A Message To Torres-Garcia: See You At Christie's

by Stephen J. Gertz

TORRES-GARCIA, Joachim.
L'Art en relació amb l'home etemi l'home que passa.
[Barcelona]: Amics de Sitges and sold by Salvat-Papasseit, 1919.
Twelvemo. Original wrappers (probably after Torres-Garcia).
Case by Cambras w/design after Torres-Garcia.
Inscribed to Joan Salvat-Papasseit.

On November 29, 2012, Christie's-South Kensington is offering a fiesta of books associated with South American Modernism at their Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts sale. 

Amongst books by Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Borges ia a selection of first editions by Joachim Torres-Garcia (1874-1949), the Uruguayan artist, theorist, and writer who introduced abstract art to South American culture after moving to New York City in 1920.

TORRES-GARCIA, Joachim. Raison et nature.
Paris [Montevideo]: Imán, 1932 [but later].
Small folio. 44 ff reproducing Torres-Garcia's MS
and drawings. Case by Cambras.

Born in Uruguay's capitol, Montevideo, Torres-Garcia studied drawing as a seventeen year-old, and when the family moved to Barcelona in 1892 he enrolled in Escuela de Bellas Artes de Barcelona. His earliest work was influenced by French Impressionism and his paintings were exhibited. He soon began to paint frescoes, murals, and design stained glass. He possessed an idealist conception of art and followed the ideology of Catalan nationalism bringing its themes into his work.

TORRES-GARCIA, Joachim. Historia de mi vida.
Montevideo: Asociación de Arte Constructivo [the author],1939.
Octavo. Illustrations throughout. Original wrappers.
Case by Cambras.

But his first book, Notes sobre Art ("Notes on Art"), published in May 1913, marked the de facto break with the Catalanistas. Slowly and inexorably he moved toward Modernism and abstraction while developing his progressive art theories, and in 1920 moved to Paris and then New York City where he mingled with the expat Parisian and American artists who were turning the art world upside down. He never returned to Barcelona.

TORRES-GARCIA. Joachim.
Nueva escuela de arte del Uruguay.
Montevideo: Asociación de Arte Constructico, 1946.
Quarto.  Reproductin of the author's MS and
photomechanical illustrations throughout.
Original printed card covers w/dust jacket, each
illustrated after Torres-Garcia. Inscribed by the author.

Broke and with a family to support, he returned to Europe, settled in Italy, and turned to toymaking, founding the Aladdin Toy Company. Encouraged to take up his brush once more, he exhibited to favorable reviews, returned to Paris in 1926 and began his association with the Constructivist movement to which he brought the order and logic of geometry and proportion to composition.

TORRES-GARCIA, Joachim.
Lo aparente y lo concreto en al arte.
Paris: Studio Torres-Garcia, 1948.
Octavo. 32 plates. Original cloth backed illustrated boards.

He left Paris once more in 1932 and migrated to Madrid where he established the Grupo Constructivo. Two years later, he packed his family and moved- this time for good - to his native Montevideo, where he was received as a member of the European artistic elite, and founded the Sociedad de las Artes del Uruguay.

By the late 1930s, Torres-Garcia had begun to integrate Pre-Columbian and indigenous Native American symbolism into his work.

TORRES-GARCIA, Joachim. Diálegs.
Terrassa: Mulleras & Co. [for the author?], 1915.
Octavo. Original cloth. Morocco case by Cambras.

His aesthetic-philosophical artistic theory of Universalismo Constructivo ("Constructive Universalism") was published in 1944 based upon the principles of proportion, unity and structure organized on a mystic theory of order.

TORRES-GARCIA, Joaquin. Notes Sobre Art.
N.p. [Terrassa?]: Printed by Rafel Masó [for the author?], 1913.
Octavo. Title with illustrations after "M.P." Four headpieces after Torres-Garcia.
Original cloth, by Eduard Domench of Barcelona.

Torres-Garcia's influence upon Latin American artists was incalculable. It was he who called upon them to embrace their local roots and bring their heritage to bear in their work through a modern artistic language of which he was a key developer. When discussing Latin American art in the twentieth century all conversation leads back to Torres-Garcia.

With over thirty-five writing credits to his name, Torres-Garcia was as fluent and influential as an author as he was an artist.

__________

All images courtesy  of Christie's, with our thanks.
__________
__________

The Day Boxing's Jack Johnson Put Dada Surrealism on Dreamstreet

surreal by Stephen J. Gertz

Note Johnson in tuxedo.

On April 23, 1916, Jack Johnson, the former Heavyweight boxing champion of the world in exile in Europe after fleeing conviction for violating the White-Slave Traffic Act (aka the Mann Act), went mano a mano with modern art.

