As promised last week, here is my third installment of “Digging Daura,” another excerpt from a wonderfully illuminating letter Louise Blair Daura wrote from Paris to her family in Virginia.
One of the most interesting was that of Arp, one of the band of Dadists that centered around Picabia.[1] When they started that movement in Zurich their amusement was to play jokes on the public, and shock people as much as possible. I don’t know whether I wrote to you ages ago that we had tea with Torres the day that the Arps came to visit him, and Arp related all of the pranks that they enjoyed so much on the subject of it.[2] They published that they were going to give a conference on Dadaism in an important hall, with paid seats. The hall was filled, the hour arrived for the lecture, and out came four of the band, among them Picabia, seated themselves in four chairs on the stage, and four barbers came out and shaved each solemnly. Not a word was spoken until the operation was finishes, and then fresh and rosy, the four gave a serious lecture on Dadaism. We went to his exhibition, the first day called the Vernissage when the artist holds court for all his friends. The gallery was a brand new one, very modern, the interior decorator of which was Mme. Arp. The gallery was full of friends and critics. We took a catalogue and made the rounds after having spoken to Arp. His innovation in painting and exhibition was composed entirely of pieces of flat wood, sawed into abstract shapes, about an inch and a half thick, and glued onto a slab of wood, framed with flat wood of the same thickness as the shapes. The hole was painted in one or two tones of ordinary house paint. That was all very well, but he gave names to his pictures, such as “Paolo et Francesca” to two sort of formless chunks of wood that touch each other, and “Deux Hommes Tenant par la Bride une Tete de Cheval” (Two men holding a horse’s head by the bridle). In the midst of that select gathering came four or five young men, who took catalogues and went from one of the pictures to the other shrieking with loud laughter and hearty guffaws. Arp, who once delighted in such, trembled with rage, and said to Pierre: “I am going to put them out!” Pierre said he had a better idea, and dashed out to buy all day suckers to present to each of the young men. They went out with a sorry show of bravado.
(Louise Blair Daura, letter to her family, November 14, 1929, Pierre Daura Archive, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia)
Next week I’ll post another excerpt from Louise in which she describes a visit to Mondrian’s studio.
[1] Francis Picabia (French, 1879-1930), painter and poet, Cubist, then Dadaist, published the periodical 391 (1917-1921).
[2] Joachim Torres-García (Uruguayan, 1874-1949) painter and sculptor; and Jean (Hans) Arp (German-French, 1886-1966) and Sophie Tauber-Arp (Swiss, 1889-1943) Dada artists who joined Cercle et Carré in 1929/30.
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