Francis Picabia, peintre-poète qui a traversé toute la première moitié du XXe siècle, nous a laissé en héritage un riche corpus d’écrits, dont la plupart a été publié, mais il reste encore aujourd’hui de nombreux inédits et des avant-textes conservés dans les archives. Si la période Dada de la poésie de Picabia est peut-être la plus connue, l’artiste a continué d’écrire des poèmes toute sa vie (il est disparu en 1953). C’est notamment après la rencontre avec son dernier éditeur, Pierre André Benoit (PAB), en 1948, que Picabia décide de révéler encore une fois saveine poétique, et publie un grand nombre de recueils, écrits entre 1939 et 1951.Ces poèmes naissent, plus particulièrement, sous l’empreinte des lectures des oeuvres de Friedrich Nietzsche, car l’artiste reprend systématiquement des passages du Gai Savoir, qui nous obligent à repenser les limites de l’écriture poétique, en général. On découvre alors une nouvelle manière de faire de la poésie, qui reprend, d’unemanière assez libre, le langage philosophique de La Gaya Scienza. PAB a sûrement compris la portée des nouveaux poèmes de Picabia et il s’est dédié à la réalisation de solutions créatives pour la présentation de ces écrits poétiques. Au-delà de cet intense travail il y a bien sûr une amitié, qui s’est manifestée notamment à traversl’échange de lettres, car les occasions de se rencontrer ont été très rares.Cette dernière période de l’écriture de Picabia est alors digne d’être remarquée et mérite d’être comprise et mise en valeur. Nous avons essayé, par cette recherche, de trouver une solution pour classer ces écrits, que nous aimerions inscrire dans le contexte de la « récriture intertextuelle ». / Francis Picabia (1879 – 1953), well-known French painter of the beginning of the twentieth century, was also an experimentalist poet of the avant-garde milieu, who wrote throughout his entire life. Part of his writings have been edited, but many unpublished works can still be found in archives. The Dada period of his poetry is perhaps best known, more particularly for his drawing-poems, but I have discovered during my research that his late writings contain many unrevealed aspects. Particularly after he met the editor Pierre André Benoit (PAB) in 1948, a new important period began in Picabia’s poetic output, during which he published his writings from 1939 to 1951. This intense collaboration took place mainly at a distance, through the exchange of frequent letters, soon turning into a sincere friendship. These publications, most of which are one-of-a-kind books, are printed personally by PAB on his printing press, and are often illustrated by the artist or by the editor himself.Surprisingly, Picabia’s late poetry is strongly marked by Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings, in particular by The Gay Science (1882). The “borrowings” are so evident, that they call for a specific, new interpretation: thus, this peculiar creative process can be seen as a phenomenon of appropriation, or “intertextual rewriting”. This process of “copying”, was applied by the artist indistinctively to his art and poetry and can function as a possible solutionfor the classification of his controversial poems.

This essay is an attempt to analyze, understand and reconstruct the Swedish Ballet's last work Relâche (1924) based on Richard Wagner's term Gesamtkunstwerk. Gesamtkunstverk in this case above allmeans the cross-border collaboration of artists and art forms in between, which leads according to Wagnerto a whole which is presented here as The Gesamtkunstwerk. The purpose of this essay is to take part in a work that literally no longer exist, and to try to understand itscultural-historical value. All that remains from the Swedish Ballet, is everything but the dance itself. Still we can take part of the Ballet through the artistic synthesis through innumerable collaborations shown in the sets, costumes, posters and musical compositions. I will in the analysis based on four points, try to find the tones indicating that the work is, on the basis of Wagner's definition, a Gesamtkunstwerk. The essay is also an attempt to show the innovation of this Company and to provide redress to which, according to me, is too forgotten in Swedish historiography. The thesis shows both the Swedish Ballet's historical background which includes previous works built by the same principles of collaboration presented. In this section I will also address something, according to me, important; The Swedish homophobia, mainly in the tabloids during the period in which the essay deals with, and the consequences for the company in question. Then I will analyze Relâche on the basis of the four theses, which, according to my investigation shows that the work is a Gesamtkunstwerk.

