Album primo-avrilesque  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man (1884), a composition by Alphonse Allais. It consists of nine blank measures and predates comparable works by John Cage ("4′33″") by a considerable margin.
Enlarge
Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man (1884), a composition by Alphonse Allais. It consists of nine blank measures and predates comparable works by John Cage ("4′33″") by a considerable margin.
Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel at Night (1882) by Paul Bilhaud, here shown in the 1887 version appropriated by Alphonse Allais as published in Album primo-avrilesque (April fool-ish Album)
Enlarge
Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel at Night (1882) by Paul Bilhaud, here shown in the 1887 version appropriated by Alphonse Allais as published in Album primo-avrilesque (April fool-ish Album)

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

"Album primo-avrilesque" (April Foolish Albumn, 1897)[1][2][3] is a portfolio of seven monochromatic images by French artist Alphonse Allais.

While it was Paul Bilhaud who invented in 1882 the first "monochroïde": Combat de nègres pendant la nuit, Alphonse Allais generalized the concept.

The slim volume of 26 octavo landscape pages, 18.5 by 12 centimetres (7.3 in × 4.7 in), bound with card, was published by Paul Ollendorff in Paris on 1 April 1897, and was sold for one franc. The work is generally known by its French title, which may be translated into English as "April Fool-ish album".

The album included the Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man.

Contents

List of plates

  • Récolte de la tomate par des cardinaux apoplectiques au bord de la mer Rouge (rouge)
    • Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes on the Shore of the Red Sea (Study of the Aurora Borealis)[4], also translated as 'Tomatoes Harvested by Apoplectic Cardinals at the Edge of the Red Sea'
  • Stupeur de jeunes recrues de la Marine en apercevant pour la première fois la Méditerranée (bleu)
    • The Stupor of Young Recruits, on Perceiving for the First Time your Azure, o Mediterrenean!, also translated as 'Fear of Navy Recruits Seeing the Mediterranean for the First Time'
  • Des souteneurs, encore dans la force de l'âge, le ventre dans l'herbe, buvant de l'absinthe (vert)
    • Some Pimps, known as Green Backs, on their Bellies in the Grass, Drinking Absinthe, also translated as 'The Pimps, Still in the Prime of Life, Face Down in the Grass, Drinking Absinthe'
  • Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige (blanc) [5]
    • First communion of chlorotic young girls in the snow, also translated as 'First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls in the Snow'
    • Title of an entirely white painting exhibited at Expositions des Arts Incohérents 1884-5 organised by Jules Lèvy.
    • chlorosis, a form on anemia. Also cf. the later "white paintings" by Robert Rauschenberg.
  • Combat de noirs dans un tunnel, la nuit (noir)
    • Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel by Night.
    • Title of an entirely black painting.
  • Manipulation de l'ocre par des cocus ictériques (jaune), 'Jaundiced Cuckolds Handling Ochre'
  • Bande de pochards poussiéreux dans le brouillard (gris), 'Band of Greyfriars in the Fog', also translated as 'Band Of Dusty Drunks In The Fog'

Description

The artist's book includes eight printed pieces: a series of seven monochrome artworks, each a solid block of a single colour – black, blue, green, yellow (or brown), red, grey, white – displayed within an ornamental frame, followed by the score for a silent funeral march, with blank staves covering two pages. Each piece was given a humorous title in French.

The booklet also includes two prefaces in French, one for the monochrome artworks and one for the funeral march. In the preface to the monochromes, Allais wrote that other painters were "ridicules artisans qui ont besoin de mille couleurs différentes pour exprimer leurs pénibles conceptions" [ridiculous craftsmen who need a thousand different colours to express their painful conceptions] and that his ideal artist employed "pour une toile une couleur ... monochroïdal" [for one canvas one colour ... monochromatic]. In the preface to the funeral march, for "un grand homme sourd" [a great deaf man], Allais wrote that "les grandes douleurs sont muettes" [great pains are silent].

Background

Allais exhibited his first monochrome artwork at the second Salon des Arts Incohérents in Paris in 1883: his all-white Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par temps de neige [First communion of anaemic young girls in snowy weather] – a blank sheet of white Bristol paper, attached to a wall with four drawing pins. He showed another monochrome work, the all-red Récolte de tomates sur le bord de la mer Rouge par des cardinaux apoplectiques [Apoplectic cardinals harvesting tomatoes on the shore of the Red Sea], at the third Incoherents show in 1884, along with his silent funeral march. The exhibition catalogue notes that the red monochrome is an offering of Peter's pence to Pope Leo XIII.

Allais's monochromes were inspired by an all-black artwork exhibited by his friend Paul Bilhaud at the first Salon des Arts Incohérents in 1882 under the title Combat de nègres dans un tunnel [Negroes fighting in a tunnel], which had been intended by Bilhaud as a satirical response to Impressionism. Bilhaud was not the first to create an all-black artwork: for example, Robert Fludd published an image of Darkness in his 1617 book on the origin and structure of the cosmos; Laurence Sterne included a black page in his novel Tristram Shandy in 1760, immediately after the death of Parson Yorick; and Bertall published his black Vue de La Hogue (effet de nuit) in Les Omnibus no.7 in 1843, satirizing the very dark canvas exhibited at the 1843 Salon by Jean-Louis Petit. In Either/Or (1843), Søren Kierkegaard gives the story of an artist painting the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, painting a wall red, and contending that the Israelites had crossed and the Egyptians had drowned.'

Reception

Allais's joke was repeated by Émile Cohl, himself formerly a member of the Incoherents, in a cinema film in 1910, Le Peintre néo-impressionniste [The Neo-Impressionistic Painter], which included intertitle cards introducing monochrome presentations, such as Un cardinal mangeant une langouste aux tomates sur les bords de la Mer Rouge [A cardinal eating a lobster and tomatoes by the Red Sea], or Chinois transportant du maïs sur le Fleuve Jaune par un temps d'été ensoleillé ["Chinamen" transporting corn on the Yellow River in the sunny summer].

The publication of Allais's book of monochrome artworks predated Kazimir Malevich's Black Square and Red Square printings by nearly two decades. It was reported in 2015 that X-ray analysis of one version of Malevich's Black Square had uncovered a hand-written inscription in the white border that may read "Negroes battling in a cave", suggesting Malevich was familiar with Allais's earlier work.

The blank score of Allais's silent funeral march came five decades before John Cage's soundless 4′33″. Cage has denied being aware of Allais's work before composing his piece.


Similar works

see also some monochromatic paintings by Yves Klein.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Album primo-avrilesque" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools