Word: dadaism
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...doesn't like: 1) the highly individualistic sort (spattery impressionism, cubist geometry, African-influenced neo-primitives, Freudian surrealist nightmares) that made Paris the artistic capital of the pre-war world; 2) art that does not glamorize war and womanhood. Says he: "Cubism, dadaism, futurism, impressionism and the rest have nothing in common with our German people. For all these notions are neither old nor are they modern; they are simply the artificial stammering of people whom God has denied the boon of genuine artistic talent and given instead the gift of prating and deception...
Literary Exercise. Pseudo-duels, arty riots (incited by everything from Dadaism to literary prize awards), political squabbles and fishwife furies are traditional components of the French literary life. Dean of French literary stirrer-uppers is scrawny, deaf, 71-year-old Charles Maurras, libeling editor for 41 years of the Royalist-Catholic Action Francaise. Last Maurras scandal occurred a year ago when he was elected to the French Academy (TIME, June 27, 1938), following close on the finish of his eight-month prison sentence for urging assassination of Leon Blum...
Dada is something newer, different, a bewilderment that affected the art world of Europe for a few shell-shocked years during and immediately after the War. The object of dadaism was a conscious attack on reason, a complete negation of everything, the loudest and silliest expression of post-War cynicism. "I affirm," wrote early Dadaist Hans Arp, "that Tristan Tzara discovered the word dada on the 8th of February, 1916, at 6 o'clock in the evening ... in the Terrace Cafe in Zurich. I was there with my twelve children when Tzara pronounced for the first time this word...
...long ago this cofounder of Dadaism told an interviewer: "My attitude towards Art is that of an atheist towards religion. I would rather be shot, kill myself or kill someone than paint again...
...mind temporarily off art but at its end French artists were sitting on top of the world. U. S. painters, unable to sell at home or abroad, tried copying the French, turned out a profusion of spurious Matisses and Picassos, cheerfully joined the crazy parade of Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism. Painting became so deliberately unintelligible that it was no longer news when a picture was hung upside down...