French Studies, Vol. 00, No.

0, 1–18
doi:10.1093/fs/knz180

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COLLAGE AS FORM AND IDEA IN THE ART CRITICISM OF
TRISTAN TZARA

KATHRYN BROWN
LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY

Tristan Tzara’s art criticism extended over a broad range of stylistically diverse
twentieth-century artists including James Ensor, Henri Rousseau, Pablo Picasso,
Henri Matisse, Ivan Puni, Paul Klee, Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, and
Joan Miró. Attesting to the poet’s wide-ranging interest in visual creativity, sub-
stantial essays were also devoted to African, pre-Columbian, and Oceanic arts.
These art-critical writings appeared in newspapers, exhibition catalogues, and jour-
nals between 1926 and 1961. Although Tzara had outlined plans to collect and
publish his essays under the title ‘Le Pouvoir des images’, the project remained in-
complete at the time of his death in 1963.1
Scholarship has tended to focus on Tzara’s leading role in Dada to the detri-
ment of his later writings. Yet consideration of the poet’s works from the 1930s to
the end of his career — in particular, his art criticism — offers a broader perspec-
tive on the contribution that Tzara made to theoretical debates about both
literature and painting and their respective social roles.2 The aim of this article is
to examine a style of image production that, in Tzara’s view, eroded boundaries
between media and contributed to the emergence of a ‘mythologie moderne’ in
European art and society: collage.3 For Tzara, collage was important not just as a
style of making (a form), but also as an idea that demonstrated a powerful way in
which art could regenerate social relations. Illustrating the claim that readers
would look in vain for any ‘rupture’ that divided his creative persona into periods
before and after Dada, Tzara’s close engagement with collage testifies to the un-
derlying unity of his aesthetic and embeds his critical thinking in broader
twentieth-century debates about the relationship between visual art, poetry, and
theatre.4
1
The essays were published in the order and with the title envisaged by the poet in Tristan Tzara, Œuvres com-
plètes, ed. by Henri Béhar, 6 vols (Paris: Flammarion, 1975–91), IV: 1947–1963 (1980), pp. 297–440.
2
Stephen Forcer discusses the implication of this critical focus on the early part of Tzara’s œuvre in Modernist
Song: The Poetry of Tristan Tzara (Oxford: Legenda, 2006), pp. 126–27.
3
The term ‘mythologie moderne’ is taken from one of Tzara’s essays on Henri Rousseau discussed in the sec-
ond part of this article: ‘Le Rôle du temps et de l’espace dans l’œuvre du Douanier Rousseau’, in Œuvres complètes,
IV, 337–44 (p. 344).
4
Letter from Tzara to Sacha Pana, 17 January 1934, quoted in Œuvres complètes, I: 1912–1924 (1975), p. 632. See
also Fernand Drijkoningen’s discussion of the unity of Tzara’s aesthetic in ‘Entre surréalisme et marxisme:
révolution et poésie selon Tzara’, Mélusine, 1 (1980), 265–80 (p. 266). Franck Knoery makes the point that Tzara’s
art criticism and essays of the 1930s can be understood as a development of the magazine format favoured by the
poet in the early years of Dada; see Knoery, ‘Les Revues littéraires et artistiques: trajectoires de Tristan Tzara’, in
Tristan Tzara: l’homme approximatif (exh. cat.), ed. by Serge Fauchereau (Strasbourg: Musées de la ville de
Strasbourg, 2015), pp. 192–205.

# The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French Studies.
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2 KATHRYN BROWN

Collage is a style of visual production that is associated with many major

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European art movements of the early twentieth century, including Cubism,
Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. As a revolutionary form of making that ranged
from pasting pieces of paper, card, or newsprint onto a two-dimensional surface
(papier collé), to the incorporation of fabrics, photographs, printed ephemera, or en-
tire objects into large-scale multimedia constructions, collage challenged ideas
about the types of material from which art could be produced and the ways in
which works in visual media drew from, and connected to, reality. As Elza
Adamowicz notes, by giving rise to fragmented, heterogeneous, and often trans-
gressive forms, the ‘collage principle’ has been interpreted by many scholars and
artists ‘as the principal actant in the history of modern art’.5 This article will argue
that, for Tzara, the expressive and symbolic power of collage had the potential to
impact life beyond the boundaries of the art world. Taking as key reference points
Tzara’s 1931 essay ‘Le Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’, his prose work
Grains et issues of 1935, and his critical writings on Picasso and Henri Rousseau
published between 1935 and 1951, I shall argue that collage served as a template for
the poet’s reconception of both social relations and the psychic life of the
individual.
This argument is consistent with the ideas that had motivated Tzara’s earliest
commitment to Dada. As Stephen Forcer has noted, Dada made important con-
tributions to ideas beyond the textual and can be seen ‘to animate and expand
debates about a diverse range of other fields, including poetics, psychoanalysis,
ethics, semantics, intellectual history and science’.6 The following discussion will
show that Tzara’s conception of collage is similarly expansive. By elevating collage
to the status of a metaphysical principle, Tzara distinguished his writings on this
subject from those of his contemporaries and guaranteed an exceptional place for
this style of making within twentieth-century creative and intellectual life.

Collage as form
‘Le Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’ was one of Tzara’s first and most im-
portant commentaries on collage. Published in Christian Zervos’s leading art
journal, Les Cahiers d’art, the essay was accompanied by reproductions of collages
that had been produced by Picasso, Arp, Miró, Schwitters, Georges Braque, Juan
Gris, Henri Laurens, and Louis Marcoussis between 1913 and 1930. Visually, there-
fore, the essay showcased the development of collage from early Cubism to Miró’s
compositions of the late 1920s in which rumpled pieces of pasted paper were
combined with minimalist charcoal lines.
Tzara’s approach to this subject developed ideas that Louis Aragon had put for-
ward in a catalogue essay, ‘La Peinture au défi’, which had been published to

5
Elza Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), p. 14.
6
Stephen Forcer, Dada as Text, Thought and Theory (Oxford: Legenda, 2015), p. 3.
 COLLAGE AS FORM AND IDEA IN THE ART CRITICISM OF TRISTAN TZARA 3
accompany an exhibition of collages at the Galerie Goemans in Paris in 1930.7

