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

Max ERNST (1891.1976)

Autograph manuscript signed. Dada.

Three quarto pages on lined school paper.

A signed cover letter addressed to Alain Gheerbrant [?].

Slnd [February 1967]

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

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"Dear Alain, here it is. Forget it if you think it's worthless. I'm dancing in my blood. Yours sincerely, Max."

"Dada." That some of the survivors of the Dada scourge find little consolation in the fact 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," scavengers of the Dada spirit, can seriously proclaim that the Dada movement, by its very destructive power, was 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 a few miserable fragments of bombs exploded long ago; that these same fragments are mounted on pins and presented to a respectful public as historical treasures or objects of aesthetic value; that the city which is probably the most bourgeoisly respectable in the world is now proud to have witnessed the birth of Dada within its walls; that many of the most civilized and conservative countries in the world prepare to sound trumpets and drums to celebrate 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 crimes committed that cannot occur without serious falsifications of history, all this might seem monstrous, absurd, grotesque, immoral, if one of the fundamental Dadaist thoughts did not consist in affirming that all this is only normal, mediocre, average, vulgar and inevitable. ME »