Incoherents
Description
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. Read more ↗
Key Artists
Jules Lévy
The charismatic writer and publisher who founded Les Arts Incohérents in Paris in 1882, organizing annual satirical exhibitions and masked balls to parody official Salon culture.
Alphonse Allais
Celebrated humorist and proto-conceptual pioneer who exhibited radical early monochrome paintings and silent musical scores decades ahead of Malevich, Duchamp, and John Cage.
Paul Bilhaud
French playwright and poet who exhibited the very first monochrome painting in art history at the foundational 1882 Incoherents exhibition ('Combat de Nègres dans un Tunnel').
Eugène Bataille (Sapeck)
Caricaturist and illustrator who created the iconic 1883 image of the Mona Lisa smoking a pipe ('Le rire'), directly prefiguring Dada appropriation and Duchamp's readymade.
Émile Cohl
Pioneering caricaturist and future father of animated cartoon film who actively contributed surreal, distorted photography and satirical drawings to the Incoherents salons.
Jules Chéret
Master Belle Époque poster designer who designed dynamic, vibrant color lithographic posters to advertise and immortalize the annual Incoherents exhibitions and balls.
Famous Artworks
Fun Facts
At their height in the mid-1880s, the annual Arts Incohérents exhibitions drew over 20,000 visitors in a matter of weeks, transforming what began as a private bohemian joke in a small Latin Quarter studio into one of Paris's most talked-about cultural phenomena.
↗ Source: britannica.com
In his 1897 'Album primo-avrilesque', Alphonse Allais included a completely blank page of sheet music titled 'Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man', instructing that the musicians should observe absolute silence because great grief is mute.
↗ Source: britannica.com