6.

Rrose Sélavy

In New York, Duchamp meets Man Ray. Between them they create a second identity for Duchamp and call her Rrose Sélavy. Dada makes its presence felt in Paris as the precursor to surrealism in a series of controversial theatrical events; the first exhibition in Paris by Max Ernst is proposed.

January 1920 saw the arrival in Paris of the long-awaited Tristan Tzara, and thus of Dada, surrealism’s bad sister (or brother) and precursor. Breton, Aragon, Éluard and Soupault all gathered in Apollinaire’s old friend Picabia’s apartment to meet the maestro of Dada, where to their astonishment they found a nervous man who spoke broken, hesitant French. His belongings seemed to consist of a typewriter. He soon got over his reticence, however. Before the end of the month he was planning Dada exhibitions, Paul Éluard had been requisitioned to set up a Dada evening later in the year and the Littérature group was being galvanized into action. Proposals included an exhibition of works by Dada member Hans Arp’s friend Max Ernst. By spring Breton was already planning a show of Ernst’s works, which would take place in May 1921.

By spring Dadaist propaganda was already ubiquitously in print; the seventh issue of Dada, retitled Dadaphone, included a range of international contributions. Breton was putting together a dossier of Dada publications collected from all over Europe. They included Die Schammade, a Dadaist magazine published in Cologne by Max Ernst, which had first drawn Breton’s attention to the artist. Cocteau was already working on his own ‘merrily anti-Dada’ broadsheet, Le Coq. He had enlisted the help of his latest flame, dark-haired, sultry seventeen-year-old Raymond Radiguet, who was writing publicity articles on Satie and Les Six for Spectacle-concert; Radiguet had also somehow established a rapport with Breton’s group of poets, despite not really liking their poetry. The first issue of Le Coq was due to appear in May (there would be four issues in total, the latter two called Le Coq parisien). This was Cocteau’s first project with Radiguet, and together they set out to distinguish themselves from Breton and the Dadaists. ‘I am the very model of an anti-Dadaist,’ Cocteau was boasting by the end of the year. In February he had produced his ballet Le Bœuf sur le toit, amended from its originally intended carnival setting to reflect the more topical theme of Prohibition. The 18th Amendment had come into effect in America on 17 January and Cocteau’s ballet was now set in a bar.

Le Bœuf sur le toit was nothing if not another sorte de sur-réalisme, surely comparable with Parade. The cast (of whom three were played by clowns from the Medrano Circus) moved about in a dreamlike trance, out of step with the music (by Francis Poulenc), the props (bottles, glasses, cigarettes, chalk) piled on their heads. In essence, the show was a farce. A redhead, seduced by a black boxer, walks away on her hands, whereupon a red-faced, gold-toothed bookie punches the boxer. A giant policeman looks in to check the premises for alcohol. Finding ‘ONLY MILK DRUNK HERE’ (a placard hastily produced by the barman), he performs a little celebratory dance, before being decapitated by a fan operated by the barman. The redhead performs a Salome-style dance. When the policeman, now headless, attempts to stagger to his feet he is dragged offstage by the barman. The end. Surrealist? Yes, in that it was irreverent, irrational and confounded audience expectations. The programme also included an overture and Cocardes by Poulenc, a foxtrot by Georges Auric, a musical intermission entitled ‘American Bar’ and three piano pieces by Satie. The audience completely missed the joke about the American bar – crowding into it in the hope of interval drinks, they found no alcohol, only a jazz-playing trio – but the show was a success and continued to attract audiences. The Mercure’s reviewer (reputedly Paris’s toughest) called it ‘a choppy, voluptuous fantasy with real charm’ – further provocation, if any were needed, for Breton and his friends. The spring issue of Littérature included a piece entitled ‘23 Manifestes Dada’, to which reactions were generally hostile. In the still all-pervasive climate of fervent patriotism Dadaism was regarded as highly suspect – grist to the Dadaists’ mill, since they were hardly courting approval.

A further precursor to surrealist activities, the first Dada event in Paris took place in March at the Palais des Fêtes, an unassuming venue between two cinemas in the rue Saint-Martin, a commercial street of jewellers, watchmakers, wig merchants and cosmetic dealers; these made up a significant portion of the audience, since top of the bill, as announced in L’Intransigeant, was a lecture by André Salmon entitled La Crise du change (‘Exchange Crisis’). As it emerged that the Dadaist agenda had nothing to do with currency exchange, the local businessmen began to file out, leaving only those who had already heard about Dada and come to see Tristan Tzara. Events included the unveiling of a canvas by Picabia which bore simply the acronym L.H.O.O.Q. (after Duchamp’s retouched Mona Lisa), which – once the audience got the point – provoked jeers. There followed poems by Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars and Pierre Reverdy, poet and editor of Nord-Sud magazine, read by specially appointed professional actors and, somewhat bafflingly, Cocteau, who had presumably invited himself. The final item was delivered by Tzara, his words drowned out by Breton and Aragon, who stood in the wings ringing bells. Tumult ensued, the audience screaming, ‘Back to Zurich!’ ‘To the gallows!’

