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Provocative Personifications: Dada Aesthetics of Alterity at the Galerie Montaigne, Paris, 1921

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mod.2023.a913148

1080-6601

Hilary Whitham Sánchez,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Provocative Personifications: Dada Aesthetics of Alterity at the Galerie Montaigne, Paris, 1921 Hilary Whitham Sánchez (bio) In 1921, the Paris dadaists rented the top floor of the Champs-Élysées Theatre in the chic eighth arrondissement for the entire month of June. Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), the Romanian-born poet-founder of the movement who had recently relocated from Zürich, took the lead in organizing a series of group productions. According to press accounts, the space—renamed the Galerie Montaigne—accommodated two hundred attendees at the first of three planned evening and matinee programs. The Soirée Dada, held in the evening on June 10, featured at least five acts—songs by Madame Bujaud, poems read by Louis Aragon and Valentin Parnak, a masquerade, and a play written by Tzara himself, interspersed with musical interludes by Monsieur Jolibois, a local porcelain repairman (fig. 1). The second item on the bill for that evening was a performance by poet Philippe Soupault titled The Matchbox: The President of Liberia Visits the Exhibition (La Boîte d’Allumettes: Le Président de la République de Liberia visitera l’exposition). Wilber M. Judd, the Paris bureau correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, immersively described its central character in a dramatic retelling of the event: “As the last note was vibrating through the Galerie, many noises were heard from the rear of the hall. The Dada idea of the president of the republic of Liberia, clothed in black and with his face to match, strolled in escorted by several of the most prominent Dadaists.”1 Jean Jacquemont, the correspondent for Le Petit Havre, corroborated Judd’s account of Soupault’s racialized burlesque, writing, “The dadaiste who plays this role wears red jacket and tie. He wrapped his [End Page 251] head in a black mask to look like a nègre.”2 Although the journalists related different colors for Soupault’s attire, both describe Soupault’s actions as the impersonation of someone of African descent. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Soirée Dada: Galerie Montaigne: le vendredi 10 juin 1921 à 9 heures, 1921, paper, 27 × 21 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, DADA V:19 / DS 2. Can The Matchbox be understood as a form of blackface despite Soupault’s eschewal of the direct application of viscous materials such as greasepaint or shoe polish to his face typically associated with the genre? Although the archives offer no direct evidence [End Page 252] of Soupault’s familiarity with minstrelsy, jazz historian Matthew F. Jordan’s research on the French reception of Black American music clearly demonstrates that there was a context for Soupault’s apprehension of the form, with minstrel shows touring France beginning in 1870.3 Furthermore, Soupault’s fiction and poetry of the interwar period frequently operationalized stereotyped Black characters, and, indeed, his first autobiography, Story of a White Man (Histoire d’un blanc), published in 1927, was grounded in a racialized self-understanding.4 While further details of his costume remain unknown, ultimately Soupault’s tools (whether face paint, a mask designed for the occasion, or even a balaclava described in the press and scholarly accounts) are less important than The Matchbox’s underlying premise and intended signification, which must be categorized as a form of blackface. These reports point to a previously unaddressed issue in studies of dadaism and avant-garde performance, namely the Paris-based group’s use of racialized representations during the interwar period to further their double critique of the French far right and the equally conservative art establishment.5 The Matchbox marks an important departure: while earlier dadaist events incorporated objects and techniques which emblematized so-called “primitive” or direct artistic expression (perhaps most infamously Richard Huelsenbeck’s use of drums at the Cabaret Voltaire), the Galerie Montaigne production deployed a human subject. Soupault’s decision to impersonate the democratically elected leader of the first independent republic in West Africa and the public’s positive response noted in the press raises a critical question about the role of race—and racism—in dadaist aesthetics. How did varying French constructions of African identity from popular culture to academic ethnography, and specifically in this case that...