Pour respecter les droits d’auteur, la version électronique de cette thèse a été dépouillée de certains documents visuels et audio-visuels. La version intégrale de la thèse a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal / Nous définissons l’« hétérogénéité stylistique » comme la cohabitation synchrone de styles hétérogènes dans un corpus individuel, particulièrement visible dans un médium unique. Une telle cohabitation est avérée dans les productions d’artistes aussi divers que le Tintoret, Sébastien Bourdon, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia et Gerhard Richter, que nous abordons ici comme autant de cas d’étude. L’hétérogénéité stylistique, inégalement distribuée dans le champ de la production artistique et généralement mal identifiée par l’histoire de l’art, pose des problèmes de définition et d’interprétation qui sont directement liés aux fondements méthodologiques de cette discipline (en raison même de l’histoire complexe de la notion de style). Ainsi, l’histoire de la réception critique de l’hétérogénéité stylistique, de la Renaissance à aujourd’hui, fait ressortir les nombreux enjeux idéologiques qui ont variablement déterminé le processus de son identification et de son interprétation. À une époque où l’on peut cerner plus clairement les enjeux que soulève l’hétérogénéité stylistique, il devient possible d’entreprendre une analyse structurelle et contextuelle de ce dispositif esthétique, à partir d’une série de faits historiques et de modèles épistémologiques (tels que l’histoire de la subjectivité, l’évolution des techniques de production, de gestion et de diffusion de l’art et de l’information, etc.). / We define « stylistic heterogeneity » as the synchronic cohabitation of heterogeneous styles within an artist’s body of work, rendered particularly visible when appearing in a single medium. Such a cohabitation may be observed in the works of artists such as Tintoretto, Sébastien Bourdon, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia and Gerhard Richter, which are used here as case studies. Stylistic heterogeneity, being unevenly distributed throughout the field of art production, is generally not correctly identified by art history. Indeed, the difficulties encountered in trying to define and interpret this particular phenomenon may be linked to the methodological foundations of the discipline (and more specifically to the complex history of the notion of style). The history of stylistic heterogeneity’s critical reception, from the Renaissance to the present, underscores the numerous ideological underpinnings that have conditioned the processes of its definition and interpretation. Now that the issues raised by stylistic heterogeneity can be assessed with greater clarity, a new structural and contextual reading of this aesthetic apparatus may be undertaken, based on a series of historical facts and epistemological models (such as the history of subjectivity, the evolution of techniques for art and information’s production, management and dissemination, and so on).

Following his 1924 break with the Paris avant-garde, Francis Picabia (1879-1953) decamped to the French Riviera and soon began work on his radically new Transparency paintings. This series, which occupied Picabia from approximately 1928 to 1933, drew on classical imagery of biblical and mythological subjects, layering disparate human forms and natural motifs in sensuous compositions remarkable for their ambiguous pictorial space and sinuous lines. The Transparencies' resistance to narrative or allegory--notwithstanding their apparent clarity of reference--parallels the paintings' evasion of formal interpretation in spite of their classical beauty; both of these characteristics have made Picabia's Transparencies one of his most inscrutable and misunderstood bodies of work. To avoid treating the Transparencies as a non sequitur or as a conservative abandonment of earlier modernist goals, it is important to understand the sources of the concepts underpinning these works but originating in Picabia's earlier Cubist and Dada periods. Dimensionality, appropriation, figuration, and a rigorous commitment to individualism are all themes from Picabia's acclaimed work in the 1910s and early 1920s that continue into the Transparencies. Particularly relevant are the multivalent interpretations of the spatial fourth dimension--scientific, philosophical, and occult--that Picabia had first encountered in the context of Cubism and the Stieglitz Circle and, later, in his friend Marcel Duchamp's optical experiments. In the Transparencies Picabia's layered outlines both deny linear perspective and suggest projections of interior worlds. In 1936, Picabia affirmed his interest in the fourth dimension, referring specifically to the Transparencies' superimposition at the time he signed Charles Sirató's "Manifeste Dimensioniste." Picabia's visual synthesis of decades of avant-garde concerns in the Transparencies appealed to the American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein, who became one of Picabia's closest friends and confidantes in the early 1930s after she saw his recent paintings. Stein's commentary on Picabia's work and their friendship in "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" and "Everybody's Autobiography" reveals the painter's impact on Stein at a turning point in her career, but also elucidates their shared search for new verbal and visual expressions of the human figure and higher dimensionality. / text