On Saturday 27 March, at the Théâtre de la Maison de l’œuvre, Paul Éluard made his stage debut – dressed as a woman. He and Gala played two beggarwomen in S’il vous plaît (If You Please), a play by Breton and Soupault (they had considered and discarded the idea of ending it with a suicide). Gala’s lines consisted of, ‘Avez-vous quelquefois, monsieur, quand vient le soir,/Pris garde à la pauvresse errant sur le trottoir?’ (‘Do you sometimes, sir, when evening comes/To look out for the poor woman straying on the pavement?’). Her acting skills must have been limited, since she was called for only one performance and consigned to watch subsequent ones from the wings. In the final act, Éluard appeared again. This time, disguised as a village idiot wrapped in a paper bag, he played Pipi in La Première Aventure céléste de Monsieur Antipyrine (The First Celestial Adventure of Mr Benzedrine) by Tristan Tzara. In this role he had to yell, ‘Zoumbai!’ four times before reciting a text written by Tzara: ‘Amertume sans église allons allons charbon chameau/synthesise amertume sur l’église isissise les rideaux dodododo’ (untranslatable nonsense, in other words). Two months later on 26 May, the second Dadaist performance took place, this time in a more salubrious venue, the large, plush Salle Gaveau in the rue la Boétie, usually reserved for classical concerts. Breton, in glasses and a stiff collar and sandwiched between two boards bearing a large bull’s eye, read from a manifesto: ‘Before you can love something, you have to have SEEN and HEARD it for a LONG TIME heap of idiots’, signed by Picabia. Was this a swipe at the belief that well-behaved bourgeois children should learn to be seen and not heard?

Performers again included Éluard, who this time had somehow been talked into appearing in a cylindre de Bristol (engine cylinder). Soupault, blacked up, held aloft a large balloon bearing the name Cocteau, which he burst with his heel. A cardboard cone bouncing on a sea of balloons was labelled ‘sexe of Dada’. The high point of the evening was – inevitably – another incomprehensible piece by Tzara, Vaseline symphonique. The audience, by this time incensed, began chanting La Madelon. Some disappeared before the interval. For those who stayed, the ordeal continued. Éluard came on yet again, this time in a blond wig and yellow lace dress, to play the part of the Sewing Machine opposite Soupault, playing the Umbrella, in Vous m’oublierez (You Will Forget Me), another piece by Breton and Soupault. The reference to Lautréamont’s chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table went straight over the audience’s head. More booing and jeering ensued and Soupault was hit in the face by something being hurled through the air … and so it went on. Already, to everyone except Tzara, it was all becoming somewhat trying. ‘If one must speak of Dada, then one must speak of Dada,’ Éluard was heard to long-sufferingly remark. But for how long? The problem with Dada was that, ultimately, the delivery of utter nonsense was bound to become limiting and expendable. For its spirit to survive, it needed to develop into something with more cultural, intellectual and artistic heft – which was where (as he himself considered) Breton came in.

Almost from the start the Parisian poets of Breton’s circle were ambivalent about Dada, partly, perhaps, because it was not their own invention. Breton was already frustrated with its limitations when, that June, while strolling in the Luxembourg Gardens, he met a girl named Simone Kahn. Romantically interesting to him, she also seemed clever, independent and more intellectually sympathetic than any woman he had ever met. At their very first meeting she told him she was anti-Dada, which by now (a mere six months after Tzara’s arrival) seemed to him understandable. Simone, whom he would later marry, was influential in Breton’s shift of direction away from Dada, though he had not yet formulated anything more substantial to take its place. Invited by the Nouvelle Revue française to write a piece, Breton sent an article entitled ‘Pour Dada’ (‘For/In Support of Dada’). Some began calling him a hypocrite. However, in ‘Pour Dada’ he aired his disagreements with hard-liners such as Tzara, revealing his own growing frustrations with the movement and taking the opportunity to clarify his own position and convictions. Breton’s sympathies were fundamentally literary and philosophical rather than political; he still wanted, above all, to be taken seriously as an intellectual. ‘When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?’ he asked his readers – the question that ultimately underpinned the as yet unformulated Surrealist Manifesto.

