After passing the folded piece of paper back and forth, you open it up to gleefully reveal a man in a bowler hat, with huge breasts, a kilt, and octopus tentacles for legs. This is Exquisite Corpse at its finest. But where did this game come from, that so many parents have to thank for making long car journeys with kids bearable for 10 minutes? Well, like melting clocks and furry teacups, it all started with the Surrealists.
Although the very similar word-based game of “consequences” had been a much loved parlor game for considerably longer, the writer André Breton (who founded the Surrealist group in Paris in 1924) wrote in the Surrealist magazine La Révolution surréaliste in 1927, that the Surrealists developed the game Exquisite Corpse (“Cadavre Exquis”) around 1925. Breton pinned the game’s conception down to “the old house” at 54 rue de Château in Montparnasse, where the French actor Marcel Duhamel regularly hosted Breton and their friends the poets Benjamin Péret and Jacques Prévert, and the poet Yves Tanguy. Breton reminisced in the essay about the evenings spent there “mixing mellow Château-Yquem with other, more tonic wines” and playing children’s games for which they “felt the same zeal … as we had felt in childhood, and more”.
Cadavre Exquis (1934), André Breton, Jacques Hérold, Yves Tanguy, Victor Brauner. Kay Sage Tanguy Bequest. Image Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In the Dictionairre abrégé du surréalisme, compiled in 1938 by Breton and the poet Paul Éluard, Exquisite Corpse was defined as “a game in which several people compose a phrase or drawing together, folding the paper so that no one can see the previous collaboration or collaborations. The now-classic example, which gave the game its name, was the first phrase created in this method: the exquisite-corpse-drank-the new-wine.”
The game was centered around one of the Surrealist’s favorite things: juxtaposition. The game quickly evolved from a written parlor diversion into a method for collaborative art-making.Much of the group’s art and poetry celebrated unlikely meetings between random objects—like Dalí’s Lobster Telephone (1936) or Man Ray’s Indestructable Object (1923)—so this game was naturally right up their street. The strange bodies they created during their games of Exquisite Corpse represented the Surrealist desire to pull apart reality, and question the the objectiveness of perception. Breton wrote that with this game, the Surrealists had found a way to “negate the frantic, derisory imitation of physical appearances, which is still the most prominent—and most contestable—part of contemporary art”—it shattered the illusion of bodily perfection and instead “emphasize[d] chance relationships, that which unites the interior and exterior worlds.”
Invitation from the ‘Exquisite Corpse’ for the reopening of the Surrealist Gallery, in 1927, in Paris, France. (Photo by API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Exquisite Corpse artworks by the group are now kept in major collections around the world, including several collages, like this one made by Breton and six Surrealist pals, featuring an umbrella head supported on a luggage trunk body and stacked pot legs. The design featured on the group’s invitation to the reopening of their Surrealist gallery in 1927.
Other collages, while retaining the sense of randomness, seem to have been done collaboratively in full sight of each other, without the artists folding over the page between contributions. Even when their contributions weren’t made in secrecy, Exquisite Corpse allowed the Surrealists to create something which “no single mind” could have created, drawing on multiple artists’ visions. These collaborations often involved historically over-looked—read, female—members of the group, like Valentine Hugo and Remedios Varo.
Cadavre Exquis (1926–27), Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky). Image Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Exquisite Corpse was by no means the only example of an innovative art-making method developed by the Surrealists. In the early 1920s, ‘automatic drawing’ saw the Surrealists create artwork relying on chance, randomness, and accident, attempting to separate their brain’s conscious intentions for the artwork from the unconscious actions of their hands. The following decade, Salvador Dalí developed his ‘paranoiac-critical method’, in which he would work himself up into a frenzy before painting, in an attempt to engage with the most irrational parts of his psyche. All three methods were born from the Surrealist desire to centre the unconscious brain in the act of art-making, bypassing rationality in a quest to create something new, free, and surreal—beyond reality.
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