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Categories
Branding, Web Design
Client
Arden & Co.
Project
Project Echo
Services
Branding
Art & Design Direction
Motion
Web design
Year
2025
On October 1, 1882, two thousand people crammed into a tiny Parisian apartment at 4 rue Antoine Dubois for what was supposed to be an "unusual evening." Among the crowd: Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Richard Wagner. They had come to see something unprecedented—an exhibition of art made by people who couldn't draw.
The host, Jules Lévy,
had a simple manifesto:
"Death to clichés, to us young people!"
What they witnessed would unknowingly shape the next century of art. But nobody was taking it seriously. That was the entire point.
Jules Lévy was a Parisian writer, publisher, and former member of the bohemian literary club Les Hydropathes. He wasn't trying to start an art revolution—he was trying to make people laugh during a dark time in French society.
The name "Les Arts Incohérents" was itself a joke, a play on "les arts décoratifs" (decorative arts), which was also the name of a prestigious Parisian art school. Lévy was essentially calling his movement "Incoherent Arts"—the opposite of everything the establishment stood for.
The movement recruited artists with no formal training alongside established names like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Writers, actors, journalists, comedians, cabaret performers—anyone who wanted to thumb their nose at the stuffy Salon system was welcome.
Paul Bilhaud: A playwright who created the first monochrome painting
Alphonse Allais: A humorist who expanded the concept into a full series
Émile Cohl: An early film animator who contributed surreal photographs
Arthur Sapeck (Eugène Bataille): Created the defaced Mona Lisa, 36 years before Duchamp
At that first 1882 exhibition in Lévy's apartment, Paul Bilhaud displayed what would become one of the most important artworks in history—though nobody realized it at the time.
It was a completely black canvas, displayed more than thirty years before Kazimir Malevich's famous Black Square.
The joke was obvious: if Black people are fighting in the dark, you can't see anything. The entire canvas was just... black. That's it. That's the joke.
Except it wasn't just a joke.
This work is now considered by some critics to be the first monochrome in art history. In 2021, after being missing for 139 years, the painting was rediscovered and classified as a National Treasure by the French government.
In 2018, art expert Johann Naldi discovered among seventeen previously unknown Incoherent works a piece by Allais: "Des souteneurs encore dans la force de l'âge et le ventre dans l'herbe boivent de l'absinthe" (Pimps in Their Prime, Bellies in the Grass, Drinking Absinthe).
The artwork? A green cab curtain hanging on a wooden cylinder.
That's it. An actual cab curtain from a horse-drawn carriage, exhibited as art. This work has been classified as a National Treasure and is seen as evoking Duchamp's ready-made practice—which wouldn't happen for another three decades.
February 20, 2025
February 19, 2025
