Modernist primitivism in 1933: Brassaï's "involuntary sculptures" in Minotaure

Modernism - Modernity

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 127-140

  Conley, Katharine ^a  

^a DARTMOUTH COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149480598     PISSN: 10716068     EISSN: 10806601     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/mod.2003.0005     Document Type: Review

References (43)

1. These lines from Brunius, originally published in Photographie, are cited in Edouard Jaguer, Les Mystères de la chambre noire (Paris: Flammarion, 1982) 4. All translations from the French are my own, unless indicated otherwise.
2. T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," The Norton Anthology of English Literature, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 2199,
3. cited in Ronald Bush, "The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic Thinking/Literary Politics," in Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 23.
4. Bush, "The Presence of the Past," 37, 40.
5. Kirk Varnedoe, "Gauguin," in "Primitivism" in 20th-Century Art, Vol. I., ed. William Rubin (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 180.
6. Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), xvii. Henceforth abbreviated as PIMA.
7. William Rubin, "Primitivism" in 20th-Century Art I., ed. William Rubin (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 5.
8. In "Le Message Automatique," his contribution to number 3-4, for example, André Breton reveals the extent of his own editorial control by suggesting that he himself selected Salvador Dalí's article on Art Nouveau architecture (for which Brassaï's "sculptures" serve as "preface") because it was a subtle accompaniment to his own. See André Breton, "Le Message Automatique," Minotaure 3-4 (1933): 60. Henceforth abbreviated as "LMA."
9. Clio Mitchell, "Minotaure. A Surrealist State of Mind," Apollo 127.312 (February 1988): 127.
10. See also Jean Jamin, "De l'humaine condition de « Minotaure»," in Regards sur Minotaure (Genève: Musée d'art et d'histoire, 1987), 83.
11. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 147. Henceforth abbreviated as POC.
12. Clifford explains that the French social science of "ethnology" with its particular "cultural predisposition" was different from social anthropology in England and from cultural anthropology in America (POC, 121). Mary Douglas emphasizes the differences between British and French anthropologists, specifying that, in the United Kingdom, the focus was much more on the laws of succession and economics whereas the French orientation was more on the arts. Mary Douglas, "Réflexions sur le renard pâle et deux anthropologies: à propos du surréalisme et de l'anthropologie française," L'Autre et le sacré, ed. C. W. Thompson (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1995) 199.
13. Thirty-two of these photographs were published in the 1932 volume Paris de nuit, which has recently been re-issued. See Maria Morris Hambourg, "Photography between the Wars," The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 45.4 (Spring 1988): 45.
14. Alain Sayag, "The Expression of Authenticity," in Brassaï: The Monograph eds. Alain Sayag and Annick Lionel-Marie (Boston: Little Brown - A Bullfinch Book, 2000), 14. Henceforth abbreviated as "TEOA."
15. Brassaï, "Du Mur des cavernes au mur d'usine," Minotaure 3-4 (1933), 6. Henceforth abbreviated as "DMDC."
16. Brassaï, Picasso and Company, transl. Francis Price (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1966), 12.
17. Bourgeois distinctions between high and low culture were abolished by surrealist journals, as Roger Cardinal notes: "Whether in the voluntarily austere format of the Révolution surréaliste, which parodies the solemnity of scientific publications, or in the luxurious format of Minotaure, rich in color plates, the surrealist journal has always had the audacity to everything that cultivated French taste would have rejected as obvious impurities" (see Roger Cardinal, "Les Arts Marginaux et l'esthétique surréaliste," in L'Autre et le sacré, ed. C. W. Thompson [Paris: L'Harmattan, 195], 55).
18. Jean-Luis Paudrat, "From Africa," transl. John Shepley, in "Primitivism" in 20th-Century Art I., ed. William Rubin (New York: the Museum of Modem Art, 1984), 163.
19. Georges-Henri Rivière, "Le Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro," Documents 1.1 (1929): 58.
20. Paudrat, "From Africa," 164.
