![a wide solid black rectangle printed with an ornate line drawn frame and a title, based on the famous painting [sic] by bilhaud,](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Allais_Combat_de_nègres_dans_une_cave-1024x717.jpg)
[UPDATE NOT SO FAST]
Thanks, @voorwerk, @doncalmecito, and @juancrodelo. Little did I know that the last time I gave much thought to the history of the monochrome, that history would soon be blown wide open? In 2020 it was a reconsideration of the racist graffiti found on Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915), which linked it to its supposed, satirical precursor, a portfolio of seven mdr titled monochrome artworks published by the famous Parisian funny guy Alphonse Allais on April Fool’s Day in 1897.
Album primo-avrilesque is the historical post hoc documentation of the lost monochrome artworks Allais and Bilhaud showed in the Salon des Arts Incohérents, a parody exhibition organized by journalist Jules Lévy beginning in 1882. That’s when Bilaud, then 28, showed a black monochrome painting titled, Combat de nègres dans un tunnel [Negroes fighting in a tunnel]. Allais, also 28, followed in 1883 by showing a blank piece of white paper, Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par temps de neige [First communion of anaemic young girls in snowy weather], and a red work of unknown form titled, Récolte de tomates sur le bord de la mer Rouge par des cardinaux apoplectiques [Apoplectic cardinals harvesting tomatoes on the shore of the Red Sea] in 1884.
Les Incohérents emerged out of the Montmartre cabaret and literary culture, and caught popular attention amidst newly relaxed press censorship, using irreverence and caricature to critique mainstream artistic practice. Their influence in art history was constrained, perhaps, by their not being too serious about any actual artwork surviving. Except.
In early 2021, gallerist Johann Naldi revealed seventeen l’Arts Incohérents artworks by seven artists had been discovered in 2018 in a neglected trunk. The two most significant are Bilhaud’s original black monochrome painting, and a previously unknown found object monochrome by Allais. The former is small, maybe about the size of a computer monitor. It has its own website, but oddly, the dimensions have not been published. The latter is a carriage window shade of green moiré silk. The title matches Allais’ green monochrome from 1897: Des souteneurs encore dans la force de l’âge et le ventre dans l’herbe boivent de l’absinthe [The pimps, in the prime of life, their stomachs in the grass, drink absinthe].
Bilhaud’s Combat is hyped as the first monochrome [painting. framed. presented in an art context.], the birth of yet another avant-garde. Allais’ Pimps “annonce le mouvement «ready made» de Marcel Duchamp.” Naldi only wants to sell the collection together. Musée d’Orsay declared it all a Trésor National, limiting its exportability. I think there’s only one purchaser here, and only one place who’d care enough to tell the Incohérents’ tale. In the mean time, it’s a challenge to even see the work.
The only substantive conversation I’ve seen about these Incohérents works that isn’t trying to sell them is from Denys Rious and Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux. They note that the entire history of monochrome artworks, from Robert Fludd and Tristram Shandy through the Incohérents, is literary. Is this a shakeup, a fresh perspective, or a diversion? How does it matter that they were made by non-artists? How does it matter that these works were made as jokes? And that they never did more? Is that what Allais’ Album was for: to document the critiques whose impact, however slight, were already fading or forgotten?
One thing Rious and Labelle-Rojoux discuss is how academic the rest of the Incohérents works are. The most I can find is party coverage of a one-night show in 2022 in the lobby of l’Olympia, which sought to approximate the larger, more public venue of the second Arts Incohérents exhibition.
As alluring as the possibility might be of connecting these objects prophetically to the monochromes and readymades to come, I feel like I’ve seen this revisionist impulse before. And from a trolling Parisian critic. In 1910, a reactionary critic tried taking down Matisse and the Fauves by submitting a supposedly avant-garde painting to the Salon that had actually [sic] been painted [sic] by the tail of an ass.
Which suggests that the critical and cultural milieu in fin-de-siècle Paris is the subject here more than the art these critics are supposedly responding to. I think the most insightful thing to learn from the Incohérents, now that we can see their actual work, is how it was received and discussed at the time.
In 2022 Julia Langbein published her University of Chicago dissertation as Laugh Lines: Caricaturing Painting in Nineteenth-Century France. She tracks the deployment of humor and satire, and the media critique of the Salon as a site of both mainstream and commercial culture. Langbein’s broader history challenges the way caricatures of Manet paintings have been interpreted; maybe these ur-monochromes and readymade precursors could be next.
Previously, related: Black Square, White Suprematism
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