, but life itself. The artist must become a technician, learning to use the tools and materials of modern production. Art into life! was Vladimir Tatlin's slogan, and that of all the future Constructivists. Varvara Stepanova and Alexandre Exter and others abandoned easel painting and diverted their energies to theatre design and graphic works.

On the other side stood Kazimir Malevich, Anton Pevsner and Naum Gabo. They argued that art was essentially a spiritual activity; to create the individual's place in the world, not to organize life in a practical, materialistic sense. Many of those who were hostile to the materialist production idea of art left Russia. Anton Pevsner went to France, Gabo went first to Berlin, then to England and finally to America. Kandinsky studied in Moscow then left for the Bauhaus. By the mid1920s the revolutionary period (1917 to 1921) when artists had been free to experiment was over; and by the 1930s only socialist realism was allowed.[35] 82

The Bauhaus The Bauhaus at Weimar, Germany was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius.[36] The philosophy underlying the teaching program was unity of all the visual and plastic arts from architecture and painting to weaving and stained glass. This philosophy had grown from the ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement in England and the Deutscher Werkbund. Among the teachers were Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Anni Albers, and László Moholy-Nagy. In 1925 the school was moved to Dessau and, as the Nazi party gained control in 1932, The Bauhaus was closed. In 1937 an exhibition of degenerate art, 'Entartete Kunst' contained all types of avantgarde art disapproved of by the Nazi party. Then the exodus began: not just from the Bauhaus but from Europe in general; to Paris, London and America. Paul Klee went to Switzerland but many of the artists at the Bauhaus went to America.

Abstraction in Paris and London

Kurt Schwitters, Das Undbild, 1919, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

During the 1930s Paris became the host to artists from Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and other European countries affected by the rise of totalitarianism. Sophie Tauber and Jean Arp collaborated on paintings and sculpture using organic/geometric forms. The Polish Katarzyna Kobro applied mathematically based ideas to sculpture. The many types of abstraction now in close proximity led to attempts by artists to analyse the various conceptual and aesthetic groupings. An exhibition by forty-six members of the Cercle et Carré group organized by Joaquin Torres-Garcia[37] assisted by Michel Seuphor[38] contained work by the Neo-Plasticists as well as abstractionists as varied as Kandinsky, Anton Pevsner and Kurt Schwitters. Criticized by Theo van Doesburg to be too indefinite a collection he published the journal Art 83

Concret setting out a manifesto defining an abstract art in which the line, color and surface only, are the concrete reality. [39] Abstraction-Création founded in 1931 as a more open group, provided a point of reference for abstract artists, as the political situation worsened in 1935, and artists again regrouped, many in London. The first exhibition of British abstract art was held in England in 1935.

The following year the more international Abstract and Concrete exhibition was organized by Nicolete Gray including work by Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Hepworth, Nicholson and Gabo moved to the St. Ives group in Cornwall to continue their 'constructivist' work. [40]

America: mid-century Main articles: Modernism, Late modernism, American Modernism, and Surrealism

The above is a 1939–42 oil on canvas painting by Mondrian titled Composition No. 10. Responding to it, fellow De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg suggested a link between non-representational works of art and ideals of peace and spirituality.[41]

During the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s many artists fled Europe to the United States. By the early 1940s the main movements in modern art, expressionism, cubism, abstraction, surrealism, and dada were represented in New York: Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Jacques Lipchitz, André Masson, Max Ernst, André Breton, were just a few of the exiled Europeans who arrived in New York.[42] The rich cultural influences brought by the European artists were distilled and built upon by local New York painters. The climate of freedom in New York allowed all of these influences to flourish. The art galleries that primarily had focused on European art began to notice the local art community and the work of younger American artists who had begun to mature. Certain artists at this time became distinctly abstract in their mature work. During this period Piet Mondrian's painting Composition No. 10, 1939–1942, characterized by primary colors, white ground and black grid lines clearly defined his radical but classical approach to the rectangle and abstract art in general. Some artists of the period defied categorization, such as Georgia O'Keeffe who, while a modernist 84

abstractionist, was a pure maverick in that she painted highly abstract forms while not joining any specific group of the period.

Eventually American artists who were working in a great diversity of styles began to coalesce into cohesive stylistic groups. The best known group of American artists became known as the Abstract expressionists and the New York School.

In New York City there was an atmosphere which encouraged discussion and there was new opportunity for learning and growing. Artists and teachers John D. Graham and Hans Hofmann became important bridge figures between the newly arrived European Modernists and the younger American artists coming of age. Mark Rothko, born in Russia, began with strongly surrealist imagery which later dissolved into his powerful color compositions of the early 1950s.

The expressionistic gesture and the act of painting itself, became of primary importance to Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline. While during the 1940s Arshile Gorky's and Willem de Kooning's figurative work evolved into abstraction by the end of the decade. New York City became the center, and artists worldwide gravitated towards it; from other places in America as well. [43]

Later developments Main articles: Abstract expressionism, Color field, Lyrical abstraction, Postpainterly abstraction, Sculpture, and Minimal art Digital art, hard-edge painting, geometric abstraction, minimalism, lyrical abstraction, op art, abstract expressionism, color field painting, monochrome painting, assemblage, neo-Dada, shaped canvas painting, are a few directions relating to abstraction in the second half of the 20th century.

In the United States, Art as Object as seen in the Minimalist sculpture of Donald Judd and the paintings of Frank Stella are seen today as newer permutations.

Other examples include Lyrical Abstraction and the sensuous use of color seen in the work of painters as diverse as Robert Motherwell, Patrick Heron, Kenneth Noland, Sam Francis, Cy Twombly, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell.

Causation One socio-historical explanation that has been offered for the growing prevalence of the abstract in modern art – an explanation linked to the name of Theodor W. Adorno – is that such abstraction is a response to, and a reflection of, the growing abstraction of social relations in industrial society.[44] Frederic Jameson similarly sees modernist abstraction as a function of the abstract power of money, equating all things equally as exchange-values.[45] The social content of abstract art is then precisely the abstract nature of social existence – legal formalities, bureaucratic impersonalization, information/power – in the world of late modernity.[46]

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Post-Jungians by contrast would see the quantum theories with their disintegration of conventional ideas of form and matter as underlying the divorce of the concrete and the abstract in modern art.[47]

Gallery 

Albert Gleizes, 1910–12, Les Arbres (The Trees), oil on canvas, 41 × 27 cm. Reproduced in Du "Cubisme", 1912



Arthur Dove, 1911–12, Based on Leaf Forms and Spaces, pastel on unidentified support.

Now lost



Francis Picabia, 1912, Tarentelle, oil on canvas, 73.6 × 92.1 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Reproduced in Du "Cubisme"



Wassily Kandinsky, 1912, Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II), oil on canvas, 120.3 × 140.3 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show



Pablo Picasso, 1913–14, Head (Tête), cut and pasted colored paper, gouache and charcoal on paperboard, 43.5 × 33 cm, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh



Henri Matisse, 1914, French Window at Collioure, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

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

Hilma af Klint, Svanen (The Swan), No. 17, Group IX, Series SUW, October 1914–March 1915. This abstract work was never exhibited during af Klint's lifetime.



Theo van Doesburg, Neo-Plasticism: 1917, Composition VII (The Three Graces)



Fernand Léger 1919, The Railway Crossing, oil on canvas, 53.8 × 64.8 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago



Joseph Csaky, Deux figures, 1920, relief, limestone, polychrome, 80 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo



Albert Gleizes, 1921, Composition bleu et jaune (Composition jaune), oil on canvas, 200.5 × 110 cm

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

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray, 1921, Art Institute of Chicago



Paul Klee, Fire in the Evening, 1929



Otto Gustaf Carlsund, Rapid (1930), a Concrete Art restaurant mural, Stockholm



Barnett Newman, Onement 1, 1948, Museum of Modern Art, New York

See also     

Abstract art and Theosophy Abstract expressionism Abstraction in art Action painting American Abstract Artists 88

          

Asemic writing Concrete art De Stijl Geometric abstraction Hard-edge Lyrical abstraction Op Art Representation (arts) Spatialism Surrealism Western painting

In other media    

Abstract animation Abstract comics Abstract photography Experimental film

References 1.

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^ Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking, University of California Press, 1969, ISBN 0-520-018710 ^ Mel Gooding, Abstract Art, Tate Publishing, London, 2000 ^ "Abstract Art – What Is Abstract Art or Abstract Painting, retrieved January 7, 2009".

Painting.about.com. 2011-06-07. Archived from the original on 7 July 2011. Retrieved 201106-11. ^ "Themes in American Art – Abstraction, retrieved January 7, 2009". Nga.gov. 2000-07-27.

Archived from the original on 8 June 2011. Retrieved 2011-06-11. ^ György Kepes, Sign, Image and Symbol, Studio Vista, London, 1966 ^ Derek Hyatt,"Meeting on the Moor", Modern Painters, Autumn 1995 ^ Simon Leys, 2013. The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays. New York: New York Review Books. p. 304. ISBN 978-1-59017-620-7. ^ Lippit, Y. (2012). "Of Modes and Manners in Japanese Ink Painting: Sesshū's Splashed Ink Landscape of 1495". The Art Bulletin, 94(1), p. 56. ^ Watt, J. C. (2010). The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 224 ^ Ernst Gombrich, "The Early Medici as Patrons of Art" in Norm and Form, pp. 35–57, London, 1966 ^ Judith Balfe, ed. Paying the Piper: Causes and Consequences of Art Patronage, Univ. of Illinois Press ^ Whistler versus Ruskin, Princeton edu. Archived June 16, 2010, at the Wayback Machine Retrieved June 13, 2010 ^ From the Tate, retrieved April 12, 2009 ^ Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Art, Thames and Hudson ^ "Hilton Kramer, "Mondrian & mysticism: My long search is over", New Criterion, September 1995". Newcriterion.com. Retrieved 2012-02-26. ^ Brenson, Michael (December 21, 1986). "Art View; How the Spiritual Infused the Abstract" – via NYTimes.com. ^ Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism, Thames and Hudson, 1977

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18. ^ La Section d'or, 1912–1920–1925, Cécile Debray, Françoise Lucbert, Musées de Châteauroux, Musée Fabre, exhibition catalogue, Éditions Cercle d'art, Paris, 2000 19. ^ Harrison and Wood, Art in theory, 1900–2000, Wiley-Blackwell, 2003, p. 189. ISBN 978-0631-22708-3.books.google.com" 20. ^ Susan P Compton, The World Backwards, British museum Publications, London, 1978 21. ^ "Francis Picabia, Caoutchouc, c. 1909, MNAM, Paris". Francispicabia.org. Retrieved 201309-29.

22. ^ "Museum of Modern Art, New York, Francis Picabia, The Spring, 1912". Moma.org.

Retrieved 2013-09-29.

23. ^ "MoMA, New York, Francis Picabia, Dances at the Spring, 1912". Moma.org.

Retrieved 2013-09-29.

24. ^ "National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC., Francis Picabia, The Procession, Seville, 1912".

Nga.gov. Archived from the original on 2012-08-05. Retrieved 2013-09-29.

25. ^ Stan Rummel (2007-12-13). "Wassily Kandinsky, Untitled (First Abstract Watercolor), 1910". Faculty.txwes.edu. Archived from the original on 2012-07-19. Retrieved 2013-09-29.

26. ^ "The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum, Kandinsky Retrospective, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-0718. Retrieved 2013-09-29.

27. ^ "Philadelphia Museum of Art, Disks of Newton (Study for "Fugue in Two Colors") 1912".

Philamuseum.org. Retrieved 2013-09-29.

28. ^ "Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Robert Delaunay,Formes Circulaires, Soleil n°2 (1912–13)" (in French). Centrepompidou.fr. Archived from the original on September 7, 2012. Retrieved 2013-09-29.

29. ^ "Museum of Modern Art, New York, Léopold Survage, Colored Rhythm (Study for the film) 1913". Moma.org. 1914-07-15. Retrieved 2013-09-29.

30. ^ "Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, Netherlands, Piet Mondrian, 1913". Kmm.nl. Archived from the original on October 2, 2013. Retrieved 2013-09-29.

31. ^ Wassily Kandinsky, Untitled (study for Composition VII, Première abstraction), watercolor, 1913, MNAM, Centre Pompidou 32. ^ Shawn, Allen. 2003. Arnold Schoenberg's Journey. Harvard University Press. p.

62. ISBN 0-674-01101-5 33. ^ François Le Targat, Kandinsky, Twentieth Century masters series, Random House Incorporated, 1987, p. 7, ISBN 0-8478-0810-6 34. ^ Susan B. Hirschfeld, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Hilla von Rebay Foundation, Watercolors by Kandinsky at the Guggenheim Museum: a selection from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Hilla von Rebay Foundation, 1991. In 1871 the family moved to Odessa, where the young Kandinsky attended the Gymnasium and learned to play the cello and piano.

35. ^ Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863–1922, Thames and Hudson, 1962 36. ^ Walter Gropius et al., Bauhaus 1919–1928 Herbert Bayer ed., Museum of Modern Art,publ.

Charles T Banford,Boston,1959 37. ^ Seuphor, Michel (1972). Geometric Abstraccion 1926-1949. Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.

38. ^ Michel Seuphor, Abstract Painting 39. ^ Anna Moszynska, Abstract Art, p. 104, Thames and Hudson, 1990 40. ^ Anna Moszynska, Abstract Art, Thames and Hudson, 1990 41. ^ Utopian Reality: Reconstructing Culture in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond; Christina Lodder, Maria Kokkori, Maria Mileeva; BRILL, Oct 24, 2013 "Van Doesburg stated that the purpose of art was to imbue man with those positive spiritual qualities that were needed in order to overcome the dominance of the physical and create the conditions for putting an end to wars. In an enthusiastic essay on Wassily Kandinsky he had written about the dialogue between the artist and the viewer, and the role of art as 'the educator of our inner life, the educator of our hearts and minds'. Van Doesburg subsequently adopted the view that the spiritual in man is nurtured specifically by abstract art, which he later described as 'pure thought, which does not signify a concept derived from natural phenomena but which is contained in numbers, measures, relationships, and abstract lines'. In his response to Piet Mondrian's Composition 10, Van Doesburg linked peace and the spiritual to a non-

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42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

representational work of art, asserting that 'it produces a most spiritual impression…the impression of repose: the repose of the soul'." ^ Gillian Naylor, The Bauhaus, Studio Vista, 1968 ^ Henry Geldzahler, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, 1969 ^ David Cunningham, 'Asceticism Against Colour', in New Formations 55 (2005) p. 110 ^ M. Hardt/K. Weeks eds., The Jameson Reader (2000) p. 272 ^ Cunningham, p. 114 ^ Aniela Jaffé, in C. G. Jung ed., Man and his Symbols (1978) pp. 288–89, 303

Sources[edit]   

^ Compton, Susan (1978). The World Backwards: Russian Futurist Books 1912–16. The British Library. ISBN 978-0-7141-0396-9. ^ Stangos, Nikos, ed. (1981). Concepts of Modern Art. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-20186-2. ^ Gooding, Mel (2001). Abstract Art. Movements in Modern Art series. Tate Publishing. ISBN 978-1-85437-302-1.

External links[edit]   

The term "Abstraction" spoken about at Museum of Modern Art by Nelson Goodman of Grove Art Online Non Figurative Art explained Tate UK "Abstract art is..."

