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THE
INCOHERENTS
By Monique Laurent
PhD
Eugène Bataille (Sapeck), Mona Lisa with a Pipe
photo-relief illustration for Le Rire by Coquelin Cadet, 1887.
Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New
Jersey, Herbert D. and Ruth Schimmel Museum Library Fund. (Photo by Jack
Abraham)
October 1882, the artists Pierre Auguste Renoir
Edouard Manet, and Camille Pissarro, the musical composer Richard
Wagner, the king of Bavaria were among over two thousand curious
invitees reported to have crowded into the Left Bank apartment of
the young writer and Hydropathe Jules Lévy to view the exhibition
entitled Arts incohérents.
G. L. de Questlan, Jules Lévy. Die Personifikation
Les Arts incohérents, 1893
Two months earlier, as a challenge to academic art,
Lévy had organized a show of "drawings made by people who don't know
how to draw."
Lévy's October proto-happening included professional
artists who poked fun at the art establishment and produced "incohérent"
works using a variety of peculiar and everyday "ready made" found
materials, for example, sculptures made from bread and cheese. These
works pre-date Marcel Duchamps " Fountain" by 37 years.
Yoko Ono
Smoke Painting, 1961
Smoke Painting: Light canvas or any finished painting with a
cigarette at any time for any length of time. See the smoke
movement. The painting ends when the whole Canvas or painting is
gone. 1961 summer Among other works to be seen
in Levy's apartment were a relief painting of a postman from which
protruded an actual worn-out shoe, a landscape painted by a dancer
from the Paris Opera on a ballet slipper and a painting on a garlic
sausage. Far lighter in spirit than the Dada objects that they
prefigure, these pieces hung alongside others that looked forward to
very different movements: a drawing said to be done by the artist
with his foot in two seconds -- a whimsical anticipation of Gutai
artist Kazuo Shiraga's foot painting -- and what we can presume to
be the first exhibited monochrome, a black rectangle by poet Paul
Bilhaud carrying the facetious title Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at
Night.
Following a British poll
of 500 art experts
associated with the Turner Prize, Marcel Duchamp's R.Mutt-signed (a
play on the German word Armut
:poverty) urinal, which he presented as the artwork Fountain,
was voted the most influential modern artwork of the 20th Century .
Art "expert" Simon Wilson was quoted at the time as saying "it
reflects ... the idea that the creative process that goes into a
work of art is the most important thing".
In 1887 proto-performance artist Sapeck (Eugène
Bataille), who was known to travel the streets with his head painted
blue, portrayed the Mona Lisa smoking a pipe years before Marcel
Duchamp added a moustache to the Louvre's venerated icon.
One entry, a group painting by six artists,
anticipated the collaborative efforts of the Surrealists some forty
years later. The most provocative work was the first
documented monochrome painting by the poet Paul Bilhaud and entitled
Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night. Predating the supposedly
first monochromes by Russian artists Malevich by 36 years.
Above: Paul
Bilhaud (after), Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night in
Album primo-avrilesque (April fool-ish Album), by Alphonse Allais
(Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1897).
Artist Alphonse Allais expanded on Bilhaud's conceit by
exhibiting a white and then a red monochrome painting in the 1883
and 1884 Incohérent shows; in 1897 he published a book of
these images along with an empty musical score billed as a funeral
march for the deaf. As early as 1885, with photographs
of an ear filled with cotton and a hand holding a rose, filmmaker
Emile Cohl prefigured the uncanny juxtapositions of Surrealists.
Levy's apartment show of 1882 was a precursor and a model for
many later avant-garde exhibitions, which would also draw art world
cognoscenti to unconventional sites to view unconventional work.
The most innovative feature of Paris cabaret exhibitions was Le
Mur (The Wall), a 10-year changing display in the Quat'z' Arts
cabaret. Initiated in September 1894, Le Mur was a hybrid form,
possessing characteristics of both the changing exhibition and the
printed journal. It included drawings, caricatures, poems, stories,
newspaper clippings, works that mixed drawing and photography, and
even collaborative narratives to which multiple participants would
contribute over time.
Jean Louis Eugène Emile
Cohl
study for poster for
L'Exposition des Arts Incohérents
1893
watercolor and gouache
Excerpts and References from 19th century
AD
Art in America,
Feb,
1997 by
Bruce Altshuler
www.nyu.edu/greyart |
Emile Cohl
Emile Courtet was
born in Paris in 1857 and adopted the pseudonym Cohl when he was
20.
He
was also the French Caricaturist of the
largely-forgotten Incoherent movement,
cartoonist and animator , called "The Father of
the Animated Cartoon" and "The Oldest
Parisian".The Courtet family has been traced
back to the 10th century, to the time of Hugh
Capet Of France.
He only began to take an interest in the cinema in 1907 - a
year that marked a turning point in his productive life and
career.
In 1878, Émile
obtained a letter of reference from Etienne Cajat to approach
André Gill, the most famnous caricaturist of the day, for a job.
Émile Courtet's position was one of an assistant to Gill in
order to complete the backgrounds; he may have done a few of the
illustrations by himself. Gill had made his fame a decade
earlier by publishing La Lune,
a periodical critical of Napoleon III. His presses were smashed
and he was incarcerated. He started
La Lune Rousse in 1876
to continue his work. By this time, he had moved beyond
attacking individuals to making observations on the
ludicrousness of conformist bourgeois values in general
At about this
time he began using the pseudonym of Émile Cohl. The
meaning of "Cohl" is ambiguous: it may be from the pigment known
as "kohl". It may also have been chosen because of its
exotic sounding ring. The visual signature of a glue-pot appears
in a few of Cohl's caricatures.
Through Gill,
Cohl had become acquainted with the artistic circle calling
themselves the Hydropathes. This group was united by a love of
poetry and various "modern" ideas. The group, like many others
of the time, based most of their activities on shocking people.