At the same time it was starting to seem as if everyone in the group just wanted to leave Dada’s wilder shores. Soupault had married in late 1918, Aragon had successfully resumed his medical studies, and even Éluard and Gala had deserted, albeit temporarily; they were on their way to Monte Carlo, where they blithely gambled away a small fortune before the Grindel parents called them to order, and after which they continued their travels. In Tunisia, unable to slough off the spirit of Dadaist pointlessness altogether, they bought a chameleon, which back in Paris they managed to palm off on a friend, Jean Paulhan, who collected ‘poetic curiosities’.

Even Tzara had followed convention by leaving Paris for the summer. As far as Breton was concerned, Dada’s potential in the city now seemed somewhat precarious. One problem was that the French capital was fundamentally unshockable. A succès de scandale was still a success, and audiences quickly grew weary of scandales that simply repeated themselves. By the same token, an article by Breton in the Nouvelle Revue française reminding readers of Dada’s status as an intellectual idea was hardly guaranteed to cement the movement’s anarchist credentials. No, to make an impact in Paris, Dada itself required some kind of transformation. As Max Ernst later pointed out, the whole point of Dada was that it was meant to be a bomb, not a ripple: ‘a “stage”, as they call it, in “the history of art” [was] exactly the opposite of what Dada was looking for.’ Asked several decades later to write about it, Ernst said, ‘(Very sharply): I am not a historian!’ According to him, the work generated by the Dadist impulse consisted of ‘objects, collages, through which we expressed our disgust, our indignation, our revolt’ – which is perhaps the best way of putting the distinction between Dada (disgusted, indignant, outraged – like a bomb) and surrealism, which – in theory, at least – was both aesthetically and intellectually more nuanced (searching, exploratory, receptive to the marvellous; improvisational, like the impulses of jazz).

When he returned to Paris in October Breton moved into the Soupaults’ apartment on the Île Saint-Louis and began to look around for new ways of earning a living. Tzara appeared to have abandoned him, though Breton knew he was back in town. Apparently deserted by everyone, Breton took on a series of small jobs, including reading to the partially sighted owner of a fashion house who introduced him to the couturier Jacques Doucet, who, having sold his collection of ancien régime art (for 13 million francs), was now collecting modern art, rare books and literary manuscripts. Doucet hired Breton to catalogue his literary acquisitions, including first editions, manuscripts, correspondence and periodicals by those Doucet considered to be at the cutting edge of modernity. The papers included some of Cocteau’s, grouped with those of Breton and his bande, which merely amused Cocteau. ‘The Dadaists know … I am at the extreme Right … so close to the extreme Left, with which I close that circle, that people confuse one of us with the other.’ In any case, he added, such comparisons were meaningless. ‘Critics always compare, the incomparable is outside their ken.’

Still in New York, Duchamp was being pulled further into the American art scene. Katherine Dreier had decided to establish a museum to house and exhibit modern art and was hoping he would help her. When he visited her to discuss the idea he took along a friend, Man Ray, in those days still a struggling young painter. When they met at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery they had struck up an instant rapport; Man Ray had immediately seen the point of Duchamp’s readymades and even come up with some of his own. He suggested a name for the new museum, Société anonyme; he assumed it meant ‘anonymous society’. In fact, the French expression means ‘public limited company’ or ‘corporation’, but Dreier liked it as a name, too, so they used it anyway. At 19 East 47th Street they rented a suite and set about creating a substantial venue for the exhibition of contemporary art in New York. Duchamp decorated the rooms and made a banner for the outside of the building, pointing out that, when they judged the works within and if they wanted modern art to come into its own, Americans should be encouraged to refer to their ‘far-famed sense of humour’ rather than listening to the critics. He and Man Ray had already begun working collaboratively, after Man Ray visited Duchamp’s studio one day while he was out of town and found La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even)), the work Duchamp had begun in Paris but which was still uncompleted, left beside an open window and covered in dust. Man Ray was fascinated by the coating of dust and the patterns it made on the glass; this time, Duchamp had managed to make art without even being in the room. When he came back the two of them set up a camera and went out for an hour, leaving the lens open, the glass illuminated by a naked bulb overhead. As Man Ray put it, ‘While the bride lay on her face decked out in her bridal finery of dust and debris, I exposed her to my sixteen-candle camera.’

Once Man Ray had taken the photograph, Duchamp ‘fixed’ the dust with varnish until what remained resembled a lunar landscape, then had the glass panel coated with silver at the lower-right section. He spent the next few months crazing the silver surface by scratching it with a razor, which Man Ray thought gave the work the appearance of an aerial view. Duchamp renamed it Élevage de poussière (Raising Dust).

