![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.messynessychic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Exposition_arts_incohe%CC%81rents.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nIf modern art has taught us anything, it is that anything can be considered art. Picasso\u2019s and Braque\u2019s curious peeling newspaper collages of the 1910s spring to mind as the opening act for the \u2018Modern Art\u2019 movement. It was at this point in time, in the early 20th<\/sup> century where \u2018real\u2019 art \u2013 the academic 19th<\/sup> century kind, with all its airs and graces and establishment-imposed \u2018rules\u2019 \u2013 and this new lighter, less formal and somewhat random approach, parted ways. Modern Art as we perceive it was arguably launched by the quirky and wonderfully chaotic Dada movement that took root in central Europe around 1910 and flowered in New York in the early 1920s, causing a somewhat profound ruffling of the feathers of the status quo. And whilst we now see Dada as revolutionary, it was uncanny to discover that Dada had a look-a-like predecessor \u2013 not a direct ancestor, mind you, more like a forgotten uncle. \u2018Les Incoh\u00e9rents<\/em>\u2019 was a short-lived French art movement that originated from Montmartre in Paris in the 1880s. Unconcerned with the intellectual, political or spiritual facets of the arts (which Dada would address a mere 20 years later), they did, however, attempt to question through satire and ridicule, what exactly \u2018art\u2019 was, who it was intended for and why on earth it had to be so darn square.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paris in the 1880s was the capital of a flourishing world empire, serious and secure. Perhaps it could afford some cultural introspection and self-analysis, if only for its own entertainment? If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then the Incoherents movement had a point: why restrict the arts, visual, music or dance world to the same old tedious and traditional offerings? Why not open it up to fun, new rules and new media?<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a small group of self-publicists, Les Incoh\u00e9rents<\/em> were fed up with the stale and rather dull version of the-then established Arts world and wanted to entice the public with an alternative and more joyful view on art and life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Playful, ingenious, ridiculous and entertaining, the Incoherent\u2019s message was delivered through social amusement of the public, not unlike today\u2019s social media content. This was to be an art for all, not just for a chosen few intellectuals. There\u2019s indeed nothing new under the sun: from the graffitied walls of Pompeii to the current explosion of self-indulgent imagery on the likes of Facebook and Instagram, it\u2019s human nature to tease and tinker with mainstream messages and offer an alternative opinion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Mona Lisa of the movement is quite literally, the Mona Lisa herself, enjoying her long clay pipe. Mona Lisa fumant la pipe<\/em> created by the artist Sapeck (AKA Eug\u00e8ne Bataille) in 1883, is perhaps Les Incoh\u00e9rents<\/em>\u2019 most iconic identity piece. The crude application of the pipe and its smoke rings, shatters the reverence of the historic image, and let\u2019s face it, Sapeck\u2019s subject is clearly far more relaxed than Leonardo\u2019s. No longer part of an exclusive private collection or purely the intellectual property of the elite, street art was now there for all to enjoy. Technological developments in printing and photography allowed ease of artistic appropriation of established iconic images and masterpieces.<\/em> Contributors of the Incoherents movement continued to manipulate and distort all aspects of the Arts, from dance to opera, from poster art to photography in an attempt to provoke and rewrite the rules as to what \u2018art\u2019 was and who it was for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The founder and leader of the movement was Jules L\u00e9vy, a Parisian writer, publisher and founder of a wine-loving literary club out of Montmartre during the Belle Epoque called Les Hydropathes<\/em>, which had fizzled out in 1880. Working in newspapers of the day and familiar with volume printing and understanding the public\u2019s appetite for news, in an anti-establishment move, Levy had decided to throw a public \u2018exhibition of drawings by people who could not draw\u2019. Billed as a charity event, the contributors could present works in a public forum. This was the first \u2018Incoh\u00e9rent\u2019 art exhibition, held on July 13th<\/sup> 1882 on the Champs Elys\u00e9es. Appropriately, in true Incoh\u00e9rents<\/em> style, the Champs Elys\u00e9es show was extravagantly lit by candlelight due to a gas outage. A profusion of works were shown; drawings of all types, paintings littered with alternative and radical subject matter, miscellaneous sculpture and objects in all mediums and forms. These consisted of nonsensical, irrational and bizarre imagery, all engineered to question, provoke, engage and get a laugh from the public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The success of the Champs Elys\u00e9es event prompted L\u00e9vy to run a second show from his own tiny attic apartment in October 1882 which attracted some 2,000 people including \u00c9douard Manet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Richard Wagner. Imagine the art world\u2019s most famous artists and critics crowded together to see over 150 works in a chambre de bonne<\/em> (Paris\u2019 matchbox apartments reserved for domestic workers). A stark contrast to the pomp and elitism of the prestigious art \u2018Salon\u2019 and its official circuits, it was nothing short of a parody. One academic called the radical counter-salon \u201can attack on