Max ERNST – Autograph manuscript signed. “Dada.” 1967.

Max ERNST (1891.1976)

Signed autograph manuscript. Dada.

Three pages in-4° on lined school paper.

A sending page signed to Alain Gheerbrant [?].

Slnd [February 1967]

Important manuscript by Max Ernst – published in Le Monde on March 1, 1967 – revisiting the Dada heritage for the fiftieth anniversary of the movement.

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“Dear Alain, here it is. Let it go if you don't think it's worth anything. I dance in my blood. Yours sincerely, Max. »

“Dada. That some of the survivors of the Dada scourge find it hard to console themselves that their provocations and acts of vandalism have suffered the sad fate of "entering history" after a short and brilliant career in euphoria, that "historians", escomateurs [sic] of the Dada spirit can seriously proclaim that the Dada movement was, by its very destructive power, one of the most constructive of our time, that respectable directors of respectable museums train respectable teams to glean from the battlefields and "cultural" arenas to gather together some miserable debris of bombs exploded in the past, that these same fragments are mounted on pins and presented to a respectful public [sic] as historical treasures or objects of aesthetic value, that the city which is probably the most bourgeoisly respectable in the world, shows itself today proud to have witnessed the birth of Dada within its walls, that many of the most civilized, most conservative countries in the world are preparing to sound trumpets and drums to salute the half-centenary of the advent, that among the early Dadaists there are some who today insist on claiming – I met two of them one Sunday morning in the so-called Dada exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art – that the hidden meaning of the movement was the search for a new aesthetic language – which implies that with its “entry into history” Dada had to submit to a heart-rending revision of its own splendors – all this and the other calamities that threaten to befall Dada from its “entry into history” – never desired, never sought by it – will have become one of those accomplished crimes that cannot occur without serious falsifications of history, all this could seem monstrous, absurd, grotesque, immoral, if one of the fundamental Dadaist thoughts was not to affirm that all this is only normal, mediocre, average, vulgar and inevitable. ME »