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Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies // ειδικό αφιέρωμα σε επόμενο τεύχος With essays by Carlos Basualdo, Erica F. Battle, and Caroline Bourgeois, and an interview with Bruce Nauman The first in-depth exploration of Bruce Nauman’s Contrapposto Studies, I through VII. It surveys Nauman’s trajectory from his early works, which set precedents for experimentation with video and performance, to his latest installations that combine video, sound, and performative elements to create immersive environmental experiences. The essays address his return to the motif of contrapposto and the use of his body as a tool and subject for performance. Related works, including Walks In Walks Out, are also considered. In an interview published here for the first time, Nauman discusses the conception, development, and installation of Contrapposto Studies, which stand as a testament to his ability to transform simple gestures into grand ruminations on the possibilities of representation.

About the Editors Carlos Basualdo is the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art; and Erica F. Battle is the John Alchin and Hal Marryatt Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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Robert Rauschenberg

Life and career Rauschenberg was born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas, the son of Dora Carolina (nĂŠe Matson) and Ernest R. Rauschenberg. His father was of German and Cherokee and his mother of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. His parents were Fundamentalist Christians. Rauschenberg was dyslexic. He had a younger sister named Janet Begneaud.

At 16, Rauschenberg was admitted to the University of Texas where he began studying pharmacy. He was drafted into the United States Navy in 1943. Based in California, he served as a mental hospital technician until his discharge in 1945.

Rauschenberg subsequently studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the AcadĂŠmie Julian in Paris, France, where he met the painter Susan Weil. In 1948 Rauschenberg and Weil decided to attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Canyon (1959) Josef Albers, a founder of the Bauhaus, became Rauschenberg's painting instructor at Black Mountain, something Rauschenberg had looked forward to.

His hope was that Albers would curb the younger artist's congenital sloppiness. Albers' preliminary courses relied on strict discipline that did not allow for any "uninfluenced experimentation".Rauschenberg described Albers as influencing him to do "exactly the reverse" of what he was being taught.

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Rauschenberg became, in his own words, "Albers' dunce, the outstanding example of what he was not talking about".He found a better suited mentor in John Cage, and after collaborations with the musician Rauschenberg moved forward to create his combines.

From 1949 to 1952 Rauschenberg studied with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor at the Art Students League of New York, where he met fellow artists Knox Martin and Cy Twombly.

Rauschenberg married Susan Weil in the summer of 1950 at the Weil family home in Outer Island, Connecticut. Their only child, Christopher, was born July 16, 1951. The two separated in June 1952 and divorced in 1953. According to a 1987 oral history by the composer Morton Feldman, after the end of his marriage, Rauschenberg had romantic relationships with fellow artists Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns.[21] An article by Jonathan D. Katz states that Rauschenberg's affair with Twombly began during his marriage to Susan Weil. His partner for the last 25 years of his life was artist Darryl Pottorf, his former assistant.

Death[edit] Rauschenberg died on May 12, 2008, on Captiva Island, Florida,of heart failure at the age of 82, after a personal decision to go off life support.

Artistic contribution[edit] Rauschenberg's approach was sometimes called "Neo Dadaist," a label he shared with the painter Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg was quoted as saying that he wanted to work "in the gap between art and life" suggesting he questioned the distinction between art objects and everyday objects, reminiscent of the issues raised by the Fountain, by Dada pioneer, Marcel Duchamp. At the same time, Johns' paintings of numerals, flags, and the like, were reprising Duchamp's message of the role of the observer in creating art's meaning.

Alternatively, in 1961, Rauschenberg took a step in what could be considered the opposite direction by championing the role of creator in creating art's meaning.

Rauschenberg was invited to participate in an exhibition at the Galerie Iris Clert, where artists were to create and display a portrait of the owner, Iris Clert. Rauschenberg's submission consisted of a telegram sent to the gallery declaring "This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so."

"Neo Dadaist" Neo-Dada was a movement with audio, visual and literary manifestations that had similarities in method or intent with earlier Dada artwork. It sought to close the gap between art and daily life, and was a combination of playfulness, iconoclasm, and appropriation.[1] In the United States the term was popularized by Barbara Rose in the 1960s and refers primarily, although not exclusively, to work created in that and the preceding decade. There was also an international dimension to the movement, particularly in Japan and in Europe, serving as the foundation of Fluxus, Pop Art and Nouveau rĂŠalisme.[2] Neo-Dada has been exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast. It was a reaction to the personal emotionalism of Abstract

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Expressionism and, taking a lead from the practice of Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, denied traditional concepts of aesthetics.[3]

Robert Rauschenberg, 1963, Retroactive II; combine painting with paint and photos.

A Jean Tingueley fountain in Basel

Interest in Dada followed in the wake of documentary publications, such as Robert Motherwell's The Dada Painters and Poets (1951)[4] and German language publications from 1957 and later, to which some former Dadaists contributed.[5] However, several of the original Dadaists denounced the label Neo-Dada, especially in its U.S. manifestations, on the grounds that the work was derivative rather than making fresh discoveries; that aesthetic pleasure was found in what were originally protests against bourgeois aesthetic concepts; and because it pandered to commercialism.[6] Many of the artists who identified with the trend subsequently moved on to other specialities or identified with different art movements and in many cases only certain aspects of their early work can be identified with it. For example, Piero Manzoni's Consacrazione dell'arte

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dell'uovo sodo (Artistic consecration of the hard-boiled egg, 1959), which he signed with an imprint of his thumb, or his cans of shit (1961) whose price was pegged to the value of their weight in gold, satirizing the concept of the artist's personal creation and art as commodity.[citation needed]

A Jean Tingueley fountain in Basel

An allied approach is found in the creation of collage and assemblage, as in the junk sculptures of the American Richard Stankiewicz, whose works created from scrap have been compared with Schwitters' practice. These objects are "so treated that they become less discarded than found, objets trouvĂŠs."[7] Jean Tinguely's fantastic machines, notoriously the self-destructing Homage to New York (1960), were another approach to the subversion of the mechanical.

Although such techniques as collage and assemblage may have served as inspiration, different terms were found for the objects produced, both in the U.S. and in Europe. Robert Rauschenberg labeled as "combines" such works as "Bed" (1955), which consisted of a framed quilt and pillow covered in paint and mounted on the wall. Arman labeled as "accumulations" his collections of dice and bottle tops, and as "poubelles" the contents of trash-bins encased in plastic. Daniel Spoerri created "snare pictures" (tableaux piège), of which the earliest was "Kichka's Breakfast" (1960), and in which the remains of a meal were glued to the cloth and mounted on the table-top affixed to the wall.[citation needed] To push conversation via art and conversation as art, DADA.nyc was formed in 2014 in Brooklyn, New York-based visual conversation platform launched in 2014 by Helena Ramos, Yehudit Mam and Abraham Milano. "A cross between a marketplace, an art project, and a technology startup ... Dada was conceived as a social network where people can speak to each other in drawings rather than words." [8] After 2017, they have used the decentralized technology and consensus mechanisms of blockchain to support scaling the community with low overhead.[9] Dada has experimented with methods to help artists benefit and receive a larger percentage of the value from their work, [8] but has also been criticized as potentially facilitating commercialism that could work to suffocate digital art.[10]

Poems In the Netherlands the poets associated with the 'magazine for texts', Barbarber (1958–71), particularly J. Bernlef and K. Schippers, extended the concept of the readymade into poetry, discovering poetic suggestiveness in such everyday items as a newspaper advert about a lost tortoise and a typewriter test sheet.[11] Another group of Dutch poets infiltrated the Belgian experimentalist magazine Gard Sivik and began to fill it with seemingly inconsequential fragments of conversation and demonstrations of verbal procedures. The writers included C.B. Vaandrager, Hans Verhagen and the artist Armando. On this approach

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the critic Hugo Brems has commented that "the poet's role in this kind of poetry was not to discourse on reality, but to highlight particular fragments of it which are normally perceived as non-poetic. These poets were not creators of art, but discoverers."[12] The impersonality that such artists aspired to was best expressed by Jan Schoonhoven (1914–94), the theorist of the Dutch Nul group of artists, to which Armando also belonged: "Zero is first and foremost a new conception of reality, in which the individual role of the artist is kept to a minimum. The Zero artist merely selects, isolates parts of reality (materials as well as ideas stemming from reality) and exhibits them in the most neutral way. The avoidance of personal feelings is essential to Zero." [13] This in turn links it with some aspects of Pop Art and Nouveau Réaliste practice and underlines the rejection of Expressionism.

The beginnings of Concrete Poetry and text montage in the Wiener Gruppe have also been referred back to the example of Raoul Hausmann's letter poems.[14] Such techniques may also owe something to H.N. Werkman's typographical experiments in the Netherlands which had first been put on display in the Stedelijk Museum in 1945.

References 1.

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^ Collins, Bradford R., 1942- (2012). Pop art : the independent group to Neo pop, 1952-90.

London: Phaidon. ISBN 9780714862439. OCLC 805600556. ^ Chilvers, Ian and John Glaves-Smith. A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art. Oxford University Press (2009), p. 503 ^ Craft, pp.10–11 ^ Karpel, Bernard (1989). The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. ISBN 9780674185005. Archived from the original on 2015-12-22. Retrieved 201512-12. ^ Brill, p.101 ^ Alan Young, Dada and After: Extremist Modernism and English Literature, Manchester University 1983, pp.201–3 Archived 2015-12-22 at the Wayback Machine and Brill, pp.104–5 ^ Robert Goldwater in A Dictionary of Modern Sculpture, London 1962, pp.277–8 ^ Jump up to:a b "Can Blockchain Eliminate The Myth Of The Starving Artist?". 15 July 2018. Archived from the original on 2019-07-07. Retrieved 2019-12-11. ^ DADA: Not Just Art On A Blockchain, But A Blockchain As Art?, Mike Ward, 7 October 2019 ^ "The Blockchain Is Just Another Way To Make Art All About Money". 7 March 2018. Archived from the original on 2019-01-07. Retrieved 2019-12-11. ^ Bertram Mourits, The Conceptual Poetic of K. Schippers: the aesthetic implications of literary readymades, Dutch Crossing 21.1, pp.119–34 ^ Hugo Brems, Contemporary Poetry of the Low Countries, Flemish Netherlands Foundation, 1995, p.20 ^ Translation in Dutch Interior: Postwar Poetry of the Netherlands and Flanders, Columbia University 1984, pp.36–7 Archived 2015-12-22 at the Wayback Machine ^ Anna Katharina Schaffner, "How the Letters Learned to Dance: on language dissection in Dadaist, Digital and Concrete Poetry", in Avant-garde/Neo-avant-garde, Amsterdam 2005, pp.149–165 Archived 2015-12-22 at the Wayback Machine

Bibliography  

Dorothée Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus, Dartmouth College 2010 Catherine Craft, An Audience of Artists: Dada, Neo-Dada, and the Emergence of Abstract Expressionism, University of Chicago 2012

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   

Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958–62, Universe Books and American Federation of Arts (1994) David Hopkins, Neo-avant garde, Amsterdam, New York 2006 Cecilia Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art, University of Minnesota 2010 Owen Smith, Fluxus: The History of an Attitude, San Diego State University 1998

Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg Rhyme, 1956

From the fall of 1952 to the spring of 1953 Rauschenberg traveled through Europe and North Africa with his fellow artist and partner Cy Twombly. In Morocco, he created collages and boxes out of trash. He took them back to Italy and exhibited them at galleries in Rome and Florence. A lot of them sold; those that did not he threw into the river Arno. From his stay, 38 collages survived. In a famously cited incident of 1953, Rauschenberg erased a drawing by de Kooning, which he obtained from his colleague for the express purpose of erasing it as an artistic statement. The result is titled Erased de Kooning Drawing.

By 1962, Rauschenberg's paintings were beginning to incorporate not only found objects but found images as well - photographs transferred to the canvas by means of the silkscreen process. Previously used only in commercial applications, silkscreen allowed Rauschenberg to address the multiple reproducibility of images, and the consequent flattening of experience that implies. In this respect, his work is contemporaneous with that of Andy Warhol, and both Rauschenberg and Johns are frequently cited as important forerunners of American Pop Art. In 1966, Billy Klüver and Rauschenberg officially launched Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) a non-profit organization established to promote collaborations between artists and engineers.

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In 1969, NASA invited Rauschenberg to witness the launch of Apollo 11. In response to this landmark event, Rauschenberg created his Stoned Moon Series of lithographs. This involved combining diagrams and other images from NASA's archives with photographs from various media outlets, as well as with his own work.

1 APOLLO 11 LUNAR MISSION, SATURN V ROCKET CLEARS THE LAUNCH PAD, CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA, JULY 16, 1969 In the summer of 1969, at the invitation of NASA, Rauschenberg witnessed the Apollo 11 space launch, the first manned mission to the moon. Stoned Moon 100

Drawing contains Rauschenberg’s account of the event, “The bird’s nest bloomed with fire and clouds. Softly largely slowly silently Apollo 11 started to move up. Then it rose being lifted on light. In its own joy wanting the earth to know it was going. Saturated, super-saturated, and solidified air with a sound that became your body. For that while everything was the same material. Power over power joy pain ecstasy there was no inside, no out. Then bodily transcending a state of energy. Apollo 11 was airborne, lifting pulling everyone’s spirits with it.”

Rauschenberg From 1970 he worked from his home and studio in Captiva, Florida. His first project on Captiva Island was a 16.5-meter-long silkscreen print called Currents (1970), made with newspapers from the first two months of the year, followed by Cardboards (1970–71) and Early Egyptians (1973–74), the latter of which is a series of wall reliefs and sculptures constructed from used boxes. He also printed on textiles using his solventtransfer technique to make the Hoarfrosts (1974–76) and Spreads (1975–82), and in the Jammers (1975–76), created a series of colorful silk wall and floor works. Urban Bourbons (1988–95) focused on different methods of transferring images onto a variety of reflective metals, such as steel and aluminum. In addition, throughout the 1990s, Rauschenberg continued to utilize new materials while still working with more rudimentary techniques, such as wet fresco, as in the Arcadian Retreat (1996) series, and the transfer of images by hand, as in the Anagrams (1995–2000). As part of his engagement with the latest technological innovations, he began making digital Iris prints and using biodegradable vegetable dyes in his transfer processes, underscoring his commitment to caring for the environment.The White Paintings, Black Paintings, and Red Paintings.

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Robert Rauschenberg, untitled "combine," 1963.

In 1951 Rauschenberg created his "White Paintings," in the tradition of monochromatic painting, whose purpose was to reduce painting to its most essential nature, and to subsequently lead to the possibility of pure experience. The "White Paintings" were shown at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery in New York during October 1953. They appear at first to be essentially blank, white canvas. However, one commentator said that "‌rather than thinking of them as destructive reductions, it might be more productive to see them, as John Cage did, as hypersensitive screens – what Cage suggestively described as 'airports of the lights, shadows and particles.' In front of them, the smallest adjustments in lighting and atmosphere might be registered on their surface.

Rauschenberg himself said that they were affected by ambient conditions, "so you could almost tell how many people are in the room". The Black Paintings of 1951 like the White Paintings were executed on multiple panels and were single color works. Here Rauschenberg incorporated pieces of newspaper into the painting working the paper into the paint so that sometimes newspaper could be seen and in other places could not. By 1953-1954 Rauschenberg had moved from the monochromatic paintings of the White Painting and Black Painting series, to the Red Painting series. These paintings were created with diverse kinds of paint applications of red paint, and with the addition of materials such as wood, nails, newsprint and other materials to the canvas created complex painting surfaces, and were forerunners of Rauschenberg's well-known Combine series.

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Combines Rauschenberg picked up trash and found objects that interested him on the streets of New York City and brought these back to his studio where they could become integrated into his work. He claimed he "wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing."

