Kemper Art Museum
Collage, from the French: coller, "to glue"!
The formal aspect of the aesthetic effect of this gluing together of material cannot be separated from the information embedded in the texture of the image.
Juxtaposition
This collage depicts an oval café table cluttered with a bottle of Suze, a glass, and the day’s news. A piece of wallpaper suggests the background wall, so background and foreground are collapsed onto the surface of the picture. The newspaper clippings report the first Balkan War of 1912-13, and a graphic description of the war’s victims is pasted upside down. Another article about a pacifist meeting held to protest the advent of a European war is pasted right side up.The juxtaposition of elements in Picasso's collage/drawing includes the following:
A bottle of SUZE
Suze is a French brand of bitters flavoured with the roots of the plant gentian, normally drunk as an apéritif. There is a possible association between the wild gentian and the Balkans, Albania in particular, although the wild gentian roots were originally sourced from the mountains of the Auvergne.
Trouble in the Balkans
The Treaty of London ended the First Balkan War on 30 May 1913. All Ottoman territory west of the Enez-Kıyıköy line was ceded to the Balkan League, according to the status quo at the time of the armistice. The treaty also declared Albania to be an independent state. Almost all of the territory that was designated to form the new Albanian state was currently occupied by either Serbia or Greece, which only reluctantly withdrew their troops.
Having unresolved disputes with Serbia over the division of northern Macedonia and with Greece over southern Macedonia, Bulgaria was prepared, if the need arose, to solve the problems by force, and began transferring its forces from Eastern Thrace to the disputed regions. Unwilling to yield to any pressure Greece and Serbia settled their mutual differences and signed a military alliance directed against Bulgaria on 1 May 1913, even before the Treaty of London had been concluded. This was soon followed by a treaty of "mutual friendship and protection" on 19 May/June 1, 1913. Thus the scene for the Second Balkan War was set.
The Second Balkan War left Serbia as the most militarily powerful state south of the Danube. Years of military investment financed by French loans had borne fruit. Central Vardar and the eastern half of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar were acquired. Its territory grew in extent from 18,650 to 33,891 square miles and its population grew by more than one and a half million. The aftermath brought harassment and oppression for many in the newly conquered lands. The freedom of association, assembly and the press guaranteed under the Serbian constitution of 1903 were not introduced into the new territories. The inhabitants of the new territories were denied voting rights, ostensibly because the cultural level was considered too low, in reality to keep the non-Serbs who made up the majority in many areas out of national politics. Opposition newspapers like Radicke Novine remarked that the 'new Serbs' had had better political rights under the Turks. There was a destruction of Turkish buildings, schools, baths, mosques. In October and November 1913 British vice-consuls reported systematic intimidation, arbitrary detentions, beatings, rapes, village burnings and massacres by Serbs in the annexed areas. The Serbian government showed no interest in preventing further outrages or investigating those that had taken place. When the Carnegie Commission, composed of an international team of experts, selected for their impartiality, arrived in the Balkans, they received virtually no assistance from Belgrade.
Anti-war movement
The socialist movements had declared before the war their opposition to a war which they said could only mean workers killing each other in the interests of their bosses. Syndicalists had long opposed nationalism and militarism. French syndicalists viewed the Army as the primary defender of the capitalist order. In 1901, the CGT published a manual for soldiers encouraging desertion. Patriotism, syndicalists argued, was a means of integrating workers into capitalist society by distracting them from their true class interest. In 1908, the CGT's congress invoked the slogan of the First International, proclaiming that the "workers have no fatherland"
Picasso's juxtaposition of cut newspaper stories is both image, texture, and an augury of things to come.
Jean Jaurès was a committed antimilitarist who tried to use diplomatic means to prevent what became the First World War. In 1913, he opposed Émile Driant's Three-Year Service Law, which implemented a draft period, and tried to promote understanding between France and Germany. As conflict became imminent, he tried to organise general strikes in France and Germany in order to force the governments to back down and negotiate. This proved difficult, however, as many Frenchmen sought revenge (revanche) for their country's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the return of the lost Alsace-Lorraine territory.
Policy of European peace
Then, in May 1914, with Jaurès intending to form an alliance with Joseph Caillaux for the labour movement, the Socialists won the General Election. They planned to take office and "press for a policy of European peace". Jaurès accused French President Raymond Poincaré of being "more Russian than Russia"; whereas Viviani complied.