Nous définissons l’« hétérogénéité stylistique » comme la cohabitation synchrone de styles hétérogènes dans un corpus individuel, particulièrement visible dans un médium unique. Une telle cohabitation est avérée dans les productions d’artistes aussi divers que le Tintoret, Sébastien Bourdon, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia et Gerhard Richter, que nous abordons ici comme autant de cas d’étude. L’hétérogénéité stylistique, inégalement distribuée dans le champ de la production artistique et généralement mal identifiée par l’histoire de l’art, pose des problèmes de définition et d’interprétation qui sont directement liés aux fondements méthodologiques de cette discipline (en raison même de l’histoire complexe de la notion de style). Ainsi, l’histoire de la réception critique de l’hétérogénéité stylistique, de la Renaissance à aujourd’hui, fait ressortir les nombreux enjeux idéologiques qui ont variablement déterminé le processus de son identification et de son interprétation. À une époque où l’on peut cerner plus clairement les enjeux que soulève l’hétérogénéité stylistique, il devient possible d’entreprendre une analyse structurelle et contextuelle de ce dispositif esthétique, à partir d’une série de faits historiques et de modèles épistémologiques (tels que l’histoire de la subjectivité, l’évolution des techniques de production, de gestion et de diffusion de l’art et de l’information, etc.). / We define « stylistic heterogeneity » as the synchronic cohabitation of heterogeneous styles within an artist’s body of work, rendered particularly visible when appearing in a single medium. Such a cohabitation may be observed in the works of artists such as Tintoretto, Sébastien Bourdon, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia and Gerhard Richter, which are used here as case studies. Stylistic heterogeneity, being unevenly distributed throughout the field of art production, is generally not correctly identified by art history. Indeed, the difficulties encountered in trying to define and interpret this particular phenomenon may be linked to the methodological foundations of the discipline (and more specifically to the complex history of the notion of style). The history of stylistic heterogeneity’s critical reception, from the Renaissance to the present, underscores the numerous ideological underpinnings that have conditioned the processes of its definition and interpretation. Now that the issues raised by stylistic heterogeneity can be assessed with greater clarity, a new structural and contextual reading of this aesthetic apparatus may be undertaken, based on a series of historical facts and epistemological models (such as the history of subjectivity, the evolution of techniques for art and information’s production, management and dissemination, and so on). / Pour respecter les droits d’auteur, la version électronique de cette thèse a été dépouillée de certains documents visuels et audio-visuels. La version intégrale de la thèse a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

This thesis aims to investigate Les Ballet Suédois (1920-1925) and their ambition to create total works of art (Gesamtkunstwerk), a term made famous by the composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883). With regards to modern research into total works of art as expressions of the social or political visions of the avant-garde, this thesis applies theoretical concepts of intermediality and performativity to discern how the company cooperated with members of the Parisian avant-garde. Their joint mission was to regenerate society by uniting the arts and constructing ballets designed as total works of art that conveyed the ideas of the collaborating artists, commonly expressed in written manifestos during this era. In analyzing three works: Dårhuset/Maison de Fous, Världens Skapelse/La Création du Monde, and Relâche, it was revealed that staging total works of art was a common pursuit among artists of the avant-garde. The unique function of the Ballet Suédois was to transgress the ideas of the avant-garde into corporeal, temporal, intermedial manifestations of their radical collaborators. The results showed that Ballet Suédois functioned as enablers that performatized aesthetic, social and political ideas to the stage and, in manifesting the manifestos, had a unique function within the Parisian avant-garde of the early 1920s.

The central role that avant-garde music and dance theatre played in the interplay and synthesis of the arts and media in the 1920s, particularly in Paris, is well known. However, the creative potential of ballet has hardly been recognized in its manifold relationships with film and cinematic-inspired expression. The extent to which especially ballet music interacted with the latest cinematographic principles and techniques and referred to cinematic aesthetics in a variety of ways can instructively be seen regarding the productions of the Ballets Suédois. This is discussed in this article with an exemplary look at Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (1921), Within the Quota (1923), Skating Rink (1922) and Relâche (1924). By that it becomes clear that the transmedia inclusion of cinematographic ideas not only inspired the vocabulary of avant-garde dance and modern choreography, but was also distinctively reflected in the conception and composition of film-affected music.