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Like Aragon, Tzara was keen to explore the role of collage at the intersection of
verbal and visual media. The title of the essay gives a sense of the direction to be
taken in the ensuing discussion: collages make use of familiar words or phrases
(‘proverbs’) that are dislodged from their usual semantic function and made to sig-
nify differently in their new visual context. As scholars have noted, this visual and
linguistic ‘dépaysement’ was a staple of both Dada and Surrealist ideas about the
liberating potential of collage.8 In keeping with this premise, Tzara’s essay opens
with a discussion of the limits of linguistic expression. According to Tzara,
thought is held in check by familiar patterns of referentiality and grammatical
codes. Individual words are encased in a ‘trop solide carapace’ that undergirds hu-
man thought and interaction with a stable, but ultimately ‘paresseuse logique’.9
The practice of verbal collage in poetry is envisaged as a means by which to break
such habits of expression. Tzara argues that by inserting a ‘bloc autonome du lan-
gage parlé’ or a non-linguistic symbol into the poetic line, conventional patterns of
sense can be deflected and thought will be elevated to ‘des transparences
insoupçonnées’ (ibid.).
Turning his attention to visual expression, Tzara explains that collage in paint-
ing plays an analogous role by reconfiguring the relationship between the space of
the artwork and that of the viewer. With its roots in the world of everyday things,
collage is a style of creativity that can, Tzara claims, bring the viewer into a greater
‘intimacy’ with everyday truths.10 Dispensing with aspirations to mimesis, this in-
novative style of visual art integrates ordinary objects into the visual field and
thereby blurs the boundary between real and fictional space: ‘Une forme découpée
dans un journal et intégrée dans un dessin ou un tableau y enveloppe le lieu com-
mun, le morceau de la réalité quotidienne, courante, par rapport à la réalité
construite par l’esprit’ (ibid., p. 358). In this account, the intrusion of a visual ‘com-
monplace’ (‘le lieu commun’) interrupts the seamlessness of the world depicted on
the material support and troubles the way in which the artwork generates meaning.
As Marjorie Perloff notes, a collaged element on a work’s surface serves a ‘double
function’ by simultaneously referring to an external reality and undercutting ‘the
very referentiality it seems to assert’.11 Paradoxically, it is simultaneously part of,
but external to, the thing it represents.
For Tzara, this combination of material unevenness and referential disruption
was central to the emancipatory potential of collage. In both painting and poetry,
collaged words and materials could ‘divert’ existing paths of sense and thereby
7
Tzara, ‘Le Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’, in Œuvres complètes, IV, 357–60. Aragon’s essay, ‘La Peinture
au défi’, is reprinted in Louis Aragon, Les Collages (Paris: Hermann, 1980), pp. 37–77. For further discussion of
Aragon’s conception of collage, see Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image, p. 10.
8
See Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image, pp. 74–75; Philippe Moret, Tradition et modernité de
l’aphorisme: Cioran, Reverdy, Scutenaire, Jourdan, Chazal (Geneva: Droz, 1997), pp. 184–87; and Marie-Paule Berranger,
Dépaysement de l’aphorisme (Paris: José Corti, 1988), p. 215.
9
Tzara, ‘Le Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’, p. 358.
10
Tzara, ‘Le Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’, p. 360.
11
Marjorie Perloff, ‘Collage and Poetry’, in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. by Michael Kelly, 4 vols (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), I, 384–87.
4 KATHRYN BROWN

undermine familiar modes of expression. According to Tzara, collage was neither

a ‘quotation’ of reality, nor a means of signifying it.12 Rather, it was the irruption

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of the everyday (‘le morceau de la réalité quotidienne’) into the fiction created by
the mind (‘la réalité construite par l’esprit’).13 The positive upshot of this process
was the inauguration of an alternative and unpredictable system of signification
that created a new world from objects that remained anchored in the everyday.14
In ‘Les Papiers collés de Picasso’ of 1935, Tzara summed up this transformation
when he noted that a piece of white paper cut from and pasted onto the same
piece of white paper underwent more than a merely perceptible change. Rather,
the collaged strip of paper was transformed in its very nature. For Tzara, this fu-
sion of ‘means and expression’ generated a distinctive ‘residue’ that exceeded the
referential boundaries of the collaged artwork itself: ‘C’est un pur résidu nommé
poésie.’15
The stress on rerouting referentiality for the purpose of creating a different, but
oddly familiar space was not unusual in art-critical discussions about collage in the
first half of the twentieth century. Adamowicz points out that, from the 1920s on-
wards, it was common to identify this process as an act of ‘reworlding’ in art.16
She notes Aragon’s semiotic approach in ‘Max Ernst, peintre des illusions’ of 1923,
in which the author writes: ‘Toute apparence, notre magicien la recrée. Il détourne
chaque objet de son sens pour l’éveiller à une réalité nouvelle.’17 Tzara used a simi-
lar formulation in ‘Le Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’, when he described
linguistic collage as an attempt to ‘greffer un sens nouveau aux mots qu’on détourne
de leur direction habituelle’.18 Other artists and writers adapted the notion of
détournement to suit their own expressive purposes. In an even stronger formula-
tion, the Berlin-based Dadaist Hannah Höch described collage as a means by
which elements from contrasting realms (including music and dance) could be
‘alienated’ from their usual function for the purpose of generating ‘a newly created
entity’.19 For Max Ernst, embracing ideas expressed by Pierre Reverdy and André
Breton in their writings on Surrealism, collage enacted the ‘systematic displace-
ment’ of objects for the purpose of staging ‘the chance meeting of two distant
realities on an unfamiliar plain’.20
12
Aragon explores the idea of collage as quotation in an essay of 1965, ‘Collages dans le roman et dans le film’
(in Aragon, Les Collages, pp. 113–36 (p. 131)).
13
Tzara, ‘Le Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’, p. 358. This discussion of the collaged surface develops
the distinction that Tzara makes between ‘la pensée dirigée’ and ‘la pensée non-dirigée’ in his ‘Essai sur la situation
de la poésie’ of 1931 (in Œuvres complètes, V: 1924–1963 (1982), pp. 7–28).
14
‘[U]ne réalité unique dans un monde créé par la force de l’esprit et du rêve’ (Tzara, ‘Le Papier collé ou le
proverbe en peinture’, p. 358).
15
Tzara, ‘Les Papiers collés de Picasso’, in Œuvres complètes, IV, 361–63 (p. 362); original emphasis. Tzara takes up
this theme in ‘Picasso et l’homme à l’agneau’ when he writes: ‘L’art n’est pas imitation de la vie; il est une création
parallèle’ (in Œuvres complètes, IV, 377–79 (p. 378)).
16
Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image, p. 68.
17
Aragon, ‘Max Ernst, peintre des illusions’, in Les Collages, pp. 27–34 (p. 30).
18
Tzara, ‘Le Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’, p. 358; my emphasis.
19
Hannah Höch, ‘On Collage’, in The Ends of Collage, ed. by Yuval Etgar, trans. by Naomi Vogt (London:
Luxembourg & Dayan, 2017), p. 43.
20
Max Ernst, ‘Beyond Painting’, in The Ends of Collage, ed. by Etgar, trans. by Vogt, 119–36 (p. 128). Ernst’s for-
mulation echoes Pierre Reverdy’s famous discussion of the poetic image as a ‘rapprochement de deux réalités plus
 COLLAGE AS FORM AND IDEA IN THE ART CRITICISM OF TRISTAN TZARA 5
Like his Surrealist counterparts, Tzara emphasized the power of collage to di-
vert sense for the purpose of creating ‘une réalité unique’.21 His approach to this

