L’exposition d’art africain et d’art océanien à la Galerie du théâtre Pigalle en 1930

        « L’exposition d’art nègre et océanien au théâtre Pigalle (…) a irrité la pudeur de tous les gardiens de la morale »(8), lit-on dans la revue Cahiers d’art en 1930. « Pour apaiser quelques pays soucieux de la vertu de leurs demoiselles », lit-on encore, « le propriétaire de la galerie, le baron Henri de Rothschild, fit expulser de la salle les quelques statues qui ne lui semblaient pas d’une tenue exemplaire »(9). Réagissant contre cette forme de censure, les organisateurs de l’exposition (Tristan Tzara, Charles Ratton et Pierre Loeb) demandèrent « au président du tribunal de la Seine de commettre un expert pour donner son avis sur "le caractère purement artistique des oeuvres exposées"». L’argument de l’art eut raison des réticences du Baron de Rothschild et les pièces furent réintégrées avant que la justice n’ait eu à intervenir(10). Qu’il s’agisse de l’art d’Afrique exposé à la Galerie Pigalle ou de l’art moderne qui s’en inspire, c’est le statut même de l’objet qui est mis en jeu à cette époque(11). L’idée d’altérité et de contraste, l’opposition presque dichotomique entre le Beau ou l’admis, et l’étrange ou le dégradé, est au cœur de la démarche d’un artiste comme Man Ray.


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LES GRANDES EXPOSITIONS COLONIALES :

Les expositions coloniales furent organisées au XIXe siècle et dans la première moitié du XXe siècle dans les pays européens. Elles avaient pour but de montrer aux habitants de la Métropole les différentes facettes des colonies.
Les expositions coloniales donnaient lieu à des reconstitutions spectaculaires des environnements naturels et des monuments d'Afrique, d'Asie ou d'Océanie.
La mise en situation d'habitants des colonies, souvent déplacés de force, les fera qualifier dans les années 2000 de zoos humains.

La France compte alors 41,8 millions d'habitants et son Empire colonial, second derrière celui du Royaume-Uni, 67 823 000 personnes pour une superficie de 12 356 637 km².

1866 : Exposition Intercoloniale de Melbourne (Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia)
1870 : Exposition Intercoloniale de Sydney (Intercolonial Exhibition)
1875 : Exposition Intercoloniale de Melbourne (Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition)
1876 : Exposition Intercoloniale de Brisbane (Intercolonial Exhibition)
1883 : Exposition Internationale et Coloniale d'Amsterdam (Internationale Koloniale en Untvoerhandel Tentoonsellung)
1886 : Exposition Coloniale et Indienne de Londres (Colonial and Indian Exhibition)
1894 : Exposition Internationale et Coloniale de Lyon. Elle vit l'assassinat du président de la République Sadi Carnot.
1894 : Exposition Insulaire et Coloniale de Porto (Exposição Insular e Colonial Portuguesa)
1898 : Exposition internationale et coloniale de Rochefort-sur-Mer
1902 : Indo China Exposition Française et Internationale de Hanoï
1902 :

LES GRANDES EXPOSITIONS COLONIALES :

Les expositions coloniales furent organisées au XIXe siècle et dans la première moitié du XXe siècle dans les pays européens. Elles avaient pour but de montrer aux habitants de la Métropole les différentes facettes des colonies.
Les expositions coloniales donnaient lieu à des reconstitutions spectaculaires des environnements naturels et des monuments d'Afrique, d'Asie ou d'Océanie.
La mise en situation d'habitants des colonies, souvent déplacés de force, les fera qualifier dans les années 2000 de zoos humains.

La France compte alors 41,8 millions d'habitants et son Empire colonial, second derrière celui du Royaume-Uni, 67 823 000 personnes pour une superficie de 12 356 637 km².

1866 : Exposition Intercoloniale de Melbourne (Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia)
1870 : Exposition Intercoloniale de Sydney (Intercolonial Exhibition)
1875 : Exposition Intercoloniale de Melbourne (Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition)
1876 : Exposition Intercoloniale de Brisbane (Intercolonial Exhibition)
1883 : Exposition Internationale et Coloniale d'Amsterdam (Internationale Koloniale en Untvoerhandel Tentoonsellung)
1886 : Exposition Coloniale et Indienne de Londres (Colonial and Indian Exhibition)
1894 : Exposition Internationale et Coloniale de Lyon. Elle vit l'assassinat du président de la République Sadi Carnot.
1894 : Exposition Insulaire et Coloniale de Porto (Exposição Insular e Colonial Portuguesa)
1898 : Exposition internationale et coloniale de Rochefort-sur-Mer
1902 : Indo China Exposition Française et Internationale de Hanoï
1902 : Exposition Internationale et Coloniale des Etats-Unis de New York (United

Africa, Oceania and the Indigenous Americas

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The Department oversees four separate collection segments: the arts of Africa, Egypt, the South Pacific and the Indigenous Americas. Reflecting current scholarship and geography, Egyptian art is now a sub-section of this department. African art thus consists of works from the rest of Africa other than Egypt. African Art The DIA’s African art collection ranks among the finest in the United States. It comprises some rare world-class works from nearly one hundred African cultures, predominantly from regions south of the Sahara desert. A diverse collection, ranging from sculpture to textiles to exquisite utilitarian wares, religious paraphernalia and bodily ornaments, it is heavily weighted toward the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. African art collecting is inextricably tied to the founding of the Detroit Institute of Arts at the turn of 20th century and remains one of the institution’s important hallmarks. From the late 1800s through the 1930s, generous contributions from some of Detroit’s first collectors, such as Frederick Stearns and Robert Tannahill, helped to develop the core collection. This included priceless works, such as several Benin royal brass sculptures, an exquisite 16th century Kongo Afro-Portuguese ivory knife container, a 17th century Owo ivory bracelet, a Kongo steatite funerary figure (ntadi) and a finely crafted Asante royal gold soul-washer’s badge recovered from the chamber of the nineteenth century Asante King, Kofi Karikari. Support from the City of Detroit has since aided the purchase of additional works of

