{"id":3134,"date":"2017-09-19T15:45:34","date_gmt":"2017-09-19T15:45:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/?p=3134"},"modified":"2017-09-19T15:45:34","modified_gmt":"2017-09-19T15:45:34","slug":"gabrielle-buffet-picabia-the-eyes-of-the-avant-garde","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/2017\/09\/19\/gabrielle-buffet-picabia-the-eyes-of-the-avant-garde\/","title":{"rendered":"Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia: The Eyes of the Avant-Garde"},"content":{"rendered":"

Biography:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia is no more than a reference to many writers discussing the avant-garde period, and particularly Dadaism. Born in France in 1881, she grew up with musical aspirations and a<\/span>ttended Schola Cantorum, a liberal and controversial center of music in France, directed by Vincent d\u2019Indy. While studying and practicing, d\u2019Indy became an influence on her liberating and daring practices (<\/span>Kamenish <\/span>39). Between 1908 and 1909, Gabrielle Buffet met and married Francis Picabia. In his analysis of Francis Picabia\u2019s life, William Camfield discusses how Buffet influenced and even accelerated Picabia\u2019s desire and transition to produce more imaginative, reflective, and radically abstract modern art. However, Picabia\u2019s biggest artist relationship appears to be with Marcel Duchamp, who the couple meets around 1910. Buffet claimed the two men to be the primary innovators of Dada and described their relationship: \u201c\u2018their difference of temperament and conception\u2026 drove them to the limits of logical decomposition. They became engaged in an extraordinary contest of paradoxical and destructive statements, words of blasphemy and inhumanity that did not merely attack the old myths of art but the very foundations of life in general\u2019\u201d (Gibson). <\/span><\/p>\n

Buffet is mostly valued for her \u201crefreshingly unprejudiced analysis of the period,\u201d but she also had many works including \u201cscholarly analyses of contemporary music and art\u2026to an experimental prose and verse\u201d \u00a0(<\/span>Kamenish <\/span>40, 47). For example, her work was observant of the artistic and cultural themes indirectly, in pieces like her \u201cPetit Manifeste,\u201d in which she embodies \u201cthe teasing spirit of Dada\u201d with lines like: \u201cThat frightening noise is the beating of your heart\u201d (<\/span>Kamenish 46). In two of her essays, \u201cArthur Cravan and American Dada\u201d and \u201cSome memories of Pre-Dada: Picabia and Duchamp,\u201d Buffet mirrors the form of her writing <\/span>with the subject of her writing. In her essay on Arthur Cravan she ends the essay with, <\/span>\u201cthe end of this amazing figure will never be cleared up\u201d (Motherwell 17). In the essay about Picabia, Duchamp and Dada, she ends with \u201cDada vanished one fine day\u201d (Motherwell 267). Both pieces end with an uncertain and inconclusive feeling, just as the subjects of the essays have. By doing so she embraced the very nihilistic spirit she described the <\/span>391 <\/span><\/i>publication as having, because it is \u201c\u2018without other aim than to have no aim\u2019\u201d (Hofmann). <\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, as a clear participant of avant-garde and more specific Dada movement, Buffet was naturally one of many artists and writers present at \u201c33 West Sixty-seventh Street,\u201d otherwise known as Louise and Walter Arensberg\u2019s apartment (Burke 213). Larry Witham delves into the habits at these gatherings and asserts that \u201cart, sex, and alcohol\u201d and \u201cchess\u201d became the language in Arensberg\u2019s circle (114). <\/span>Buffet and Picabia attended as guests of Duchamp, and this is most likely the setting in which Buffet and Mina Loy became acquainted – as well as many other artists including, Arthur Cravan, <\/span>Germaine Everling (Picabia\u2019s mistress), Edgard Var\u00e9se, Albert Gleizes and wife Juliette Gleizes, Juliette Roche, Jean Crotti, Suzanne Duchamp, Pan Ray, Joseph Stelle, Morton Schamberg, and everyone who gathered at Louise and Walter Arensberg\u2019s place (<\/span>Kamenish <\/span>41). <\/span><\/p>\n

An area that Buffet and Loy seemed to bond over was in their questioning of Duchamp\u2019s intentions in some of his <\/span>scandalous and harsh remarks about women (Burke 217). Though their opinion of a man may have bonded them, ironically, their relationship ended over their opinion of another man, Arthur Cravan, who Loy had a romantic relationship with. After Buffet \u201cpublished a memoir of Cravan that was largely complementary but expressed doubt about the reasons for his disappearance, Mina cut her dead\u201d (Burke 381). Although this \u201ccutting\u201d of Buffet out of Loy\u2019s life seems dramatic, it implies their relationship was closer than it appears, because if Buffet was someone that Loy was not close to then she probably would not care about what she wrote very much. Additionally, in the same piece Buffet wrote that Loy told her that she went looking for Cravan when he disappeared, whether or not this was figurative or literal, it suggests that Loy and Buffet\u2019s relationship was personal enough for Loy to confide in her. <\/span><\/p>\n

In Buffet\u2019s later years, she participated in the French Resistance and sheltered Allied parachutists and escaped prisoners of war, and hid documents for the Belgian secret service (<\/span>Kamenish <\/span>51). Her passion for whatever she was involved during any time in her life is uncontroversial. However, she is most remembered and praised for her \u201cinvaluable reflections on the rise and spread of the avant-garde on both continents\u201d (<\/span>Kamenish 38). Her work is successful and interesting in providing professors, students, and scholars internationally a window into the social, cultural, and political world of primary figures during her lifetime. <\/span><\/p>\n

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Bio Template:<\/strong><\/p>\n