UC BERKELEY EXTENSION COLOR THEORY FOR ARTISTS: EXQUISITE CORPSE

The Exquisite Corpse

"Exquisite Corpse: Game of folded paper played by several people, who compose a sentence or drawing without anyone seeing the preceding collaboration or collaborations. The now classic example, which gave the game its name, was drawn from the first sentence obtained this way: The-exquisite-corpse-will-drink-new-wine."

--André Breton (Waldberg, 93-94)

Drawing by Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Max Morise, Joan
Miró, c. 1926.More exquisite corpses. Drawings by Victor Brauner, André Breton, Jacques Hérold and Yves Tanguy, 1935.

The Dada Manifesto (1918):

The signatories of this manifesto have, under the battle cry

D A D A ! ! !

gathered together to put forward a new art. What, then, is Dadaism? The word "Dada" signifies the most primitive relation to the reality of the environment. . . . Life appears as a simultaneous muddle of noises, colours and spiritual rhythms, which is taken unmodified, with all the sensational screams and fevers of its reckless everyday psyche and with all its brutal reality. . . . Dada is the international expression of our times, the great rebellion of artistic movements, the artistic reflex of all these offensives, peace congresses, riots in the vegetable market. . . . (Hughes, 71)

First Surrealist Manifesto (1924)

By André Breton. (Breton photograph by Man Ray [1938],

SURREALISM, noun, masc., Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.

ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought. It leads to the permanent destruction of all other psychic mechanisms and to its substitution for them in the solution of the principal problems of life.

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