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# Finding Contemporary Threads in the End of Dada
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/finding-contemporary-threads-in-the-end-of-dada/
- Published: 2014-09-04T11:02:39.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:00:31.000Z
- Description: PARIS — In our stimulating era of online publishing, it is all the more exciting to look back at paper precedents. And Man Ray, Picabia et la revue Littérature (1922-1924) at the Centre Pompidou provides just such an opportunity by focusing on the period between the end of the Dadaist movement and t
- Author: Joseph Nechvatal
- Tags: Art, Centre Pompidou, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Review, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:03 (2014, 2015, part 1)

![006. Picabia LittÇrature 7](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/09/006--picabia-littcrature-7.jpg)

Francis Picabia, untitled cover project for Littérature (1922) (Centre Pompidou, musée national d’art moderne, Paris. Achat grâce au mécénat de Sanofi, 2014)

PARIS — In our stimulating era of online publishing, it is all the more exciting to look back at paper precedents. And [*Man Ray, Picabia et la revue* Littérature *(1922-1924)*](http://www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/ressource.action?param.id=FR%5FR-74aeae8a99f6f046e5ee9ac4f6afde¶m.idSource=FR%5FE-6c8ba994e92fe8444235768f5184b&ref=hyperallergic.com) at the Centre Pompidou provides just such an opportunity by focusing on the period between the end of the Dadaist movement and the advent of Surrealism.

This exhibition highlights the contributions that [Man Ray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%5FRay?ref=hyperallergic.com) made to the journal *Littérature* after moving to Paris in 1921, like “Le Violon d’Ingres” and “L’Élevage de poussière,” a collaboration with Marcel Duchamp. But the core of the show is the original drawings for the twenty-six covers of [*Littérature*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litt%8Erature?ref=hyperallergic.com) that were designed by [Francis Picabia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis%5FPicabia?ref=hyperallergic.com), the painter, poet, pamphleteer, enfant terrible, and avant-garde publisher of such art reviews as *291* and *Cannibale*. Until very recently, only their printed version was known. It was exhilarating to see them in the flesh.

![017. Man Ray Le violon d'Ingres](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/09/017--man-ray-le-violon-dingres-.jpg)

Man Ray, “Le Violon d’Ingres” (1924) (Centre Pompidou, musée national d’art moderne, Paris. Achat, 1993)

These original drawings (fifteen of which have never been exhibited) were only discovered in 2008, in an envelope forgotten at the [1900-2000 Gallery](http://www.galerie1900-2000.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com). They were acquired by the Centre Pompidou this year.

In 1922, André Breton was in charge of the review, after the departure of [Louis Aragon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis%5FAragon?ref=hyperallergic.com) and [Philippe Soupault](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe%5FSoupault?ref=hyperallergic.com), with whom he had founded it in 1919\. To mark the review’s change of direction, Breton decided to replace the cover image (which had been created by Man Ray) with drawings — different each time — by Picabia, to whom he gave carte blanche for each issue. In the artist’s career, these drawings came between the famous [mechanomorphic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/291%5F%28magazine%29?ref=hyperallergic.com#mediaviewer/File:291%5FNo56p234-Spread.jpg) works and the [*Espagnoles*](http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/picabia-otaiti-t11982?ref=hyperallergic.com).

Picabia’s mechanomorphic work, where he blended machinist aesthetics with representations of the human body, creating his significant *dea ex machina* period — is in my mind his strongest. By this artistic amalgamation, Picabia expressed decadent cyber-sensations in advance, connected to the interface/dialectic between body and machine. Undoubtedly, with his Dada mechanomorphic period, Picabia illustrated nicely our spatial/digital paradigm by mixing bodies with mechanical schematics. Here the phantasmagorical cyborg body received an ecstatic capability through machinery, a condition now commonly known as [posthuman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthuman?ref=hyperallergic.com).

![025. Picabiaaa Projet de couverture LittÇrature 1922-1924](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/09/025--picabiaaa-projet-de-couverture-littcrature-1922-1924.jpg)

Francis Picabia, untitled cover project for Littérature (1922–24) (Centre Pompidou, musée national d’art moderne, Paris. Achat grâce au mécénat de Sanofi, 2014)

The ink cover drawings in this show are done in a highly linear graphic style, Picabia’s ironic response to the vogue of the “return to [Ingres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres?ref=hyperallergic.com)” advocated by the former Cubists, whom he regularly mocked. But Picabia also drew on religious imagery, erotic images, and the iconography of games of chance. Some of these drawings reveal Picabia as a very good animal artist, as he depicts horses, baboons, tigers, dogs, and deer, probably inspired by books for laymen. Several drawings appear to be of the authors of the review itself, to which Picabia made a regular literary contribution.

The fluid ink drawings that Picabia made for *Littérature* seem to courageously facilitate an inebriated subjectivity. Here flamboyant relationships between the protoplasmic body-image and animal and mechanical conceptions are visualized as self-prosthesis. Thus Picabia is the mythic oracle pointing us to an indeterminate but artistic resolution between the two competing categories of being today — the mechanic and the organic. That such a Dada philosophy engages our contemporary fixations is remarkable.

[Man Ray, Picabia et la revue *Littérature* (1922-1924)](http://www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/resource/cGEMaAB/rpbeRGK?ref=hyperallergic.com) *continues at the Centre Pompidou (Place Georges-Pompidou, Paris) through September 15.*