Alter Ego

The Critical Writings of Michel Leiris

Sean Hand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351197014
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Alter Ego is the first monograph in English on the critical writings of Michel Leiris (1901-90). A groundbreaking autobiographer and pioneering ethnographer, Leiris also produced important criticism on art, opera, jazz and literature, which acts as a key commentary on twentieth-century intellectual movements and demonstrates vividly the constant refashioning and reformulation of contemporary ideas and aesthetics. Hand defines and situates Leiris's core themes, analyses his criticism in each of the art areas examined, and delineates the model that emerges of a contrapuntal and heterogeneous critical identity."

Chapter 1
Perceiving Presence: Leiris and Visual Art

Image and imaging occupy from the beginning a crucial role in all of Leiris's major works. As noted in my introduction, writing and image are indissociably linked through the production throughout Leiris's life of limited-edition works illustrated by famous artists. Within the texts themselves, moreover, imaging operates as the origin of consciousness; that is to say, the images in no way simply illustrate the text. A primary drama of perception, against the play of light and dark, opens Simulacre, Aurora, Biffures and Fourbis, while the metaphysical corrida of 'De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie' and the psychosexual dramas of L'Age d'homme more generally assume the same expectant penumbra. A Leirisian Lichtung therefore illuminates the iconic emergence of Being: the text is the autogenerative act of perceiving presence.¹ Within this light, there emerges a stream of images, especially in the autobiographies, that sustains and even generates the writing. L'Age d'homme is the most complete example: each stage of the journey towards virility has its own significant visual content, whether taken from Epinal or the Histoire sainte or theatrical and biblical scenes or Géricaults Radeau de la Méduse; while the work's consistent scopic drive creates a general intelligibility by collecting such images as 'les vrais fétiches, c'est-à-dire ceux qui nous ressemblent et sont la forme objectivée de notre désir', to quote an early article by Leiris on Giacometti.² This fetishism, which extends back from L'Age d'homme to the work of Documents, shows up powerfully in relation to the painting by Antoine Caron entitled 'Massacres d'une proscription romaine'.³ Leiris's early enthusiasm for this erotic and bloody representation, in Documents, is directly absorbed into the text of L'Age d'homme, yet the work itself nowhere mentions either the Caron painting or the original piece.⁴ The absent presence of this newly mythologized imagery makes it the fitting formal version of a screen memory, and further confirms the absolutely generative nature in Leiris's autobiography of the (fetishized) image 'qui, comme aux temps les plus anciens, reste à la base de notre existence humaine [et] ne trouve que bien rarement l'occasion de se satisfaire sous une forme non déguisée'.⁵ Leiris's recognizably autobiographical work does not, then, begin in 1938 with the sociological 'Le sacré dans la vie quotidienne', or in 1934 with the ethnographic journal L'Afrique fantôme, but at least as early as 1929 with an essay on one obscure image which remained uncollected until the posthumous publication of Zébrage. In addition to the questions here raised of genre, chronology and liminality, this genealogy powerfully illustrates the primordiality of the image m all of Leiris's writing.

This fetishism is further confirmed by the way in which Leiris consistently dedicated his works to painters such as Picasso, Miró, Masson, Juan Gris, Henri Laurens, Giacometti and Wifredo Lam. Far from being an immediate acknowledgement of the irreducibility of representation, this linkage reflects a writerly envy for the effulgent presence free of relation which he continually credited these artists with creating or revealing. Leiris constantly describes these artists' approaches, therefore, in terms of his own existential wager: Picasso is presented as a highly autobiographical artist who embraces 'freedom' and plays with the (im)possibility of directly intelligible transcription;⁶ Masson's painting Le Peintre is described as 'l'expression dramatisée du jeu de dupes dans lequel, corps et âme, est engagé l'artiste (bondir vers quelque chose qu'il s'agit de saisir et, en dernière analyse, ne jamais saisir qu'un reflet de soi-même)';⁷ Giacometti's working practices as much as his finished products are felt to create 'des œuvres qui n'ont besoin de nulle signature pour qu'on reconnaisse en elles des "Giacornettis"'.⁸