Rauschenberg's comment concerning the gap between art and life can be seen as a statement which provides the departure point for an understanding of his contributions as an artist. He saw the potential beauty in almost anything, including junk he would find off of the streets, "I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable." he once said. In particular his series of works which he called Combines served as instances in which the delineated boundaries between art and sculpture were broken down so that both were present in a single work of art. Technically "Combines" refers to Rauschenberg's work from 1954 to 1962, but the artist had begun collaging newsprint and photographic materials in his work and the impetus to combine both painting materials and everyday objects such as clothing, urban debris, and taxidermied animals such as in Monogram continued throughout his artistic life.

His transitional pieces that led to the creation of Combines were Charlene (1954) and Collection (1954) where he combined collage technique and started to incorporate objects such as scarves, comic strips, and faux architectural cornice pieces. Considered one of the first of the Combines, Bed (1955) was created by dripping red paint across a quilt. The quilt was later stretched and displayed as a work of art. Some critics according to The Daily Telegraph considered the work to be a symbol for violence and rape.

Critics originally viewed the Combines in terms of the formal aspects of art, shape, color, texture, and the composition and arrangement of these. This 1960s view has changed over time so that more recently critics and art historians see the Combines as carrying coded messages difficult to decipher because there is no apparent order to the presentation of the objects. Canyon (1959) features a stuffed bald eagle which drew government ire due to the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, but the stuffed angora goat with paint applied to its snout in his Monogram (1955-1959) was without controversy.

Performance and dance From the early 1950s until 2007 Rauschenberg designed for dance. He began designing sets and costumes for Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Trisha Brown and for his own productions. In the 1960s he was involved in the radical dance-theater experiments 103

at and around Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village and was close to Cunningham-connected experimentalists like Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber, and Steve Paxton; he even choreographed himself. Rauschenberg's full-time connection to the Cunningham company ended with its 1964 world tour. In 1977 Rauschenberg, Cunningham, and Cage reconnected as collaborators for the first time in 13 years, when the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, New York, performed Travelogue (1977), for which Rauschenberg contributed the costume and set designs.

Commissions In 1965, when Life magazine commissioned him to visualize a modern Inferno, he did not hesitate to vent his rage at the Vietnam War and a whole range of horrors, including racial violence, neo-Nazism, political assassinations, and ecological disaster. On December 30, 1979 the Miami Herald printed 650,000 Rauschenbergs as the cover of its Sunday magazine, Tropic. In essence an original lithograph, it showed images of south Florida. The artist signed 150 of them.

In 1966, Rauschenberg's created the Open Score performance for part of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering at the 69th Regiment Armory, New York. The series was instrumental in the formation of the Experiments in Art and Technology foundation.

In 1983, he won a Grammy Award for his album design of Talking Heads' album Speaking in Tongues. In 1986 Rauschenberg was commissioned by BMW to paint a full size BMW 635 CSi for the sixth installment of the famed BMW Art Car Project.

Rauschenberg's contribution was the first to include the wheels in the project, as well as incorporating previous works of art into the design. In 1998, the Vatican commissioned (and later refused) a work by Rauschenberg based on the Apocalypse to commemorate Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, the controversial Franciscan priest who died in 1968 and who is revered for having had stigmata and a saintly aura, at Renzo Piano's Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church in Foggia, Italy.

Works

Rauschenberg, untitled (Scatole Personali), 1952, assemblage of box with painted interior, fabric, thorns and snail shells, collection of Jasper Johns

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Rauschenberg, Retroactive II, 1963, combine painting with paint and photos

Rauschenberg, untitled, before 1968, combine painting with photos and paint; photo in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Feb. 1968

Rauschenberg, Tire, in 1996-97 designed; in 2005 made in blown glass and silver-plated brass Exhibitions

In 1951 Rauschenberg had his first one-man show at the Betty Parsons Gallery and in 1954 had a second one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery. In 1955, at the Charles Egan Gallery, Rauschenberg showed Bed (1955), one of his first and certainly most famous Combines.

Rauschenberg had his first career retrospective, organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1963, and in 1964 he was the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale (Mark Tobey and James Whistler had previously won the Painting Prize). After that time, he enjoyed a rare degree of institutional support. A retrospective organized by the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum), Washington, D.C., traveled throughout the United States in 1976 and 1978. A retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1997), traveled to Houston, Cologne, and Bilbao (through 1999). Recent exhibitions were presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2005; traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art, 105

Los Angeles, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, through 2007); at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2009; traveled to the Tinguely Museum, Basel, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and Villa e Collezione Panza, Varese, through 2010); and Botanical Vaudeville at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (2011).

A memorial exhibition of Rauschenberg's photographs opened October 22, 2008, (on the occasion of what would have been his 83rd birthday) at the Guggenheim Museum.

Further exhibitions include: 5 Decades of Printmaking, Leslie Sacks Contemporary (2012); Robert Rauschenberg: Jammers, Gagosian Gallery, London (2013); Robert Rauschenberg: Hoarfrost Editions, Gemini G.E.L. (2014); Robert Rauschenberg: The Fulton Street Studio, 1953–54, Craig F. Starr Associates (2014); Collecting and Connecting, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (2014); A Visual Lexicon, Leo Castelli Gallery (2014); Robert Rauschenberg: Works on Metal, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills (2014).; Robert Rauschenberg, de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong (2016), Museum of Modern Art retrospective (2017), and Rauschenberg: The 1/4 Mile at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, (2018-2019).

On June 4, 2004 the Gallery of Fine Art at Florida SouthWestern State College was renamed the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, celebrating a long-time friendship with the artist. The gallery has been host to many of Rauschenberg's exhibitions since 1980.

Legacy Already in 1984, Rauschenberg announced his Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) at the United Nations. This would culminate in a seven-year, tencountry tour to encourage "world peace and understanding", through Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, Beijing, Lhasa (Tibet), Japan, Cuba, Soviet Union, Berlin, and Malaysia in which he left a piece of art, and was influenced by the cultures he visited. Paintings, often on reflective surfaces, as well as drawings, photographs, assemblages and other multimedia were produced, inspired by these surroundings, and these were considered some of his strongest works. The ROCI venture, supported by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., went on view in 1991.

In 1990, Rauschenberg created the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (RRF) to promote awareness of the causes he cared about, such as world peace, the environment and humanitarian issues. He also set up Change, Inc., to award one-time grants of up to $1,000 to visual artists based on financial need. Rauschenberg's will, filed in Probate Court on October 9, 2008, named his charitable foundation as a major beneficiary, along with Darryl Pottorf, Christopher Rauschenberg, Begneaud, his nephew Byron Richard Begneaud, and Susan Weil Kirschenbaum. The amounts to be given to the beneficiaries were not named, but the estate is "worth millions", said Pottorf, who is also executor of the estate.

The RRF today owns many works by Rauschenberg from every period of his career. In 2011, the foundation, in collaboration with Gagosian Gallery, presented "The Private 106

Collection of Robert Rauschenberg", selections from Rauschenberg's personal art collection; proceeds from the collection helped fund the endowment established for the foundation's philanthropic activities.[55] Also in 2011, the foundation launched its "Artist as Activist" print project and invited Shepard Fairey to focus on an issue of his choice.

The editioned work he made was sold to raise funds for the Coalition for the Homeless.[56] The RRF artist residency takes place at the late artist's property in Captiva Island, Florida. The foundation also maintains the 19th Street Project Space in New York.

In 2000, Rauschenberg was honored with amfAR's Award of Excellence for Artistic Contributions to the Fight Against AIDS. Art market Robert Rauschenberg had his first solo show in 1951, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. Later, only after much urging from his wife, Ileana Sonnabend, did Leo Castelli finally organize a solo show for Rauschenberg in the late 1950s. The Rauschenberg estate was long handled by Pace Gallery before, in May 2010, it moved to Gagosian Gallery, a dealership that had first exhibited the artist's work in 1986. In 2010 Studio Painting (1960 61), one of Rauschenberg's "Combines", originally estimated at $6 million to $9 million, was bought from the collection of Michael Crichton for $11 million at Christie's, New York.

Lobbying for artists' resale royalties In the early 1970s, Rauschenberg unsuccessfully lobbied U.S. Congress to pass a bill that would compensate artists when their work is resold. The artist later supported a state bill in California that did become law, the California Resale Royalty Act of 1976.

Rauschenberg took up his fight for artist resale royalties after the taxi baron Robert Scull sold part of his art collection in a 1973 auction, including Rauschenberg's 1958 painting Thaw that he had originally sold to Scull for $900 but brought $85,000 at an auction at Sotheby Parke Bernet in New York.

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https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/art/art-in-context/stoned-moon

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Stoned Moon Stoned Moon Drawing, dated October 28, 1969, records Rauschenberg’s reflections on the Apollo 11 launch in July of that same year and the lithographic series it inspired.

Embedded with the artist’s writings are photographs by Sidney Felsen and Malcolm Lubliner, who documented the working process at the innovative print studio Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, along with official images from NASA. The right side of the composition features the rising smoke plume of the rocket launch and the first boot prints on the moon’s surface. This work, together with the thirty-four Stoned Moon lithographs and the nineteen drawings and collages for the unpublished Stoned Moon Book, provides a singular account of the space program and humankind’s first lunar landing. In the collaged text, he remarks on the environs of Cape Canaveral, Florida, “highways built yesterday past ghost towns of technology abandoned with the haste and impatience of emergency surgery.” He intimates the anthropomorphizing sentiment, “My head said for the first time moon was going to have company and knew it.” Rauschenberg’s impressions contain a mixture of trepidation and wonder that conveys the technological and astronomical sublime.

Apollo 11 lunar mission, Saturn V rocket clears the launch pad, Cape Canaveral, Florida, July 16, 1969. Photo: NASA

1 APOLLO 11 LUNAR MISSION, SATURN V ROCKET CLEARS THE LAUNCH PAD, CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA, JULY 16, 1969 In the summer of 1969, at the invitation of NASA, Rauschenberg witnessed the Apollo 11 space launch, the first manned mission to the moon. Stoned Moon Drawing contains 109

Rauschenberg’s account of the event, “The bird’s nest bloomed with fire and clouds.

Softly largely slowly silently Apollo 11 started to move up. Then it rose being lifted on light. In its own joy wanting the earth to know it was going. Saturated, super-saturated, and solidified air with a sound that became your body. For that while everything was the same material. Power over power joy pain ecstasy there was no inside, no out. Then bodily transcending a state of energy. Apollo 11 was airborne, lifting pulling everyone’s spirits with it.”

Cover of Studio International (London), December 1969, with Rauschenberg’s Banner (1969)

2 COVER OF STUDIO INTERNATIONAL (LONDON), DECEMBER 1969, WITH RAUSCHENBERG’S BANNER (1969) Stoned Moon Drawing was published as a black-and-white, double-page spread in the December 1969 issue of Studio International. The cover featured the lithograph Banner (1969) from the Stoned Moon series. The image prominently displays the state seal of Florida resting in a bed of oranges, its signature fruit. These familiar symbols rein in the otherworldliness of Cape Canaveral, where gigantic sophisticated machines intrude upon a vast, sparse landscape. First among the artist’s memories of being there, recorded in Stoned Moon Drawing, was the “free orange juice.”

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Rauschenberg purchased a property on Captiva Island off the Gulf Coast of Florida in summer 1968. By fall 1970, he would move there permanently.

Vehicle Assembly Building, Cape Canaveral, Florida, May 20, 1969. Photo: NASA

3 VEHICLE ASSEMBLY BUILDING, CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA, MAY 20, 1969 Rauschenberg dedicated the upper-right corner of Stoned Moon Drawing to his observations on the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) in Cape Canaveral, Florida. He marveled at the enormity of the monolith, built for the express purpose of assembling the SaturnV rocket for the Apollo 11 launch. Looming 525 feet tall by 518 feet wide and covering 8 acres, the VAB remains the world’s tallest single-story structure. According to Rauschenberg, “Only possible to think how big it is. Can’t feel it. Enter. Inside larger than all outsides. Level after level men of trade uniformed clanning [sic] climbing. Being washed in an [sic] out of view by a common ocean of work.”

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112

Overcast I, 1962 (detail)

4 OVERCAST I, 1962 Rauschenberg was an enthusiastic observer of the U.S. space program from its beginning, enlisting mass-media images of its activities in the picture inventory for his silkscreen paintings (1962–64). A Newsweekmagazine image of NASA officials handling a spacecraft (October 8, 1962) is emphatically repeated four times in Overcast I. The screen was used in at least six other paintings, including Calendar, Glider, Overcast II, Payload (all 1962), Barge (1962–63), and Shortstop (1963). “Payload” is a term from the space program playbook, referring to the carrying capacity of an aircraft.

Stop Gap, 1963

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5 STOP GAP, 1963 Rauschenberg’s interest in space program photography is also evident in Stop Gap (1963). The upper portion of the silkscreen painting is dominated by an image of the Sigma 7 splashdown from Life magazine (October 26, 1962). The spacecraft housed astronaut Walter H. Schirra Jr., who safely returned from a six-orbit mission around earth on October 3, 1962. The screenprint recurs in a number of contemporaneous paintings, including Die Hard (1963), Harbor, Whale (both 1964), and Untitled (1964–65; RRF 64.027). Rauschenberg’s engagement with the silkscreen process coincided with his initiation into lithography in 1962.

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Accident, 1963

6 ACCIDENT, 1963 Rauschenberg was initially skeptical of lithography but was persuaded to work in the medium by Tatyana Grosman while at her workshop, Universal Limited Art Editions, West Islip, New York, in 1962. He quickly became a devoted practitioner, and the following year, his lithograph Accident (1963) was awarded the Grand Prize at the 5th International Exhibition of Graphic Art, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. A press release issued by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on June 20, 1963, announcing the achievement, includes the artist’s statement on his conversion, “I began lithography reluctantly, thinking that the second half of the twentieth century was no time to start writing on rocks. This biased idea was soon consumed in the concentration any unfamiliar medium requires. Lack of preconception and recognition of the unique possibilities in working on stone, not paper or canvas, suggested that the approach acknowledge this.” The distinguishing characteristic of Accident is the diagonal fissure caused by a break in the lithographic stone. Rauschenberg made the unusual decision to proceed with printing, embracing the accident, which he viewed as an enhancement rather than an interruption.

In Stoned Moon Drawing, he wrote, “ideas can be cracks in the stone,” and recorded the poetic attribution, “a print is the widow of the stone.” Cracked stones would affect several lithographs in the Stoned Moon series: Brake, Ghost, Horn, Marsh, and Sack (all 1969).

Spread with Random Order (1963), Location (New York), Spring 1963

7 RANDOM ORDER (1963) SPREAD IN LOCATION, SPRING 1963 The format of Stoned Moon Drawing, combining image and text, is reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s contribution to the inaugural issue of the short-lived art journal Location, 115

edited by Thomas B. Hess and Harold Rosenberg. In Random Order, he collaged his own aphoristic writings with original photographs. Imparting insight, observation, rune, and enigma, the texts include the commentary, “With sound and scale and insistency trucks mobilize words, and broadside our culture by a combination of law and local motivation on which produces an extremly [sic] complex random order that can not be described as accidental.” The eponymous concept informs Rauschenberg’s approach to collage and illuminates the manner in which he registered events throughout the Stoned Moon works.

From Random Order to Stoned Moon Drawing, there is a shift from handwritten to typed text, and the artist’s own photographs to images taken by others or drawn from massmedia sources. This development may signal his romance with technology in the latter half of the decade.

The Moon Museum, 1969 Tantalum nitride film on ceramic 3/8 x 3/4 inches (1 x 1.9 cm) Drawings contributed by (clockwise from top left) Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, and Forrest Myers

8 THE MOON MUSEUM, 1969 In 1969, artist Forrest Myers invited his contemporaries to contribute drawings that he intended to send to the moon. Myers then enlisted Bell Laboratories engineers Fred Waldhauer and Robert Merkle to shrink the drawings and etch them onto a tiny ceramic wafer, measuring 3/8 x 3/4 inches. Rauschenberg furnished the line drawing at top center.