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topic differed from that of his contemporaries, however, insofar as he also empha-
sized the reciprocal relationship between collage and the visual environment from
which materials are taken. For Tzara, the act of ‘reworlding’ associated with col-
lage did not simply occur in the artwork, but also on the city street. Focusing on
the ephemeral presence of posters in public spaces, he drew a parallel in his 1931
essay between art and urban culture. City spaces are, he argues, an admixture of
paper advertisements that spontaneously give rise to new visual forms. Subject to
erosion by the elements and to vandalism by passers-by, advertising posters are
slowly unmoored from the products they are designed to sell and cohere unex-
pectedly into new visual and sculptural forms (‘un torse éblouissant’)22 within the
city (see Figure 1):
Arrosés par les pluies, les tempêtes ou le soleil, la formule caractéristique, le signe ou la couleur,
éveillent un simulacre de culte ancien, d’un culte depuis longtemps disparu de la circulation hu-
maine, dans cette partie de l’homme où les étincelles s’allument encore bien vite, et dirigent la
raison et ses désirs.23

Echoing the creative spontaneity championed in the early years of Dada, the im-
promptu metamorphosis of urban poster culture gives rise to an independent
form of symbolism (or ‘myth’) that appeals to and is expressive of collective con-
sciousness. The collaged canvas mimics this mysterious visual transformation of
the city street by generating unexpected layered surfaces from mass-media texts
and images.24 While Walter Benjamin argued in 1935 that the mechanical reproduc-
tion of images had separated art from its ‘cult value’, Tzara pursued the
contrasting idea that collage — with its explicit connection to mass-produced
posters and popular culture — awakened ‘de nouvelles superstitions’ that could
flourish in quotidian life.25

ou moins éloignées’; Reverdy, ‘L’Image’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Étienne-Alain Hubert, 2 vols (Paris:
Flammarion, 2010), I, 495–96 (p. 495). See also André Breton, ‘Manifeste du surréalisme’, in Œuvres complètes, ed.
by Marguerite Bonnet, with Philippe Bernier, Étienne-Alain Hubert, and José Pierre, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard,
1988–99), I (1988), pp. 309–46 (p. 324).
21
Tzara, ‘Le Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’, p. 358.
22
Tzara, ‘Le Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’, p. 358.
23
Tzara, ‘Le Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’, p. 359. Elmer Peterson notes an overlap between this im-
age of the city street and Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ of 1913, a poem in which handbills and posters combine
to form ‘la poésie de ce matin’. Peterson points out, however, that in contrast to Apollinaire’s search for beauty in
quotidian experience, Tzara’s image expresses the idea that poetry resides in ‘l’élément de la vie’ that neither mani-
fests beauty nor has any aspiration to it. Elmer Peterson, Tristan Tzara: Dada and Surrational Theorist (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1971), p. 86; Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Zone’, in Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Marcel
Adéma and Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 39.
24
On the broader role of mass-media advertising in Tzara’s works, see Katherine Papachristos, L’Inscription de
l’oral et de l’écrit dans le théâtre de Tristan Tzara (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 73–75.
25
Tzara, ‘Le Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’, p. 359; Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999),
pp. 211–44 (p. 218). On collage’s connection to mass culture, see Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism,
Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 253–56.
6 KATHRYN BROWN

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Figure 1 ‘[U]n torse éblouissant’, Paris, rue du Temple, April 2018. Photo # Kathryn Brown.

In Tzara’s view, the images that circulated on and between the city street and
the canvas were slowly freed from the capitalist logic of their underlying advertis-
ing material. His reference to the presence of a ‘lieu commun’ in collage should,
therefore, be understood in a dual sense. It does not simply refer to a collaged
 COLLAGE AS FORM AND IDEA IN THE ART CRITICISM OF TRISTAN TZARA 7
element as the incursion of a ‘commonplace’ or ‘platitude’ into an artwork, but

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also signals the emergence of a unique space that is shared by museum and street,
fiction and reality, artist and viewer. For Tzara, the incorporation of ordinary
materials into an artwork harnesses a generative process that takes place within
the urban environment and stages a recuperation of the visual commons. By con-
stituting a vital site of exchange between art and the everyday, collage could
function, therefore, as a powerful signal of art’s democratic potential.
The social implications of collage were not, however, simply rooted in ideas
about the need to undermine circuits of capital exchange. Rather, by evidencing
physical acts of tearing, cutting, and pasting, the collaged surface staged a ‘visual
transfer’ of humankind’s instinctive sensory responses to the world.26 Drawing on
Jungian psychology, Tzara envisaged collage as a counter to cognitive engagement
with both the realm of art and the space of the city. As a form of creativity that en-
gaged the whole body, collage could unleash desires anchored in the collective
unconscious for the purpose of triggering new modes of thought that were capa-
ble of opening a ‘domaine de la joie’ for the individual.27 For Tzara, collage
liberated pictures from a purely visual realm, thereby restoring both artist and
viewer to sensory plenitude and initiating a new set of shared ‘rites’ in modern
society.
In ‘Picasso et les chemins de la connaissance’ of 1947, Tzara developed this
point by emphasizing the ability of collage to construct a newly embodied specta-
tor who enjoys a form of ‘toucher visualisé’.28 Importantly for the purposes of
the present discussion, the same essay draws a connection between tactility that
takes place through vision and theatrical performance.29 Akin to the creation of a
‘lieu commun’ in a collaged canvas, the theatre was, for Tzara, a multi-sensory
space of spontaneous gesture shared by actor and spectator. It was also a place in
which elements drawn from different spatial and temporal frameworks could be
juxtaposed and compressed. As Philippe Dagen has noted, by drawing a connec-
tion between works on canvas and those on stage, Tzara posited ‘une unité qui
transcende la distinction ordinaire entre deux modes d’expression profondément
différents, l’un dans le temps, l’autre sur la surface, l’un par la parole, l’autre par
les lignes et les couleurs’.30 Significantly, it was by analysing the theatrical works of
a painter, Henri ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau, that Tzara developed this connection be-
tween contrasting media and the sensory experiences with which they were
associated. As I shall argue in the following section, in his analysis of the structure
of Rousseau’s plays and paintings Tzara also showed how the idea of collage could
stimulate a powerful reconceptualization of individual psychology.

