I first heard the name Arthur Cravan when reading Guy Debord’s Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle. Debord, developing his ideas on the replacement of the real with the false copy, comments that since the death of art, it’s become easy to disguise policemen of the state as artists. He says this is what Cravan may have meant when he wrote “Soon in the street one will see only artists, it will be difficult to find a man.” This stayed in my mind: Who was Arthur Cravan?
Cravan was a figure in the art world just before World War One. Young, handsome, and physically imposing, he was the nephew of Oscar Wilde; his grandfather had been a counselor to Queen Victoria. Cravan was part of the first modern art scene— those that benefitted from widespread newspaper coverage—where the artists not only understood this exposure but actively learned to exploit it. They recognized that newspapers needed content—and they deliberately fed it to them. But, above all, Cravan was fatally in the right place at the right time.
The 19th century gave rise to what became known as “the art scene.” Key to this phenomenon was the journalism which fed the growing middle-class— out of the shadow of the aristocracy and allowed itself and its artistic tastes to be taken seriously— the cultural food it demanded. The fame mechanism was in place at the start of the 20th century. It began with ballet dancers and opera singers, moved through Franz Liszt, Paganini, Jenny Lind, and Wild Bill Hickock, continued with the Impressionists and various scandals which took place at Parisian artistic salons (for example, Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe). By the turn of the century, it was ready for full-blown exploitation. Within this context, the scandal was the crowning glory of success.
Scandals took a few forms. First came sex, then the grotesque, and the morally shocking. Ideally any given work combined at least two of these elements for success. A few well-known examples: Nijinsky’s ballet Afternoon of a Faun which ends with a scene of masturbation, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps deals with the sacrifice of a young girl accompanied by music representing early Europeans as primitive savages, and Marcel Duchamp’s signed urinal Fontaine, one in his series of taste-free artworks.
Cravan fit perfectly into this world, having a natural flair for the contentious. He wrote in his review Maintenant! (Now in English), “Only brutes look for the beautiful in art,” a phrase to make any bourgeois feel he must rethink his idea of beauty to stay current. This type of aesthetic peer pressure has remained in place ever since; using the word beautiful, one risks banishment to the land of hopeless reactionary.
Cravan, perhaps feeling that there is “no bad publicity,” violently criticized the 1912 Salon of Independent Artists in Paris calling all the participating artists—except for his friend Kees van Dongen—untalented louts. This provoked the poet Apollinaire to challenge him to a duel. Cravan gave a mitigated apology; the affair was dropped. After all, Cravan was, to quote Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim “one of us.”
Later, on June 5th, 1914 Cravan gave a performance in a rented hall. He came out, shot a gun into the air, danced, and gave a demonstration of boxing. He then delivered a discourse saying sport was superior to art, praising homosexuality, the insane, all the while insulting the audience. When it started to fall flat, his friends got up and did the same. It was a success: it made the front page of the Paris-Midi newspaper the next day.
When the First World War broke out, Cravan fled Europe by way of Barcelona. While there he held a highly publicized boxing match with the world heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, who he’d met while training in a gym in Berlin. Johnson carried him to the sixth round and then knocked him out much to the chagrin of the high-paying public which felt tricked.
Cravan next went to New York. Marcel Duchamp, always ready to help a friend in financial need and never one to miss an opportunity for promotion, organized another public performance for Cravan. This time Cravan showed up late and was drunk. He then took off all his clothes, again insulted the audience and passed out on stage. Duchamp, knowing that once reported in the papers and left to activate the readers’ imagination, it would become an event, declared a great success. As usual, he was right.
Journalism even entered Cravan’s love life. While in New York, he met the painter Mina Loy, recently crowned “the prototype of the modern woman” by the New York Evening Sun. Together they went to Mexico, where, lacking money, he hoped to have a boxing career. It was there that, one day in 1918, at the age of 31, under unknown circumstances, he went to sea in a small boat and was never seen again.