His nominal opponent was Arthur Cravan née Fabian Lloyd, an Englishman born and educated in Switzerland, who claimed to be the nephew of Oscar Wilde, a professional boxer, singer, art critic, poet - you name it. Living in Paris, he was a performance artist before the genre existed, the subject and theme of his art being himself. Creating a public spectacle was the reason he got out of bed each morning, and once on his feet was a walking happening.

From 1911-1915 Cravan published Maintenant, a literary review that lasted for only five issues but had enormous influence upon the young artists and intellectuals who had come together in Paris and were on the cusp of changing the world.

Maintenant no. 3, October-November 1915.

Cravan brazenly caused sensation wherever he went, whatever he did. In an article in Maintenant about the arts salon of 1912 he explicitly and graphically asserted that a portrait of artist Marie Laurencin suggested to him that she needed a good screwing, an opinion that her lover, poet and literateur Guillaume Apollonaire, took issue with. He challenged Cravan to a duel.

Absurdity, the ridiculous, the eccentric, the striking, the outrageous, and the shocking  were Cravan's bread and butter. His identity was whatever he decided it would be; long before Madonna made self-invention and re-invention standard operating procedure, Cravan practiced it with a vengeance. It is no wonder, then, that Cravan became the darling of Dadaists Marcel Duchamps, Andre Breton, and Francis Picabia.

In 1916, he was desperate to get to the United States (dodging conscription into the French army was nearly a full-time occupation), had moved to Barcelona and fallen in with its colony of French avant-garde artists in exile, and needed money. Whose notion it was to stage a match with Jack Johnson remains unclear but Cravan's fingerprints are all over the patently wacko and divinely nonsensical idea.

Arthur Cravan by Jean-Paul-Louis L'Espoir.

And so, "In early 1916, a frenzied group of fight promoters gathered in Barcelona to organize what promised to be a 'sensational encounter' between former world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson (the famous black fighter who was living in Europe, a fugitive from his native land because of charges of having violated the Mann Act) and Arthur Cravan, an outspoken, notoriously eccentric Englishman, who claimed not only to be a professional fighter, but also the nephew of Oscar Wilde. Posters were hung throughout the city to publicize the event. In the controversial match, which took place at the Plaza de Toros Monumental on Sunday afternoon, April 23, we can safely surmise that Cravan fought true to form, that is, leading more with his mouth than with his fists. After six rounds of what must have amounted to little more than a skillful demonstration of shadow boxing -  staged more for the benefit of a rolling camera than the disappointed audience - Johnson finally dropped Cravan with an upper-right/left-cross combination. Knockout or not, the audience smelled farce, and because of the guaranteed fifty-thousand-peseta purse, the next day the daily press proclaimed the fight 'The Great Swindle.'

"For Johnson, it was just one more relatively uneventful 'ring contest,' as he called it, arranged for the benefit of his pocketbook. For Cravan, it was the main event in his tragically short life; two and one-half years later, at the age of thirty-one, he would disappear off the coast of Mexico, leaving behind only scant traces of a fascinating and adventurous life, one that stretched from the outback of Australia to the inner circle of vanguard artists and poets on both sides of the Atlantic. Far more significant than the footnote he left in pugilistic histories was the undying legacy of his outrageous behavior, which played a unique role within the development of an artistic and literary avant-garde. Arthur Cravan was, as Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia [Francis Picabia's wife] later asserted, 'a man who personified within himself, and without premeditation, all the elements of surprise to be wished for by a demonstration that was not yet called 'Dada.'
   
"Another release announced that Cravan temporarily abandoned his post as Professor of Real Club Marítimo boxing in preparation for the big fight. He trained publicly at the Bricall Gymnasium with boxers Hoche, Pomés and Jacks. To the press, he is a 'great athlete of the white race.' In order to continue to warm the spirits, it was announced that a great night of boxing with five bouts will be held April 12: Arthur Craven and Jack Johnson will be the arbiters of the last two fights" (Naumann, Francis. New York Dada 1915-23, p.162).

Jack Johnson, 1915.

Reality check: Though he claimed to be a light-heavyweight champion (of something, somewhere) Cravan, according to Boxrec, had absolutely no competitive experience prior to the fight. Indeed, his official record notes  that he fought only three bouts: With Johnson (knocked out); against Frank Hoche (a draw, June 26, 1916); and against Jim Smith ("The Black Diamond" with only this fight to his credit) in Mexico City, September 15, 1918 (knocked out). With a record of no wins, two losses via knock-out, and a draw his only threat as a boxer was to his own safety.

In January 1917, Cravan departed for New York. His shipmate was Leon Trotsky. Upon arrival in the city he was welcomed by Duchamps (who had preceded him), and the collector, critic, and poet Walter Arensberg.

Hollywood has yet to produce a biopic about the fascinating character who was Arthur Cravan; I smell  a ripe indie flick. Johnny Depp on steroids?