Unable to gain official sanction for delivering the piece into space, Myers claimed that an engineer at Cape Canaveral, Florida, secretly attached the wafer to the Intrepid lunar module for the Apollo 12 mission. This collaborative work became known as The Moon Museum (1969). Apollo 12 launched on November 14, 1969, the day after the premiere presentation of Stoned Moon lithographs at Castelli Gallery, New York.

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Rauschenberg portrait, New York Times Magazine, October 9, 1966, in Richard Kostelanetz, “The Artist as Playwright and Engineer”

9 RAUSCHENBERG, NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 9, 1966 In fall 1966, Rauschenberg was preparing Open Score, a work that hybridized his waxing interest in theater and technology. (This intersection was perhaps epitomized by NASA, as he expressed in Stoned Moon Drawing, “a theatre where performance is all.”) In the New York Times Magazine portrait, Rauschenberg sits in front of his painting, Axle (1964). The parachuting astronaut in the upper left corner is another NASA image that recurs in several silkscreen paintings (see “Art in Context: Retroactive I”).

The artist holds an electronically rigged tennis racket, a prop for Open Score, conceived for 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering (October 1966). Now considered an arthistorical landmark, 9 Evenings was plagued by technical difficulties and malfunctions.

Rauschenberg embraced the idea of failing well. Unfavorable, even undesirable, results could still be creatively valuable. New York Times critic Clive Barnes scoffed, “If the American engineers and technologists participating in this performance were typical of their profession, the Russians are sure to be first on the moon” (October 15, 1966). By the end of the decade, the artist would witness the launch of Apollo 11, the first manned lunar mission, and his artwork may have been sent to the moon by Apollo 12. It was the peculiar alchemy of art and technology after all that NASA sought in inviting artists to observe, interpret, and represent its endeavors.

Robert Rauschenberg Foundation The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation fosters the legacy of Rauschenberg’s life and work. The foundation supports artists, initiatives, and institutions that embody the same innovative, inclusive, and multidisciplinary approach that Rauschenberg exemplified in both his art and philanthropic endeavors.

381 Lafayette Street New York, NY 10003 Phone: 212.228.5283 Fax: 212.995.8022

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Marcel Duchamp: List of works - All Artworks by Date 1→10 List of works

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Portrait of Yvonne DuchampMarcel Duchamp • 1901

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Yvonne (in kimono)Marcel Duchamp • 1901

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Church at BlainvilleMarcel Duchamp • 1902

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Landscape at BlainvilleMarcel Duchamp • 1902

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Parva Domus, Magna QuiesMarcel Duchamp • 1902

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PlayMarcel Duchamp • 1902

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Portrait of Jacques VillonMarcel Duchamp • 1905

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Man seated by a windowMarcel Duchamp • 1907

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Portrait of Yvonne DuchampMarcel Duchamp • 1907

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ChauvelMarcel Duchamp • 1910

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Chess GameMarcel Duchamp • 1910

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Laundry BargeMarcel Duchamp • 1910

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Nude with black stockingsMarcel Duchamp • 1910

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Paradise, Adam and EveMarcel Duchamp • 1910

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Portrait of Dr. DumouchelMarcel Duchamp • 1910

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Portrait of Dr. Ferdinand Tribout Marcel Duchamp • 1910

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Portrait of the artist's fatherMarcel Duchamp • 1910

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Standing NudeMarcel Duchamp • 1910

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Standing NudeMarcel Duchamp • 1910

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Two NudesMarcel Duchamp • 1910

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Marcel Duchamp: List of works 

Portrait of Yvonne Duchamp, 1901

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Yvonne (in kimono), 1901

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Church at Blainville, 1902

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Landscape at Blainville, 1902

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Parva Domus, Magna Quies, 1902

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Play, 1902

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Portrait of Jacques Villon, 1905

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Man seated by a window, 1907

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Portrait of Yvonne Duchamp, 1907

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Chauvel, 1910

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Chess Game, 1910

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Laundry Barge, 1910

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Nude with black stockings, 1910

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Paradise, Adam and Eve, 1910

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Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel, 1910

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Portrait of Dr. Ferdinand Tribout, 1910

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Portrait of the artist's father, 1910

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Standing Nude, 1910

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Standing Nude, 1910

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Two Nudes, 1910

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About Young Sister, 1911

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Baptism, 1911

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Japanese Apple Tree, 1911

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Landscape, Study for 'Paradise', 1911

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Portrait (Dulcinea), 1911

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Portrait of Chess Players, 1911

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Sad young man in a train, 1911

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Sonata, 1911

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The Bush, 1911

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The Chess Players, 1911

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Young Girl and Man in Spring, 1911

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Yvonne and Magdeleine Torn in Tatters, 1911

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Bride, 1912

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King and Queen surrounded by swift nudes, 1912

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Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2, 1912,

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Portrait of Gustave Candel's Mother, 1912

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Transition of Virgin into a Bride, 1912

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Bicycle Wheel, 1913

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Bottlerack, 1914

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Chocolate Grinder, 1914

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Chocolate Grinder, 1914

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Network of Stoppages, 1914

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To Have the Apprentice in the Sun, 1914

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Glider Containing a Water Mill in Neighboring Metals, 1915

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In Advance of the Broken Arm, 1915

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Nine malice moulds, 1915

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Apolinere Enamelled, 1916

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With Hidden Noise, 1916

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Fountain, 1917

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Hat Rack, 1917

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To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 1918

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50 cc of Paris Air, 1919

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L.H.O.O.Q, Mona Lisa with moustache, 1919

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Fresh Widow, 1920 129

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Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics), 1920

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The Brawl at Austerlitz, 1921

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Why not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy, 1921

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Disks Bearing Spirals, 1923

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The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, 1923

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Monte Carlo bond, 1924

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Rotary demisphere, 1924

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Rotary demisphere, 1925

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Rotorelief n°11 - Total Eclipse / Rotorelief n°12 - White spiral, 1935

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Genre Allegory (George Washington), 1943

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Cover design for "View" magazine, 1945

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Cover for "Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares", 1946

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Please touch - Cover design for "Le Surréalisme", 1947

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Study for "Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. Illuminating Gas", 1949

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Female Fig Leaf - Cover design for "Le Surréalisme", 1956

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Self Portrait in Profile, 1958

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With My Tongue in My Cheek, 1959

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Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1966

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The Bec Auer, 1967

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After love, 1968

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Bare Stripped Bride, 1968

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King and Queen, 1968

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Selected Details after Courbet, 1968

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Selected Details after Cranach, 1968

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Selected Details after Ingres I, 1968

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Selected Details after Ingres II, 1968

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Selected Details after Rodin, 1968

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https://www.wikiart.org/en/marcel-duchamp/allworks#!#filterName:Media_aquatint,resultType:masonry

Bert Jansen MORE ABOUT DUCHAMP’S WORDPLAY RELIEF 10 (1), 2016 – ISSN: 1873-5045. P. 30-69 http://www.revue-relief.org DOI: http://doi.org/10.18352/relief.924 Uopen Journals The author keeps the copyright of this article This article is published under a CC-by license Given Duchamp’s lifelong passion for wordplay, as is already manifested in his early humoristic drawings, I take this love as a decisive factor in the way he “found” his readymades. Another factor I find in articles and illustrations in popular magazines of the time that provide a context in which his works originated. My attempts to reconstruct this context result in another view on the nature of Duchamp’s artistic calling than the still prevailing views of the conceptual 60ties and 70ties and the postmodern 80ties.* Introduction In my overview of the reception of Duchamp, I examine the plurality of possible approaches. I demonstrate that the cause of this diversity is primarily a result of Duchamp’s ambiguity. Dario Gamboni’s conception of the artwork as a ‘potential image’ allows me to consider diverse views about Duchamp as complementary instead of mutually exclusive.

Ambiguous images make the viewer aware of his active way of looking. The method I propose is similar to the "educated guesswork" of archaeologists and palaeontologists – an informed guess based on secondary evidence that supports a hypothesis. This approach respects and values the claim of Duchamp on indifference and allows for multiple meanings of a work to coexist. That this produces a more speculative kind of art history seems consistent with the cultural life of the period around 1900 that is characterized by the desire for ambiguity. I put my * On March 31, 2015, I got my PhD at Leiden University on the thesis ”Chacun son Marcel”? Meerduidigheid in het werk van Marcel Duchamp [Ambiguity in the Work of Marcel Duchamp], available at Erasmusbooks, Amsterdam.This article is a summary of it. 31 ideas for a speculative art history into practice, as I searched for that which has potentially played a role in the development of the works of Marcel Duchamp. I believe he did not acquire his knowledge from scientific publications, as much as he acquired it from popular media and hearsay from his immediate surroundings including his brothers and friends. Special attention is devoted to Duchamp’s wordplay, in which his ambiguous attitude emerges concretely and that, I believe, is undervalued. I compare Duchamp’s wordplay that, after 1912, began to play a crucial role in the development of his work with the way it previously functioned in the humorous drawings he published until 1910. I see this inartistic, not to say anti-artistic, decision in 1912 as a recalcitrant answer of a dandy to the rejection of Nude descending a Staircase 2 by his contemporaries of the Section d’Or. His language play substituted the scientific basis for the Cubism that his contemporaries sought. I will review the oeuvre chronologically and formulate my own findings, in regard to a couple of works, about what probably played a role in the development of it.

More important than the aspect of sexual attraction and repulsion in the humorous drawings that Schwarz emphasizes, is the purpose of what was to come, the appreciation of the wordplay in the title. Wordplay was at that time very popular in France, as it is indeed still. Perhaps French lends itself more than other languages for this jeu de mots because of the frequent occurrence of homonyms. Lists of homonyms were included in French dictionaries and schoolbooks. On such a list of identical sounding words, one would likely find the origin of a pun by Duchamp on the word art, which he recorded as a note in the Box of 1914: arrhes : art = merdre : merde 131

(arrhes means deposit, rent or collateral). The combination of art and arrhes is found in a list of homonyms, taken from a French dictionary, in the Grand Dictionnaire Callewaert 1909, 700.

Duchamp compares that pun with Jarry’s merdre, the famous curse that sounds like merde (shit), uttered by Ubu upon entering the stage, and which had resulted in great consternation at the opening night in 1896. That event was considered to be exemplary for a scandalous avantgarde success – as was a new performance in February 1908 judging from the report in Le Rire of February 29, 1908. The Jarryesque comparison dates back to when Duchamp brought a bicycle wheel on a stool and, after that, a rack for drying bottles into his studio, but it would be another two years before he would term these things readymade. The readymade as a work of art was then still in the stage of a speculative question as evidenced by the phrase: "peut-on faire des oeuvres qui ne soient pas ‘d’art ‘?" (can one make works which are not works of ‘art’?), 32 another note from 1913 that Duchamp wrote before he matched word with deed. After 1912, the wordplay began to play a crucial role in the formation of meaning in Duchamp’s art.

This change happened after seeing the play Impressions of Africa by Raymond Roussel in the spring of 1912, after reading Jarry’s absurd stories filled with puns, and after examining the hallucinogenic etymological arguments of Brisset. Roussel’s example would become of crucial importance to Duchamp. Apollinaire and the Section d'Or On October 9, 1912, Duchamp was back in Paris after spending three months in Munich for the opening of the exhibition of La Section d’Or by Apollinaire, who had, the day before, received the proofs of his new book about the Cubists. The publication, funded by Picabia, would, however, have to wait until the spring of 1913.1 Presumably with the still to be processed corrections and additions in mind and to distinguish it from the book Du cubisme by Gleizes and Metzinger which had also just appeared, a week in Étival was planned in the family house of Gabrielle Buffet. There, she welcomed the guests together with her mother. Marcel Duchamp was also present. According to Gabrielle Buffet, they especially talked about Apollinaire’s poems, which he recited by the fireplace in the evenings. Of the first poem in the anthology Alcools, Zone, named after this area in the Jura, the original version of the lamentation of a narrator is preserved (Apollinaire 1953). A comparison with the published version shows what changes have been made. The text has been subjected to a tight rhythm of verse lines. The narrator is addressed as ‘you’, it uses homophonic repetitions, and original metaphors are reduced to autonomous sound images. Even punctuation marks, commas and periods, are gone. In an ironic piece in the Fantasio from July 1, 1913 (831), the spelling by Apollinaire was characterized as being a conjugisme, a pun on conjungo, a popular word for marriage, with the prediction that even the spaces between words will have disappeared in the second edition. Those changes took place after the week in Étival.2 In addition, the proofs of Apollinaire’s book about Cubism were discussed.3 The title Les peintres nouveaux changed into Les peintres cubistes and was preceded by Méditations esthétiques, perhaps referring to the famous book Méditations poétiques by the poet Lamartine to whom the family Buffet was affiliated. The book is an informal collection of considerations that Apollinaire had previously published and to which texts about new artists were added. In the corrections, one can see how previous passages on Picabia and Duchamp 33 were changed.

They were promoted from the "instinctive" cubism, the lowest category, to the new Orphic branch, so that they formed the closing piece of the book, which ends with a prophecy about a glorious future for Duchamp. However, in the corrections, that passage is followed by a paragraph, in which Apollinaire voices doubts about Picabia and Duchamp: "Let us add that, to 132

tell the truth, the art of Duchamp, of Picabia (instinctive cubism), to the point where it is now (fall 1912), has no definite sculptural sense where these painters merely display the simulacrum of the movement that can be considered as leaning towards the symbolism of motion" [translation BJ].4 Even though he deleted that passage later, it does show that Apollinaire did not have such a high opinion of both artists, although he had recently characterized them as "addicted to an art without rules".5 A trip to the Hérisson-waterfalls The company also took trips in the area with Gabrielle as a guide. One of those trips led them to Les Rousses from where they enjoyed a view over Lake Geneva.6 A highlight in the surroundings of Étival was, in 1912 and still is, a stroll along the series of waterfalls of the Hérisson, twenty-five kilometres from Étival. The Baedecker and Les Guides Joanne extensively describe a visit to the waterfalls, including the way there and the mill where one could stop for food and drinks. The location had been made accessible by to the Club Alpin that had laid out the road along the cascades with, as a spectacular detail, a passage behind the highest waterfall (Baedeker (1903), 270 and Joanne (1909), 305-306). 34 Postcards Hérisson Cascades and travel guide Guides Joanne 1911-1912 The existence of multiple postcards of the Hérisson waterfalls further indicates that it was a popular destination at that time. It is tempting to assume that the company made this trip and that it can somehow explain Duchamp’s choice, a year later in a department store in Paris, to buy a bottle rack that, at that time in French, was called a hérisson and was also sold under this name in that particular store. Painting is finished After his return to Paris, Duchamp realized that painting as he did before, affiliated with a group of likeminded artists and operating through the art trade, no longer interested him. The fact that Duchamp was done with the art of painting is remarkable. It was indeed that October that the group of la Section d’Or started to enjoy success, Delaunay in particular. Up until then, Duchamp worked from the same interest. As his drawings and paintings from 1911 show, he also sought a way to connect the idea of speed and the modern technique of train, automobile and aircraft with visual art. The difference between Delaunay and Duchamp is shown in their response to The Aviation Salon of 1912. It inspired Delaunay to paintings like L’Equipe de Cardiff (1913), in which he added the aircraft by Blériot, a billboard of the aircraft factory Astra, and a propeller as metaphors to the Eiffel Tower and the Ferris wheel, 35 both of which he had used before as symbols of the modern age. La grande roue (postcard) and R. Delaunay, L’équipe de Cardiff, 1913 (postcard) What inspired Delaunay to an abstracting pictorial painting, led Duchamp to ideas about the bankruptcy of the commonplace art forms, as shown by his remarks against Brancusi and Léger. Duchamp was brooding on something else. Delaunay had, in that year, exhibited Les Fenêtres (Windows); paintings in which the transparent colours looked like glass. In that context, he wrote: "Eyes are the windows of our soul" as a variation on the French proverb "Eyes are the mirror of the soul" (Cohen ed. 1978, 84). Where Delaunay hinted at a painted suggestion of glass, Duchamp hatched the idea of an actual glass window as a medium. He no longer relied on pictorial metaphors. Duchamp in Paris: Can one Make Works Which are not Works of “Art”? The JuraParis Road The text 1912 The Jura-Paris road about the return trip after the week in the Jura formed the prelude to the associative outline of ideas for the Large Glass. The text is full of cryptic words like la machine à 5 coeurs (the machine with 5 hearts) or à cinq heures (at five o’clock) and le chef des 5 nues (the boss of the 5 nudes) or seins nus (naked breasts) or saints nus (naked Saints). In addition to this 36 homophonic word play, it mentions an enfant-phare (lighthouse child or headlight child, but also: in fanfare). This enfant-phare has a comet on the 133

