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Francis Picabia's Anti-Art Anti-Christ

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Francis Picabia's Anti-Art Anti-Christ Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère: Francis Picabia’s Anti-Art Anti-Christ Sarah Hayden Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère was published in Paris in the autumn of 1920.1 After protracted, ultimately abortive, negotiations with René Hilsum and Bernard Grasset, it was produced at Francis Picabia’s own expense under the ‘Collection Dada’ imprint of Paris bookseller-publishers, Au Sans Pareil, and distributed by Jacques Povlovsky’s Librairie-Galerie La Cible.2 The fact that Ezra Pound was an early proponent of Picabia’s writing is not surprising; the fact that his enthusiastic early reading of Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère has not been succeeded by extensive further scholarship certainly is. Having dismissed Picabia in 1916 as a proponent of ‘modern froth’,3 by 1921 Pound was willing to praise his prowess ‘not exactly as a painter, but as a writer’.4 In the same year, Pound 1. Francis Picabia, Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère (Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1920), hereafter JCR in the text. Translators and critics have offered various glosses on the book’s title. See Michel Sanouillet, Francis Picabia et 391, vol. 2 (Paris: Eric Losfeld, 1966), p. 123, and Francis Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation, ed. and trans. by Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007), p. 223. Picabia also used the ‘rasta’ prefix in his visual art of this period, including Tableau rastadada (1920) (collage on paper, 19 x 17 cm), and Le Rastaquouère (1920). The latter of these was exhibited at the Salon d’automne, Paris, October 1920. For an illuminating treatment of the Tableau rastadada, see George Baker, ‘Long live Daddy’, October, 105 (2003), 37–72. 2. 1,060 copies of this publication were released. It is, however, widely listed as having been issued by René Hilsum’s Au Sans Pareil press. See Michel Sanouillet, Dada à Paris (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1951) and Keith Aspley, Historical Dictionary of Surrealism (Maryland: Scarecrow, 2010). To trace the sequence of rejections which threatened to prevent the book’s appearance, see Documents 120–25 of Sanouillet’s Dada à Paris, and Eddie Breuil’s essay, ‘Vie et mort de la Collection Dada’, Revue des Littératures de l’Union Européenne, 3 (2005) <http://www.rilune.org/mono3/8_ Breuil.pdf> [Accessed 20 August 2013]. 3. Ezra Pound, ‘Letter to John Quinn, March 10 1916’, in The Letters of Ezra Pound (1907–1941), ed. by D. D. Paige (London: Faber, 1951), p. 74. 4. Ezra Pound, Letter to Wyndham Lewis, 1921, in The Letters of Ezra Pound, p. 166. IJFrS 13 (2013) 42 HAYDEN recommended Picabia to Margaret Anderson for the French editorship of the Little Review, writing: ‘F.P.’s painting is perhaps not convincing when reproduced, but the intelligence in his last book is another matter.’5 Pound’s archive in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library lists a translation of Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère and a typescript of the text among its holdings of his papers,6 and references to Picabia’s anti- war writings also surface among Pound’s Cantos, namely in LXXXVII, XCVII and CIII.7 In his 1937 treatise ‘D’Artagnan Twenty Years Later’, an essay written many years after Dada’s pan-national bushfires had died out, Pound pronounces Picabia ‘the only man I have ever met who has a genius for handling abstract concepts with the ease and surety a chartered accountant would have with a bill (ordinary) of lading’.8 At times recognizably Dada, and at others idiosyncratically Picabian, Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère registers the contradictions which 5. Ezra Pound, Letter to Margaret Anderson, April 20 1921, in Pound/ The Little Review: The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson: The Little Review Correspondence, ed. by Thomas L. Scott and Melvin J. Friedman (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 264. As is observed in an editorial note, this ‘last book’ might refer either to Jésus- Christ Rastaquouère or to Unique eunuque, which also appeared in 1920. However, as the editors point out, Picabia had already referred specifically to the former text in other letters around that date. It is, to my mind, almost definitely a reference to Jésus- Christ Rastaquouère. 6. Yale University Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Collection of American Literature: Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 43, Box 146, 6440: [‘Jesus Christ Rastaquouere’]: trans. by Ezra Pound, typescript, n.d. and Box 146, 6441: ‘Jesus Christ Rastaquouere’: typescript, [1], Cl. 1–8, n.d. 7. All three of these, as Daniel Albright notes (‘Pound, Picabia, and Surrealism’, in Ezra Pound and Referentiality, ed. by H. Aji (Paris: Presses de l’université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003), pp. 161–75 (p. 171)), refer to the same quotation, variously reprocessed in the Cantos as: ‘“Europe” said Picabia/ “exhausted by the conquest of Alsace-Lorraine”’ (LXXXVII, 570); ‘“By the conquest,” said Picabia, “of Alsace-Lorraine”’ (XCVII, 678); ‘“Europe” said Picabia: “exhausted/ by the conquest of Alsace Lorraine”’ (CIII, 733). See Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). The line that follows the original quotation, ‘Poor beings, felled by the hundreds for the glory of a ventriloquist’, closely recalls Picabia’s indictment of French war generals (JCR 60). For an acute reading of Pound’s interest in Picabia, see Albright’s essays: ‘Early Cantos I–XLI’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. by Ira B. Nadell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 59–91 and ‘Pound, Picabia, and Surrealism’. 