Incoherents

The Incoherents (Les Arts Incohérents) was a short-lived French art movement founded by Parisian writer and publisher Jules Lévy in 1882, which anticipated many of the art techniques and satirical attitude commonly attributed to later avant-garde art movements as novel.

Lévy coined the phrase "les arts incohérents" as a play on the common expression "les arts décoratifs". The Incoherents presented work which was deliberately irrational and iconoclastic, "found" art objects, the drawings of children, and drawings "made by people who don't know how to draw." Lévy exhibited an all-black painting by poet Paul Bilhaud called "Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night". The early film animator Émile Cohl contributed photographs which would later be called surreal. In an 1882 show, the artist Sapeck (Eugène Bataille) contributed an 'augmented' Mona Lisa that directly prefigures the famous Marcel Duchamp image "L.H.O.O.Q." of 1919.

Although small and short-lived, the Incoherents were certainly well-known. The movement sprang from the same Montmartre cabaret culture that spawned the Hydropathes and Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. The October 1882 show was attended by two thousand people, including Manet, Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Richard Wagner. Beginning in 1883 there were annual shows, or masked balls, or both. The movement wound down in the mid 1890's.

External links

* [http://www.artsincoherents.info/ Arts Incoherents (in French)]
* [http://www.nyu.edu/greyart/exhibits/counter/index.html Parisian cabarets and the avant-garde, 1875-1905]