back of his head with the tail forward. The text reads like a futuristic ode to a car with a fivecylinder engine, which in the night tries to find its way from behind the light beams of its headlights. Another version of the text describes the headlight child as a type of Jesus child, that radiates with glory, as a "burgeoning of the machine-mother" (Duchamp 1980, note 109). To the relationship that has been established between the cryptic phrases of 1912 The Jura-Paris Road and Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, I add my suggestion that Duchamp follows the reverse path of Roussel, not from text to image but from image to text. Images that function as inspiration for his text are, in my view, to be found, for example, in the advertisements for acetylene headlights in L’IIlustration (October 12, 1912, issue 4), and for a car in the December 7, 1912 Christmas issue of L’Illustration. L’Illustration 7 december 1912 and 12 october 1912. That advertisement suggested that the Three Kings had difficulty reaching the Star of Bethlehem on the rhythm of the camels, but that modern pilgrims visit the Holy places in a Unic Automotive. The picture shows a car with a modern Western company in an Oriental environment, parked in front of a church building. Above the building, like a vision in the sky, a nativity scene is 37 shown: Maria holding up baby Jesus and showing him to the Three Kings. From behind the child’s head, a ray of light beams forward. In addition to this inspiring ad, I would like to point out a passage from the poem Zone by Apollinaire that had been discussed in Étival and was published in December 1912 in a prepublication of Mercure de France. In it, Apollinaire mentions "Three Kings who follow the Star". It appears that, to the original text a passage has been added about a Christ who, in the twentieth century, morphs into an airplane and whose Ascension is being watched from below by the Devil. The green ray In the first sketch for the Large Glass, the work is divided into two parts: the Bride above, the Bachelors below. They are separated by three horizontal lines that were to be executed as glass strips. That separation of glass gives, in my opinion, an indication of a book that inspired the Large Glass. Because of their horizontal position the glass strips are green in colour. In 1947, Duchamp would give a hint about their origin in his contribution to an exhibition of the surrealist group in Paris. There, on his instigation, Kiesler had made an installation, which is described in the catalogue as: "a porthole lets the green ray of Marcel Duchamp through". Herbert Molderings made a connection with Le Rayon vert by Jules Verne (Duve ed. 1991, 257-261). Jules Verne, Le Rayon Vert, 1968 (1882) In that book by Verne, the claim of the nineteenth-century positivist science on objective truth is ridiculed.

According to Molderings, that is the reason why Duchamp refers to the book: to link his own ironic/critical concepts of science, 38 as they are shown in his readymades, to the theme of the exhibition: ‘the modern myth’. However, I think the reference by Duchamp to Verne’s book not only relates to the theme of the exhibition, but goes back to the first ideas for the Large Glass.

That idea of a flashback in 1947 also fits in with the new work Given... with which Duchamp had started precisely that year and which would, at the release after his death, explain many cryptic suggestions behind the Large Glass. That inspiration by Verne’s book can be deduced if we take into consideration the story as a whole. The search for the green beam that shoots over the horizon at a clear sunset is, in the book, a symbol for the search for true love. Irony about a scientific explanation of love, competition between science and art, the battle between bachelors for the love of a bride: these are the basic characteristics of the book that are also essential elements in the story of the Large Glass, such as Duchamp composed it in 1913 and 1914. “Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?” I will connect the first readymades, Bicycle Wheel and Bottlerack, that developed after moving to the rue St. Hippolyte, to the note: 134

“Peut-on faire des œuvres qui ne soient pas ‘d’art’? (“Can one make works which are not works of ‘art’?”) from 1913, which Duchamp wrote before he moved. I suggest that the interrogative form of that note connects to the title of the catalogue Is it Art? that had appeared at the Armory Show in New York in 1912, where his Nude descending a Staircase 2 resulted in a scandalous success. As before with the humorous drawings, where the meaning is created in the symbiotic relationship between the caption and the image, the new objects in his studio receive their meaning in their description or title. This meaning is often based on wordplay that serves as a means by which Duchamp transforms everyday objects into readymades. Bicycle Wheel can thus be seen as a wordplay along the lines of Roussel, and especially when the work is defined in French: une roue sur une selle, (a wheel on a kitchen stool), a tribute to Roussel as inspirer. In addition, it can be seen as a quip about visual arts in its reference to a stool (selle) as a symbol of sculpture, to the introduction of the pedestal in sculpture by Brancusi, and to the circles of colour by Delaunay and Kupka that were designed to suggest a sense of movement. 39 Winner prix de Rome for sculpture Femina 15 aug.1911 and view atelier Brancusi 1918 (?) (image from Princesse X exh. cat. Centre Pompidou 1999). After Bicycle Wheel, Bottlerack appeared in his workshop, a hérisson as that object is called in French. I will relate this work to the watermill in The Large Glass. The motive for which, as I have said before, can be found in a visit to the Hérisson waterfalls in the Jura. Not only because they were, given their proximity to Étival, a likely destination for a group getaway in October 1912, but also on the basis of a drawing from the Green Box, in which the water shoots over the Bachelors in accordance with the situation at the falls, as travel guides at the time also stated. Note from the Green Box (from: A. Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 1969) and detail from Les Guides Joanne 1911-1912.

40 In my reconstruction, Duchamp was not looking for a drainer when he, as many of his fellow citizens, went to visit the newly opened modern Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville and came across a bottle rack with the name Hérisson, where he, in a Roussellian way, realized the similarities with the series of waterfalls with the same name at Étival. reconstruction Bazar de l’Hotel de Ville, Lectures pour Tous, 15 october 1913. The bottle rack with the name Hérisson merges the journey along the waterfalls into a simultaneous representation of space and time, to put it in Cubist terms, coloured by the erotic feelings of the traveller for his guide Gabrielle Buffet. A flexible meter The name for 3 Stoppages Étalon (3 Standard Stoppages), in which Duchamp subjected the meter to chance with three different lengths as a result, seems to have been found on a shop window: stoppages et talons (stoppages and heels). A possible motive I find in the Conférence Internationale de l’heure from October 1912. This conference was held on whether the Paris time, which was linked to 41 the old 0-meridian through Paris, was still to be followed internationally after the relocation of that meridian to Greenwich. The meter is a symbol of French rationalism. Every French child was taught in school that the meter had been a ten millionth part of a quarter of the meridian of Paris since 1795 and that the original meter was kept at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures in Sèvres. The meter was a reminder of the time when the meridian of Paris still counted as the 0-meridian. The change to the English time was pre-emptively realized by setting the clock back 9 minutes and 21 seconds before the congress was held. With that, the unity of time was, like the meter, detached from its referent in nature and became an abstract unit. At that time, mathematical certainties were seen in perspective, for example, by the hypothetical, non-Euclidean scientific philosophy of Poincaré, whose death in 1912 received extensive media coverage in newspapers and magazines. All this 135

formed the context for Duchamp’s pataphysical experiment with the meter. Duchamp’s act is similar to a hilarious piece on the loss of the meter that was published in the August 29, 1912 issue of Le Sourire Le Sourire, 29 aug. 1912 and detail. 42 M. Duchamp, 3 Standard Stops (from E. Bonk, The Box in a Valise, 1989). The reader was advised to visit the bazar and buy a mètre pliant, literally a ‘flexible meter’ – a ruler. It showed a ‘last’ photo of mister Méridien Terrestre with the appearance of a washed up clown. Duchamp’s approach is that of an ironic twentiethcentury alchemist that provides the relationship between space and time with a new referent, at the precise moment that the standards of the metric system became abstract concepts. With 3 Standard Stoppages the rational science of physics was satirized by the crafter Duchamp, who, with a piece of darning thread, reconnected the abstracted foundations of science with the concrete world of objects. The Xth Station of the Cross The Chocolate Grinder and the Scissors in the Large Glass are conceived as a coherent whole in an etching from 1967. I see in this a link with the traditional image of the Crowning with Thorns from the Passion, in which Christ is sitting on a block while soldiers push down the crown of thorns with two crossed sticks. Both in Munich and in the Louvre, versions of Titian’s interpretation of this scene can be found. My suggestion is supported by the painting of this Christ en pudeur, as the scene is called in French, in the Rouen Cathedral, where it is situated in the position of the tenth Station of the Cross. The combination of the Chocolate Grinder and the Scissors therefore seems like a continuation on Mécanisme de la Pudeur ou Pudeur Mécanique, the drawing from Munich that, as Duchamp said later, was drawn as a joke in the usual composition of the tenth Station of the Cross, in which Christ is stripped by 43 the soldiers. That drawing with the subtitle The Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors later yielded the title for the Large Glass. In this reference to the tenth Station of the Cross there has been a change in gender of the bride and the bachelor(s), but this is not surprising given the autobiographical nature of the work, in which the first syllables of the protagonists’ names, la Mariée and les Célibataires, form the name Marcel. M. Duchamp, The Bride stripped bare by the Bachelors 1912, (from A. Schwarz, The Complete Works od Marcel Duchamp, 2000); Xth Station of the Cross in the church of Blainville (photo Bert Jansen); Xth Station of the Cross, Rouen Cathedral (photo Madeline Maus). 44 Camouflage The colour of the Bachelors in the Large Glass is provisional; they are still in lead, a primer, "waiting for their colour as croquet cones." Although there is only one military uniform in the Bachelors (the cavalryman), I see in that “waiting for colour” a reference to a discussion that took place at that time about the colour of the army uniform. The arrival of advanced weaponry demanded the replacement of the brightly coloured uniforms with camouflage clothing. Other European countries had already chosen khaki and field grey, but in France, the conservative military command kept the traditional red pants until after the Battle of the Marne. Articles on this can be found, for example, in L’Illustration (03.09.1912), Le Rire (may 4, 1912), Je sais tout (April 15, 1912), and Nos Loisirs (July 14, 1912). 45 Three magazines in which the color of French uniforms is discussed. A visit to Fécamp The idea for the falling bottle of Benedictine pulling back the Glider, probably arose in early September 1913 while on vacation with his family in Yport. The great local event that summer was the opening of the Benedictine liqueur factory in the neighbouring Fécamp. The L’Illustration of July 19th published the news in a full-page advertisement with a picture of the stained glass window that is still located in the factory. On it a personification of Fame gives a bottle of Benedictine to a gentleman in the bottom part of the window. 46 Advert in L’Illustration july 19, 1913. The liqueur factory was a well-known patron 136

for artistic poster makers such as Shem and Mucha. And on December 20, 1913, in Le Rire, a drawing was published of an aviator who pours himself a glass, referring to Pégoud who, in that year, had flown upside down for the first time. Duchamp in New York: Art Made "Read-y" L'X Many readymades in New York originated from the friendship with Walter Arensberg; an avid lover of language games and well aware of Guillaume Apollinaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein. In Arensberg, Duchamp found not only a patron, but also a language researcher 47 akin to Brisset. The friendship with Arensberg and the works that it brought forth confirm the importance of language in the creation of works. Like philologists, of the stature Roussel/Arensberg/Brisset, distort the relationship between words and objects, and metaphor makes language literary, Duchamp’s readymades make objects “readable” as visual art. In that sense of “made readable,” I want to consider the name ‘readymade’ that Duchamp began to use in 1915; ‘ready’ as a cognate of ‘to read’. The motive for this, I think, is the first readymade with that name: Pulled at 4 Pins (Tiré à 4 épingles), a chimney fan with a rotating cap: a girouette in French.7 That word also has a figurative meaning: someone who often changes his mind; a fickle person. It also refers to a Don Juan as De Maupassant uses the word in Yvette (Maupassant 1910, 10). The English title Pulled at 4 Pins is a literal translation of the French Tiré a quatre épingles (dressed to the nines). Duchamp also used that French title in 1959 for an etching in which the sheet seems to be pulled away from four corners by creases drawn on the paper. 8 The etchings are not only connected by their corresponding titles. A link can also be established with the original readymade. The form of an X in the etching of 1959 corresponds with the L’X, the French name for a chimney cowl. The X was embossed on the iron of the cowl. M. Duchamp, Tiré a quatre épingles (from A.Schwarz, The complete works of Marcel Duchamp, 2000), a French chimney cowl and detail (collection Bert Jansen). In the French version of the title (Tiré à quatre épingles) one can, as is known, also find the origin of the word "readymade" for these kinds of works, which Duchamp chose at the end of 1915. Dressed to the Nines refers to clothes, like ‘readymade’, the word that was used for off-the-peg clothes. This reference to 48 the clothing industry is supported by a portrait of Duchamp by Jean Crotti that was modelled directly on his face and was described in a catalogue of April 1916 as “a sculpture made to measure”. Made to measure (sur mesure in French) is, like ‘readymade’, a tailoring term but means the opposite (exh. cat. 1983, 93). The term ‘readymade’, however, is in my view not only to be interpreted as a tailoring term. The word ‘readymade’ itself can, in my view, also be analysed multilingually, in conjunction with the English that Duchamp began to learn after his arrival in New York. Those lessons were basically held in parallel with the French lessons that his New York friends received from him in the form of French-English conversation. From Louise Norton and Beatrice Wood, we know that Marcel’s language lessons mostly came down to learning ambiguous words and scabrous phrases (Marcadé 2007, 139). Louise Norton was gifted Pulled at 4 Pins by Marcel Duchamp before she met her husband Edgard Varèse through Duchamp in the autumn of 1917. Duchamp knew Varèse through Gabrielle Buffet, who was a classmate of Varèse during their music studies in Berlin. After her divorce from Allen Norton, Louise had multiple sexual encounters with, among others, Duchamp and Henri Pierre Roché (Marcadé 2007, 161). The girouette thus befits her in the double meaning of a female Don Juan.

She later lost the readymade. In the late thirties, Duchamp was unable to find a picture of it to add to the overview of his oeuvre in the Box in a Valise, as he did with the other readymades.

