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Detail from Francis Picabia, Savon, 1924 (plate 1).

Figure 2. Francis Picabia, Ridens, c. 1929. Watercolour, gouache, and pencil on cardboard,
104 × 74 cm. Private collection. Photo: © Estate of Francis Picabia/SODRAC (2010).

In June 1924 Francis Picabia’s dadaist magazine 3911 included on page three a drawing by
the editor occupying the upper half, a ‘poem’ by the American expatriate Man Ray2 in the
bottom left, and a short writing by Erik Satie to the right. Until now there have been no
proposals to thematically connect the three enigmatic works (plate 1). Their proximity has
been taken to be unrelated. I would like to propose, however, that the entire page was
carefully calculated to operate in an integrated fashion whereby shifting and evolving
references occur that are of considerable richness and associative possibilities. Metamorphosis
and interpretative simultaneity are both subjects and devices of this three-part collaborative
effort. The three works are mutually interdependent to such a degree that one could speak of
one work rather than three, or one work comprised of three.3 Responsibility for the authorship
of the individual pieces is, arguably, a matter of degrees, despite each contribution being
signed. Rather than considering the individual works in isolation, it is when conducting an
analysis at the level of the page itself that the artistic project becomes intelligible.
Figure 1. Francis Picabia, Savon; Man Ray, Poem; and Erik Satie, Cahiers d’un Mammifère;
in 391, number 17, June 1924, page 3. Los Angeles: Research Library, The Getty Research
Institute (84-S1216). Photo: © Estate of Francis Picabia/SODRAC (2010); © Man Ray
Trust/SODRAC (2010).

Picabia’s magazine was an integral part of his own art practice, and he clearly directs the
overarching content and style of the publication. It is a commonplace in the Picabia art-
historical literature to point to the innumerable borrowed sources that he employed in his
work. Indeed, much of the meaning of this 391 page emerges through recognition of and
engagement with the metamorphosing, interconnected references. As when considering
Picabia’s own multi-layered approach to painting in the later 1920s, or his earlier poetry,4 one
finds that the concept of metamorphosis is critical for understanding the interpretative
transformations that are demanded by this page’s composition and shifting thematic
references (plate 2). The interpretations that I give for the page, therefore, will themselves be
mutable, because the task of the commentary is found in the work’s structural form,
operations, and allusions.
The Man Ray, Picabia, and Satie contributions have not been adequately discussed in the
literature, probably because any interpretative attempts necessarily founder when trying to
understand them as autonomous entities to be considered in isolation from one another. As an
example of the interpretative problems that arise when requiring conventional artistic
autonomy for each work, whenever Man Ray’s poem is illustrated in the art historical
literature, it is consistently excised from the original page context in which it first appeared.5
But doing so immediately removes the source of much of the poem’s meaning. An interesting,
though significantly limited interpretation based strictly on its circumscribed appearance
becomes one of the few viable options for commentary. It is typically assumed that Man
Ray’s poem at bottom left employs blocked-out lines of text organized as poetic stanzas.
Either actual words or simulations of the spaces occupied by possible words are understood to
lie beneath the thick black lines. Jean-Gérard Lapacherie points out that in terms of traditional
poetry (which Man Ray wrote on occasion) the work is organized as a tercet, two quintils, and
a quatrain.6 Lapacherie has written about Man Ray’s poem in a manner that typifies the
conventional understanding of it:
This ‘poem’ is not made up of words, nor letters, but of thick black dashes, of variable length,
each one of which is supposed to stand for a word. It is arranged the way poems usually are:
with a title (made up of three dashes) and seventeen lines of unequal length … It retains the
visual and graphic appearance of a ‘poem’: that is to say an arrangement in lines of unequal
length and in stanzas. By reducing the ‘poem’ to black dashes, Man Ray expresses his
defiance of words as the dada poets did. With derision he reminds us of this truth, that poetry,
which today has hardly any existence except written and printed, is laid out on the page in a
codified, specific, visual, and immediately recognizable manner.7
Despite the importance for the avant-garde of declaiming poetry in public, Lapacherie views
the poem as a visual presentation of suppression and withdrawal in which the form of a poem
is abstracted to indicate a resistance to the verbal. The codification that he refers to involves
the conventions of poetic presentation on the page.
