April 6, 2020

"We were at once recipients of and contributors to the joy of witnessing the sudden appearance of creatures none of us had foreseen, but which we ourselves had nonetheless created."

Said the Surrealist poet Simone Kahn, quoted in "Explaining Exquisite Corpse, the Surrealist Drawing Game That Just Won’t Die."

It's a game you might want to play, during our long confinement, with all the concern about about our body.

Here are 2 fabulous examples by Man Ray, André Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Max Morise (in 1928):



If you don't know how to do these drawings and don't want to read the linked article, look closely at these images and see where the paper folds are. One person begins the drawing, then makes a fold that reveals only the ends of his lines, the next draws from there and makes the next fold, etc.

6 comments:

rcocean said...

There's some real talent there. I can draw stick men, that's about it.

Howard said...

It's the picture version of the game telephone

Rick.T. said...

Philistine that I am, my first thought was Mad magazine.

Narr said...

NPR used to have a commentator named Andrei Codrescu, editor of a magazine called Exquisite Corpse. Wonderful Romanian-New Orleans accent IIRC.

I didn't know the history of the phrase.

Narr
Still learning

JMW Turner said...

There's something surreal about all of this.

Ann Althouse said...

“ NPR used to have a commentator named Andrei Codrescu,..”

Yeah, I liked him a lot.