Police are on the lookout for this man, seen wandering around by the River Limmat wearing a cardboard tube and a dunce cap and gesticulating like a madman. He’s wanted for disturbing the peace and trying to destroy Art As We Know It.
The year was 1916. The man was Hugo Ball, a German poet and theatrical producer who’d been tagged a traitor for quitting the army because “men have been confused with machines”. His anarchist streak was a mile wide, but it wasn’t militant, merely revolutionary.
The costume was something he’d dreamed up with the Romanian painter Marcel Janco, his legs and torso swallowed by bright blue cardboard cylinders so that he’d “look like an obelisk”, a cape of gold cardboard lined with scarlet paper that he could flap, along with his grotesque mittens, like a pair of wings, and a tall, blue-and-white striped magician’s hat.
The place was the Spiegelgasse, a little street in Zurich where Lenin, ensconsed at No 14, was among the neighbours complaining about the din coming from No 1, the Cabaret Voltaire, at all hours of the night. He could barely hear himself think about killing the Tsar, and that was some noisy thinking! (James Joyce was also in Zurich at the time, writing “Ulysses”, though he appears to have been unharassed by the commotion, and may even have found additional inspiration in it.)
Below, Google Earth images of the scene of the crime. in the lower shot, the cabaret is in the centre with what looks like a rainbow carpet outside — just light through a prism, I’m sure, but fitting enough.
Lenin and Joyce had their own plans. Hugo Ball’s destructive scheme was dada.
Ball (1886-1927) had founded the Cabaret Voltaire with fellow poets — his future wife Emily Hennings (1885-1948), Tristan Tzara from Romania and Richard Huelsenbeck from Germany — the painters Janco and Arthur Segal from Romania, the Germans Hans Richter and Christian Schad, Dutchmen Otto and Adya van Rees, Alsatian Hans Arp and the Swiss painter and dancer Sophie Taeuber.
Most of them were expressionists for whom expressionism was no longer expressive enough. Some would soon follow Kandinsky toward pure abstraction. All had come to neutral Switzerland to stay clear of a blood-soaked world war.
Something had to be done about man’s habit of fighting, they felt. It was getting out of hand. But the only answer, they decided, was to shred the whole of civilisation and start all over again. They would issue a declaration, said Ball, “to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals”.
Since they were artists, society’s demolition would begin with art, and the wrecking ball would be “anti-art”. They would pull pomp from its pedestal and level the Louvre. Art would return to the innocence of its youth. It would grow anew in random acts of creation, straight from the subconscious, rid of self-consciousness. In a fever, Ball embraced the “total work of art” — gesamtkunstwerk: “A fusion, not merely of all art, but of all regenerative ideas. The background of colours, words and sounds must be brought out from the subconcious and given life, so that it engulfs everyday life and all its misery.”
The movement needed a name, and anti-intellectually, Tzara poked a paper knife into a French-German dictionary, so one story goes, and it came to rest on dada, the French word for “hobby horse”, the German for “goodbye” or “get off my back”, the Romanian for “absolutely right”. On this vehicle of affirmative farewells they would ride into man’s better future. See the rest.
The image resolution and my knowledge of wind instruments are unfortunately poor, but the ruined hull of a boat at the lower right is intriguing, as are the visages in the clouds. The smaller one reminds for all the world of JMW Turner’s “Sea Monster” (detail below).
The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation has “Saliva” at the moment, though it’s attributed to the collection of noted connoisseur Eugene Thaw of New Mexico, ever since a Sotheby’s auction in 1997. Jason Kaufman has an interesting 1994 interview with Thaw on his website.
Anne’s dirt-poor farmer parents sold her off at age 12 and she toiled for other folks until she escaped to the convent 16 years later. There she began experiencing mystical visions that came with massive headaches, as if a crown of thorns was in place. This continued after Napoleon’s kid brother, the King of Westphalia, closed the convent and she found herself doling out miracles of faith and health to her fellow downtrodden. In 1813 the stigmata that appeared on Anne’s hands and feet convinced an episcopal commission that she was indeed divine.