Because there is no actual text (apart from the author’s name, place of production, and date,
which provide some contextual information) the effect of Man Ray’s poem partly depends on
the readers’ experience of being denied information. As such it would resemble the
presentation strategy of his well-known photo-sculpture The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse,
which depicts a burlap-covered, bound, uncommunicative object (plate 3). The veiled
presentation is more intriguing than the unveiled object or assemblage beneath. One could
suggest, furthermore, that the photograph of the veiled presentation is of greater interest than
the actual three-dimensional object in space. The example of The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse
has no doubt informed the reception of Man Ray’s poem that understands it to involve a
refusal to communicate8 or an emulation of censored text. From the latter standpoint there
would seem to be a conscious deployment of the aesthetic effect of censorship,9 minus the
political circumstances around its occurrence. Because Man Ray’s poem is on a page that I
consider to be devoted to metamorphosis and multiple readings, the poem could certainly be
read in terms of negation, the suppression of text, or a refusal to communicate. But as will be
shown in this paper, the poem (as well as the other works on the 391 page) can perhaps more
productively be understood as presenting encoded information (made meaningful by relations
to the other works on the page) that is conveyed through a process of ongoing translation,
which itself is fundamental to any interpretative understanding.
Figure 3. Man Ray, The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, 1920. Photograph, dimensions unknown.
Location unknown. Photo: © Man Ray Trust/SODRAC/ADAGP/Telimage (2010).

One should not necessarily assume that Man Ray’s poem was a pre-existing work that was
then requested by Picabia for publication in 391. The poem could have been made specifically
for the original 391 page setting. If so, it may not have been an essentially autonomous work,
in terms of the poem itself and possibly even the authorship of it. It is dated to just one month
prior to the issue’s publication, and on close inspection the three contributions on the page by
Man Ray, Picabia, and Satie demonstrate themselves to be interrelated. This interrelatedness
may seem unlikely given their individual distinctive appearance, but each contribution
appears to make cryptic references to the magazine’s title and engage in a conversation of
sorts with the other works on the page. One example of the 391 references is found in the
formatting of Erik Satie’s text at bottom right entitled ‘Cahiers d’un mammifère’ or
‘Notebook of a Mammal’. Perhaps because it appears to be a simple textual presentation with
verbal transparency (and so notable mainly for its literary significance as a personal polemic
against perceived enemies) it has never been pointed out that Satie’s contribution has been
formatted so as to present 3 separate sections and 9 indented paragraphs, while including the
underlined word for 1 in the title. There are no literary or stylistic necessities for these
formatting peculiarities, making it reasonable to suggest that the presentation of Satie’s
writing may have been consciously encoded to allude to the magazine’s title of 391. Satie’s
text comprises 3 sections (each separated by 3 dots in triangular form that emulate the
tripartite organization of the page) having 3 indented lines each. The 3 men’s 3 contributions
being on page 3 of 391 is probably not coincidental,10 but seems largely due to Satie’s
interests in numerology and his frequent employment of 3 as a symbolic and technical device
in his musical compositions and experimental writings, as will be further discussed later. Like
the two other works on the page, Man Ray’s poem (with its 3-part title) can certainly be
viewed in isolation from its original context, but doing so gives it a largely non-
representational significance of negation. It becomes a richer, more complex work when it is
read in conjunction with the Picabia and Satie contributions.
In addition to Satie’s numerological interests, a partial explanation for the dense encoding of
this 391 page may be found in the circumstances of Picabia’s and Man Ray’s earlier
association in New York. When living in New York, Man Ray, Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp
socialized in the circle of Walter Arensberg. Picabia dedicated his book of poetry, The
Mortician’s Athlete, to Arensberg in 1918.11 Francis M. Naumann has noted that Arensberg
was intensely interested in cryptography, writing that ‘between 1915 and 1920, he spent the
majority of his waking hours deciphering secret messages he believed were deliberately
concealed by means of ciphers in the writings of Dante and Shakespeare.’12 In 1922
Arensberg published his book The Cryptography of Shakespeare (plate 4). He begins his first
chapter by writing:
Figure 4. Walter Conrad Arensberg, The Cryptography of Shakespeare, Los Angeles: Howard
Bowen, 1922, page 194. Photo: Jarrett Duncan.