Furthermore, in 1964, the chimney cowl was not reproduced in eightfold unlike the other 137

fourteen readymades. Duchamp did, however, make an etching of the cowl on which the inscription can be read in mirror both in English and French. Jabberwocky nonsens This mirrorimage text provides, in my opinion, a clue to the origin of the word ‘readymade’ in relation to Louise Norton. During their classes, Duchamp used Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll (Decimo 2002, 99). Norton characterizes the inscription of her readymade as "Alice in Wonderland nonsensical" (exh. cat. 1973, 225). A possible connection with the word ‘readymade’ arises from the poem Jabberwocky (Carroll 1970, 191). That poem, full of onomatopoeic words and portmanteaux, has become synonymous for nonsensical language, ‘Jabberwocky’ after the dragon named Jabberwock. The text only becomes readable when Alice holds the book in front of a mirror because it is printed in mirror image. 49 Detail from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, (ed. M.Gardner), 1970, p.191. In that name Jabberwocky a linguistic definition of the word ‘readymade’ can be found, if the -y is seen as a suffix, as a clause of ‘to read’. ‘Ready Made’ can then be translated as ‘made readable’. Later, in 1972, Louise would publish a biography of her husband with the title Varèse, behind the Looking Glass, in which perhaps the memory of Duchamp’s language lessons resounds. A wall sink as a urinal Fountain was photographed by Stieglitz in front of a painting by Marsden Hartley, in which the shape of the urinal is repeated in a horse’s ass. In Duchamp’s circle of friends, the shape of the urinal was also compared with the contours of a Madonna and a meditating Buddha. That comparison prob ably has his origins in a different painting by Marsden Hartley Musical Theme (Oriental Symphony) (1912-1913), that was sold a year earlier

by Stieglitz to another acquaintance of Duchamp, John Quinn. 50 Marsden Hartley, Musical Theme (oriental symphony), 1912-1913 (from internet). In that painting, images of a Madonna and Child and a meditating Buddha side by side, are combined with an abstract shape that corresponds to the contours of the urinal. The contemptuous equation of a urinal with a Madonna and a Buddha or a horse’s ass is to be interpreted, in my opinion, as a sneer at the abstracting art that Marsden Hartley produced. I further note that to title a urinal Fountain is, in my view, not strange given the correspondence in shape with a French fontaine (fountain) in the sense of a lavabo, a wall sink – its reservoir disappearing, after its connection to the water supply, above the shell-shaped basin. We know them still as they are pictured in the catalogue of Manufacture Française d’Armes et Cycles de Saint-Etienne of 1911. 51 M.Duchamp, Fountain 1917 as presented in The Blind Man 2 (from: W. Camfield, Marcel Duchamp Fountain, 1989) and lavabo/fontaine (detail) from: Manufacture Francaise d’ Armes et Cycles, St. Etienne 1911 (?).

This association of a urinal with a fountain was also made by Proust, though erroneously, in À la recherche du temps perdu, Jeunes filles en fleurs. Autour de mme. Swann, when the young narrator together with his nanny, visits a public toilet in which they have recently been installed: “ce qu'on appelle en Angleterre un lavabo et en France, par une anglomanie malinformée, des water-closets.” (Proust 1999, 393). This interpretation as a sink, combined with a sexual connotation, is supported by Duchamp’s advice to Beatrice Wood to use a shell-shaped soap dish as a representation of the female sex in the painting that she submitted to the Independent Artists exhibition for which Fountain was also intended. I would also like to point out the painting/collage Le Lavabo by Juan Gris another friend of Duchamp. That painting had drawn much attention at the exhibition of the Section d’Or in 1912 because it incorporated shards of a mirror. Apollinaire defended the work against the critic Louis Vauxcelles by repeating Juan Gris who had declared that you can only represent a mirror, a variable surface that even reflects the 138

viewer, by pasting it on as such. Vauxcelles, a declared opponent of all innovations in the arts, reiterated that mockingly in Gil Blas and also turned his ridicule to artists that wanted to represent movement for which he took The King and Queen Traversed by Nudes at High Speed

by Duchamp as an example (Apollinaire 1980, 230). 52 Princess Marie Bonaparte The sculpture Princesse X by Brancusi in the exhibition seems to have played a crucial role in the choice of the tilted urinal (Camfield 1989, 55-56 and exh. cat. 2000, 77-88). In 1916, the sculpture in a white marble and a bronze version had been on show in New York in The Modern Gallery. The marble version was purchased in March 1917 by John Quinn, who, a year earlier, had bought Musical Theme by Marsden Hartley. The bronze version was submitted to the Independent Artists exhibition and subsequently acquired by Arensberg. That Brancusi’s sculpture, unlike Duchamp’s Fountain, was accepted is remarkable because the sculpture was widely recognized as a phallus.

Princesse X was submitted as a portrait of Marie Bonaparte, who had posed for Brancusi in 1909, which led to a sexual relationship (Schouten 2011, 66-69). Brancusi later remembers her as a woman who was obsessed with her own beauty and constantly looked back in the mirror.

That is how he initially portrayed her and he would later abstract that pose into a form that really does look suspiciously like the male sex organ (exh. cat. 1999, 9-10). C. Brancusi, Princesse X 1915 and Woman looking at herself in a mirror 1909 (from Princesse X, exh.cat. Centre Pompidou 1999. Perhaps with this Brancusi is referring to Marie Bonaparte’s strong views about an anatomical cause of female frigidity in relation to the shape of the penis, about which she would later write (Bertin 1982, 140-141). After her analysis with Sigmund Freud, she would introduce psychoanalysis in France in 1925. It seems that with Princesse X Brancusi anticipated his model’s unpublished views. Duchamp, who was friends with Brancusi and perhaps aware of his affair with Marie Bonaparte, would have, for that reason, chosen 53 Fountain as a counterpart of his sculpture, that within the inner circle of the organizing committee of the Independent Artists exhibition received much praise, but was also known for its suggestive shape. R. Mutt – Richard Muther? The question remaining is the why behind the signature R. Mutt. Duchamp himself has mentioned a double reference: to Mott Iron Works, the store where the urinal was purchased, and to the daily comic Mutt & Jeff (Camfield 1989, 23 and note 21). To this he added the R as initial, an abbreviation of the name Richard (in French slang: money-bag in contrast with the empty form of the urinal), which together with Mutt yields the German Armut (poverty). Ulf Linde read the signature as a reversal of Tu m’..., the title of the painting that Duchamp would make before long. A reference to the German Mutter (mother) has also been suggested, which Duchamp later seems to endorse when he, in 1964, tears a family photograph, with him sitting on his mother’s lap, in the form of a urinal. To the possible associations I would like to add Richard Muther the author of popular art books at the time, about Leonardo da Vinci for instance (Muther 1907). Also because he soon reappears as a possible source of inspiration, namely when Duchamp with his contemptuous criticism of the Mona Lisa introduces his, by now termed Dadaist approach, to Paris. The fact that in 1919 Da Vinci’s four hundredth anniversary of death was commemorated may have also played a role in Duchamp’s motives for the act of providing a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with the caption L.H.O.O.Q., much like the exhibition of the Mona Lisa in 1963 in New York and Washington, where in six weeks, two million people walked past the painting, was a motive for L.H.O.O.Q. rasée (L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved). Marie Bonaparte and Sigmund Freud The joke of L.H.O.O.Q. lies in the reference to Da Vinci’s homosexuality, which was the subject of Eine Kindheitserinnerung 139

des Leonardo da Vinci by Sigmund Freud (1910) that had been translated into English in 1916. As Nesbit and Sawelson-Gorse have shown, Arensberg owned a copy of this as well as other books

by Freud. Freud was also a subject of discussion at the soirees, for example when the dreams of Beatrice Wood were interpreted in a Freudian way (Nesbit/Sawelson-Gorse (1995), 170 and note 97). The memory to which the title of the book refers is a dream of Leonardo about a vulture that descended on his cradle and put its tail in his mouth. Freud explains that dream as a memory of the mother’s breast (Freud 1927, 95). Furthermore, 54 Freud believed that Leonardo’s homosexuality could be deduced from the heavenly smiles of the women in his paintings, which he associated with the early childhood of the artist with his mother and an absent father because he was an illegitimate child. Freud obtained his data from among others the books of Merezhkovsky and Muther. As mentioned before, I suggest that the reversal of the syllables in the name Muther, the author and publisher of a popular series of art books, may have played a role in the signature R. Mutt on Fountain. That connection between L.H.O.O.Q. and Fountain is supported, albeit within an anachronistic reasoning, when it turns out that Freud’s book was translated into French in 1927 by Marie Bonaparte, Brancusi’s muse for Princesse X, the sculpture that revealed the female nature of Fountain. R. Muther, Leonardo da Vinci, 1907 and S. Freud, Un Souvenir d’enfance de Léonard de Vinci, (translated by Marie Bonaparte). A Rembrandt as an ironing board At some point, Duchamp advises himself in his notes to limit the number of readymades. At the same time, he contemplates possibilities of the readymades existing as text only; for example the sentence se servir d’un Rembrandt comme une planche à repasser (Use a Rembrandt as an ironing-board). In addition to the rebellious meaning, the phrase can also be considered as a pun. A planche (board) is an art term for a painting and ‘Rembrandt’ pronounced in French sounds like a form of remembrance, a solemn word both in French and in English. Together with repasser (‘to iron’, but can also be deconstructed to re-passé (the past again)) an interpretation emerges as "a Rembrandt used to commemorate the past." For this interpretation, I find support in a description of the installation that Matta made, at Duchamp’s request, in 1947 next to The Green Ray by Kiesler (Marcade 2007, 387). Which concerned the unexecuted passage in the Large Glass of the Handler of Gravity. 55 Therein dangled a flatiron (fer à passer) on a rope, featuring the text: à refaire le passé (to remake the past). The statement "Use a Rembrandt as an ironingboard" became known, famous and infamous after Duchamp cited the sentence as an example in the definition of the lemma ‘readymade’ in the Dictionnaire abregé du surrealisme in 1938. The sentence had this same effect at the opening panel of the exhibition The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961. The English ‘ironing board’ will have further strengthened the ironic aspect. Duchamp’s admirer Robert Rauschenberg was part of the panel and repeatedly entered into discussion with Shattuck who emphasized the historical aspect of the readymades as a ‘zero point’ to which they fall back after they had served as art only once. According to him, that could not be repeated and he thus denied the importance of the readymade as contemporary art (Elderfield 1992, 118-151). A year later, Rauschenberg made for Dylaby in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam an installation, part of which still exists: a combine painting, titled Dylaby consisting of a loose hanging canvas, a rusty Coca Cola billboard and an ironing board (shown in: exh. cat. (1987, 91)). R. Rauschenberg, Dylaby 1962 (from exh. cat. Coleccion Sonnabend 1987). 56 That board was, judging by the log of Ad Petersen, the starting point for the final installation (exh. cat. 1962, n.p.). In that work, Robert Rauschenberg seems to refer to 140

Duchamp’s infamous remark about using a Rembrandt as an ironing board. Duchamp and the Film World After 1923, Duchamp turned away from the art world. There it was said he had stopped being an artist, a view that is still widely held. The reality, however, is rather different.

After 1923, Duchamp called himself an artiste défroqué – a retired artist; with which he did not suggest that he was no longer an artist, but rather he compared the art world with a religious community of which he no longer wished to be part. In Paris, he, together with Picabia and Man Ray, was part of a circle in which film was for the first time recognized as an artistic medium.

That happened in conjunction with performances of the Ballets Suédois at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées where artists and designers were recruited for the costumes, music and scenery. Their input was also sought by Marcel L’Herbier for L’Inhumaine, that ran between September and December of 1924. The film was received as a form of avant-garde art, also because a host of international artists had collaborated on it: Fernand Léger and Robert MalletStevens for the scenery, Paul Poiret for the costumes, René Lalique for some objects, Georges Antheil and Darius Milhaud for the music, and Jean Börlin for the choreography. The avantgarde design emerges, for instance, in the filming of a tumultuous musical performance on October 4, 1924 by Antheil for which tout Paris, including Duchamp, was invited to attend as extras to listen and respond. The music did indeed lead to heated controversies between supporters and opponents, just as L’Herbier had hoped. Duchamp also searched for new forms of art, besides the serious consideration of a career as a professional chess player. This was accompanied by a restless traveling back and forth between New York and Paris. Together with Man Ray, he had, since 1920, conducted experiments with stereometric photos and with film. At the end of 1921, he had written Arensberg from Paris that he wanted to come back to New York and get a job in film as an assistant cameraman. Picabia also had aspirations in the film world, in which he wanted to involve Duchamp. At the end of 1922, he had written him in New York and invited him to work on a film for which he had been approached by L’Herbier. Duchamp declined that proposal at first, but he later revised that decision. But by then, L’Herbier had already relinquished Picabia’s participation in L’Inhumaine by asking Léger in his place.

Thereafter, Picabia decided to finance his own productions. His actions and the quarrelling in 57 1924 in the Parisian world of Dada can be followed in the last issues of his magazine 391, the issues XVIII and XIX. The last page of issue XIX, published in October, contains an invitation to attend the premiere of the ballet Relâche for which Picabia had created the decor. In the break between the two acts, an entr’acte cinématographique would be shown. Issue XVIII of July 1924 contains Duchamp’s design for Rotary Demisphere including the spoonerism along the edge. The cover too features a few feats of Rrose Sélavy in that area: Oh! Do shit again! ... Oh! Douche it again! ... and Du dos de la cuillère au cul de la douairière! A letter was also published in that issue from Gabrielle Buffet, dated June 20, 1924, in which she writes about the fun they had while seeing the opera Mercure, with music by Satie and sets and costumes by Picasso, “tres nettement inspiré de Picabia et Duchamp.” Monte Carlo Bond In this context, Duchamp’s Monte Carlo Bond developed. The hint to Mercury in the two wings of shaving cream on Duchamp’s head is, besides a reference to the god of trading, perhaps also traceable to the ballet Mercure that caused quite the racket. Perhaps there is an additional reference possible, namely to the book Feu Mattias Pascal (The late Matthias Pascal) by Luigi Pirandello that L’Herbier was going to adapt for the screen after finishing L’Inhumaine. The intention for this he had declared in 1924. In all likelihood, Picabia and Duchamp were aware of L’Herbier’s plans because they 141

moved in the same circles and Picabia also had direct contact with L’Herbier. The latter writes in his autobiography that Picabia, after he was passed over for Léger, did not ask him, as previously agreed, for the filming of Entre’acte in May 1924, but approached René Clair, who in December 1923 also contacted L’Herbier (1979, 103-104). Duchamp, who after April 20 was back in Paris after his chess competition in Nice, perhaps then linked the idea for his Bond, which he had gotten at the roulette table in Monte Carlo, to the story of Pirandello. The book provides sufficient indications for that assumption. Mattias Pascal, a librarian, runs away after an argument with his wife and his mother-in-law. He wins a fortune at the Monte Carlo gaming tables. With that money, he is feeling man enough to withstand the women at home. During his return trip, however, he reads in a newspaper article that his wife has identified the body of a suicide victim as his own. In that he sees a chance to start a new life. In Rome, he finds a place to stay in a family-run lodge under the fictitious name of Adrien Meis. When he knocks, the occupant Anselmo Paleari opens the door, his head and chin covered in shaving cream. Paleari immediately suspects that the man at 58 the door is an artist. Paleari exploits a daughter-in-law, a dipsomaniac woman with a moustache, who acts as a medium and conjures ghosts. During such a session, her husband steals the money from Adrien Meis, who knows he cannot report the crime to the police because he cannot identify himself and realizes that for that same reason a marriage with Adrienne, Paleari’s attractive daughter, is impossible. He decides to assume his real identity and, after a fictitious suicide as Adrien Meis, he goes back home. But, it turns out, his wife has remarried to his childhood friend. He starts to work as a librarian again and sometimes he puts flowers on his own grave. In the village, he is known as the late Matthias Pascal. I believe, the picture of Duchamp’s head full of shaving cream on his Monte Carlo Bond, besides the connotations with the god of trading, could also refer to the novel by Pirandello, after the muddleheaded Paleari who exploits a masculine daughter-in-law as a spiritual medium and with whom a man without an identity, Matthias Pascal alias Adrien Meis, moves in and who Paleari initially mistook for an artist: all characters and aliases of Duchamp from the recent past.