8. Ezra Pound, ‘D’Artagnan Twenty Years After’, in Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. by William Cookson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), pp. 422–30 (p. 428). JÉSUS-CHRIST RASTAQUOUÈRE 43 marked its author’s final, fractious days as a Dadaist. By 1920, Picabia’s enthusiasm for Dada and for Breton had become frayed; a year later, the mock-trial of Maurice Barrès would hasten his final disaffiliation from the movement. The philosophy of Nietzsche resonated with diverse vectors of the pan-national Dada experiment,9 and Picabia’s own familiarity with his writings have been widely acknowledged.10 We know that he discussed his reading with Breton and Tzara and that he quoted freely and borrowed blatantly from the philosopher — sometimes manufacturing whole poems from unattributed quotations.11 In his recent introduction to the first English edition of Picabia’s collected writings, entitled I am a Beautiful Monster, Marc Lowenthal remarks: ‘Perhaps the most ticklish aspect of Picabia’s writings, and particularly of his later writings, is his often blatant, and as yet little discussed, plagiarism and appropriation of Nietzsche.’12 Although Lowenthal is admirably thorough in identifying the sources for many of these covert borrowings, this sleuthing out of instances of plagiarism and appropriation is much less tantalizing a proposition than is the 9. See for example: T. J. Berard, ‘Dada between Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Bourdieu’s Distinction: Existenz and Conflict in Cultural Analysis’, Theory, Culture & Society, 16.1 (1999), 141–65; Christine Battersby, ‘“Behold the Buffoon”: Dada, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo and the Sublime’, Tate Papers, 13. 1 (2010), <http://www.tate. org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/behold-buffoon-dada-nietzsches-ecce-homo- and-sublime> [Accessed 6 October 2013]. 10. See for example William Camfield, ‘The Machinist Style of Francis Picabia’, The Art Bulletin, 48.3–4 (1966), 309–22; Tanguy L’Aminot, ‘J.-J. Rousseau chez les Surréalistes’, Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, 83.1 (1983), 65–80 (p. 67); Eva Kraus and Valentina Sonzogni, ‘Wanted: Original Manuscript on Marcel Duchamp’, Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Online Studies Journal, 2.5 (2003), n. 50; Christopher Green, Modern Antiquity: Picasso, de Chirico, Léger, Picabia (L.A.: John Paul Getty Museum), pp. 7–9. 11. Picabia’s ‘Dada Philosophe’, which is dedicated to Breton, includes the line: ‘DADA songe à Nietsche et à Jésus-Christ’. Littérature, 13 (1920), 5–6. An epigraph by Nietzsche is among the three with which he opens Unique eunuque. Francis Picabia, Unique eunuque (Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1920), p. 16. Unmarked quotations from The Gay Science appear severally and Lowenthal identifies particular poems, including ‘I Must Dream’, ‘Chi lo sa’ and ‘Laissez déborder le hasard’, as well as multiple instances in his private correspondence, as exemplary of this practice. See Marc Lowenthal, ‘Introduction’, in Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster, pp. 1–24 (p. 15). 12. Lowenthal, ‘Introduction’, in Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster, p. 15. 44 HAYDEN task of analyzing Picabia’s processing of Nietzschean thought. The analysis that follows centres on the imprint of Nietzschean philosophy on Picabia’s negotiation of embodiment, art and religion. Presenting Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère as a critically neglected masterwork of Paris Dada, I want to demonstrate how Picabia enlisted Dadaist suspicion of organized religion as a template for enacting his disavowal of the official art world. Whereas Nietzsche’s anti-deism is clearly articulated and has elicited sustained scholarly investigation, Picabia’s co-opting of Nietzsche’s Anti-Cartesianism and Anti-Christ-ism into his own Anti-Art invective has been largely overlooked. Taking Pound’s claims regarding Picabia’s aptitude for processing abstract concepts alongside Lowenthal’s invitation to investigate his Nietzschean inflections as my starting point, I will move towards a diagnosis of what is at issue in Picabia’s de-abstractifying — materially embodying — portrayals of Art as/and Religion. Before examining the Anti-Art processing of Nietzschean anti-deism in Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère, I want to outline the specifically Dadaist bent of Picabia’s intent with regard to how he structures, articulates and presents the text. Strange Frames; Untoward Positions Critics tend to refer to Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère as a novel.
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