26
Tzara, ‘Les Papiers collés de Picasso’, p. 362.
27
Tzara, ‘Les Papiers collés de Picasso’, p. 363. Arguably, this brings Tzara’s conception of collage close to
Surrealism’s privileging of pleasure, parody, and humour. See Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image, p. 75.
28
Tzara, ‘Picasso et les chemins de la connaissance’, in Œuvres complètes, IV, 364–76 (p. 374). See also Tzara, ‘Le
Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’, p. 358.
29
See Tzara, ‘Picasso et les chemins de la connaissance’, p. 370.
30
Philippe Dagen, ‘Un objet de nécessité supérieure: Tzara et l’art’, Europe, 1061–62 (2017), 109–16 (p. 112).
8 KATHRYN BROWN

Collage as idea

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In 1965, Louis Aragon published a short essay, ‘Petite Note sur les collages chez
Tristan Tzara et ce qui s’en suit’, in which he describes his former Dada colleague
as ‘l’un des praticiens les plus remarquables de l’esprit de collage’.31 Aragon begins
by discussing the linguistic innovations of Tzara’s early poetry, including the intro-
duction of ‘unpronounceable signs’ into the poetic line. Linking the graphic
revolutions of Dada poems and manifestos to the development of collage in
painting, he describes collage as an expressive medium that does not simply draw
on contrasting sign systems, but that compresses different works of art into a sin-
gle entity. In support of this analysis, he discusses Tzara’s incorporation of scenes
from Shakespeare’s Hamlet into his own play Mouchoir de nuages (1924) and
describes the resulting theatrical collage as a creative ‘abbreviation’ (abrégé) of a
pre-existing artwork.32
Aragon was right to understand this twinned notion of appropriation and juxta-
position as crucial to Tzara’s broader understanding of collage and its potential
for performance. Taking up Aragon’s description of Tzara as a practitioner of the
‘spirit’ of collage, this section will consider the latter’s elaboration of these ideas in
his discussion of two plays written by Henri Rousseau. I shall draw a connection
between the conception of collage elaborated in Tzara’s ‘Le Papier collé ou le
proverbe en peinture’ discussed above and the poet’s analysis of space and time in
theatre. The relationship between the two will illuminate Tzara’s ideas about the
ways in which collage can not only usher in new forms of theatrical performance,
but also profoundly alter an individual’s conception of the temporal trajectory of
his or her own life. Tzara probes this idea in Grains et issues of 1935, a work that
bridges his discussion of papiers collés and his later ideas about the compression of
time and space in Rousseau’s works.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, Henri Rousseau’s art captured the
imagination of the Parisian avant-garde. Picasso acquired several of Rousseau’s
canvases and hosted the famous banquet in honour of the painter in Paris in
1908.33 Apollinaire devoted a substantial essay to the topic of Rousseau’s art in
1914, and Robert Delaunay acquired the manuscripts of two plays which Rousseau
had written between the late 1880s and the end of the century: Une visite à
l’Exposition de 1899 and La Vengeance d’une orpheline russe. Tzara, in turn, acquired
these from Sonia Delaunay in 1945. The manuscript of a third (incomplete) play
by Rousseau, L’Étudiant en goguette, fell into the hands of the painter’s landlord and
was subsequently lost.34 Against this background, Tzara’s interest in Rousseau’s

31
Louis Aragon, ‘Petite Note sur les collages chez Tristan Tzara et ce qui s’en suit’, in Les Collages, pp. 149–57 (p.
149); my emphasis.
32
See also Corinne Contini-Flicker, ‘Mouchoir de nuages (1924) de Tzara, collage de Hamlet: une réécriture Dada’,
in Poétiques de la discontinuité de 1870 à nos jours, ed. by Isabelle Chol (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses universitaires Blaise
Pascal, 2004), pp. 283–302, and Papachristos, L’Inscription de l’oral et de l’écrit, pp. 71–73.
33
For discussion of this banquet and Picasso’s interest in Rousseau’s works, see Peter Read, Picasso &
Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 46–48.
34
Nancy Ireson did, however, discover two typed copies of this play in the Fonds Tristan Tzara in the
Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet in Paris. She discusses the circumstances that led to Tzara’s acquisition of the
 COLLAGE AS FORM AND IDEA IN THE ART CRITICISM OF TRISTAN TZARA 9
work was as much an act of self-placement in relation to his avant-garde

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contemporaries as it was to Rousseau’s distinctive creativity.
Tzara wrote two essays that have a bearing on Rousseau’s theatre and painting.
The first, ‘Le Théâtre d’Henri Rousseau’ was the preface to an edition of Une visite
à l’Exposition de 1889 which Tzara published in 1947.35 The second, ‘Le Rôle du
temps et de l’espace dans l’œuvre du Douanier Rousseau’ was published in a cata-
logue that accompanied an exhibition of Rousseau’s paintings at the Sidney Janis
Gallery in New York in 1951.36
As commentators have noted, early twentieth-century art criticism focused pri-
marily on Rousseau’s personality and presented the artist’s œuvre in ways that
were designed to highlight its unconventionality. Insistence was placed on the fact
that Rousseau was self-taught, had spent most of his career as a Parisian customs
official, and had given music lessons towards the end of his life in the hope of in-
creasing his income. The themes of his works — notably the depiction of tropical
forests — and their naı̈ve compositional style also contributed to myths about
Rousseau’s ‘outsider’ status. In an interview of 1910, Arsène Alexandre empha-
sized ‘la ruse candide du sourire’ and the ‘bonheur enfantin’ of the painter.37 For
Apollinaire, there was ‘aucun maniérisme, aucun procédé, aucun système’ to be
found in the works of ‘le mirifique Rousseau’.38 Although other writers including
Alfred Jarry and Jean Cocteau signalled the importance of Rousseau to the early
twentieth-century avant-garde, Philippe Soupault concluded that even by the
1960s ‘la légende qui le fait traiter d’aliéné, de naı̈f, de farceur et de primaire n’est
pas encore détruite’.39
In the 1940s and 1950s, Tzara helped to re-orient this debate by examining the
structural qualities of Rousseau’s works. The compression of space and time in
Rousseau’s painting became the clue to understanding his approach to theatre. In
his commentary on a canvas of 1908, Les Joueurs de football (see Figure 2), Tzara
notes that although Rousseau’s paintings appear to be static, their structure is de-
rived from ‘la décomposition du mouvement en éléments indépendants, véritables
tranches de temps, liés les uns aux autres par une sorte d’opération