For their next collaborative work, Duchamp helped Man Ray create his first optical machine, Rotary Glass Panel (Precision Object), a motor-driven construction made of three layers of glass propellers mounted on a shaft and driven by an electric motor. Each pair of propellers was painted with parallel lines, creating the illusion of a spiral. When they set it in motion it went so fast that the electric belt connecting the propellers snapped, scattering splinters of glass across the studio. The work was destroyed. However, the process of filming The Large Glass and then inventing Rotary Glass Panel had triggered something in Duchamp’s imagination. Ever intrigued by the problem of creating motion, he had also always been fascinated by the whole notion of motion pictures. As he watched Man Ray with his camera, Duchamp had been reflecting on the whole process of filming and being filmed. When Katherine Dreier bought him a hand-held movie camera (one of the first) he and Man Ray tried using it to make a three-dimensional film in which Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven shaves her pubic hair. Pleased with the results, Man Ray rented a second movie camera and found a mechanic to help them mount it alongside Duchamp’s so as to have two lenses filming in tandem. This, however, was an idea that came to nothing, since when they tried to develop the film the two reels stuck together and were ruined. But somehow it had all added up to another idea, and Duchamp was soon posing for portrait photographs – in drag.

Rrose Sélavy was the joint invention of Duchamp and Man Ray, and the latter photographed Duchamp as Rrose, sultry in fur collar and low-brimmed art deco-style hat, hands adorned with large rings, then again, more provocatively, in a hat heavy with black feathers, a velvet coat with a frilled collar and two strings of pearls. Rrose was dusky, decadent, a bit sluttish, undeniably seductive and obviously French. Asked how he had chosen the name, Duchamp said ‘Rose’ was just a corny, popular French girl’s name; Sélavy was c’est la vie (‘that’s life’). That winter of 1920 (the year, incidentally, Coco Chanel launched No. 5) Duchamp invented a readymade for Rrose: a bottle of Rigaud perfume, the label amended to read Belle Haleine – Eau de Voilette; and another, FRESH WIDOW COPYRIGHT ROSE SÉLAVY 1920, which consisted of a miniature French window, all eight panes covered in black leather. How both men felt about photographing her can only be imagined. For the time being, nobody saw the photographs. Also that year Man Ray took some conventional portrait photographs of Duchamp in which his forehead and neck are lit while the lower half of his face is in shadow. He poses without expression; by comparison with Rrose, he looks small-boned, slightly delicate, expressionless. By contrast, the photographs of Rrose are taken full face and are starkly lit, creating the impression that her face has been caked in white powder. Somehow the whole face seems larger, with prominent nose, wide mouth, strong jaw; the expression is haughtily provocative. If the genius of Man Ray was that he seemed capable in photography of creating a complete facial transformation, as far as Duchamp was concerned, the point of Rrose Sélavy was ‘not to change my identity, but to have two identities’. (It was, after all, the year American women gained a new social identity, having been given the right to vote; in the UK suffrage was granted in 1918, in France not until 1945).

In December audiences at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées witnessed the first concerted attack by Breton on Cocteau. On the 21st the Ballets Russes performed a revival of Parade. The cultural climate had changed since the ballet was first performed in 1917; this time, the reception was rapturous. On the first preview night Diaghilev persuaded Picasso and Satie to show the public they had forgotten their differences with Cocteau; the three of them appeared in a box and took a bow together. On the night of the second invited preview there was mayhem when the performance was disrupted by Breton, Tzara and friends. Somehow, they had infiltrated the invited audience and bobbed up and down in their seats, yelling, ‘Vive Dada!’ (Long live Dada!). Tzara vented his fury in his high-pitched voice at those who had sent the youth of his generation to their deaths in the war. No one else could see or hear properly, including the critics, who gave up trying to write proper reviews. In one sense the protest backfired, since no sooner was it established than Dada already seemed to be the new chic; audiences began to arrive at the theatre with eggs and tomatoes to hurl onstage. Something had to change – surely this same (Dadaist) bomb could not continue to be tediously dropped, again and again. However, Tzara had not lost faith; his ambition now was to convert more celebrated artists to the Dadaist cause. First choice was Picasso, although for the time being his alliance with Diaghilev made him an unlikely prospect. Next was Duchamp, since his reputation in Paris seemed only to have increased with his absence. Tzara approached him via his sister Suzanne, who wrote to him in New York to tell him Tzara was organizing a Dada Salon at the Galerie Montaigne and would Duchamp consider submitting something? He declined. He was working on a new ‘ “assisted” readymade’, or trompe l’œil sculpture, a birdcage containing marble ‘sugar lumps’, two small marble dishes, a thermometer and a piece of cuttlebone entitled Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy?