Incoherents

The Incoherents (Les Arts incohérents) was a short-lived French art movement founded by Parisian writer and publisher Jules Lévy (1857-1935) in 1882, which in its satirical irreverence anticipated many of the art techniques and attitudes later associated with avant-garde and anti-art.

Lévy coined the phrase les arts incohérents as a play on the common expression les arts décoratifs (i.e. arts & crafts, but above all, a famous art school in Paris, the National School of Decorative Arts). The Incoherents presented work which was deliberately irrational and iconoclastic, "found" art objects, nonsense humoristic sketchs, drawings of children, and drawings "made by people who don't know how to draw." Lévy exhibited an all-black painting by poet Paul Bilhaud called Combat de Nègres dans un Tunnel (Negroes Fight in a Tunnel). The early film animator Émile Cohl contributed photographs which would later be called surreal.

Although small and short-lived, the Incoherents were certainly well-known. The movement sprang from the same Montmartre cabaret culture that spawned the Hydropathes of Émile Goudeau and Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. The October 1882 show was attended by two thousand people, including Manet, Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Richard Wagner. Beginning in 1883 there were annual shows, or masked balls, or both. In an 1883 show, the artist ^(French) contributed Le rire, an "augmented" Mona Lisa smoking a pipe, that directly prefigures the famous Marcel Duchamp 1919 "appropriation" of the Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q..

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