manuscripts and debates his reasons for not publishing L’Étudiant en goguette in ‘Tristan Tzara and the Plays of the
Douanier Rousseau’, The Burlington Magazine, 146 (2004), 616–21 (pp. 616–17).
35
Tzara, ‘Le Théâtre d’Henri Rousseau’, in Œuvres complètes, IV, 345–56.
36
Tzara, ‘Le Rôle du temps et de l’espace dans l’œuvre du Douanier Rousseau’, in Œuvres complètes, IV, 337–44.
The Sidney Janis Gallery presented an exhibition on international Dada in 1953.
37
Arsène Alexandre, ‘La Vie et l’œuvre d’Henri Rousseau: peintre et ancient employé de l’octroi. Entretien avec
Arsène Alexandre’, in Le Douanier Rousseau par ses contemporains: critiques, écrits, entretiens, essais, monographies, souvenirs,
témoignages, ed. by Raoul Coquereau (Toulouse: Ombres, 2016), 65–70 (pp. 70 and 71).
38
Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Le Douanier’, Œuvres en prose complètes, 3 vols, ed. by Pierre Caizergues and Michel
Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1991–93), II (1991), pp. 627–41 (pp. 638 and 627).
39
Philippe Soupault, ‘Henri Rousseau, le Douanier’, in Profils perdus (Paris: Mercure de France, 2015), pp. 105–12
(p. 112). For further discussion of the reception of Rousseau’s works over the course of the twentieth century, and
the mythologizing of his character, see Gabriella Belli and Guy Cogeval, ‘Rousseau, or About Archaic Naiveté’, in
Henri Rousseau: Archaic Naiveté (exh. cat.), ed. by Gabriella Belli and Guy Cogeval (Milan: 24 ORE Cultura, 2015),
pp. 21–29.
10 KATHRYN BROWN

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Figure 2 Henri Rousseau, Les Joueurs de football, 1908. Oil on canvas, 100.3  80.3 cm. Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Public domain. Wikiart.
 COLLAGE AS FORM AND IDEA IN THE ART CRITICISM OF TRISTAN TZARA 11
40
arithmétique’. The work depicts four men playing football, yet there is little

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sense of continuity in the action. Whether an image of two men is repeated or
whether the work depicts different moments within a single game or multiple
games (including potentially other sports, for example, boxing), the compressed
action, restricted space, and unconventional perspective imbues each part of the
canvas with its own structural — and, by extension, narrative — independence.
Anticipating the look of Magritte’s ‘collaged paintings’ of the 1920s, Les Joueurs de
football, like many of Rousseau’s works, juxtaposes distinct units that defy spatio-
temporal logic.41
A similar point could be made about Rousseau’s self-portrait, Moi-même, portrait-
paysage (see Figure 3), a painting that Tzara identified as a summation of
Rousseau’s entire art.42 The work has a troubling perspective (the discrepancy be-
tween the size of the central figure and the bystanders on the left), and Rousseau
himself seems to be floating just above the ground. Applying Tzara’s notion of
collage as the simultaneous presence of competing spatial and temporal elements
in a single framework, one might ask whether the painter truly inhabits the back-
ground scene. As the double-barrelled title suggests, the work is not a
straightforward self-portrait, but rather two works layered on top of each other: a
portrait and a landscape.
In his analysis of space and time in Rousseau’s works, Tzara raises an issue that
is crucial to ideas about how paintings communicate to the viewer, namely: can
the action of a picture be unfolded in linear time as if it were a narrative?
Considering this problem from the perspective of analytic aesthetics, David
Carrier answers in the affirmative. He argues that as a general rule viewers try to
animate figurative paintings by imagining a ‘before’ and ‘after’, and that the act of
interpretation itself is an attempt to ‘move’ the depicted scene.43 For Carrier,
much twentieth-century painting subverts that operation, and he cites Matisse’s
Luxe, calme et volupté (1904, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) as an example of a painting that,
though figurative, resists the imposition of a definitive narrative.44
Tzara offers a different perspective on this problem by drawing on ideas
expressed in his essays about collage. He argues that the characters in Rousseau’s
works occupy a single pictorial space, but that they do not share the same tempo-
ral space (or, by extension, a continuous, linear narrative). As Tzara notes in
connection with Les Joueurs de football, each segment of the painting retains its
‘intégrité indépendante et sa vie propre’.45 Like collaged materials on a canvas,
Rousseau’s works display a rupture in the structural continuity of the depicted
40
Tzara, ‘Le Rôle du temps et de l’espace dans l’œuvre du Douanier Rousseau’, p. 341. See also Ireson’s discus-
sion of Tzara’s approach to ‘pictorial synthesis’ in Rousseau’s paintings in ‘Tristan Tzara and the Plays of the
Douanier Rousseau’, p. 618.
41
For discussion of Magritte’s collaged paintings, see Patricia Allmer, René Magritte: Beyond Painting (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 120.
42
Tzara, ‘Le Rôle du temps et de l’espace dans l’œuvre du Douanier Rousseau’, p. 342.
43
David Carrier, High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernist Painting (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1996), p. 81.
44
David Carrier, ‘Luxe, calme et volupté’, Source: Notes in the History of Art, 17 (1997), 34–38 (p. 37).
45
Tzara, ‘Le Théâtre d’Henri Rousseau’, p. 346.
12 KATHRYN BROWN

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Figure 3 Henri Rousseau, Moi-même, portrait-paysage, 1890. Oil on canvas, 146  113 cm.
National Gallery, Prague. Public domain. Wikimedia Commons, Google Art Project.

subject. By virtue of this style of execution, the paintings have the appearance of
collages: ‘Le principe de juxtaposition et de simultanéité qui régit sa peinture, où
les lieux communs sont sublimés et dépassent leurs limites conventionnelles,
Rousseau l’a trouvé instinctivement’ (ibid., p. 351). Les Joueurs de football is
 COLLAGE AS FORM AND IDEA IN THE ART CRITICISM OF TRISTAN TZARA 13
interpreted as a scene that has been metaphorically ‘cut out’ from competing nar-

