ubuweb en mediatheek

I abandon sculpture engraving and painting to dedicate myself entirely to song.

--Picasso to Jaime Sabartés April 1936

When Pierre Joris and I were compiling Poems for the Millennium we sensed that Picasso, if he wasn't fully a poet, was incredibly close to the neighboring poets of his time, and when he brought language into his cubist works, the words collaged from newspapers were there as something really to be read. What only appeared to us later was the body of work that emerged from 1935 on and that showed him to have been a poet in the fullest sense and possibly, as Michel Leiris points out, "an insatiable player with words ... [who, like] James Joyce ... in his Finnegans Wake, ... displayed an equal capacity to promote language as a real thing (one might say) . . . and to use it with as much dazzling liberty."

It was in early 1935, then, that Picasso (then fifty-four years old) began to write what we will present here as his poetry - a writing that continued, sometimes as a daily offering, until the summer of 1959. In the now standard Picasso myth, the onset of the poetry is said to have coincided with a devastating marital crisis (a financially risky divorce, to be more exact), because of which his output as a painter halted for the first time in his life. Writing - as a form of poetry using, largely, the medium of prose - became his alternative outlet. The flow of words begins abruptly ("privately" his biographer Patrick O'Brian tells us) on 18 april XXXV while in retreat at Boisgeloup. (He would lose the country place the next year in a legal settlement.) The pace is rapid, violent, pushing and twisting from one image to another, not bothering with punctuation, often defying syntax, expressive of a way of writing/languaging that he had never tried before:

"if I should go outside the wolves would come to eat out of my hand
just as my room would seem to be outside of me my other earnings
would go off around the world smashed into smithereens"

It as one of us has tried to phrase it in translation.

Yet if the poems begin with a sense of personal discomfort and malaise, there is a world beyond the personal that enters soon thereafter. For Picasso, like any poet of consequence, is a man fully into his time and into the terrors that his time presents. Read in that way, "the world smashed into smithereens" is a reflection also of the state of things between the two world wars - the first one still fresh in mind and the rumblings of the second starting up. That's the way the world goes at this time or any other, Picasso writes a little further on, not as the stricken husband or the discombobulated lover merely, but as a man, like the aforementioned Joyce, caught in the "nightmare of history" from which he tries repeatedly to waken. It is the time and place where poetry becomes - for him as for us - the only language that makes sense.

That anyway is where we position Picasso and how we read him.

"Miss Gertrude Stein's memoirs, published last year under the title of Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, having brought about a certain amount of controversial comment, Transition has opened its pages to several of those she mentions who, like ourselves, find that the book often lacks accuracy. This fact and the regrettable possibility that many less informed readers might accept Miss Stein's testimony about her contemporaries, make it seem wiser to straighten out those points with which we are familiar before the book has had time to assume the character of historic authenticity. To MM. Henri Matisse, Tristan Tzara, Georges Braque, André Salmon we are happy to give the opportunity to refute those parts of Miss Stein's book which they consider require it.

Gertrude Stein | USA/France (1874-1946)
(The Hague: Service Press) February 19335

These documents invalidate the claim of the Toklas-Stein memorial that Miss Stein in any way concerned with the shaping of the epoch she attempts to describe. There is a unanimity of opinion that she had no understanding of what really was happening around her, that the mutation of ideas beneath the surface of the more obvious contacts and clashes of personalities during that period escaped her entirely. Her participation in the genesis and development of such movements as Fauvism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Transition etc. was never ideologically intimate and as M. Matisse states, she has presented the epoch "without taste and without relation to reality."

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in its hollow, tinsel bohemianism and egocentric deformations, may very well become one day the symbol of the decadence that hovers over contemporary literature."

EUGENE JOLAS.

Luigi Russolo, Italy | 1885-1947
The Art of Noise (futurist manifesto, 1913) by Luigi Russolo, translated by Robert Filliou (1967, Great Bear Pamphlet, Something Else Press)

Luigi Russolo was born in Portogruaro (Veneto) in 1885. His father was the local cathedral organist and director of the Schola Cantorum at Latisana. While his two elder brothers graduated from the Milan conservatory, Russolo, after joining his family in Milan in 1901, chose to pursue painting.

In 1909 he showed a group of etchings at the Famiglia Artistica in Milan, where he met Boccioni and Carrˆ. His Divisionist period works were influenced by Previati and particularly by Boccioni in style and subject matter. The following year, after his encounter with Marinetti, Russolo signed both the Manifesto of Futurist Painters and the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting. Afterwards, he participated in all Futurist soirees and exhibitions. His mature Futurist canvases, while open to Cubist influence, drew primarily on the examples of Anton Giulio Bragaglia's
photo-dynamism and Etienne-Jules Marey's chrono-photography.

On 11 March 1913, Russolo issued his manifesto L'arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises), dedicated to fellow Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella. Expanded into book form in 1916, it theorized the inclusion of incidental noise into musical composition. With Ugo Piatti, he later invented the intonarumori, noise-emitting machines that allowed the modification of tone and pitch. In 1913-14, Russolo conducted his first Futurist concerts with numerous intonarumori. Audiences in Milan, Genoa and London reacted with enthusiasm or open hostility. Russolo started to contribute to the magazine Lacerba, where in 1914 he published his Grafia enarmonica per gl'intonarumori (Enharmonic Notation for Futurist Intonarumori), which introduced a new and influential form of musical notation.

In 1931 he moved to Tarragona in Spain, where he studied occult philosophy and then in 1933 returned to Italy, settling in Cerro di Laveno on Lake Maggiore. Russolo published his philosophical investigations Al di lˆ della materia (Beyond Matter) in 1938. In 1941-42, he took up painting again in a realist style that he called "classic-modern". Russolo died at Cerro di Lavenio in 1947.

Written by Micaela Mantegani

Piet Mondriaan ontwikkelde zich tot de grootste schilder van de jaren tussen de wereldoorlogen. Hij was de grootste schilder die in de jaren tot rijpheid kwam.
Mondriaan wilde niet dat er diagonalen werden gebruikt! dit mag absurd lijken, maar Mondriaans ascetische instelling van zijn visie en zijn utopische denkbeelden.
De universele harmonie die hij in zijn kunst verheerlijkte, zou eens, zo meende hij, alle vormen en activiteiten van het leven beheersen.
Als 'zijn' taak zag hij vooral het ontdekken van 'zuivere middelen' waardoor die universele harmonie, de werkelijke realiteit achter de visuele schijn, duidelijk gemaakt kon worden. Mondriaan liet de zichtbare natuurlijke wereld volstrekt voor wat zij was. Hij stelde een schilderij zonder meer gelijk aan het doek en beperkte zich tot lijnen en rechthoeken tot primaire kleuren en zwart wit, en trachtte zo 'een kunst van zuivere relaties' te creëren.