Tristan Tzara

Born     April 4 or April 16, 1896
Moineşti, Kingdom of Romania
Died     December 25, 1963 (aged 67)
Paris, France
Pen name     S. Samyro, Tristan, Tristan Ruia, Tristan Ţara, Tr. Tzara
Occupation     poet, essayist, journalist, playwright, performance artist, composer, film director, politician, diplomat
Nationality     Romanian, French
Writing period     1912–1963

            Guillaume Apollinaire, Henri Barzun, Fernand Divoire, Alfred Jarry, Jules Laforgue, Comte de Lautréamont, Maurice Maeterlinck, Adrian Maniu, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Ion Minulescu, Christian Morgenstern, Francis Picabia, Arthur Rimbaud, Urmuz, François Villon, Walt Whitman

Influenced

            Louis Aragon, Marcel Avramescu, Samuel Beckett, André Breton, William S. Burroughs, Andrei Codrescu, Jacques G.

André Breton

André Breton (February 19, 1896 – September 28, 1966) was a French writer, poet, and surrealist theorist, and is best known as the principal founder of Surrealism. His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism".

Biography

Born to a family of modest means in Tinchebray (Orne) in Normandy, he studied medicine and psychiatry. During World War I he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, where he met the spiritual son of Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché, whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably. Vaché committed suicide at age 24 and his war-time letters to Breton and others were published in a volume entitled Lettres de guerre (1919), for which Breton wrote four introductory essays.

From Dada to Surrealism

In 1919 Breton founded the review Littérature with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. He also connected with Dadaist Tristan Tzara. In 1924 he was instrumental to the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research.

In The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs Magnétiques), a collaboration with Soupault, he put the principle of automatic writing into practice. He published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and was editor of La

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti (October 10, 1901 – January 11, 1966) was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman, and printmaker.


Biography

Early life

Alberto Giacometti was born in Borgonovo, now part of the Swiss municipality of Stampa, near the Italian border. His father, Giovanni Giacometti, was a painter. Alberto attended the School of Fine Arts in Geneva. In 1922 he moved to Paris to study under the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, an associate of Auguste Rodin. It was there that Giacometti experimented with cubism and surrealism and came to be regarded as one of the leading surrealist sculptors. Among his associates were Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso and Balthus.

Between 1936 and 1940, Giacometti concentrated his sculpting on the human head, focusing on the model's gaze, followed by a unique artistic phase in which his statues became stretched out; their limbs elongated. Obsessed with creating his sculptures exactly as he envisioned through his unique view of reality, he often carved until they were as thin as nails and reduced to the size of a pack of cigarettes, much to his consternation. A friend of his once said that if Giacometti decided to sculpt you, "he would make your head look like the blade of a knife." After his marriage his tiny sculptures became larger, but the larger they grew, the thinner they became. Giacometti said that the final result

Max Ernst

Born     April 2, 1891(1891-04-02)
Brühl, Germany
Died     April 1, 1976 (aged 84)
Paris, France
Nationality     German

Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst is considered to be one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.

Early life

Ernst was born in Brühl, Germany, near Cologne. In 1909, he enrolled in the University at Bonn to study philosophy but soon abandoned the courses. He began painting that year, but never received any formal artistic training. During World War I he served in the German army, which was a momentous interruption in his career as an artist. He stated in his autobiography, "Max Ernst died the 1st of August, 1914."

[edit] Dada and Surrealism
Max Ernst, Ubu Imperator, (1923), Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

After the war, filled with new

Tristan Tzara (born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; April 4 or April 16, 1896 – December 25, 1963) was a Romanian and Frenchavant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishmentDada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolulwith Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilisticside, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.

After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the first step in the movement's evolution toward Surrealism. He was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against André Breton and Francis Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclecticmodernism of Vinea and Janco. This personal vision on art defined his Dadaist plays The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924). A forerunner of automatist techniques, Tzara eventually rallied with Breton's Surrealism, and, under its influence, wrote his celebrated utopianpoem The Approximate Man.

During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascistperspective with a

André Breton (February 19, 1896 – September 28, 1966) was a French writer, poet, and surrealisttheorist, and is best known as the main founder of surrealism. His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as pure psychic automatism.

Biography

Born to a family of modest means in Tinchebray(Orne) in Normandy, he studied medicineand psychiatry. During World War I he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, where he met the spiritual son of Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché, whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably. Vaché committed suicide at age 24 and his war-time letters to Breton and others were published in a volume entitled Lettres de guerre (1919), for which Breton wrote four introductory essays.

From Dada to Surrealism

In 1919 Breton founded the review Littérature with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. He also connected with DadaistTristan Tzara. In 1924 he was instrumental to the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research.

In The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs Magnétiques), a collaboration with Soupault, he put the principle of automatic writing into practice. He published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and