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ratives and then ‘pasted’ together on the surface of a single object. Echoing the
notion of détournement pursued in ‘Le Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’,
Tzara identifies the juxtaposition of clashing elements as the means by which a vi-
sual commonplace (‘lieu commun’) is incorporated into, and surpassed within, the
artwork.
This structural feature of Rousseau’s art has important consequences for the
kinds of stories told by the works. If, for Tzara, Rousseau’s paintings depict inde-
pendent slices of time in a dramatic sequence, this is not equivalent to the linear
unfolding of a narrative that answers questions about what happened before and
after the depicted moment. In contrast to the portrayal of continuous movement
in the manner of, for example, Marcel Duchamp’s Nu descendant un escalier no. 2
(1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art), Tzara alerts the viewer to the simultaneous
presence of multiple spatio-temporal frameworks within a single visible surface. It
is this juxtaposition of discontinuous elements that, for Tzara, constitutes the
‘modern character’ of Rousseau’s art.46 Yet Tzara does not draw this conclusion
simply by interpreting the visual style of Rousseau’s paintings. Rather — in a kind
of critical collage — he turns to Rousseau’s theatre in order to explain this idea.
In his commentary on Rousseau’s short melodrama La Vengeance d’une orpheline
russe, Tzara emphasizes the alternation of scenes. In the first act, the plot follows
the action in two houses with contiguous gardens; the action in one house is held
in suspense, while the action in the other is presented to the audience. For Tzara,
this alternation suggests an analogy with cinematic editing which compresses dif-
ferent plot segments into condensed but often non-linear sequences.47 Tzara
emphasizes cuts in the visible action of Rousseau’s play as the audience’s attention
is directed to the various locations. These points of suspension permit the unfold-
ing of uneven sequences that contain more information than they show.48
Une visite à l’Exposition de 1889 opens up a related perspective: the comedy traces
the visit of a family from Brittany to Paris and culminates in their tourist route
around monuments of the capital. In the final act, the family members find them-
selves in a short space of time at the Madeleine, Les Invalides, the Place de la
République, the Grands Boulevards, and the Jardin du Luxembourg. For Tzara,
this compression of time and space anticipates the cinematic jump cut, but also

46
See also Ireson’s discussion of ‘simultaneity’ in Tzara’s essays and the dialogue that this implied with works by
Sonia and Robert Delaunay, in ‘Tristan Tzara and the Plays of the Douanier Rousseau’, pp. 619–20.
47
Tzara, ‘Le Théâtre d’Henri Rousseau’, p. 347.
48
Tzara also identifies collage-like practices in the composition of the plays. He notes that the manuscript of
Une visite à l’Exposition de 1889 comprises corrections pasted onto the page ‘faites au moyen de bouts de papier
collés’ (‘Le Théâtre d’Henri Rousseau’, p. 355), and that the manuscript of La Vengeance d’une orpheline russe contains
letters that have been written out by the author as if they were part of an actual correspondence: ‘Dans le
manuscrit de cette pièce, les lettres que le protagoniste reçoit sont toutes écrites comme de véritables lettres datées
et suivies d’une signature paraphée. Instinctive, la vérité de ces lettres pour Rousseau n’est ni ébranlée ni troublée
par la fiction du théâtre. On songe aux premiers collages cubistes de Picasso et de Braque où le problème de la
réalité objective et de la réalité construite du tableau est également posé, quoique d’une manière plus théorique’
(ibid., p. 350).
14 KATHRYN BROWN

suggests an analogy with early Renaissance painting.49 Discussing the Coronation of

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the Virgin by Fra Angelico (c. 1434–35, Musée du Louvre, Paris), Tzara draws atten-
tion to images at the base of the painting (the predella) which depict scenes from
the life of St Dominic. Like Rousseau’s theatre, this sequence does not unfold in a
continuous, linear narrative. Rather it compresses time and space, leaving place
for spectators to fill in gaps through the work of the imagination. Applying this
idea to Rousseau’s play, he states:
Après avoir été imprégnés d’une scène, le brusque transfert qu’on nous impose dans le passé
ou l’avenir ou dans un endroit différent, suppose de notre intelligence un effort d’abstraction,
d’analogie et de déduction qui, pareil à une échelle par rapport à un escalier, supprime ce qui
n’est pas essentiellement nécessaire.50

The metaphor of a ladder as opposed to a staircase is apt, as it suggests a difference

between the depiction of movement in and pictorial coherence of works by
Rousseau (ladder) and Duchamp (staircase). Significantly, the temporal and spatial
dislocations of Rousseau’s collage-like paintings and theatrical works challenge the
audience’s expectation of a continuous narrative and, instead, constitute ‘une of-
fense à l’ordre sensoriel établi’.51 In consequence, the works express the possibility
of inhabiting a perspective on human existence that is liberated from a fixed spatial
and temporal order. It is at this point that a link can be found between Tzara’s no-
tion of collage and his reconception of the trajectory of individual life.
Tzara examined this theme in his extended essay, Grains et issues, of 1935.52 A
mixture of verse and prose, the essay describes itself as a ‘Rêve expérimental’ and
identifies a productive role for poetry in a utopian conception of society. Taking
up ideas discussed above, social change is precipitated by a revolution that is artis-
tic and phenomenological as well as political. Fernand Drijkoningen identifies two
major preoccupations of the text: the ambition of giving precedence to the role of
dreams in everyday life, and ‘la constitution d’une mythologie moderne capable de
remplacer les mythes existants, surtout religieux, qui ne servent qu’à légitimer l’ex-
ploitation de l’homme par l’homme’.53 Emphasis on the role of dreams and on
the unmediated expression of the unconscious brought the essay close to topics
that were being pursued by Tzara’s Surrealist colleagues.54 While it is beyond the
scope of the present article to examine the details of this complex text, the point I
want to make for the purposes of this argument is the connection between Tzara’s
conception of individual liberty in Grains et issues and the logic of collage which he
pursues in the essays discussed above.
49
Examples of the jump cut can be found in the films of Georges Méliès, produced at the end of the nineteenth
century. The technique became a signature style of Jean-Luc Godard in A bout de souffle in 1960. See Tzara’s discus-
sion of the links between Rousseau’s art and cinema, in ‘Le Théâtre d’Henri Rousseau’, p. 349.
50
Tzara, ‘Le Théâtre d’Henri Rousseau’, p. 347. See also Ireson’s discussion of cinema, in ‘Tristan Tzara and the
Plays of the Douanier Rousseau’, p. 619.
51
Tzara, ‘Le Rôle du temps et de l’espace dans l’œuvre du Douanier Rousseau’, p. 337.
52
Tristan Tzara, Grains et issues, in Œuvres complètes, III: 1934–1946 (1979), pp. 7–145.
53
Drijkoningen, ‘Entre surréalisme et marxisme’, p. 273.
54
Henri Béhar traces these connections in his Introduction to Tzara, Grains et issues, ed. by Béhar (Paris: Garnier-
Flammarion, 1981), pp. 19–37. On the reception of this difficult text following its publication, see Émilie Frémond,
‘Grains et issues, du recueil “Divers-Cosmique” à l’épopée épistémologique’, Europe, 1061–62 (2017), 82–92.
 COLLAGE AS FORM AND IDEA IN THE ART CRITICISM OF TRISTAN TZARA 15
Once again inspired by Jungian theories concerning the relationship between con-