21. Elza Adamowicz, "'Un Masque peut en masquer (ou démasquer) un autre': Le Masque et le surréalisme," in L'Autre et le sacré ed. C. W. Thompson (Paris: L'Harmattan, 195), 79.
22. Rubin, "Primitivism" in 20th-Century Art I., 32, 73.
23. Rubin, in turn, was accused by Thomas McEvilley of de-contextualising tribal art in his "Primitivism" in 20th-Century Art" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984 and in his catalogue. However, despite the problematic fact that the tribal pieces are not dated in the catalogue, Rubin and other contributors do make the distinction between "tribal" art and how it was used by Western artists who considered it "primitivist. " Rubin explains that "the tribal sculptor creating ritual objects for a cult had no consciousness whatever of aesthetic solutions" (see Rubin, "Primitivism" in 20th-Century Art, 28) while arguing for what he calls "affinities" between the goals of Western and tribal artists: to attempt to make visible an ivisible inferior force.
24. This is quoted in Sayag, "TEOA," 15.
25. Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism," in Reflections, transl. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), 179, 190.
26. André Breton, "La Beauté sera convulsive," Minotaure 5 (1934): 14.
27. This essay was later included in L'Amour fou, published in 1937 and translated as Mad Love, transl. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 5-19.
28. Breton first describes the significance of found objects for surrealism in Nadja, transl. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 51-55.
29. In Picasso and Company, Brassaï described the surrealist attraction to the Minotaur as to "the force which shatters the limits of the rational, flooding across its frontiers, tearing down the laws and offending the gods. They identified him with their own aspirations: constant and universal violence, absolute revolt, total defiance, unbridled liberty" (See Brassaï, Picasso and Company, 9).
30. The surrealists collected them in part because of their representations of the (at least) double nature of human beings, as Elza Adamowicz argues: "Putting into play surrealism's double aim, of integration and disintegration, of totalization and fragmentation, the mask, that equivocal space and figure of alterity, is the place of the appearance of the other within the same, of the apparition of the surreal in the heart of the real" (see Adamowicz, "Un Masque peut en masquer (ou démasquer) un autre," 91).
31. Michèle Richman, "Anthropology and Modernism in France: From Durkheim to the Collège de sociologie," in Modernist Anthropology, ed. Marc Manganaro (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 192.
32. Michel Leiris, "L'Oeil de l'ethnographe," Documents 2.7 (1930): 407.
33. See Jean Starobinski, "Face diurne et face nocturne," in Regards sur Minotaure, ed. Charles Goerg (Genève: Musée d'art et d'histoire, 1987), 30-41.
34. Critics have repeatedly commented on the fact that "one of the magazine's truly revolutionary contributions was the use of photography," not only within surrealism but in the art world as well: "from then on, it is an 'art' with as much legitimacy as sculpture or painting" (see Lauren Otis, "Surrealism in Switzerland," Art International [1988]: 90-92
35. and Hendel Teichner, "Chairs nocturnes, délices photographiques," in Regards sur Minotaure, ed. Charles Georg [Genève: Musée d'art et d'histoire, 1987], 200-21).
36. Dawn Ades, Dalí (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 62.
37. See also the proofs of these photographs annotated by Brassaï as having been made "in collaboration with Dalí," Brassaï. A Monograph, eds. Alain Sayag and Annick Lionel-Marie (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 134.
38. Rosalind Krauss, "Photography in the Service of Surrealism," in L'Amour Fou, eds. Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), 40.
39. Dalí, "De la beauté terrifiante," 70-73.
40. Thomas McEvilley, "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief: 'Primitivism' in 20th-Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984," Artforum 23.3 (1984): 59.
41. Annick Lionel-Marie, "Letting the eye be light," in Brassaï. The Monograph eds. Alain Sayag and Annick Lionel-Marie, 160.
42. Breton, Nadja, 19.
43. Frank Kermode, "Modernism, Postmodernism, and Explanation," in Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, eds. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 357-72. Henceforth abbreviated as "MPAE."