The Face by Marty Roth;

Author:Marty Roth; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

While Dada’s founder, Hugo Ball, wrote in 1917 that “the human countenance has become ugly and outworn” (Sobieszek 201).

“For the Surrealists the Great War resonated as a sort of watershed event that imprinted the modern experiment with a sense of loss and melancholia” (Dalle Vacche 181-2). Louis Aragon and André Breton both worked at the military hospital Val-de-Grâce (which contained a reconstructive surgery museum exhibiting sculptures of deformed human faces) as physicians-in-training, and Amy Lyford demonstrates how they set their art against the “trajectory of recovery” implied by these exhibits (Dean 178) (5). “In surrealism,” Angela Dalle Vache writes, “the face is never whole.” The faces of Magritte and Dali, she continues, “are usually turned away, effaced, cracked, distorted” (183-4). Faces in Magritte’s work are often hidden under a veil, as in “The Central Story,” “The Invention of Life” or “The Lovers,” which has a couple kissing, their faces covered by cloth sheets. Sébastien Dufay locates Antonin Artaud and Alberto Giacometti in a generation of artists [Henri Michaux, Jean Fautrier, Jean Dubuffet, Willem De Kooning] who reclaim figuration, but with a face “threatened with disintegration, collapse, erasure, an unstable physiognomy that barely exists” (121) (6).

A musician with no eyes, no nose, and no ears is the major character of Guillaume Apollinaire’s “What Time Does a Train Leave for Paris?” (1914), a play written in collaboration with Giorgio De Chirico’s brother Alberto Savinio. And it was also in 1914 that dolls and mannequins first made their appearance in De Chirico’s art; in a 1917 series (“Il trovatore,” “Ettore e Andromaca” and “Il condottiero”), they stand against unidentifiable spectacles or dominate empty squares. Around 1920, Dadaists like Grosz and Rudolf Schlichter began to situate marionettes and puppets in uncanny cityscapes. Carol Poore cites Grosz’s “Republican Automatons” (1920) where

[t]wo faceless, prosthesis-wearing automatons with cylindrical, machinelike limbs appear … against a background of rectangular buildings and empty streets. The one on the right is a disabled veteran with amputated arms who is still a stalwart militarist, as his Iron Cross and the slogan “1 2 3 Hurra” emanating from his hollow head indicate (34) (7).

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