The poster for the pre-fight Great Evening of Boxing with Johnson and Cravan as referees (above) with its appeal to collectors of boxing material, Black-Americana, surrealist art and literature alike, is exceptionally scarce and highly desirable. The event it documents is one of the most famous and electrifying episodes in Dada history. Surrealism didn't get much more surreal than these two giant, flamboyant characters - one a phenomenal athlete and the proudest black man on Earth, the other a human artwork in constant progress - going at each other,  two of the most outrageous and out-sized personalities of their time in slam-bang-boing surreal battle-royal theater of the absurd that rocks, Do Wah Dada-Dada Dum Dada-Do.

A fine copy of the poster has just come into the marketplace after a long dry spell. The odds of seeing another copy in similar condition are not much better than Cravan's against Johnson, which is to say, fat chance.



Above, the only known footage of Arthur Cravan "boxing," in Spain 1916, here playing Ring-Around-the-Rosie with an anonymous Mighty Mouse, to all appearances the only living creature Cravan had a chance against. This is, quite possibly (why else would it have been filmed?), Cravan "training" for the fight with Johnson, a demonstration of surreal Dada absurdity exceeded only by the fight itself.
__________

[JOHNSON, Jack. CRAVAN, Arthur]. Poster advertising boxing matches at Iris-Park, Barcelona, on 12 April 1916, promoting the forthcoming match between Arthur Cravan and Jack Johnson. Barcelona: (Societat Editorial Manresana), 1916.

Printed in red and black on wove stock. 3 halftone photographic illus., including a central half-length portrait of Jack Johnson. 431 x 209 mm. (c. 17 x 1/4 inches).

Provenance: Eduardo Arroyo, the Spanish artist, born 1937, whose 1991 portrait drawings of Cravan after the Jack Johnson match were published in the Strasbourg Arthur Cravan catalogue.
__________

Poster image courtesy of Ars Libri Ltd, currently offering this prize, with our thanks. Image of Maintenant courtesy of University of Iowa Digital Library. Lespoir portrait of Cravan courtesy Wikicommons.
__________
__________

You Will Be Devoured By Seven Horrible Demons

by Stephen J. Gertz

"...Seven horrible demons of cat-like appearance...
devour her heart, her entrails, and her tongue."

"I shoulda stood in bed"
 - Boxing manager Joe Jacobs, aka Yussel the Muscle, 1934.

And so, perhaps, should have poor Teresa, a servant in the household of a noble and pious priest and the tragic subject of Nueva Relacion, Y Curioso Romance, a Romancero (a popular Spanish folk ballad) from 1770. This classic moral tale recounts the sad, the sorry, and sanguinary end that Teresa (and all who transgress) meets when she fails in her Christian duty to bless the poor.

One day, God, dressed as a poor man seeking alms, knocks on the door. Teresa, not the most pleasant of servants at any time under any circumstance, is having a bad hair day and refuses His entreaty. We've all had experiences like that. Yesterday, you gave the homeless guy who hangs out at the end  of the freeway exit a buck. Today, I dunno, maybe the transient thought of an ex provoked acute  headache, neuritis, and neuralgia, and you drove by him.

Maybe it was as simple as John Huston's American in Tampico rebuffing Bogart's mooch in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with "From now on you have to make your way in life without my assistance" after being successfully hit-up by Bogie twice before and now panhandled a third time.

In any event (and it is quite an event), Teresa pays dearly for being too close with centavos for supplicants. She falls prey to "seven horrible demons of cat-like appearance who devour her heart, her entrails, and her tongue." Readers who follow the travails of those slogging through Hollywood will immediately recognize the typical result of a screenwriter's notes-meeting with studio execs but, difficult as it may be to believe, this is worse. Digested by external demons?  Raskolnikov had it easier. Ultimately, Teresa the disagreeable became demon-dung, a waste-disposal issue, a cruel wage for a hair up her heine at the wrong time.

And so we are left with the moral of the story. The next time you're in Tampico just give the persistent beggar a peso, and another, and another, no matter what. He might be God and as we've learned from the Old Testament:

"Ya don't monkey around with Fred C. Dobbs!"

__________

Nueva Relacion, Y Curioso Romance, Donde se da Cuenta de la Amorosa Conversacion Que Tuvo un Sacerdote con Dios Nuestro Señor: Al qual se le Aparecio en Trage de Pobre a su Propia Puerta, Pidiendole una Limosna: Y el Desastrado Fin Que Tuvo una Criada Suya, con lo Demas Que Vera el Curioso Lector. Barcelona: en la Impremata de Bernardo Pia, en los Cotoners, n.d. [1770].

First edition of an extremely rare item with OCLC/KVK recording only four copies in libraries worldwide. Bifolium. 4 pp, large woodcut engraving at head of caption title, text in two columns.

Palau y Dulcet (2. ed.) 260112.
__________

Engraving courtesy of James Eaton of Alastor Rare Books, with our thanks, who is currently offering this rarity.
__________
__________