Such a dream, that of the pure, perfect, timeless, essential and freely produced image, is reinforced in Leiris by being paradigmatic. Leiris's 1973 aphoristic praise of Mirò's achievement as 'notre éveil hors du Temps',⁹ for example, was predicted both by Breton's 1959 judgement of the same artist ('N'importe où hors du monde et, de plus, hors du temps, mais pour inieux retenir partout et toujours, jaillit alors cette voix, au timbre de si loin discernable, qui s'élève à l'unisson des plus hautes voix inspirées')¹⁰ and by Giacometti's own appreciation of Miró in the same year ('Pour moi, c'était la plus grande liberté. Quelque chose de plus aérien, de plus dégagé, de plus léger que tout ce que j'avais jamais vu. En un sens, c'était absolument parfait'),¹¹ More generally, the key notion of freedom mentioned in the last quotation was used from the beginning of the post-impressionist period to describe the pre-eminent status of the image in relation to aesthetics and representation. Prior to Cubism proper, in 1908, Apollinaire had already reacted to Braque and other Fauvists by stating that 'la toile doit présenter cette unité essentielle qui seule provoque l'extase [...]. Le tableau existera inéluctablement. La vision sera entière, complète.'¹² The whole of the Cubist period, and in particular the creation of Cubist 'solutions' from Negro art, was presented in terms of the freedom forged by 'an entirely new form of representation'.¹³ Negro art, and specifically a supposedly influential Wobé (N'gere) mask from the Ivory Coast,¹⁴ was held to foster a (Western) vision of an anti-idealist art¹⁵ whose transparency was summarized in 1948 by Kahnweiler in terms of freedom: 'l'admirable liberté de l'art de notre temps qui lui ouvre des possibilités inouïes, nous la devons à l'exemple de l'art nègre'¹⁶ By 1969 the critic Pierre Dufour was able to describe the whole history of Cubism in terms of this fundamental freedom of the image: 'L'ingrisme captant les nostalgies du passé dans une récupération semi-ironique de la culture, les œuvres "cubistes" peuvent se libérer d'autant plus radicalement des survivances de l'image. Aussi apparaissent-elles, curieusement sans passé'.¹⁷

One of the most important critics of all, in this respect, was Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the Cubist art dealer to whom Leiris was related by marriage and with whom he worked closely in the Galerie Louise Leiris.¹⁸ Kahnweiler's specialist acquaintance with the Fauvists and then the Cubists, culminating in his lifelong professional relationship with Picasso, and his strong neo-Kantian views on the value of 'freedom' in art and its non-abstract obligations, closely equate to Leiris's pronouncements in both historical and generic range. Thus Leiris extols the virtues of Manet and Cézanne (as the Picasso circle always did), dismisses those artists who directly or indirectly contest the Kahnweiler aesthetic or camp, and is silent on a vast amount of western postwar art, at a time of enormous economic expansion of the field and redefinition of aesthetic principles and aims. There is thus nothing in Leiris on abstract expressionism, or conceptual art, or Arte Povera, since none of these answers to the concern for figuration, freedom and painterly presence as very narrowly defined by an early twentieth-century western art perspective, and as embodied by Kahnweiler. (One thing Leiris never is, even when writing about African art, is an art historian: his is an essentially obsessive rather than objective response, concerned with apotheosis more than archivization.) Within this context, Kahnweiler's own writings on art, including his reminiscences in Mes Galeries et mes peintres,¹⁹ actually closely echo and indeed arguably shape Leiriss productions, including even in terms of a quasi-philosophical shift, from a slightly perceptualist to a more semiological reaction to Cubism, which occurs after the end of the Second World War.²⁰ In the first of these two periods, Kahnweiler emphasizes above all the freedom represented by Cubism. A typical example of this approach is the 1947 essay 'La place de Georges Seurat', which contends that modern painting evolved from Cézanne rather than from Seurat in part because of the latter's academic training, and then concludes: 'La figuration peut fort bien naitre de l'architecture du tableau pour peu qu'on la laisse mître librement'.²¹ In the second of these periods, Kahnweiler then increasingly absorbs this concept of artistic freedom into the semiological notion of the autonomy of the sign and the reading which Cubism demands of the spectator. For example, the 1948 'Mallarmé et la peinture' claims that if it was Cézanne who taught the Cubists about plastic architecture, it was Mallarmé who convinced them that '[1]a peinture est une écriture, n'a jamais été autre chose, mais elle ne s'en est pas toujours souvenue, elle a souvent "voilé" son origine'.²² Another typical example, 'Exposition des œuvres récentes de Picasso' (1949), considers that 'la nouveauté des signes inventés par les Cubistes, et notamment par Picasso, c'était l'absence de fauxsemblant. Ces signes n'imitaient plus les objets du monde extérieur'.²³ This shift in critical language culminates in the 1961 Mes Galeries et mes peintres, where in a series of interviews Kahnweiler emphasizes how all painting is a form of writing which creates the external world, how the Cubists simply created signs that were new but were increasingly difficult to read, how this reading is none the less simply a question of convention, bow only through such reading does the painting take form, and how the significance of this form lies ultimately in the 'communion' between painting and viewer established in the viewers consciousness.

Kahnweiler's writings on Cubism, both in their championing of a highly defined set of artists and attitudes, and in their evolution towards a semiological phenomenology, have obviously had a major effect on Leiris's perception of the art image. However, one interesting, and perhaps symptomatic, demarcation can be observed in passing here. Leiris's art writings overwhelmingly comment on artists directly associated with Kahnweiler's galleries or publishing, including Masson, Picasso, Laurens and Lascaux (the last related by marriage to both Kahnweiler and Leiris). Naturally, this involves over time a reciprocating rather than one-sided influence: it was Leiris, for example, who introduced Giacometti and Masson to Kahnweiler, undoubtedly promoted the publication of several authors, including Jacob and Jouhandeau, by Kahnweiler, and placed Kahnweiler's essays in new empowering contexts by encouraging their publication in journals such as Les Temps modernes and Présence africaine. But there are also fundamental if subtly controlled differences. In the first years of his affiliation to surrealism, Leiris bought a number of surrealist pictures (specifically, in 1924, La Grande Roue orthochromatique qui fait l'amour sur mesure by Ernst, dated 1919—20, and, in 1925, Baigneuse, by Miro, dated 1925). Kahnweiler, however, insisted that surrealism was uniquely a literary phenomenon, and although he admired Miró and Masson, he openly dismissed others such as Magritte in Mes Galeries et mes peintres, commenting: 'je n'aime pas la peinture surréaliste orthodoxe pour une raison très simple: les intentions dans cette peinture [sont] tellement littéraires [que] vous êtes presque obligé de faire une peinture académique ou une peinture genre calendrier des postes' (p. 161). Bacon, the subject of Leiris's intense appreciation, never showed at the Leiris gallery and was never bought by Kahnweiler (although, in qualification, this may have been to do with Bacon's established adherence to another gallery and Kahnweiler's insistence on exclusivity in his promotions). Giacometti, the object of Leiris's immediate enthusiasm from 1929 on, was only belatedly appreciated, and again never promoted, by Kahnweiler. It is also tantalizing to note the list of Kahnweiler artists about whom Leiris remains silent, in spite of there being important pieces by such artists in the Kahnweiler-Leiris collection which was bequeathed to the Musée national d'art moderne in 1984. Here it may be understandable that, for reasons of age as much as differing aesthetic and political interests, Leiris wrote nothing substantive on early Kahnweiler artists such as Van Dongen, Derain, Vlaminck or Suzanne Roger, although he was surrounded by their work (portraits of Kahnweiler and his wife, by Derain and Vlaminck, for example, hung in the Kahnweiler salon), made passing private judgements of them (for example referring in his Journal as late as 1937 to Van Dongen's works as being 'pas trop désagréables comme œuvres de troisième zone', to Vlaminck landscapes as 'appétissants comme de la créme fouettée', and, less flatteringly, to '[d]es Derain qui puent hideusement le musée' (p. 314), and even envisaged collaboration in one case (a 1925 catalogue for Kahnweiler's Editions de la Galerie Simon anno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Perceiving Presence: Leiris and Visual Art
• 2 Breaking the Sound Barrier: Leiris and Music
• 3 Reading Rules: Leiris and Literature
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index