Used books.

I love used book store and I often find books that contain unexpected information. Two books that are at first glance unrelated yet seem to slide over into one another in an interesting way are Picasso’s Women, by Roy Macgregor-Hastie, and Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre’ Breton, by Mark Polizzotti. Picasso’s Women is the story of the many women in Picasso’s life; it is an informative and interesting account of the personal life of Picasso. I especially find his relationship with Dora Maar of interest, as she was in many ways his most equal creative muse.

Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre’ Breton, is the story of the so-called pope of the Surrealists, who was quite possibly one of the most tedious people ever to walk the earth. That aside, it is a book worth reading, and tells the story of a time when artists were still untainted by the commercial machine of the modern art world, and were driven by a passion for ideas and creative exploration.

Of course Picasso and Breton are discussed in both books, but for me the pleasant surprise is the information pertaining to one of the leaders of the Dada movement, Tristan Tzara. He is a major figure in both books, as a friend of Picasso and as a friend and eventual enemy of Breton. Tzara is someone I would like to read more about. He seems to have been an interesting personality, and seems to have possessed the sense of humour that Breton sadly seems to have lacked. I actually find the Dada movement more interesting than the heavy-handed surrealist movement, and I often wonder if Dada’s influence is more influential today than surrealism’s. A chain of artists from Duchamp, Rauschenberg, to KiKi Smith, seem to stem from Dada rather than surrealism. The Dictionary of Art and Artists: “Dada aimed to destroy art as an aesthetic cult and replace it by anti-art and non-art. They rejected the artifact and replaced it with the ready-made object and collage, in which arbitrariness, rather than creative order, dictated the final form.”