The conclusive evidence that William Shakespeare is the pseudonym of Francis Bacon is
incorporated in the original editions of the Shakespeare plays and poems. This evidence
consists of cryptograms in which the name of the poet is signed as Francis Bacon. These
cryptographic signatures are numerous. I have already deciphered more than five hundred,
and there appear to be indications of many more in passages which I have not yet had time to
submit to final examination. Pending a complete account of the signatures that I have
deciphered, I shall confine myself in the present introductory study to describing and
illustrating the cryptographic method in accordance with which these signatures are
constructed.13
Francis Picabia’s thorough encoding of this 391 page, carried out two years after the
publication of Arenberg’s book, could partly involve playful allusions to the activities of the
circle’s cryptographer friend and patron. Arensberg’s project revolved around problematic
authorship questions, also central to the work of Picabia. In this case Arensberg focused on
the presumed page-encoding, signature-hiding cryptographic activities of that other Francis –
Francis Bacon, a task with which the somewhat egocentric Picabia could perhaps both
identify with and caricature.14 At the time of the magazine issue’s production in 1924,
Picabia, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp had come to live in the same building in Paris, so
there were opportunities for nostalgic recollection as well as collaboration, potentially also
involving Duchamp.15 Satie later moved into the building in January 1925, not long before
his final hospital stay prior to his death.16
As with the formatting of Satie’s text, Picabia’s drawing may possibly allude to the
magazine’s title of 391 through the use of numerical combinations. It depicts Erik Satie as the
upper half of what initially resembles a mermaid or sea serpent. (See plate 5 for a
photographic portrait of Satie.) Satie is presented as being part of a composite creature, rather
like a ‘satyr’ playing the watery equivalent of the pan-pipes, simultaneously playing music
and blowing soap bubbles.17 Against Satie’s back lay a woman whose suspended, wavy
strands of hair hint at Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. The composite creature is composed of 2
distinct bodies, which added to the woman makes 3 bodies. The woman has precisely 9 thick
strands of hair, and there is 1 eye looking at the woman. While perhaps a coincidence, the 3
bodies, 9 hanks of hair, and 1 eye could involve an additional coded reference to the magazine
title of 391.
Figure 5. Studio Hamelle, Arcueil, Portrait of Erik Satie, 1909. Photograph, 24 × 18 cm.
Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe: IMEC L’abbaye d’Ardenne. Photo: Studio Hamelle/Fonds
Erik Satie/IMEC /dépôt des Archives nationales.

Two earlier drawings progressively develop the theme that led to Picabia’s Satie drawing on
this page. One is his drawing of 1922–23 entitled Centaur and Wife Lapith,18 and the other is
his Thermomètre Rimbaud drawing from the previous issue of 391, no. 16, May 1924 (plates
6 and 7). During the 1920s, Picabia sometimes incorporated Renaissance figure compositions
into his own artwork.19 Imaginative copying was a standard working procedure for Picabia
throughout his career.20 Apart from the possible Botticelli reference, all three Picabia
drawings appear to freely borrow and recombine characters and poses from Raphael’s fresco
The Triumph of Galatea of around 1512 in the Villa Farnesina in Rome (plate 8).21 The
sequence of drawings suggests an ongoing process of transformational mutation resulting
from Picabia’s study of Raphael’s Galatea (which notably depicts a subject from Ovid’s
Metamorphosis22) in conjunction with several other interests and sources, including two
engravings by Albrecht Dürer.
Figure 6. Francis Picabia, Centaur and Wife Lapith, c. 1922–23. Ink, watercolour, and pencil
on paper, 28.4 × 39.3 cm. Private collection. Photo: © Estate of Francis Picabia/SODRAC
(2010).
