Art
Isidore Isou's Radical Quest to Reinvent Language
A sweeping retrospective at the Centre Pompidou surveys the work of the Romanian-born artist who founded the avant-garde Letterism movement in 1940s France.
Tristan Tzara
Art
A Dada Exhibition Fetishizes the Movement’s Ephemera
The exhibition is shallow, portraying the movement through familiar pieces and presentations that provided but a façade of its "simultaneity of contradictions."
Books
A French Surrealist's Eclectic Remembrances of His Cohort, Finally in English
Phillipe Soupault delights in humanizing the celebrated with intimate particularization and paeanizing the obscure with encomium.
Art
Nancy Cunard's 'Black Atlantic'
PARIS — The display for Black Atlantic by Nancy Cunard at the Musée du quai Branly evokes a period when the artistic and literary avant-garde became intertwined with the political and the glamorous.
Performance
Surrealism's Fistfights and Adversarial Culture
An evening Dada revue organized by Tristan Tzara, July 6, 1923's Soirée du Coeur à Barbe (Night of the Bearded Heart) was the site of an infamous altercation between Tzara's associates and Surrealist don André Breton at the Théâtre Michel in Paris.
Books
“Writing with Scissors”: Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World
Last month, the UK-based novelist Graham Rawle gave a lecture at Antenna Media Centre in Nottingham called “Writing with Scissors.” Writing with scissors — a synonymous phrase for textual collage — would seem to aptly describe the compositional process of Woman’s World, Rawle’s handsomely designed a
Art
The Best Show At MoMA Is Not What You Think
With the hype surrounding the Cindy Sherman blockbuster retrospective on the 6th floor, which critics have almost unanimously praised, I was surprised to find that the most invigorating, exciting and generally mind-blowing exhibition at MoMA right now is Exquisite Corpses.