Art - Dada's anti-hero was an outrageous boxer-conman, discovers Rachel Aspden
On a cold November night in 1913, a bulky figure in an English overcoat wandered the artists' cafes of the Quartier Latin, handing out posters printed on cheap tan-coloured paper. "VENEZ VOIR," screamed the red block capitals, "Arthur Cravan, Oscar Wilde's nephew, TALK, BOX AND DANCE."
At the Societe des Savants club, a shirtless Cravan sparred with members of the audience while proclaiming himself a hotel thief, snake-charmer, grandson of the Queen's chancellor and poet with the shortest haircut in the world. It was one of his more restrained performances; a few months later, he promised to shoot himself in front of a paying audience, dressed "for the benefit of the ladies" only in a leather jockstrap.
As the "anti-art" Dada movement emerged, such extravagant scenes became more common. At the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Hugo Ball was carried on stage, immobilised by a tall cardboard cape, cardboard leg-tubes, a towering hat and what looked like cardboard lobster claws, to recite a tone poem called "Carawane". But Cravan stood out even among the wartime shock artists.
He similarly dominates 4 Dada Suicides, a new collection of Dadaist writing published by Atlas Press. Cravan's poetry now seems irritatingly mannered ("The only place left, O my neuroses!/Is the bright stabling/Of the urinals") but his life reads like a wild western. Born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd in 1887, he moved to Paris in 1912, changed his name, and began life as a kind of artistic stuntman, trading on his notorious uncle's reputation and, to the intense irritation of his cousin Vyvyan Holland, occasionally passing himself off as Wilde's son.
His magazine Maintenant, written single-handedly under 17 different pseudonyms, was a cross between Popbitch and Private Eye: full of manufactured gossip, satire, parodies and downright untruths. In March 1913, he titillated the city with an outrageously camp account of a supposed visit from Wilde, who had died in 1900. "I was frightfully bored," Cravan writes, welcoming "the stranger who trod over my doorstep with the magical air of a queen or a pigeon". The relatives get drunk on cherry brandy and vin ordinaire and Cravan screams at Wilde that he is a "street-corner whore". Fashionable Paris was agog, and the New York Times sent a reporter to scour the streets of Paris in search of the ghostly Oscar.
Appropriately for a professional conman, Cravan is a dubious inclusion in 4 Dada Suicides. He was only a marginal figure of the European Dada cliques, and almost certainly wasn't a suicide either, though he disappeared mysteriously, possibly drowned, off the coast of Mexico in 1918. But in the early 1920s, dealers in London were offered forged Wildeana by a mysterious "Dorian Hope, secretary to Andre Gide". Sightings of the poet-boxer, like those of Elvis or the yeti, continued throughout the 20th century.
Cravan crops up more legitimately, posing shirtless with his biceps flexed, in the Pompidou Centre's current, encyclopaedic "Dada" show, which includes not only the core Dadaists - Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Francis Picabia and Jean Arp - but fringe figures from Cravan to Man Ray and Marius de Zayas. Like the movement, the exhibition - a series of small cubicles crammed with art and artefacts - is barely controlled chaos. In the "Cabaret Voltaire" room, a Marcel Janco mask looms over a Jean Arp collage, a wall of Dada manifestos and a glass case containing a photograph of Hugo Ball in full cubist costume, reading his tone poem.
Despite the patchy brilliance of the artwork, Ball's earnest account of his reading hints at the frequent silliness of the Dadaists' world. "I quickly realised that if I wanted to stay serious - and I did - my expressive means would not be up to the pomp of the staging," he recalled, and intoned the last verse as "a kind of liturgical chant". Skewering these arty excesses was Cravan's favourite sport and greatest talent: shortly before Ball's reading, Maintenant begged right-thinking Parisians to free the Continent from "poets and painters who bore me stiff talking about Rimbaud, free verse, Cezanne, Van Gogh, oh Jesus, Renan (I think) and Christ knows what else".
4 Dada Suicides (Atlas Press) is available from www.atlaspress.co.uk
"Dada" is at the Pompidou Centre, Paris until 9 January 2006. For tickets and more information visit www.cnac-gp.fr
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