Thesis on Buffet, Picabia, and the Avant-Garde Process

In her work “Some Memories of Pre-Dada: Picabia and Duchamp” Gabrielle Buffet reflects upon her initial foray into abstract painting with Picabia. “It was a strange period of gestation and adaptation,” she writes, “new works brought nothing but doubt, dismay, anxiety, until minds could adjust themselves and corresponding new reflexes could be created” (256). This description of the sensory overload created by avant-garde art could provide a broad definition of the avant-garde process itself, not only for painting, but in writing and other artistic forms as well. As Buffet wrote in an earlier passage of the chapter, the avant-garde unraveled the self-assured standards of value, form, and positivism that underlay much of nineteenth century art, subjecting it to endless questioning and ironic distortions. This sensory experience that “brought nothing but doubt… until minds could adjust themselves” resonates in the disparate avant-garde methods practiced by Buffet and Picabia’s contemporaries, who – as different as their approaches and work may have been – all shared a goal of subverting and destabilizing norms and sensibilities while creating art that brought attention to the process of its own “strange period of gestation and adaptation.” By the artists’ design, the work exposing the means of its creation, a dimension formerly kept hidden by “the old myths of art” which Duchamp and Picabia opposed so vehemently” (257).

Work Cited:

Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia “Some Memories of Pre-Dada: Picabia and Duchamp”