Incoherents
also: Les Arts Incohérents
The Arts Incohérents were a short-lived Parisian movement (1882-1889) founded by Jules Lévy, dedicated to absurdity and satire of the Academy. Their exhibitions featured works designed not to make sense: all-black monochrome canvases humorously titled for invisible scenes, collages of newspaper cutouts, drawings made with feet or by chance, and spoofed Old Masters - including Sapeck's Mona Lisa with a pipe, the show's most notorious image. Alphonse Allais contributed monochrome jokes of his own. The movement dissolved after a few raucous seasons, but its logic - art as a prank on meaning itself - anticipated Dada's readymades and anti-art by more than thirty years, and it is now treated as the first modern absurdist art movement.
Defining characteristics
- Deliberate absurdity and nonsense as method
- Spoofs and defacements of Old Master paintings
- Monochrome canvases with absurd, mismatched titles
- Collage of found printed matter (newspaper cutouts)
- Chance-made and deliberately incompetent technique as joke
- Satire of the art Academy and the Salon system
Key figures
- Jules Lévy (active 1880s) — Founder of the Arts Incohérents
- Alphonse Allais (1854-1905) — Humorist whose monochrome and absurdist works defined the style
- Sapeck (Eugène Bataille) (active 1880s) — Made the Mona Lisa smoking a pipe, the movement's most notorious image
Example works
- La Joconde fumant la pipe (Mona Lisa smoking a pipe) — Sapeck (Eugène Bataille) (1883)
- All-black monochrome canvas (1882), the first of the Incoherents' monochrome jokes — Paul Bilhaud (1882)
Sources
- Incoherents - Wikipedia encyclopedia