Figure 7. Francis Picabia, Thermomètre Rimbaud, in 391, number 16, May 1924, page 3. Los
Angeles: Research Library, The Getty Research Institute (84-S1216). Photo: © Estate of
Francis Picabia/SODRAC (2010).

Figure 8. Raphael, The Triumph of Galatea, c. 1512. Fresco, 296 × 224 cm. Rome: Villa
Farnesina, Rome, c. 1512. Fresco, 296 × 224 cm. Photo: Alessandro Angeli, 2003; ©
Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

Picabia’s earliest drawing depicts a centaur moving through water, with outstretched arms and
head turned gazing at a woman who rides him bareback (and backwards) while reclining
against his shoulders. In Raphael’s painting, the sea-borne centaur at centre-right similarly
gazes at a mermaid who reclines against his back and shoulders. In order to create a more
defined pose for the woman whose source is partly obscured in the fresco, Picabia appears to
make mirrored adaptations to the body of the putti at bottom centre in the Raphael, lending
some elements of the putti’s pose to the woman, and continuing with the process of character
metamorphosis. In the subsequent drawing, Thermomètre Rimbaud, the transformation
continues with the centaur losing its legs (that were barely indicated in the earlier drawing)
and mutating into a bald, jacket-wearing merman. The merman’s lower half is blackened like
the trunk and tail of both Picabia’s earlier centaur and the later Satie-related merman. From
the Raphael, the centaur’s torso, trunk, and very closely copied mermaid’s tail merge
completely in Picabia’s merman. In place of the mermaid’s arrow-like tipped tail end, Picabia
substitutes the magazine’s title of 391, thereby beginning the self-referential process that
culminates on page three of the next issue. Picabia’s merman also draws partly on the figure
of the lascivious male sea creature at lower left in the Raphael. Picabia’s character emulates
this merman of Raphael’s who seizes and lifts up a protesting sea nymph. In the fresco, the
main character Galatea flees in a dolphin-powered vessel from an unwanted suitor. Three
cupids fire arrows from above, two of them aimed at the heart of the accompanying sea
nymph who has been caught by Raphael’s merman, with the other arrow aimed at the centaur.
Picabia’s woman is also caught, but with ‘Rimbaud’s thermometer’ hanging from her
backside, rather than Cupid’s arrow from her heart.23
In the final 391 drawing incorporating the head of Satie, the male character (still a merman
and recognizably connected to the earlier drawings) rotates 180 degrees to the right, while the
woman reverts to a reclining position against his shoulders. Picabia makes a further change by
assigning to Satie the activity of the trumpet player just to the right of Raphael’s centaur. A
further source for the later 391 drawing is Albrecht Dürer’s engraving The Sea Monster of
around 1498. Beverley Calté has noted Picabia’s direct copying of the abducted female from
that image in his painting of 1924–26, Woman with Dog (plates 9 and 10).24 Calté shows that
Picabia combined this woman with a dog directly copied from the centre foreground of
another engraving, Dürer’s St. Eustace (plate 11). Apart from the rotated orientation of
Picabia’s figures on the 391 page, Dürer’s sea monster engraving provides further links. A
small male figure with raised arms runs to the shore, and he makes direct eye contact with the
captive as she is taken away. The psychological effect of this gaze seems to be transferred into
the final Picabia drawing by the curious inclusion of the tail’s eye that gazes at the woman
from a similar angle. This eye substitutes for the ‘391’ located at the tail’s end in
Thermomètre Rimbaud, which in turn references the tipped tail end of Raphael’s mermaid.
Albrecht Dürer’s St. Eustace of around 1501 holds a number of references for Picabia apart
from the already-mentioned dog. The posture of St Eustace’s torso and the positioning of his
extended arms and hands appear to be the visual references for the upper half of Satie playing
his wind instrument. Out of the instrument emerges a soap bubble, and in a similar spatial
relation to St Eustace is the ‘miraculous’ appearance of a deer with a crucifix growing from
its forehead. Both details are suggestive of purity and transformation.25
Figure 9. Albrecht Dürer, The Sea Monster, c. 1498. Engraving, 24.6 × 18.7 cm. Boston:
Museum of Fine Arts (Centennial Gift of Landon T. Clay, 68.183). Photo: © Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston.

