rit of that neighborhood held sway, both through friendships among the participants and in the attitudes of Lévy and his associates. The Incohérents included many Hydropathes as well as a growing number of the younger participants in the Chat Noir group. In 1882, the artist and writer Henri Detouche summed up the artists’ basic motivations: “It seems to me that in front of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, Moses, the true artist of today should say: ‘I would like to do something else.’ “
As the article points out, this is years before Dada, or its offshoot Surrealism. Why is all this forgotten? Apparently no art movement is accorded its place in art history unless it has its theoreticians, issuing proclamations about the state of the world and how they propose to change it, reaching some sort of nadir with the endless humourless and autocratic directives from the “pope” of Surrealism Andre Breton. As Friedrich writes:
[y]ou almost wonder if such good humor is ultimately unforgiveable to the mandarins of Modern Art History. After all, these people have seen fit to leave the Incoherents out of general surveys of Modern Art, or at least those I’ve read. (And I’ve read a quite a few.) It’s not as if this was all just a ‘flash in the pan’ phenomenon, either. Levy organized Incoherent shows and balls annually for more than a decade, and these events were attended by tens of thousands of people.
All of this ‘prefigures’ or anticipates the program of Dada, an post-World War I art movement that was ultimately the progenitor of conceptual art. (I think it’s fair to describe Dada as the most significant paradigm for contemporary art in the last quarter of the 20th century.) But why should Dada get so much ink, and the Incoherents none, when they basically did the whole ‘art-critiquing-art’ thing a whole generation earlier? Although I’m just guessing here, it strikes me as overwhelmingly likely that the Dada habitués of Zurich would have been well aware of their Parisian avant-garde antecedents. It’s hard to believe that the choice of the name, Cabaret Voltaire, wasn’t a reference to those antecedents.
Not only does Dada appear to be modeled after Arts incohérents, but it would appear that it was a far less graceful and light-hearted affair than its Parisian role-model.
But I imagine the Incoherents wouldn’t be overly troubled by the lack of respect shown to them by history.
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