Assassination in Sarajevo, Bosnia
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, occurred on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo when they were mortally wounded by Gavrilo Princip. Princip was one of a group of six assassins (five Serbs and one Bosniak) coordinated by Danilo Ilić, a Bosnian Serb and a member of the Black Hand secret society. The political objective of the assassination was to break off Austria-Hungary's South Slav provinces so they could be combined into a Yugoslavia.
Anti-Serb rioting broke out in Sarajevo and various other places within Austria-Hungary in the hours following the assassination until order was restored by the military. On the night of the assassination, country-wide anti-Serb pogroms and demonstrations were also organized in other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, particularly on the territory of modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. They were organized and stimulated by Oskar Potiorek, the Austro-Hungarian governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The first anti-Serb demonstrations, led by the followers of Josip Frank, were organized in early evening of 28 June in Zagreb. The following day, anti-Serb demonstrations in Sarajevo became more violent and could be characterized as a pogrom. The police and local authorities in the city did nothing to prevent anti-Serb violence. Writer Ivo Andrić referred to the violence in Sarajevo as the "Sarajevo frenzy of hate." Two Serbs were killed on the first day of pogrom in Sarajevo, many were attacked, while around 1,000 houses, shops, schools and institutions (such as banks, hotels, printing houses) owned by Serbs were razed or pillaged.
In July 1914, he attended the Socialist Congress in Brussels where he struck up a constructive solidarity with German socialist party leader Hugo Haase. On the 20th of that month, Jaurès voted against a parliamentary subsidy for Poincaré's visit to St Petersburg; which he condemned as both dangerous and provocative. The Caillaux–Jaurès alliance were dedicated to defeating military objectives aimed toward precipitating war. France sent a secret mission, headed by Poincaré, to bring Russia to her side in a committed web of alliances, that equally obliged the United Kingdom. Always a pacifist, Jaurès rushed back to Paris to attempt an impossible reconciliation with the government; Russia, unable to accede to Germany's desire to cease mobilising; Kriegsgefahrzustand had activated its forces. The last holdout, Prime Minister Rene Viviani, told Sazonov that France would order mobilisation when it was ready.
Assassination at the Café du Croissant
On 31 July 1914, Jaurès was assassinated by a fanatic. At 9 pm, he went to dine at the Café du Croissant, 146, rue Montmartre. Forty minutes later, Raoul Villain, a 29-year-old French nationalist, walked up to the restaurant window and fired two shots into Jaurès' back. He died five minutes later, at 9.45 pm. Jaurès had been due to attend an international conference on 9 August, in an attempt to dissuade the belligerent parties from going ahead with the war. Villain also intended to murder Madame Caillaux with his two engraved pistols.
Shock waves ran through the streets of Paris. One of the government's most charismatic and compelling orators had been assassinated. Even his opponent, Poincaré, sent his sympathies to his widow. Paris was on the brink of revolution: Jaurès had been partisan for a general strike, and had narrowly avoided sedition charges. One important consequence was that the cabinet postponed the arrest of socialist revolutionaries. Viviani reassured Britain of Belgian neutrality but "the gloves were off". Jaurès' murder brought matters one step closer to world war. It helped to destabilise the French government, whilst simultaneously breaking a link in the chain of international solidarity. Speaking at Jaurès' funeral a few days later, the CGT leader, Leon Jouhaux, declared, "All working men... we take the field with the determination to drive back the aggressor." As if in reverence to his memory, the Socialists in the Chamber agreed to suspend all sabotage activity in support of the Union Sacrée. Poincaré commented that, "In the memory of man, there had never been anything more beautiful in France."
Artists, juxtapositions and politics
The Dream and Lie of Franco is a series of two sheets of prints, comprising 18 individual images, and an accompanying prose poem, by Pablo Picasso produced in 1937. The sheets each contain nine images arranged in a 3x3 grid. The first 14, in etching and aquatint, are dated 8 January 1937. The remaining four images were added to the second printing plate later, without use of aquatint, and dated June 7, 1937.