art\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The public was actively invited to engage with this new art through the mocking and mannering of old icons. To say they were intrigued and amused is an understatement. They were gagging for more. Masked balls and cabarets were advertised across the city as the vehicle for delivering their message, attracting the public to a variety of venues and experiences where a jumble of different media, random objects, miscellaneous artefacts, scratchings, pastings and other weird and wonderful objects would be exhibited. A sort of arts \u2018rave\u2019 of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Les Incoh\u00e9rents<\/em>, whether it was a ball or a happening or an exhibition, became a \u2018must do and see\u2019 event in the Parisian cultural calendar. October 1883 saw the first official exhibition of Incoherent art at the Galerie Vivienne in the heart of Paris. This show and all their future events would be run for charity, with the guidelines \u2018All works are allowed, the serious works and obscene excepted\u2019. The show was an Aladdin\u2019s Cave of absurdities, parodies and pictorial puns and was furnished with a formal catalogue of the works, giving us some idea today of just how bizarre the content was. A whopping 20,000-plus enthusiasts visited the exhibition that October.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The next year, the Incoh\u00e9rents were again at Galerie Vivienne with yet more artful amusements. This time the catalogue, now effectively their manifesto, was lavishly illustrated with engravings of the peculiar works Les Incoh\u00e9rents<\/em> gave the Parisian public and celebrities of the day a chaotic and absurd serving of the visual arts, a barrage of eclectic offerings and experiences. Whilst never shocking nor challenging, the events were joyfully anticipated and was very much \u2018a thing\u2019 to attend and be seen attending in the Paris of the 1880s. But by the end of the decade, the success of the movement was catching up with L\u00e9vy. Accused of commercially exploiting both his artistic contributors and his public, the press began to describe him as a new form of the establishment, \u2018the official unofficial Incoherent\u2019. To add insult to injury, other enterprises in Paris started to cash-in on the branding, badging new cafes and titling magazines with the movement\u2019s name and likeness<\/p>\n\n\n\n In order to distance himself from his accusers, L\u00e9vy organised a masked funeral ball at the Folies-Berg\u00e8re nightspot to mark the end of the movement. In 1891, Levy tried to relaunch the movement with a new magazine, \u2018Folies-Berg\u00e8re\u2019, but this also struggled to capture public attention. One last exhibition in 1893 was described this time by a critical press as \u2018all that is outdated, outmoded. Inconsistency joined decadence, decay and other jokes with or without handles in the bag of old-fashioned chiffes\u2019. L\u00e9vy plodded on until 1896, still trying to be the good Svengali and showman but his movement had flowered and wilted, and its audience had moved on for titillating entertainment elsewhere. Les Incoh\u00e9rents<\/em> would be momentarily ressurected stateside in 1919 when Marcel Duchamp appropriated the Mona Lisa image, but this time, in place of Sabeck\u2019s pipe, she now sported a moustache.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So little of the movement\u2019s works is thought to have survived, that when the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay devoted a retrospective to the Incoherent Arts in 1992, it was only able to exhibit archival documents and press clippings. Thousands of works produced by hundreds of artists during the movement\u2019s zenith had all disappeared. Even by the 1930s, surrealists like Andr\u00e9 Breton, who often spoke about the Incoherents, had never seen their works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With few traces of its existence, the movement was practically a lost legend; but more than a century later, unexpectedly in early 2021, seventeen important works attributed to the Incoherent Arts exhibitions were discovered in an old trunk. Unearthed amongst the storage of a private home near Paris, the large trunk full of a \u201cjumble of documents, drawings, objects wrapped in rags,\u201d<\/em> included one work which has since been identified as the first monochrome in the history of art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another important find amongst the trunk\u2019s contents was a piece of green cab curtain suspended from a wooden cylinder created by Alphonse Allais, given a title that roughly translates to \u201cPimps still in the prime of life and their stomachs in the grass drink absinthe<\/em>\u201c. To the untrained eye, it might look like just an old swatch of antique fabric, but the piece actually predates the Dada movement\u2019s \u201creadymade\u201d philosophy, a term coined by Marcel Duchamp to describe works of art he made from manufactured objects, such as his famous Bottle Rack<\/em> (1915), the iconic porcelain urinal he titled Fountain<\/em> (1917) and Bicycle Wheel<\/em> (1913).