Proverbe

An exceptionally rare complete collection in six issues of this important Dada journal, including the very rare sixth no. of July 1921 entitled "Invention et proverbe".

Contributions by Paul Eluard, André Breton, Céline Arnauld, Tristan Tzara, Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Jean Cocteau, Francis Picabia, Jean Paulhan, Maurice Raynal, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Jacques-Emile Blanche, Théodore Fraenkel, among others.

One of the most significant Dada journals published at the height of the movement with its very rare subscription leaflet.

Undoubtedly the finest example of poetic parody conceived by the Dadaists as a radical response to the conventionalized atrophy of lan-guage and morality. 

"These journals [D^dO⁴H² ; M'amenez-y ; Proverbe, and Z] represent the specific product of the 1920 Dadaist frenzy. […] The most interesting of them, standing clearly apart from the rest, was unquestionably Proverbe which claimed to 'exist only to justify words'" (Michel Sanouillet, Dada à Paris)

"Thus, through the alchemy of Eluard's editorial choices, Proverbe became a genuinely Dada journal: consistently innovative, exploring the diverse possibilities of language, 'justifying' words (that is, calling them into question), inventing its own idiom, and, more distinctively still, indicting conventional syntax through aphorisms. These aphorisms according to Michel Leiris's phrase, rhyme falsely: commonplaces caught in everyday speech, i.e. 'it means what it means' (no. 2); nonsense phrases; sayings taken from Dadaist writings such as Tzara's 'My name is now you' (no. 3); sentences of zero denotation such as 'With DADA, every day, rendez-vous anywhere' (no. 4). In Dépaysement de l'aphorisme, Marie-Paule Berranger compiled an exhaustive inventory of all the verbal operations proposed by the contributors to Proverbe, ranging from the inversion of stereotypes to the portmanteau proverb, the commonplace taken at face value, the deflating riddle, and the redefinition of grammatical rules: all ultimately underscoring the paradox of language. But to focus solely on this aspect is to overlook much else that the publication contains beyond sententious wordplay. Eluard, while testing the effect of his own poems, clearly took great pleasure in composing these explosive pages and wrote in another journal: 'Proverbe resembles the piers of a demolished bridge' (Henri Béhar, Dada, Circuit total, p. 302).

A rare complete copy of this ephemeral and incandescent publication: "of all the Dada journals, the one that made the most coherent contribution to the problem of language" (Tristan Tzara). Dada exhibition, Centre Pompidou, 2005-2006, pp. 830-833.