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scious and unconscious thought, Tzara envisages psychological freedom as a release
from distinctions between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, and the unfolding of
linear history.55 Like the juxtaposition of elements within collage, a ‘nouvelle forme
transitoire de l’existence’ will emerge when individuals abandon the idea that their
lives move inexorably from birth to death (ibid., p. 56). Just as conventional narra-
tive is to be eliminated from theatrical and visual artworks, so too syntax will
become multidirectional and humans will be released from a ‘tyrannie de la
mémoire’.56 Henri Béhar sums this vision up in the following terms: ‘La parole [. . .]
est abolie au profit d’une pensée sans langage [. . .]. L’espace et le temps y sont
dilatés, la mémoire abolie, ainsi que la religion et sa brutale idée de la mort.’57
For Tzara, social regeneration was not simply a political matter (a Marxist trans-
formation of capital and labour), but crucially a re-orientation of humankind’s
perception of time and space. In a passage that anticipates the theatrical strategies
of compression and simultaneity pursued in Rousseau’s works, Tzara writes: ‘Le
temps ne sera plus emprisonné dans le système de marteaux trop bien connu’.58
Neither syntax, nor time — nor human life itself — will unfold according to
established trajectories of sense. This utopian image is not simply of a society that
is liberated from capitalist domination, but of one that is released from the rules
of grammar, from spatio-temporal conventions, and thus from familiar historical
and personal narratives. This ideal is consistent with the ambitions of early Dada
and develops Tzara’s conception of collage as both a form and as an idea in po-
etry, painting, and theatre. By elevating collage to the status of a metaphysical
principle in Grains et issues, Tzara outlines the terms of a new way of being — a
new psychic life for the individual.
In a further echo of Tzara’s preoccupation with the social dimension of collage,
Grains et issues re-imagines urban life. The opening part of the extended dream se-
quence describes a new vision of the city and, by extension, the kinds of
behaviour that will be fostered within it. To take one example:
On se contentera d’arroser les jardins publics avec de l’encre et de construire sur la place de la
Concorde un immense bateau dont les moteurs tourneront à sec. Des bandits enlèveront au
lasso les banquiers qui se seront trop rapprochés et, à l’aide de béliers moyenâgeux, on détruira
petit à petit cette merveille de la mécanique moderne.59
Just as Tzara’s interest in collage focused on both the spontaneous transformation
of spaces of human habitation and the creation of art objects from mass-
produced imagery, so too the re-imagining of interpersonal relations in Grains et
issues is intimately connected to changes in the physical and visual environment of
the city.
55
Tzara, Grains et issues, in Œuvres complètes, III, 13.
56
Tzara, Grains et issues, in Œuvres complètes, III, 20 and 45.
57
Béhar, Introduction to Tzara, Grains et issues, ed. by Béhar, p. 28. See also Papachristos, L’Inscription de l’oral et
de l’écrit, p. 71: ‘La trivialité éphémère de la vie acquiert la même puissance esthétique que l’art dont une des fonc-
tions est de vaincre le temps qui passe.’
58
Tzara, Grains et issues, in Œuvres complètes, III, 16.
59
Tzara, Grains et issues, in Œuvres complètes, III, 14.
16 KATHRYN BROWN

If Tzara’s first discussion of collage constituted a dialogue with Aragon’s writ-

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ings on the subject, the ideal of a new social ‘mythology’ rooted in urban
experience once again brought the two writers into the same orbit. Although the
publication of Grains et issues is typically understood as marking Tzara’s break from
Surrealism, an ongoing dialogue with Aragon’s ideas remains clear in Tzara’s con-
tinued exploration of the ways in which art can trigger social regeneration.60 The
notion of a ‘mythologie moderne’ is central to this exchange between the two writ-
ers. Aragon’s ‘Préface à une mythologie moderne’, first published in 1924 and
reworked as the opening section of his Le Paysan de Paris in 1926, considered ways
in which an individual’s phenomenological experience of the urban environment
could challenge habits of thought and behaviour.61 Crucial to Aragon’s conception
of a ‘mythologie moderne’ is a privileging of sensory experience over rationality.
In Le Paysan de Paris, the narrator’s perambulations through the city expose him to
a range of visual material ranging from public announcements to advertisements,
pasted newspaper extracts, restaurant menus, legal notices, and private messages.
This papering of the city is examined as both a trace of human life and a form of
mark-making that gives rise to a ‘metaphysics’ of urban space.62
There are conceptual and terminological overlaps in the approaches of Tzara
and Aragon to the ways in which the urban environment — and the individual’s
navigation of it — impacts on social life. For Aragon, an unstructured experience
of the city (particularly of marginalized spaces and those threatened with demoli-
tion) reveals ‘le sentiment moderne de l’existence. Une mythologie se noue et se
dénoue. C’est une science de la vie qui n’appartient qu’à ceux qui n’en ont point
l’expérience.’63 Writing in 1930, Aragon described this as part of an attempt to un-
cover the mythical character of ‘des lieux sacrés modernes’ which had replaced
religious sites associated with earlier generations.64 As Andreas Huyssen has
noted, Aragon’s focus on ‘marginal urban spaces destined for destruction and rife
with political protest’ made Le Paysan de Paris a ‘socially critical project’ that ex-
tended beyond the work’s emphasis on dreams and personal experience.65
While Aragon posits his dérive as a means of uncovering the emergence of new
myths, Tzara’s pursued a related but different trajectory. As explained above, for
Tzara, a ‘mythologie moderne’ was rooted in the spontaneous generation of visual
forms that returned society and its styles of art production to originary experien-
ces, a ‘simulacre de culte ancien’.66 Both writers identified the world of urban
imagery as the locus of their quest for a transformative social mythology, yet
60
For further discussion of this split, see Drijkoningen, ‘Entre surréalisme et marxisme’, pp. 266–67.
61
The first two sections of Le Paysan de Paris, ‘Préface à une mythologie moderne’ and ‘Le Passage de l’Opéra’,
were published in La Revue européenne between June and September 1924; Le Paysan de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1926).
For further details on the publication history of the volume, see Louis Aragon, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. by
Olivier Barbarant and others, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), I, 1266–68.
62
Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, in Œuvres poétiques complètes, I, 143–301 (p. 151).
63
Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, p. 149.
64
Aragon, ‘Critique du Paysan de Paris’, in Œuvres poétiques complètes, I, 297–301 (p. 297).
65
Andreas Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2015), p. 190.
66
Tzara, ‘Le Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’, p. 359.
 COLLAGE AS FORM AND IDEA IN THE ART CRITICISM OF TRISTAN TZARA 17
Tzara used his conception of collage as a means of synthesizing aesthetics and