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unaware of the mysterious trunk\u2019s value or significance, the homeowners were unable to identify its original owner \u2013 perhaps a co-organiser of Les Incoh\u00e9rents<\/em>, one of the movement\u2019s artists, or an early collector? Dealer and art expert, Johann Naldi, is still searching for answers while planning to present his findings to the public at the end of 2021, when the collection is also expected to go up for sale as a single lot. The Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay is rumoured to be a likely buyer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet for such a historic find, bringing this collection to the world\u2019s stage could be far more problematic that some would probably hope having just uncovered a missing link in the history of modern art. The problem being; the collection\u2019s centrepiece, a canvas entirely painted in black, now identified as art history\u2019s first monochrome, entitled \u201cCombat de N\u00e8gres dans la Nuit<\/em>\u201c, which translates to \u201cNegroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The provocative \u201cjoke\u201d painting by the poet Paul Bilhaud, exhibited at the very first \u2018Incoh\u00e9rent\u2019 art exhibition in 1882 on the Champs Elys\u00e9es, was thought to be lost forever. And now here it is, having resurfaced nearly 140 years later, facing a very different 21st century audience in the wake of a global racial reckoning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps tellingly, the international press has been uncharacteristically slow to pick up a story about the rediscovery of an entire art movement hidden inside a trunk. Mainstream newspaper Le Monde<\/em> however, has followed the story among other French art world publications, describing Paul Bilhaud\u2019s historic monochrome as the collection\u2019s most significant attraction. Meanwhile, the French Ministry of Culture has declared the collective discovery a \u201cnational treasure\u201d. Disappointingly, we found that the French media coverage thus far has notably and consistently avoided any acknowledgement of the inevitable outcry that would likely ensue were a racist artwork disguised as humour to find its way into a public museum today and be celebrated as a national treasure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a conceptual piece, it is decades ahead of its time, which is where experts no doubt find the majority of the work\u2019s merit. But is it worth elevating as the movement\u2019s pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance<\/em> or better used to reopen the conversation about what we consider art? It\u2019s possible these issues are being raised behind the scenes before the collection is presented on a larger international stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In many ways, the Incoherents did create flickers of the avant-garde before the avant-garde. The movement momentarily released the public perception of the arts from the confines of its establishment, but it was Dada that actually managed to break the mould of previous centuries\u2019 art traditions. Where the Dadaist created art for the mind, Les Incoh\u00e9rents<\/em> was perhaps more of an amuse-bouche<\/em>; a teaser of things to come. Now it\u2019s our turn again to decide what to celebrate as art for public consumption.<\/ins><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" BY CECILE PAUL OCTOBER 8, 2021 If modern art has taught us anything, it is that anything can be considered art. Picasso\u2019s and Braque\u2019s curious peeling newspaper collages of the 1910s spring to mind as the opening act for the \u2018Modern Art\u2019 movement. It was at this point in time, in the early 20th century where \u2018real\u2019 art […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,33,39,71],"tags":[103,169,442],"class_list":["post-5501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dadaism","category-marcel-duchamp","category-paris","category-yellowism","tag-art","tag-dada","tag-surrealism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5501\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.messynessychic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Sans-titre-930x603.png\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.messynessychic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/tumblr_mb7qrb0fgN1rys3i9o1_540.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.messynessychic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/paris-salon-history-3.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.messynessychic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Bal_des_Incohe%CC%81rents_1891-1.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n.<\/s> The invitation card showed a ghostly broom-wielding dancer chasing blackbirds, perhaps an allegory for \u2018out with the old and in with the new!\u2019 The newspapers relished the event and as for the public, nothing could gratify their insatiable appetite for \u2018incoh\u00e9rent art\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.messynessychic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/thumb_large-1.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.messynessychic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/chest-of-hope-midnight-and-indigo-speculative-fiction-by-black-women-writers-930x660.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.messynessychic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/etiquette-Combat-Negresla-1882-Paul-Bilhaud-presentee-galerie-Paris-5-fevrier-2021_1-1.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.messynessychic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/7b58204_35938534-051217-55.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.messynessychic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/bb7f2ba_502928854-0120-103.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.messynessychic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/76331-930x524.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.messynessychic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/76334-930x530.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.messynessychic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/5e9c82a2b49d193d551bb78a6520fa23a0d74c2a7536b12ee35f18f0516d7c3c-930x523.png\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.messynessychic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Exposition_des_Arts_incohe%CC%81rents_Olympia_..._btv1b531591729_1-930x1294.jpeg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n