Pirandello himself was also present in the Parisian avant-garde circles. The contract for the film adaptation of the book was signed in October 1924, two weeks before the commencement date on Duchamp’s Bond. During that month, his play Chacun sa vérité was performed at the Théâtre de l’Atelier and on November 19, 1924, La Jarre premiered at the Ballets Suédois after his libretto. The same company performed Relâche by Picabia a month later, a play in two acts, between which the film Entr’acte by Clair was screened, in which Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp play a chess game interrupted by a ‘downpour’. The opening, scheduled for November 27, 1924, was delayed until December 4. On the last day, New Year’s Eve 1924, Ciné Sketch was added, a tableau vivant of Duchamp and Bronia Perlmutter, both posing naked as Adam and Eve from a painting by Cranach. Duchamp would give shape to his own cinematic aspirations in Anémic Cinéma, filmed by Man Ray, which included the rotating Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics).

The film was financed by himself with the inheritance from his parents who had died shortly after one another in February 1925. A Milky Way as a Veil A waterfall in Chexbres After the war, Duchamp left to France to visit family and friends. Shortly before his departure from New York in 1946, he had a Box in a Valise sent to 59 Maria Martins, the wife of the Brazilian ambassador, with whom he had had an affair since 1943. How passionate that love was, can be deduced from his personal addition to the Valise: a, so it seems, "abstract expressionist" painting, which was, it turned out, not painted with paint but with sperm. Its title, Paysage Fautif, is a pun on votive 142

paintings that are offered to a saint to express gratitude for a miraculous healing. This affair would inspire him to a new work as a sequel to the in 1923 declared unfinished The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, even [the Large Glass]. In early August 1946, Marcel Duchamp arrived with Mary Reynolds in hotel Bellevue in the Swiss Chexbres. Directly adjacent to the hotel is a waterfall, with which the small river the Forestay cascades itself down the ravine. A narrow path runs to a barracks, which was at the time in use as champ de tir, a shooting range, such as it can be found in every Swiss municipality where drafted men held shooting practices.

From that barracks, they shot to the other side, in the slope next to the waterfall. 60 Postcard hotel Bellevue Chexbres and postcard waterfall Chexbres (from Banz, Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall, 2010). More than twenty years later, after the death of Duchamp in 1968, Duchamp’s photographs of that waterfall in Chexbres had been used in his posthumous work of which the full title is: Given: 1. The Waterfall / 2. The Illuminating Gas. Given... is set, other than the performance in the Large Glass, within a confined space. The position of the viewer is fixed behind two holes at eye level in an old stable door. Behind a broken wall, the viewer sees a tableau vivant that gives a peek behind the horizon in the Large Glass. In her domain, the bride exposes herself without any embarrassment, legs wide, lying in an idyllic landscape. In her hand she holds a flickering gas lamp and in the background flows, without ceasing, a waterfall. 61 M. Duchamp, Etant donnés, 1946-1966 (from exh.cat. Marcel Duchamp Etant donnés, (ed. M. Taylor, 2009). The waterfall in Chexbres must have reminded Duchamp of the time when he, thirty-four years earlier, conceived the idea for the Large Glass. That is already apparent from the title of the work for which he found the inspiration here and which is an echo of the first lines that he had formulated as the "condition" 62 in his plans for the Large Glass. The waterfall and the gas lamp in that work are indeed only conditionally present as text. They are not portrayed. In this new work, however, they receive all the attention, if only because they are permanently in motion. His passion for his then lover Maria Martins will have reminded him in Chexbres of that other secret love that, in 1912, formed the motive for the Large Glass, the more so as the scene of that love was nearby. Seen from the terrace of the hotel in Chexbres, the Western horizon is formed by the hills of the French Jura. It was there that in 1912 everything started to speed up, during that week in Étival, in the parental home of Gabrielle Buffet. A veil moving by her breath That both works complemented each other was already clear in 1954 when Duchamp, at the installation of the Large Glass in the museum in Philadelphia, had a window installed in the wall behind it, anticipating the arrival of Given....

Particularly, because trough that opening, a fountain and a bronze sculpture of a female nude became visible within the transparent world of the Large Glass. The creator of that sculpture was Maria Martins. To her he had dedicated Paysage Fautif and it is after her body that the nude in Given... is modelled.9 The supplementing meaning of Given... to the Large Glass emerges very clearly in regard to the Voie Lactée (The Milky Way) from where the Bride ventilates her commands and in which the Bachelors fire their shots. That Voie Lactée can, through word play, be associated with a voile acté (an acted veil). As a pars pro toto for that Milky Way/acted veil the three Draft Pistons can be considered. Duchamp had based its form on three photographic recordings of drapes in front of a window, moving in the wind. Photo M. Duchamp for Draft Piston 1914 (from A. Schwarz, The complete works of Marcel Duchamp, 2000). 63 The polka dot pattern on that mesh is reminiscent of a small voile (veil) that ladies back then often wore.

When the bride voices her orders, those Draft Pistons are moved by her breath, indeed much 143

like a voilette (veil) as it also appears in the subtitle of Belle Haleine: eau de Voilette (Beautiful Breath: Veil Water), the readymade of a perfume bottle. And does that voie lactée also become a voile acté as a reference to L’Après-midi d’un Faune, in the memorable performance of 1912 that shocked the Parisian public when the faun (Nijinsky) fornicated with the abandoned veil of a nymph? Nijinsky in L’Après-midi d’ un faune 1912 (from internet). Duchamp was not present at that event, but was present a year later when Le sacre du Printemps, also by Stravinsky and Nijinsky, again caused much commotion and stirred up the memories of the previous year.

Lucien Métivet had written an ironic piece about it in Fantasio on July 1, 1912 and in it established a link with the infamous sale of the painting Salomé (1880) by Regnault. Salome's dance According to the 1912 volume of the theatre magazine Comoedia Illustré, the theme of the veil dance and of Salomé were very en vogue. Apart from the attention for L’Après-midi d’un Faune in a special issue of June 15, 1912, the magazine, on July 19, 1912, devotes an article to the stage performance of Salomé by Oscar Wilde and on September 15, 1912, there is an illustrated piece on the contortionist Sahory Djeli, who accentuates the snake-like movements of her naked body with veils and advertised with x-ray photo’s of her contorted poses.

Furthermore, Loïe Fuller performed her Serpentine-dance in 64 the theatre Bouffes Parisiens as a Papillon de Nuit, as Fantasio portrayed her in colour on December 1, 1912. The interpretation of voie lactée as voile acté is confirmed quite explicitly by some of the works by Maria Martins that Naumann links to Given… (Naumann 2002). In 1939, she conducted a preliminary study for Salomé who, after her Dance of the Seven Veils, sits naked on the floor with a cloth covering her lap. In 1949, Martins again created a sculpture in a virtually identical pose. Only the cloth is gone and her pubic hair is now prominently visible. M. Martins, Salome, 1939 and M. Martins, Eighth Veil, 1949 (from The Surrealist Sculpture of Maria Martins, exh.cat. André Emmerich Gallery New York, 1998). The title is Eighth Veil. Meanwhile, Martins has begun her affair with Duchamp and is aware of his plans for Given…. The bride finally stripped bare There is another indication that has supported the interpretation of the Voie Lactée as a voile acté from the beginning in the notes for the Large Glass. This interpretation can be found in one of Duchamp’s last works, a series of etchings from 1967-1968 in which he satirizes citations to Ingres, Cranach, Courbet and Rodin. On one of these, a naked girl is pictured, kneeling on a prayer bench. The etching has been printed in two stages. For the second stage, the etching plate has been sawn out around the girl, causing a grey toned background to emerge when printing. 65 M. Duchamp, The Bride stripped bare, 1968 (from A. Schwarz, The complete works of Marcel Duchamp 2000). In that contrast, the white paper surrounding the girl on the prayer bench gets the appearance of a bridal gown and a tulle bridal veil. This is also the instruction on the etching plate: as a voile de mariée. "The Bride has finally been stripped bare here," said Duchamp according to Schwarz, when he looked at the etching proofs (Schwarz 2000, 880). Given her tender age, however, this does not concern a young woman, but a girl receiving her first communion. On that occasion, after all, girls are also dressed as brides. In Duchamp’s youth, that religious celebration occurred at the age of 12.10 That comparison of a 12-year-old communicant with an adult bride can also be found in an etching that Duchamp made in 1909 on the occasion of the first communion of his second cousin Simone Delacour. On that picture she looks, dressed in a white bridal/communion gown, to a cart pulled by two horses. However, they are rocking horses and the cart is a pram. On it rests a chest with her attire, stamped with her initials S.D.. It could be a cartoon, such as Duchamp made at that time for Le Rire. 11 Peeping Tom Through Lebel, 144

Duchamp and his wife Alexina met the psychoanalyst Lacan who they dined with on September 21, 1958 and where they could see 66 Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (Marcade 2007, 440 and 443). Lacan’s wife commissioned a chastened version that could be placed in front of the original to be spared the looks of the cleaning lady and the neighbours. According to Marcadé, that could have been the motivation behind the idea of the door with the peep holes in Given…12 . A counter argument against that suggestion may be that Duchamp only placed the door four or five years later. I prefer to view it as a reference to a traditional wedding custom in the French countryside that also involves a shamelessly peeping eye. After the feast, the unmarried boys and girls (les célibataires) went looking for the young couple that had secretly retired earlier. When they found them, they would break into the bedroom with a chamber pot sold especially for this purpose. On the outside, it features in ornamental letters the command: à la mariée, (for the bride). On the bottom, a lifelike eye is painted. Wedding chamber pot (collection Bert Jansen). After his death, Duchamp turned out to have given a hint about his posthumous peep show in a photograph. After he had signed Given... and had arranged its transfer via Copley to the museum, he left for London to assist Hamilton with the layout of the retrospective The Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp that opened in June 1966.

Hamilton had created a copy of the Large Glass that Duchamp signed as copy conform. In addition, Hamilton had made an edition of the passage of the Oculist Witnesses where the Bachelors enter the realm of the Bride. On a photograph of Hamilton from 1966, Duchamp holds such a glass plate in front of his face, looking through the circle in the centre. After the publication of Given..., it became clear what Duchamp intended with that pose. Hamilton adapted the photograph in 1970 to a poster and published it under the title The Oculist Witness.

67 R. Hamilton, The oculist witness, 1968 (from exh. cat. Inventing Marcel Duchamp, 2009).

NOTES 1. On the corrections by Apollinaire see: Apollinaire 1980. 2. A comprehensive commentary on Alcools can be found in: Décaudin 1993 and Divis 1966, 106-107. 3. The second set of proofs is dated October 8, 1912 (Apollinaire 1980, note 16, 18-19). 4. Ajoutons, pour dire le vrai, qu’au point où il en est aujourd’hui [aut. 1912] l’art de Duchamp, de Picabia (cubisme instinctif) où ces peintres ne donnent que le simulacre du mouvement et qui pourrait être considéré comme tendant au symbolisme de la mobilité, n’a pas encore eu une signification plastique bien déterminée (Apollinaire 1980, note 7, 140). 5. Picabia s’adonnait, en même temps que Marcel Duchamp, à un art que n’enferme plus aucune règle (Apollinaire 1980, 265). 68 6.

Correspondence Jacques Caumont to me. I myself have proposed views on Lake Geneva as a possible inspiration of the high position of the Bride in the Large Glass in Jansen 1996. 7. I follow Schwarz’s dating. Nesbit/Sawelson-Gorse date the readymade of the chimney cowl a year later, because Duchamp did not mention it in his letter to his sister in January 1916, in which he does mention the snow shovel (Nesbit/Sawelson-Gorse 1995, 152, note 48). 8. That etching functioned as an illustration for a book of poetry with four poems by Pierre de Massot. 9. The arm that holds the lamp is a casting of the arm of Duchamp’s later wife Alexina Sattler whom he would marry in 1954. 10. The institution of receiving the first communion at the current age of six or seven was determined by Pope Pius X in 1910. 11. This link to the Bride in the Large Glass is also established by Schwarz whereby he points out that the initials of Simone Delacour match those of his sister Suzanne Duchamp (Schwarz 2000, 880). 12. The position of the viewer in front of the naked woman is reminiscent of an illustration by Dürer, which shows how a painter portrays a nude model in perspective on a screened surface. That illustration could be seen in 145

Munich at the time of Duchamp’s stay in 1912 as demonstrated by Herz 2013, 224. Literature Apollinaire, G. (1953), Alcools, suivi de: reproductions inédites des premières épreuves corrigées de la main d'Apollinaire, commentées et annotées par Tristan Tzara, Paris. Apollinaire, G. (1960), Chroniques d'art (1902-1918), Paris. Apollinaire, G. (1980), Les Peintres cubistes, (méditations esthétiques), (annoté par L. Breuning et J.-Cl. Chevalier), Paris (1965). Bertin, C. (1982), Marie Bonaparte, a Life, London. Camfield, W. (1989), Marcel Duchamp Fountain, Houston. Caroll, L. (1970), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, (The annotated Alice by M. Gardner). Cohen, A. (ed.) (1978), The New Art of Color, The Writings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, New York. Décaudin, M. (1993), Michel Décaudin commente Alcools de Guillaume Apollinaire, Paris. Décimo, M. (2002), La bibliothèque de Marcel Duchamp, peut-être, Dijon.

Divis, V. (1966), Apollinaire, Chronik eines Dichterlebens, Brno. Duchamp, M. (1980), Notes, centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Duve, T, de (ed.) (1991), The Definitely Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge (Mass.). Elderfield, J. (ed.) (1992), Essays on Assemblage, Studies in Modern Art n.2, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Freud, S. (1927), Un souvenir d'enfance de Léonard de Vinci (traduit par Marie Bonaparte), Paris. Herbier, L', M. (1979), La tête qui tourne, Paris. Herz, R. (2013), Marcel Duchamp, le mystère de Munich, Munich. Jansen, B. (1996), Duchamp in de Jura, een uitstapje in het land van de vierde dimensie, in: 69 Metropolis M, 17, 3, 34-39. Marcadé, B. (2007), Marcel Duchamp, La vie á crédit, Paris. Muther, R. (2007), Leonardo da Vinci, The Langham series of art Monographs, London. Naumann, F. (2002), The Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins, in: cat. Latin American Auction Sotheby' s, New York 30 may 2002, lot 15. Nesbit, M. and N. Sawelson-Gorse (1995), Concept of Nothing, New Notes by Marcel Duchamp and Walter Arensberg, in: Buskirk M./Nixon M. (ed.), The Duchamp Effext, Cambridge (Mass.), 131-175. Proust, M. (1999), À la recherche du temps perdu, Gallimard.

Schouten, H. (2011), Marie Bonaparte, 1882 – 1962, Amsterdam. Schwarz, A. (2000), The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, Londen/New York. exh. cat. (1962), Dylaby, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. exh. cat. (1973), K. McShine and A. d'Harnoncourt (ed.), Marcel Duchamp, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art New York. exh. cat. (1983), Tabu Dada Jean Crotti & Suzanne Duchamp 1915-1922, Kunsthalle Bern. exh. cat. (1987), Colecciòn Sonnabend, centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. exh.cat. (1999), Princesse X, galerie de l'atelier Brancusi, centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. exh. cat. (2000), Brancusi & Duchamp, centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

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Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4(3):287–307, 2003 What Does a Man Want? Reflections on “Surrealism: Desire Unbound”* Danielle Knafo, Ph.D. This paper is a critical review of the exhibition “Surrealism: Desire Unbound” at the Tate and Metropolitan Museums of Art. The author argues that the majority of the art represents a variety of perverse solutions to male gender anxiety, solutions that most often take the form of viewing the female body as a fetish object or as an object for sadistic drives. She interprets such aggression toward females as being a consequence of the era in which these works were created: Europe between two world wars. Female selfrepresentation is juxtaposed with male-generated art and demonstrates how women artists reclaimed their gaze and desire.