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utopian politics. While, in 1930, Aragon looked back to Le Paysan de Paris and de-
scribed it as ‘une jacquerie de l’individualisme’, Tzara remained committed to the
subversive role that collage could play in the restoration of collective rites, the
uncovering of a new mode of thought, and, by extension, of social regeneration.67
The new mythology envisaged by Tzara is motivated by a sense of humour and
delight (‘l’enchantement’) that is born of a liberation from time and memory. In
Grains et issues this is described in the following terms: ‘l’inspiration et l’enchante-
ment deviendront les objectifs en vue d’une innocence totale, la force émouvante
de l’esprit en mouvement’.68 This is closely related to the description of collage in
‘Les Papiers collés de Picasso’, where the inauguration of a new mode of thinking
is identified with the rediscovery of a domain of joy and pleasure.69 Collage was
the means by which the spontaneous transformation of the city streets extended
into art and social life, uniting both under the banner of a distinctive ‘mythologie
moderne’.
Instead of simply revealing the mythical character of ‘des lieux sacrés modernes’
as envisaged by Aragon, Tzara located his social revolution — and the visual means
by which it could be effected — at the level of the human psyche. Rather than choos-
ing between Communism and a commitment to principles that had informed both
Dada and Surrealism, Tzara turned to collage both as a form and as an idea that
could unite politics and aesthetics. In its ability to engage audiences’ senses beyond
the visual, collage was a means by which to identify human qualities that transcended
geographical, class, and cultural boundaries. As a creative technique, it represented,
therefore, a combined poetic and revolutionary moment that could overturn the
ways in which individuals related to each other and to the world around them.70
Tzara used a pun on the famous refrain from Charles Baudelaire’s poem
‘L’Invitation au voyage’ to characterize Rousseau’s creativity as a domain in which
‘tout est jeu, calme et volupté’.71 In similar terms, he associated collage with joy
and the ideal society of Grains et issues as the blossoming of a ‘volupté nouvelle’.72
This article has argued that, for Tzara, a ‘mythologie moderne’ consisted in the
proliferation of collage-like structures that could alter the trajectory of human life
and of social organization for the purpose of realizing ‘une harmonie ample et fra-
ternelle [. . .] aux frontières du possible’.73 Tzara’s pursuit of these themes in both
his poetry and critical writings was, in itself, a demonstration of the potential of
art and the possibilities it could offer to initiate this particular kind of revolution.

67
Aragon, ‘Critique du Paysan de Paris’, p. 297.
68
Tzara, Grains et issues, in Œuvres complètes, III, 25. For a discussion of humour in this vision of society, see pp.
47–48.
69
Tzara, ‘Les Papiers collés de Picasso’, p. 363.
70
Tzara, ‘Le Papier collé ou le proverbe en peinture’, p. 360.
71
Tzara, ‘Le Théâtre d’Henri Rousseau’, p. 352; my emphasis.
72
Tzara, Grains et issues, in Œuvres complètes, III, 9.
73
Tzara, ‘Le Théâtre d’Henri Rousseau’, p. 356.
18 KATHRYN BROWN

Abstract

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For Tristan Tzara, collage was an emancipatory style of art production that had
the power to liberate pictures from a purely visual realm and to undermine famil-
iar modes of expression in both art and literature. More importantly, collage’s
close relationship to mass-media advertising and posters suggested an analogy
with spontaneous metamorphoses of the urban environment, thereby creating a
vital link between the fictional space of the artwork and the lived reality of the
viewer. According to Tzara, these aspects of collage gave it the power to trans-
form social relations and to usher in new modes of thinking capable of
inaugurating a distinctive ‘mythologie moderne’. This article examines Tzara’s con-
ception of collage through the lens of his art-critical writings. Focusing on essays
written during the 1930s about Pablo Picasso’s ‘papiers collés’ and on essays from
the 1940s and 1950s concerning Henri Rousseau’s painting and theatre, the discus-
sion posits collage as a unifying principle in Tzara’s aesthetic and as a key element
of his utopian politics. Tzara’s account of the social potential of collage and its role
in a ‘mythologie moderne’ is distinguished from ideas expressed by his key
contemporaries including Louis Aragon and Walter Benjamin.

Résumé
Pour Tristan Tzara, le collage était une pratique artistique émancipatoire: il avait le
pouvoir de sortir les images du seul domaine visuel et d’ébranler les modes d’ex-
pression habituels. Plus important encore, la proximité entre le collage et la
publicité dans les médias de masse suggérait une analogie avec les métamorphoses
spontanées du milieu urbain, créant ainsi un lien vital entre l’espace fictif de
l’œuvre d’art et la réalité vécue par le spectateur. Pour Tzara, ces aspects du
collage lui donnaient le pouvoir de transformer les relations sociales et d’initier
une ‘mythologie moderne’ bien distincte. Cet article examine la conception du
collage que Tzara propose dans ses essais sur l’art. En mettant l’accent sur
les essais de Tzara sur les papiers collés de Pablo Picasso, écrits pendant les
années 1930, et ses essais sur la peinture et le théâtre d’Henri Rousseau, datant
des années 1940 et 1950, le collage est compris comme un principe unifiant de
l’esthétique du poète et un élément clé de son utopie politique. Les idées de Tzara
sur le rôle social du collage dans la création d’une ‘mythologie moderne’ sont
mises en contraste avec les idées développées par ses contemporains, notamment
Louis Aragon et Walter Benjamin.