Iliazd (ed.): Poésie de mots inconnus (1949)

An early anthology of experimental visual and sound poetry featuring poems by 21 avant-garde authors and illustrated with seven woodcuts, six etchings, two engravings, three drypoints, two aquatints, and six lithographs.

“Iliazd was well acquainted with the work of James Joyce, of Christian Morgenstern, and other writers who had played with the phonetic and graphical potential of language in the 19th and 20th century. But he chose to focus on the work of his peers, those figures within the modern movement of the first decades of the 20th century with whom he had been acquainted, and whose experiments he wished to bring to light and into a formal platform for recognition. He had good reason, in the late 1940s in Paris, to want to do this, as a gauntlet thrown down by the newly arrived upstart poet-theorist of Lettrism, Isidore Isou, challenged the emerging history of avant-garde literature with claims about the originality of his inventions.” (Source)

Poems by Ibronke Akinsemoyin, Pierre Albert-Birot, Hans Arp, Artaud, Jacques Audiberti, Hugo Ball, Nicolas Beaudin, Camille Bryen, Paul Dermée, Raoul Hausmann, Vincente Huidobro, Iliazd, Eugène Jolas, Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Krutchonykh, Pablo Picasso, Boris Poplavsky, Kurt Schwitters, Michel Seuphor, Igor Terentiev, Tristan Tzara.
Images by Arp, Georges Braque, Bryen, Marc Chagall, Oscar Dominguez, Serge Férat, Alberto Giacometti, Albert Gleizes, Hausmann, Henri Laurens, Alberto Magnelli, André Masson, Henri Matisse, Jean Metzinger, Joan Miró, Picasso, Léopold Survage, Sophie Taueber-Arp, Edgard Tytgatt, Wols, Ribemont-Dessaignes.

Publisher Le Degré Quarante et Un (Iliazd), Paris, 1949
26 folded sheets, 32 x 25 cm
Edition of 157
via MoMA

Commentary: Johanna Drucker (Amodern, 2016).

WorldCat

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R. Bruce Elder: Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect (2013)

“This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema’s lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film’s provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life.

This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media’s materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the author’s previous, Harmony & Dissent, examines the Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.”

Publisher Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 2013
Film and Media Studies series
ISBN 9781554586257, 1554586259
x+765 pages

Reviews: John W. Locke (Canadian J of Film Studies 2014), Robin Walz (Canadian J of History 2014), Bart Testa (U Toronto Quarterly 2015).

Publisher
WorldCat

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Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Cubism and Abstract Art: Painting, Sculpture, Constructions, Photography, Architecture, Industrial Art, Theatre, Films, Posters, Typography (1936)

The catalogue of the first MoMA’s retrospective of modernism, held 2 March-19 April 1936, laid the theoretical foundation of the museum. Its jacket contains a notorious chart of modernist art history, the Diagram of Stylistic Evolution from 1890 until 1935.

“The catalogue remains an important historical document (as does that for Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism). It set abstraction within a formalist framework that—ignoring the intellectual byways of French symbolism, German idealism, and Russian Marxism of the previous thirty years—was shaped by the scientific climate that had started a century before. … The exhibition together with the widespread dissemination of its influential catalogue, established Cubism as the central issue of early modernism, abstraction as the goal.” (Sybil Gordon Kantor, 2003)

The exhibition later traveled to another 7 cities: San Francisco, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Baltimore, Providence, and Grand Rapids.

Publisher Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936
249 pages
via MoMA

Commentary: Meyer Schapiro (Marxist Quarterly, 1937), Susan Noyes Platt (Art Journal, 1988), Astrit Schmidt Burkhardt (Word & Image, 2000).

Publisher (incl. master checklist and press releases)
WorldCat

PDF (47 MB)