Exquisite corpse

 "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau." ("The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.")^[


The technique was invented by surrealists and is similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Surrealism principal founder André Breton reported that it started in fun, but became playful and eventually enriching. Breton said the diversion started about 1925, but Pierre Reverdy wrote that it started much earlier, at least before 1918

Kurt Schwitters
German painter, sculptor, typographer and writer. using rubbish materials such as labels, bus tickets and bits of broken wood in his collages and constructions

Raoul Hausmann
German Dada artist, poet, photographer and polemicist. Born in Vienna, son of an academic painter who gave him lessons in painting.

The World War I Pamphlet Collection developed from two sources. The Greensboro Public Library donated a selection of pamphlets that were added to the Library’s holdings of United States government publications of that period and topic. While the assembled collection spans the entire war, the publications date from 1912 - 1931 with the bulk of the materials concentrated from 1914 - 1919. The collection was processed and cataloged during 2001-2002.

 

Many of the Dada artists such as Ernst, Arp, Picabia and Miró were attracted to surrealism because of its interest in poetry or in its anarchic and unconventional approach and all of them provided illustrations for Littérature. As Arp explained, ‘I exhibited along with the surrealists because their rebellious attitude towards “art” and their direct attitude towards life were as wise as Dada.

Surrealism was a movement born out of the remains of madness and terror.  After the Great War, the writings of an obscure psychologist in Vienna, Sigmund Freud suddenly seemed relevant

The French poet, André Brenton, is known as the “Pope of Surrealism.” Brenton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto to describe how he wanted to combine the conscious and subconscious into a new “absolute reality” (de la Croix 708). He first used the word surrealism to describe work found to be a “fusion of elements of fantasy with elements of the modern world to form a kind of superior reality.” He also described it as “spontaneous writing” (Surrealism 4166-67).

 

the merz barn