Figure 10. Francis Picabia, Woman with Dog, 1925–27. Oil and gouache on cardboard, 72 ×
92 cm. Private collection. Photo: © Estate of Francis Picabia/SODRAC (2010).

Figure 11. Albrecht Dürer, St. Eustace, c. 1501. Engraving, 35.5 × 25.9 cm. Boston: Museum
of Fine Arts (Anonymous gift, 59.803). Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Erik Satie’s writing ‘Cahiers d’un mammifère’, at bottom right on the 391 page, can be best
understood in relation to his ballet Mercure. While it is revelatory in terms of Picabia’s and
Man Ray’s work on this page, Mercure has been largely overlooked in the art-historical
literature on French dada, unlike Picabia’s and Satie’s ballet Relâche that was premiered later
in the year. Satie premiered Mercure26 in the same month of June 1924 in which this 391
issue was published, making this page something of a promotional vehicle for Satie. Satie’s
three-part ‘Notebook of a Mammal’ is an absurdist defence of himself against Jean Cocteau,
composer Georges Auric, and music critic Louis Laloy, with all of whom he had fallen out.27
Satie wrote the musical score for Cocteau’s ballet of 1917, Parade, (which Picasso also
collaborated on, as he did with Mercure). Satie, Cocteau, Auric and several others formed a
group called the Nouveaux Jeunes shortly after the ballet of 1917, but Satie later quit the
group. Cocteau was viewed as an opportunist by most of the Paris dadaists, although he and
Picabia sometimes got along well. According to Michel Sanouillet, Cocteau tried to have his
writing ‘Le coq et l’arlequin’ published in the dadaists’ magazine Littérature, but although it
praised Satie, he blocked its publication.28 John Richardson writes of Satie’s then-permanent
dispute with Cocteau’s circle: ‘He would avenge himself on them when he and Picasso
collaborated on their ballet Mercure.’29 In one section of his writing in ‘Cahiers d’un
mammifère’, Satie ridicules Cocteau’s concerns with scandal by using 3 variations of the
word: ‘In fact, the scandals are too scandalous and are scandalizing everyone.’30 Satie notes
that Cocteau advised his friends to be small, colourless, and invisible. In a similar way (if
understood to be a presentation of suppressed text, as it commonly is) Man Ray’s poem to the
left would seem to reduce the sign of writing to an act of inscription or translation of a stifled
speech.
Mercure was not a typical ballet because, as Robert Orledge notes, it involved movement as
well as ‘tableau vivant miming of dancers posing as constellations, letters, etc.’.31 The ballet
was commissioned by Comte Étienne de Beaumont, who wrote the basic scenario and sent
instructions to the set and costume designer, Pablo Picasso, saying that he wished for a
presentation of tableaux vivants using mythology as a universal alphabet, and that Picasso
could view the material ‘like the collection of letters that the child has at his disposal to
construct words’.32 I will return to the idea of a universal alphabet when further discussing
Man Ray’s poem. Satie’s ballet began with a setting entitled ‘Night’, which was followed by a
‘Dance of Tenderness’ between Venus and Apollyon.33 The ballet’s next act was ‘Signs of
the Zodiac’, and in astrological terms Apollyon is a ruler over the lower sphere, in the shadow
of Venus who rules above. Among the references that Picabia makes to the ballet in his
drawing, the Botticellian woman lying against the back of Satie’s figure could allude to Venus
and her astrological dance with Apollyon in the ballet of 1924.34 However, another
possibility emerges when one recalls Picabia’s use of metamorphosis and simultaneity as
organizing principles. One of Picasso’s set designs for the ballet depicts a woman seemingly
being abducted by a man in a horse-drawn chariot.35 The ballet’s final act involves the
‘Abduction of Proserpine’, a theme that directly relates to Picabia’s Satie drawing as well as
to the mythological images of abduction and pursuit that I have suggested as being
fundamental visual source material for the three Picabia drawings.
