Anguy, Yves, with André Breton and Jacqueline Breton. Cadavre exquis (Exquisite Corpse)

Tanguy, Yves, with André Breton and Jacqueline Breton. Cadavre exquis (Exquisite Corpse), 1938. In Cowling, as no. 74, p. 47.

The cadavre exquis, whether visual or verbal, was a favourite game with the Surrealists, and several cadavres exquis were reproduced in La Révolution Surréaliste nos. 9-10, October 1927. A collaboration involving usually three or four people, it is in essence identical to the children's game of 'Consequences' in which participants complete a sentence or drawing of a figure without seeing what has been done already" (Cowling 47). This exquisite corpse has at the top, center, the engraving of the head of a distinguished-looking old man, «crowned» with a leaf with a huge caterpillar on it; the lower center of the work has what looks like a single cutout of a 19th-c. ad for men's heavy long-underwear pants or work-pants, with suspenders and possibly «booties» on the feet; the pants are in the form of a hefty human, but unoccupied. Between head and waist are engravings or photos of an early locomotive, a machinist table and other a couple or more other things mechanical. The effect in Erlich's eyes is the presentation of the human as upper-class from the neck up and working-class from the waist down, with the two simultaneously separated and joined by mechanism. Any idea of D. H. Lawrencian working-class virility opposed to upper-class intellectuality is undercut in the ad (?) by the lack of a «bulge» or suggestion of space for genitalia on the real-world working-man who is to wear the underwear or work pants; if anything, the crotch suggests that the removed worker had a vagina.