Zone
“You are weary at last of this
ancient world
Shepherdess O Eiffel tower whose
flock of bridges bleats at the
morning
You have lived long enough with
Greek and Roman antiquity
Here even automobiles look old
Only religion stays news religion
As simple as hangars at the airfield”
Apollinaire

In Zone, modernity is reconfigured as “sweet stenographers” hurry to work, charmed by the “Paris factory street”. Yet this exaltation of modernity is stifled by repeated references to classical elegy and the pastoral. His city setting encapsulates all that is revolutionary, yet the ‘barking bell at noon’ and ‘twittering doorplates’ cannot escape Paris’ urban past and poetry’s literary tradition. In this introductory poem to his great work Alcools (1913), Apollinaire astutely captures the transitory nature of European art at this time. From 1911 the works of Picasso and Braque, renowned for their firm belief in artistic autonomy, made significant evelopments. Directing their vision towards modern life, they began to include song lyrics in their pieces and to amalgamate industrial with traditional painting techniques. In canvases such as Mujer con Guitarra (1911-12) Picasso began to introduce the inscription “Ma Jolie”, words from a popular song of the time.

These two words gradually evolved, first into “Joli Eva”, referring to his new lover Eva Gouel, and then into “J’aime Eva”. Thus popular ballads, modern industry and traditional artistics techniques all merged together .  Braque, with his incorporation of numbers and block capitals, also incorporated decorative styles into his work.  He used industrial paint and stencils in pieces such as Le Portugais (1911-12) whilst Picasso substituted the earthy oil colours characteristic of cubist paintings with loud reds, whites, yellows and blues. Yet amongst all their experimentation, the most significant innovation was their introduction of the papier collé technique in 1912.

Picasso included in his oil painting Naturaleza Muerta con Rejilla de Silla a piece of cloth on which was printed the weave of a wicker seat, whilst Braque, in his painting of the same year, Fruitdish and Glass, incorporated two strips of paper with mock wood imprint. Apollinaire believed these works to ‘contain the poetry of our era’, pursuing the process of reshaping artistic expectations that had been initiated by Picasso and Braque in their earlier cubist works. Their undermining of the artistic and literary canon was fertile ground for the emergence of a ‘poema-imagenes’ style, in which the boundaries between words and images became indistinguishable. The quintessence of the style fitted perfectly with the Italian Futurists’ thought and manifesto.

Rebellious and vibrant, it was promptly seized and mastered by futurists such as Carrà, who found themselves abandoning their abrupt brushstrokes and plush pigments in favour of cut out card compiled into pieces of visual poetry. A cacophonic amalgamation of visual, auditory and political expression exploded from the nucleus of Carrà’s Manifestation Interventionniste (1914), “eeviiivaaa il reee” and “evvivaaa l’esército” screaming across the centre in big bold white letters contrasted against the black background.

It is papier collé at its most intense. Some words painted, others cut out from daily political publications, magazines or pamphlets, and each declaring/promoting the prosperity of modernity and the urban: ‘Luce elletrica, strada, aviatore…’

It is not until Miró and Picabia however that the new poema-imagenes style, now under the wing of surrealism, came to fruition. Divorcing their poetic collages from the political and social agenda of the Italian Futurists, they allowed teasing word games to take precedence. Their compositions, though still applying the papier collé style, were now dominated by a quirky brand of surrealist minimalism, whilst the onomatopoeic political declarations of Carrà were evaded and substituted for enigmatic poetic phrases. The composition of Picabia’s Chapeau de Paille? (1921) for instance relies significantly on the piece of cord, the invitation and the cut-out card, but explains itself playfully in the words “Chapeau de Paille? M……. pour celui qui le regarde!”.

Miró’s Un Oiseau Poursuit une Abeille et la Baisse (1927) epitomises the eschewing of the Futurist political agendas. Through this painting Miró astutely illustrates the relationship between the palabras and imagenes of his era. Scrawled across a fluid, green-tinged brown background are the words of the title, each noun and verb treated as a collage element in itself: “Un Oiseau” is arranged in the top left corner adjacent to a few feather, “une abeille” is placed on top of a bright blue blotch in the bottom right corner just above “et la Baisse”, whilst the verb “poursuit”, written in Miró’s spidery writing and encircled by an elliptical yellow line, meanders across the central space, giving the impression of a bird in flight.

All representation has been surrendered to the words which not only serve to name and explain, but also dare to embark on a process of figuration. Language becomes ambiguous to the point of subverting it’s predominant role: communication. Nonetheless, aesthetics aside, the charm of the piece ultimately lies in the esoteric double entendre of the words themselves. Though the implication of Miró’s phrase is clear – the birds and bees being a common euphemism in most languages– the phrase does not make obvious sense (‘A bird pursues a bee and lowers her’). Hence our temptation to read the verb baisser (to lower) as baiser (to kiss or, in argot, to shag), an alteration encouraged by the orthographic error alluded to by the floating ‘u’ above the scribbled ‘po-rsuit’. We find ourselves entranced by a Breton-esque surrealist word game in which “the words don’t play, they make love”, marking a new era of artistic hybridity wherein Miró’s famed desire to “assassinate painting” could be achieved and “poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love”; an epoch where aesthetic norms were breached, tradition thwarted and art’s visual and literary facets were united as creativity conceded to modernity.

by Rachel Emily Davies