Mercure’s occult character of Apollyon originates in the Bible’s apocalyptic book of
Revelation. Apollyon is the fifth of the seven angels who appear after the Book of the Seven
Seals is opened in chapter eight. The seven angels possessed seven trumpets, and each of
them introduced themselves by blowing their trumpet, to be followed by some disastrous
event.36 The fifth angel is introduced in this manner: ‘And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw
a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.’37
Apollyon is written about as a figure of creative destruction, which is not unlike the role of
dada ascribed to by its protagonists. From the bottomless pit, in the biblical account, came
hordes of locust-like creatures that did not eat vegetation. These locusts strangely are said to
resemble battle-ready horses, but with tails like scorpions with stingers that would strike and
torment unbelievers with five months of unremitting pain.38 The location of the tail’s eye in
the Picabia drawing (with its already existing references) may involve a further association
with the stinger of these creatures. The king over the locusts was Apollyon, ‘the angel of the
bottomless pit’.39 Consistent with the shifts of metamorphosis, the wind instrument that
Picabia borrowed from Raphael could allude, in this reading, to Apollyon, who introduces
himself in Revelation with a trumpet blast. The angels’ trumpet blasts heralding destruction in
Revelation are here connected to a more amiable musical event. While Apollyon’s trumpet
music is of bombast and terror, Satie’s music is, of course, one of delightful delicacy. Hence
the trumpet blowing soap bubbles.40 Apollyon’s being ‘the angel of the bottomless pit’
suggests an association between the divine and the unclean. Therefore, Picabia’s introduction
of a soap bubble may also serve as a humorous mediator between the two.
As a further complication, Picabia’s male composite figure is joined together from two parts.
Similarly, the word ‘SAVON’ or ‘soap’, that emerges in a large bubble from the instrument,
neatly conjoins with a ‘V’ the two first letters of ‘Satie’ and the two last letters of ‘Apollyon’,
while also declaring its own substance. Just as ‘V’ connects the two sets of letters, so too does
the zigzagging line at the figure’s waist act as the point of transition between the top half of
Satie and lower half of Apollyon in the composite character.41
Picabia’s drawing includes naturalistic and abstracted components, as well as coded images
and text. When considering the different approaches to representation on the magazine page,
at least two parallel sets are created between the contributions of Satie and Man Ray, and
Picabia’s male composite creature, whose two halves appear to reference the two contributors
below. Satie (the composer of abstract sounds) writes in a representational and descriptive
manner, while Man Ray (the photographer of visible appearance and object traces) seems to
provide abstract indicators of absent text. In the drawing, Satie is rendered figuratively, but
only to the waist. What proceeds from Satie’s waist is a blackened, meandering line (though
still a tail) that visually pairs with Man Ray’s thick-lined poem and ends in an observing eye.
In his drawing of the composite figure (and on another level of reference than that of the
Mercure and Apollyon discussion) Picabia appears to shift from the figurative rendering of
the musician, composer, and writer Satie to then translate Man Ray’s apparently non-
representational lines of abstract poetry into an abstracted portrait of the photographer and his
practice.42 In a similar manner, Picabia’s celebrated mechanical portraits, published in the
earlier New York magazine 291, demonstrated the degree to which individuals’ identities
could be closely linked to seemingly non-mimetic images.
Man Ray’s poem at bottom left becomes more meaningful than simply a presentation of
negation (with the apparent effacing of individual words) when the above associations are
developed. It becomes far more productive of meanings when one realizes that this seemingly
resistant, non-signifying work may, in fact, be deciphered by means of the Morse code (plate
12).43 All three works employ codes of different sorts, and recognition of the appearance of
the Morse code allows for a closer relation to develop between Man Ray’s poem and Satie’s
text, as well as to the other forms of encoding that Picabia seems to employ on the 391 page.