Who better than Venus, goddess of love, to welcome us as we enter the labyrinthine exhibition “Surrealism: Desire Unbound”? It is no coincidence that the show opens with a wellknown sculpture of a woman, a mutilated woman whose body has been party destroyed (she is armless). Salvador Dali’s rendition of the Venus de Milo sculpture has drawers built into her body and head. Knobs are fur lined, suggesting soft sexuality. 288 Danielle Knafo What will we find if we open the drawers?

What lies inside the female body and mind? This piece is an apt one to open the exhibition, in as much as the large majority of its artwork has been created by heterosexual men and is purportedly about male desire. The major subject matter is women. Women’s bodies inspired both awe and fear in these artists, a desire simultaneously sublime and transgressive. Women are deified, on one hand, and depicted as damaged and compartmentalized, on the other. They are inspiration, Eros, love. Yet the closed drawers leading to the inner world of Dali’s sculpted woman remain a mystery that obsessed surrealist artists for decades. The remainder of the exhibition consists of twelve rooms. Let us think of each of these rooms as the fantasies these artists projected onto Venus’s inner contents. Whereas Freud regarded the central question that remained unanswered to be “What does a woman want?” (cited in Jones, 1953, p. 421), the art in this exhibition, in my view, can be considered as attempts at answering the question implicit in its title: What does a man want? The works in the exhibit do not represent “desire unbound,” as the title suggests. Rather, the desire expressed is extremely bound, as are the many images of women’s bodies. Hans Bellmer’s Store in a Cool Place, for example, is unnerving not only because of its title but also because of its depiction of a woman’s back (his wife’s) literally tied up with string in a fetal position. The word desire conjures up images of love and intimacy. But there are no such images in this show. Instead, there are copious portrayals of people—mostly women—stripped of their humanity, identity, and sense of belonging, all portrayals representing a complicated projection of male anxiety. In my opinion, the exhibition is about male perversion, what Robert Stoller (1986) called “the erotic form of hatred.” In it, we become witness to infinite aesthetic solutions for problems of male gender identity, an identity that was seriously threatened in a specific time and place. It is no accident that the time of Europe between two world wars coincides precisely with the years during which surrealism thrived. This exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was an adaptation of a larger show organized at the 147

Tate Modern What Does a Man Want? 289 in London. William Lieberman and Anne Strauss, the Met’s organizers, put together a show smaller than that at the Tate, yet it remained quite large. It was a wonderful introduction to and overview of the surrealist movement, including over 300 works of painting, sculpture, photography, books, papers, and objects. The art spanned the 1920s to the late 1950s and included the work of well-known artists, lesser known artists, artists associated with surrealism, and those who never considered themselves surrealists. My discussion here is limited to the general themes and mood of the exhibition, especially as they relate to questions of gender, sexuality, and desire. Although most of the exhibition’s artworks were made by men, there was a sizable representation of women’s works as well. Both men and women artists portrayed the female body; therefore, my interest is in the differences in the two perspectives. It was not until the late 1920s and early 1930s that desire— specifically erotic desire—became a central focus for the surrealists. It is probably no coincidence that this new focus coincided with Salvador Dali’s entry into the surrealist fold. Dali’s daring, exhibitionistic, taboo-breaking f launting of his anal aggression, oral obsessions, and multiple fetishes “tested the limits of even the surrealists’ broadmindedness” (Mundy, 2001, p. 11). Dali’s work assumed a central place in this exhibition.

With fecal penises (Anthropomorphic Bread—Catalonian Bread) and fetishized shoes (Scatological Object Functioning Symbolically) he paved the way for other surrealist artists to reveal their eroticism without guilt. Such revelations went so far as to join love and sex, eroticism and perversion. Whereas many surrealists referred to themselves as leaders of a revolutionary movement aimed at creating a new social order, Dali wrote that “perversion and vice were the most revolutionary forms of thought and activity” (p. 35). Surrealism, because of its emphasis on deeper layers of consciousness, promised the possibility of more complex, multidimensional attitudes toward women than had hitherto been displayed. The truth is that the surrealists’ relationship to women was a highly ambivalent one. Jindrich Styrský’s penises sprouting from the ground or a skeleton, as well as Dali’s countless images of males and phallic symbols on crutches, 290 Danielle Knafo amply illustrate the surrealist view that masculinity was crippled, if not already dead. Breton claimed that “the time has come to valorize women’s ideas at the expense of men’s whose bankruptcy has achieved a tumultuous climax” (Wilson, 1997, p. 135). Indeed, surrealist men believed that women embodied the irrational, the primitive, the unconscious, and the visionary, all qualities they found admirable and preferable to men’s f lawed ways of thinking and being.

Envy of females was, in fact, visible in quite a few works in the exhibit. Max Ernst’s Pieta or Revolution by Night shows a statuesque, grown boy in the arms of a kneeling man (his father), who is wearing a bowler hat. Rather than the usual figure of the Virgin Mary with Christ in her arms, Ernst reveals a negative oedipal, or feminine attitude toward the authoritative father figure. Man Ray’s photographs of Marcel Duchamp’s famed female alter ego, Rrose Selavy, depict the artist wearing a fur neckpiece and a hat covering his eyebrows. The literal pun carried in her name, “Eros c’est la vie” [Eros is life], echoes the centrality of libido in both Freudian theory and surrealism. Pierre Molinier, known for his selfportrait photographs in women’s lingerie, demonstrates unmistakable envy of the feminine position. A penis is nowhere to be found in photographs in which he is completely shaved, made up, masked, or wearing corsets, stockings, and stiletto heels (sometimes with an attached dildo). At the same time that women were envied and revered, feminine qualities were commonly associated with insanity, sexuality, 148

otherness, and, in Bataille’s (1929) theory of the informé, chaotic baseness. Woman’s beauty was idealized, yet women were treated essentially as objects expected to serve as inspiration for male genius and to allow manipulation of their bodies for aesthetic purposes and male desire. Man Ray’s picture of Duchamp as Rrose reappears on bottles of “Belle Haleine [Beautiful Breath]: Eau de Voilette,” emphasizing women’s value as a commodity. Most noteworthy are the female nudes, a subject that pervaded surrealist imagery in this exhibition. Women were invariably depicted as deformed (Picasso), dismembered (Bellmer), dismantled (Duchamp), dehumanized (Giacometti), What Does a Man Want? 291 and anonymous (Dali). A woman’s torso frequently stood by itself, faceless and often headless (Magritte, Man Ray). Ernst created a piece called Femme 100 Têtes (woman with a hundred heads which, when read out loud in French, sounds like woman with no head). The French proverb, Femme sans tête tout en est bon [A headless woman is all to the good], is relevant here (Wilson, 1997, p. 153 n39). It is not difficult to understand feminist critics, beginning with de Beauvoir (1949), who objected to the sole role of women as sex/love objects and labeled the surrealist movement patriarchal and misogynist (Kuenzil, 1990). In the exhibit, Duchamp, champion of Dada, the antiart movement that eventually transformed into surrealism, along with Man Ray and Francis Picabia, starts off the female dehumanization in room #2 with sexual mechanomorphic imagery. Objects, including an egg beater and a coffee grinder, are meant to represent surrogates for the human body. In Duchamp’s pivotal painting, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, many bachelors are projected for one bride, yet consummation appears elusive. Duchamp’s bride is a machine, the key element in modern life and one that encodes anxieties of threatened masculinity (Jones, 1998). He comments, “Basically the bride is a motor . . . timid power.” Duchamp’s own desire is understood as repetitive, solitary physical forces, mechanical pushes and pulls with no apparent spiritual value. Breton hailed the painting as innovative in its depiction of Eros. Paradoxically, in Duchamp’s notes, contained in his Green Box displayed in a glass encasement in the center of the room, he mentions female superiority, a popular view in surrealist writings (Mundy, 2001, p.

28). Duchamp’s Green Box is one of many boxes in this exhibit. There are even boxes within boxes. On one level, boxes are symbolically related to the female, her genitals and interior space. On another level, boxes may be understood as Bion’s container (1963), in this case a container for frightening or malignant desires. Like some surrealist images of women in cages (e.g., Man Ray, Mannequin), the boxes can be thought of as prisons in which women are kept.

Some of Bellmer’s photographs show his dolls/women encased in boxes that 292 Danielle Knafo resemble coffins (see Figure 1). Women are loved, contained, safe from aggression, yet limited in freedom. One of the greatest creators of boxes, reclusive American artist Joseph Cornell, has a room (box) of his own in which to display them. Cornell boxed his women and idealized them from afar. Objects associated with the adored women are sometimes placed in vials and fitted into intricate wooden chests—fetishes that allow him to possess the glamour through which beautiful women exert power over men.

Courtesans and legendary stars, like Greta Garbo and Hedy Lamar, are framed and contained, forever maintaining their status as fantasy figures in lovely precious boxes. What is it that surrealists found so threatening in women that they had to box them in? Giacometti, an artist who temporarily aligned with the surrealists, has several sculptures in room #8 Figure 1. Hans Bellmer. The Doll (La Poupée), ca. 1934. Ford Motor Company Collection//Metropolitan 149

Museum of Art. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. What Does a Man Want?

293 that provide some clues. His compellingly violent sculpture, Woman with Her Throat Cut, shows a creature that is part woman, part crustacean, part reptile, and part insect. Illustrating Bataille’s theory of base materialism, the sculpture lies on the f loor without a base, as was intended by the artist. This woman evidently has been violated and now lies dead, her throat slit. The many-fanged shapes that constitute her body recall the vagina dentata (vagina with teeth), the feared female genital. (The exhibit has other images of the vagina dentata: Masson’s Gradiva as well as works by Picasso, Bourgeois, and Maria.) Giacometti’s sculpture Woman Holding a Void seems also to refer to woman’s genitalia, the milieu interieur, as threatening and dangerous. The emptiness between the woman’s hands represents an upward displacement from the dark lower void between her legs.

Although the woman possesses a face, her eyes are blank and stare with a sightless gaze. A small room (room #5) devoted to surrealist photography furthers our understanding of surrealist fear and desire. All but one or two of the photographs exhibited involve close-up, cropped, or distorted parts of a woman’s anatomy. The photographic techniques employed by artists like Man Ray, JacquesAndré Boiffard, Raoul Ubac, Maurice Tabard, and Hans Bellmer to crop the female body result, not coincidentally, in the body’s resemblance to a male phallus.

Rosalind Krauss (1985) has convincingly argued that surrealist manipulation of the female body is best understood as a visual and aesthetic manifestation of male perversion. Freud (1927) argued that the nude female body, with its lack of penis, evokes in male spectators a fear of castration—a fear that can be allayed by a fetish. The female nudes in this exhibit, cut to phallic form, may be seen as representing the artistic solution to the surrealists’ castration anxiety: the reinscription of the phallus on or as the female body that was originally found to lack it. This genital reassurance for a woman’s absent penis is not entirely successful, however; the phallus, as depicted, is detached from the body, designating a castrated penis in its own right.

Nonetheless, on an unconscious level, the photographs allude to both male and female genitalia and thus collapse the 294 Danielle Knafo difference between the sexes. Good examples are Man Ray’s Anatomies, in which a cropped shot of a woman’s neck and chin, as she raises her head upward, looks like a giant, erect penis; and Minotaur, a photograph that resembles a male animal body until one gets a closer view, at which time breasts become apparent. The mysterious identities of the numerous anonymous women in surrealist art, I believe, lead ultimately to the Mother. The cut-up pieces of the female body recall Melanie Klein’s (1946) theory, which postulates the infant’s splitting of the maternal representation and relating to its parts (e.g., the breast) rather than to the whole person. Later theorists (e.g., Bach, 1994) have claimed that fixation at this stage explains male adult perverse relationships in which women are related to solely in terms of their body parts, which are used exclusively for sexual satisfaction. Males and females alike were once part of their mothers’ bodies. Yet, in order to develop a male gender identity, boys must first separate from the mother’s body and from an internal identification with her. The inability of some men to complete this task is the major promoter of perversion. Stoller (1975) wrote of the triad of hostility that emerges in men who cannot completely differentiate their identity from that of the mother: rage at relinquishing early bliss and identification with her; fear of not succeeding in escaping her orbit; and revenge for having placed them in this predicament. The mother’s body is the most loved and hated of all, and she is without question the mysterious, faceless woman 150

in surrealist art. The many phallic women in the show are meant to deny castration and difference between the sexes as well as to re-create symbiosis with the mother—even to become the mother. Dali expressed these sentiments in a passage he wrote about Gala, his wife/muse/ mother: “Gala understood me. She adopted me. I became her newborn, her child. . . . She assumed the power of being my protectress, my divine mother, my queen” (Gille, 2001, p.

149). It has been said that while surrealism exalted la femme, the surrealists did not equally revere les femmes. One might add that, although surrealist artists were constantly looking at women, they did not actually see them. An acknowledged example is Magritte’s Je ne vois pas [la femme] cachée dans la forét, a collage found in a What Does a Man Want? 295 glass container in room #7. In it, photographs of 16 male surrealist artists with eyes closed surround a painting of a nude woman. The photographs of clothed, real men with eyes shut contrast sharply with the naked fantasy woman, a painted image. On one level, this work was meant to emphasize the surrealists’ imaginative power to see beyond the nude (unsight = insight). Indeed, Breton said, “The eye must ref lect what is not” (Balakian, 1959, p. 170). Nevertheless, the woman’s vulnerability and exposure—her (in)visibility—creates considerable tension. Spector (1997) insightfully refers to this picture as a symbolic gang bang. In the same glass container, we find a 1934 monograph by Breton titled Qu’est-ce-que c’est le Surrealism? [What Is Surrealism?]

It is of utmost significance that Breton chose Magritte’s painting Le Viol (The Rape) as an answer to this defining question. Breasts substitute for eyes, and pubic hair replaces a mouth in an attempt to conf late the distinction between body and mind, reason and sexuality, human and animal, high and low. This painting clearly demonstrates the manner in which the male gaze is considered sufficient to rape and violate a woman. The eye, as a matter of fact, is a recurrent image in surrealist art. The surrealists were indebted to the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan, both of whom connected the visual and the sexual. For Freud (1919), blindness was a symbolic equivalent for castration (p. 231). Un Chien Andalou, a film by Bunuel and Dali, opens with the celebrated scene of a woman’s eyeball being sliced by a razor. George Bataille (1928) wrote The Story of the Eye, a book about voyeurism, castration, and death, whose pornographic illustrations by Bellmer were on view in room #9. Bellmer’s drawing, Eye Vulva, shows an eye peeking out of a woman’s vulva. In Styrský’s collage, eight enormous eyes watch a couple during intercourse (see Figure 2). The abundance of eyes in the exhibition reveals how the act of looking (and spectatorship) is linked with anxiety, the voyeuristic roots of desire, and the attempt to establish identity: an I (eye). The walls of room #7 are covered with glass encasements of images, many of them women’s eyes, as well as texts. There is a close-up of one eye belonging to Lee Miller, Man Ray’s assistant and lover. There are the eyes of Najda, the subject of Breton’s 296 Danielle Knafo well-known novel by the same name, a mentally unstable woman he met in the street and with whom he had had a brief, intense affair. The eyes of Gala, wife of Paul Eluard and, later, of Salvador Dali, are present repeatedly. Disembodied eyes and faceless bodies surround us. In surrealism, a whole woman is hard to find. Figure 2. Jindrich Styrský. Collage #5. From series “Emile Comes to Me in a Dream.” 8¼" × 7" (20.9 cm × 17.7 cm).

Courtesy Centro Ordóñez-Falcon de Fotographía, San Sebastián, Spain, and Ubu Gallery, New York.

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