As a result of his new-found notoriety, Cohl was named editor of
the group's mouth-piece, L'Hydropathe,
Meanwhile, the
Hydropaths had disbanded in 1882. Their place in Cohl's life was
replaced by the Incoherants. The group was founded by Jules Lévy,
who coined the phrase "les arts incohérents" as a contrast to
the common expression "les arts décoratifs". The Incoherents
were even less politically-minded than the Hydropathes. Their
slogan was "Gaity is properly French, so let's be French". The
focus was absurdism nightmares, and the drawing style of
children. Cohl's Incoherent art joined his caricatures and
satiric news reporting at La Nouvelle Lune, where he had
become the major contributor and acting editor. He became editor
in chief on November 30 1883.
Between the ages of 18 and 50, Cohl plied a large number of
trades. He worked mainly in satiric illustration (he was friend
and disciple of André Gill), cartoons, journalism, and also
theater and photography. He rubbed shoulders with many painters
and writers: Victor Hugo, Courteline, Verlaine, François Coppée,
Alphonse Allais, Alphonse Daudet, H. Gauthier-Villars (aka
Willy), Caran d'Ache, Willette, Daubigny, and others. He was
also a regular at the Lapin Agile and Chat Noir cabarets.
Cohl came to the cinema as a fairground entertainer, but having
no head for business, he preferred to offer his services as
scenario writer and trick film director to Lux, and particularly
to Gaumont, which he joined after a year working independently.
After a short stint with Pathé (1911)he went independent again
and made some films for Eclipse, before being sent by Eclair to
work in their American studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey (1912-14)
where, shortly after his return to France, the first animation
studios would open (Raoul Barré and J.R. Bray).
The hardships of the Great War didn't stop him making films, but
when French cinema's domination of world cinema came to an end
his own career declined: Cohn withdrew from the cinema in 1923
after making, usually working alone, some 300 shorts (of which
80% are considered lost).
During his film career, Emile Cohl crossed paths with many film
personalities of the day: Louis Feuillade, Alice Guy, Ferdinand
Zecca, Lucien Cazalis, Etienne Arnaud, Benjamin Rabier, Georges
Méliès, Musidora, Harry Baur, Lucien and Sacha Guitry, Lortac...
What is interesting in Cohl's work is that, in addition to
having invented the animated cartoons with his "Fantasmagorie"
(a magic lantern term), projected on August 17, 1908 at the
Théâtre de Gymnase in Paris, he gave animation a sense of
poetry, a plethora of innovations, and made it an art in its own
right, dubbed by some as the "eighth art," which combined
cinema, drawing and painting. Thanks to the intellectual
experiences of his youth, Cohl gave free rein to his imagination
and made films in which critics have discerned the influence of
cubism, but also the premises of Dadaism and Surrealism.
He innovated with the creation of the first animation hero,
Fantoche. He made the first puppet animation film, the first
animation films in color, the first animated commercial, the
first animation films based on comic strips. He used paper
cutouts, and often combined images, animated objects,
pixillation, and layering with real-life footage within the same
film.
This all happened
in France, springing from the hands and mind of Emile Cohl. Walt
Disney acknowledged as much when he was decorated with the
Legion of Honor, and many animation filmmakers, such as Norman
McLaren, for instance, were influenced by him, forming what one
might call the Cohl School. In every country around the world,
Cohl has been recognized as the father of motion picture
animation.
In
April of 1937, Cohl was admitted to La Pitié
hospital for severe burns, after a freak
accident, the result of being too poor and
without heat and electricity and while drawing
by lamplight in a slum room. Cohl was trying to
warm himself with a candle when his long white
beard caught on fire.
He
was burned so horribly that any movement was
agonizing. "I am nothing but a broken
marionette" he told a reporter.
Cohl's stipend was soon spent on hospital bills.
Despite appeals made on his behalf in
newspapers, Cohl was transferred to an indigent
hospital.
As he had feared all his life, Émile Cohl
suffered the fate of his early mentor André
Gill, dying in debt forgotten by everyone (at
least in his own mind) on January 20 ,1938 of
bronchial pneumonia. The "Oldest Parisian" had
just turned 81. On that same night, Snow
White and The Seven Dwarfs premiered in
Paris; Cohl's friend Georges Méliès died a few
hours after Cohl. Émile Cohl died penniless,
alone and virtually forgotten was interred in
the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
In
the November 15th 1934 issue of Paris-Soir, Émile Cohl
had this to say about why he became interested in cinema: "It
was simply because I was born a trickster. For more than sixty
years I have poured out a stream of brain teasers, contests,
rebuses, and puzzles for the multitude of large and, especially,
small magazines that reserve space for things for youngsters,
who are always interested in this sort of thing. It is a trade
that may seem bizarre, but which nevertheless, in my opinion, is
very engaging."
Cohl
was, in his own eyes, an outsider, an artist that was as
anti-commercial as possible while still being in the public eye.
With animation (both drawn and stop-motion) he laid down the
guidelines followed by many of his successors. In the creation
of the first successful animated series.
Excerpts and references from
- Donald
Crafton;
Emile Cohl, Caricature, and
Film; Princeton Press; ISBN 0-69-105581-5 (1990)
- Michael
Barrier;
Hollywood Cartoons:
American Animation in Its Golden Age; Oxford
University Press; ISBN 0-19-503759-6 (1999)
- Giannalberto
Bendazzi (Anna Taraboletti-Segre, English translator);
Cartoons: One Hundred Years
of Cinema Animation; Indiana University Press; ISBN
0-253-20937-4 (2001 reprint)
- Biography of
Émile Cohl: http://www.lips.org/bio_cohl_GB.asp
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