Le cadavre exquis lives to see another day
From left to right: Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, André Breton, Jean Arp, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, René Crevel and Man Ray. (Photo by Anna Riwkin-Brick)
A small but elegant exhibition Surrealist Collaboration: Poetry, Art, Literature, Ingenuity and Life Itself, is now on view at Kasmin at 297 Tenth Avenue until February 26, 2022. It includes 20 works on paper along with photographs, documents, and films. Perhaps the most interesting pieces in the show are the collaborative drawings that resulted from surrealists playing le Cadavre exquis game.
During the course of the game, participants drew or wrote in turn on a sheet of paper, folded to hide what they have written, and passed it on to the next player. Far from being an innocent parlor game, le Cadavre exquis served as one of the devices which surrealists, such as André Breton, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, and Remedios Varo, used to bypass the conscious mind en route to the core of the psyche. Surrealists were also famous for practicing automatic writing as a way to generate poetry and record dreams as a shortcut to a story composition.
One of the joys of Surrealist Collaboration is trying to figure out which artist did what part of the drawing. Some folds of the drawings are signed and some are very recognizable due to artists’ unique styles. In Cadavre exquis from 1930, each of the four parts is meticulously labeled. The hot air balloon by Valentine Hugo flies above Gala Dalí’s disembodied breasts and fish-egg with long spider legs, below them Salvador Dalí’s seashell is armed with a giant penis while sitting precariously on top of the fist with an outstretched pinky by André Breton. In other cases, such as Cadavre exquis from 1928, the folds are not signed and we have to rely on the gallery labels for guidance.
Bibliography
Kasmin. “SURREALIST COLLABORATION: Poetry, Art, Literature, Ingenuity, and Life Itself.” Kasmin. Accessed February 17, 2022. https://www.kasmingallery.com/exhibition/surrealist-collaboration/ovr.
Schneider, Pierre. “A Note on the Exquisite Corpse.” Yale French Studies, no. 2 (1948): 85–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928884.