Incoherents

The Incoherents (Les Arts incohérents) was a short-lived French art movement founded by Parisian writer and publisher Jules Lévy (1857–1935) in 1882. In the movement's satirical irreverence, it anticipated many of the art techniques and attitudes later associated with the avant-garde and anti-art movements such as Dada. Lévy coined the phrase les arts incohérents as a play on the term les arts décoratifs (i.e. arts and crafts, but above all, a famous art school in Paris, the National School of Decorative Arts). The Incoherents presented work which was deliberately irrational and iconoclastic, used found objects, was nonsensical, included humoristic sketches, drawings by children, and drawings "made by people who don't know how to draw". Lévy exhibited an all-black painting by poet Paul Bilhaud called Combat de Nègres dans un Tunnel (Negroes Fight in a Tunnel). The early film animator Émile Cohl contributed photographs which would later be called surreal.¶

Although a small and short-lived movement, the Incoherents were well known. The group sprang from the same Montmartre cabaret culture that spawned the Hydropathes of Émile Goudeau, Hirzuts and Fumists of Alphonse Allais, and Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. The October 1882 show was attended by two thousand people, including Manet, Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Richard Wagner. Beginning in 1883 there were annual shows, or masked balls, or both.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Incoherents”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Incoherents is 19th-century French art movement, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 4 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