The Dream and Lie of Franco is significant in that it is regarded as Picasso's first overtly political work and prefigures his iconic political painting Guernica. However, in the collage Bottle of Suze, 1912, Picasso cannot help presenting the politics of the time, even it is "covert", a layer of the juxtaposition of the everyday beneath the aesthetic glaze and gaze.
The etchings satirise Spanish Generalísimo Francisco Franco's claim to represent and defend conservative Spanish culture and values by showing him in various ridiculous guises destroying Spain and its culture while the poem denounces "evil-omened polyps". Three of the four images added in June 1937 are directly related to studies for Guernica.
The individual images were originally intended to be published as postcards to raise funds for the Spanish Republican government, and sold at the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World's Fair, although it is unclear whether any prints were made or sold in postcard format.
In his review of the etchings for The Spectator in October 1937, art historian Anthony Blunt complained that the work could not;
"reach more than the limited coterie of aesthetes".Steiner, George (1987). "The Cleric of Treason". George Steiner: a reader. p. 179.
Critic and author John Golding on the other hand, claimed that;
"more than any other work by Picasso Dream and Lie of Franco breaks down, as the Surrealists so passionately longed to, distinctions between thought, writing and visual imagery."Golding, John (1994). Visions Of the Modern. p. 244.
The daily telegraph
The 'field' and the information wrap
The notion of the field as mentioned in the original LODE proposal was to think of the way bits of information placed side by side generate their own valences of connection and interpretation in the electricity of the juxtaposition. However, when say twenty-two bits of information are assembled together in a field something else can happen, equivalent to the assembling of a significant number of magnetic compasses, and how the magnetic needles reveal the lines of force in the invisible magnetic field that is created by their interaction.
This analogy suggested something else, the idea of information presented in the form of the sheets of paper we use from newspapers, used to capture information, to read and then dispose of, and potentially used as wrapping materials to keep objects intact as bulky and soft packing material.
The headline and the story
When the electric telegraph came along a new species of consciousness came into being. You could "know" what was "happening" somewhere else as you de-coded the dots and the dashes Morse the painter had devised. Space was abolished. Inhabiting this non-space no doubt prompted the age of anxiety, the age of dread, but it also transformed the "text".
Knowing, in real time, what was happening somewhere else inspired the meteorological chart, the isobar/contour-line, could be drawn, and a synoptic view of weather generated.
Robert FitzRoy the English Naval officer and scientist, who achieved lasting fame as the captain of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin's famous voyage, was also responsible for developing meteorological charts to allow predictions to be made, which he called "forecasting the weather", thus coining the term "weather forecast". A terrible storm in 1859 prompted FitzRoy to establish fifteen land stations and to use the new electric telegraph to transmit to him daily reports of weather at set times.
The first daily weather forecasts were published in The Times in 1861.
The
first published weather forecast is a list, just as the front page of
the Daily Telegraph continued to be printed as an alphabetical allforabit and abcedminded reflection of the bureaucratic way of organising information in the "Gutenberg Galaxy".
Editors of daily newspapers were presented with a similar challenge or opportunity. Daily telegraph communications from correspondents across the globe resulted in several stories of significant interest landing on the editors desk, stories that were only connected by their juxtaposition on a particular day, date and time. What developed was a front page mosaic of stories, punctuated by headlines, a device that would influence a kind of concrete poetry effect for all readers and some artists, notably those who began in DADA and ended up in Surrealism.
An article, by David Cottington: What the Papers Say: Politics and Ideology in Picasso's Collages of 1912, in the Art Journal, Vol. 47, No. 4, Revising Cubism (Winter, 1988), pp. 350-359, references Robert Rosenblum as being someone who pointed out in the 1960's that readings of works of this kind, other than purely formalistic ones, were possible, and that fragments of text in the newspaper "textura" held information with some possible bearing on the multi-layered quality of the work. David Cottington also mentions the article by Patricia Leighten in the Art Journal magazine of December 1985 on Picasso's collages of 1912-13, where she emphasizes the relevance of political events and ideologies to Picasso's artistic practice. In the article she argues that the collages represent a commitment to anti-militarism consistent with the artists involvement in anarchist politics in Barcelona and the implicit social radicalism of the Cubist project itself.
Picasso’s picture illustrates this concept: on this café table in Paris, news of a war in the Balkans is reported in the newspaper, collapsing time and space by transforming distant world events into an instantaneous moment of simultaneity.
