Disumbrationism

movement 1924-1927 United States

Disumbrationism was a hoax masquerading as an art movement, launched in 1924 by Paul Jordan-Smith, a Los Angeles novelist and Latin scholar. Annoyed at the cold reception his wife Sarah Bixby Smith's realistic still lifes received from an exhibition jury, Jordan-Smith took revenge: styling himself the Russian-American painter "Pavel Jerdanowitch", he painted crude, blurry canvases and presented them as the new school of Disumbrationism. His first, retitled Exaltation (1925), was entered in New York's Exhibition of the Independents and praised by the very critics who had dismissed his wife's work. Further daubs - Illumination, Aspiration, Gination, Adoration - followed until Jordan-Smith confessed to the Los Angeles Times in 1927 that the whole movement was a spoof.

The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)
The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)Public domain (credit: Johann Zoffany) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Deliberately clumsy, blurry brushwork by a painter who had never held a brush
  • Parodic borrowings from modernism: zig-zag abstraction, garish color, primitivist pastiche
  • Grandiose titles (Exaltation, Illumination, Adoration) laid over crude imagery
  • Invented ethnographic scenes and dark symbolic posturing
  • A fabricated persona complete with Cyrillic signature, "Pavel Jerdanowitch"

Key figures

  • Paul Jordan-Smith — Los Angeles novelist and Latin scholar who invented the movement and painted all its works
  • Sarah Bixby Smith — Realist still-life painter whose rejection by an exhibition jury provoked the hoax

Example works

  • Exaltation — Pavel Jerdanowitch (Paul Jordan-Smith) (1925)
  • Aspiration — Pavel Jerdanowitch (Paul Jordan-Smith)
  • Adoration — Pavel Jerdanowitch (Paul Jordan-Smith) (1927)

Sources

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