Morse code involves the translation of letters, numbers, and terms into dots and dashes, and it
was the basis for the modern communication system of the telegraph.44 Morse code appears
to be abstract and non-referential to the uninitiated, but it is an interpretable communicative
system. The Morse code alphabet and number chart illustrated in this paper was published in
an American popular guide to radio receiving in 1922, two years prior to the production of
Man Ray’s poem.45 It is useful to recall that Marcel Duchamp’s earlier telegram work
‘PODE BAL’ of June 1921 was transmitted using Morse code, although it is the translated
text with which we are familiar. The telegram was a punning insult sent to the Paris dadaists
who had requested an exhibition contribution. Both Man Ray and Picabia sometimes
employed devices similar to those used earlier by their friend Duchamp, and as already
mentioned, Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia lived in the same building in Paris when the 391
page was produced, with Satie moving in several months later. But from 1912 to 1915, Man
Ray lived in the small community of Ridgefield, New Jersey, where he came of age as an
artist and published one issue of a satirical magazine, The Ridgefield Gazook. It was, and
remains, a point of local pride in Ridgefield that Samuel Morse (inventor of the Morse code)
had possessed large property holdings in the area.46 Man Ray’s use of the Morse code could
therefore have had a certain personal resonance for himself.
Figure 12. ‘International Morse Code’, from Rhey T. Snodgrass and Victor F. Camp, Radio
Receiving for Beginners, New York: MacMillan Company, 1922, page 96. Photo: Jarrett
Duncan.

Published on the eve of the production of his new ballet Mercure, Satie’s writing in ‘Cahiers
d’un mammifère’ discusses his dispute with Jean Cocteau, and takes care to disparage
Georges Auric, and Louis Laloy as well. Given that Satie also attacked Auric, it is noteworthy
that in May 1924 (just one month prior to the publication of this issue of 391) the often-
divisive Picabia responded to a questionnaire from Paris-Journal regarding his favourite
musicians: ‘I love Auric’s wireless telegraphy.’47 In 1918 (when he and Satie were still on
good terms) Cocteau wrote a pamphlet entitled ‘Le coq et l’arlequin’, which was designed to
explain the ballet Parade on which Cocteau and Satie had collaborated. Cocteau wrote that
Satie had composed background music for noises that Cocteau had wanted to include in order
to convey an urgent sense of modernity. These included the sounds of a steam engine, sirens,
and the clicking of a Morse code apparatus.48 In addition to its many other references, Man
Ray’s poem appears to associate the Morse code with Satie’s conflicted relationship to
Cocteau’s circle, within the larger already codified context of this page of Picabia’s 391. The
poem can therefore be understood as an exercise in codified communication rather than non-
communication, as it is generally held to be.
Most, though not all, lines of Man Ray’s poem can be translated using individual Morse code
letters for comparison. The following is a Morse translation of the poem made by considering
each ‘poetry’ line individually and distinguishing between the short and long markings of the
sequences, with the shorter marks being the equivalent of a dot and the longer ones a dash.
Identical Morse signs were then linked to the corresponding alphabetical letter or number.
The lines marked [ ] do not translate accurately:
U[][]M[][]KYVKJX3[]VPXX
When considered in terms of the lyric poetry tradition, this may not seem like much of a
poem, and some might argue that it is not a translation of a poem at all on account of there
being no obvious words other than the number 3. However, as transcribed above, Man Ray’s
poem is quite reasonably situated within the context of dadaist experimental poetry, as the
following short poem of 1918 by Berlin dadaist Raoul Hausmann demonstrates: ‘fmsbwtöz
u / pggiv-..?mü’.49 Translated through Morse code, Man Ray’s poem fits within a pre-
existing avant-garde poetic tradition – one largely pioneered by the Italian futurists as well as
by the Russian zaum poets and the later dadaists. The futurist leader F. T. Marinetti wrote
about his new poetic form in 1913: ‘With words-in-freedom we will have: …
TELEGRAPHIC IMAGES’.50 Marinetti proposed that futurist poetry involve ‘a swift, brutal,
and immediate lyricism, a lyricism that must seem anti-poetic to all our predecessors, a
telegraphic lyricism …’.51 The suggestion of a meeting between poetry and the Morse code
(the basis of the telegraph system) had already been placed into circulation by the futurists,
whose innovations were at the root of so many later developments in dada. There is no need
to assume that a dadaist poem (or a futurist or Russian zaum poem for that matter) requires
viable individual words. What was often emphasized in this type of poetry was the abstract
utterance or the absolutely fundamental components of language and writing such as letters,
punctuation marks, and other signs of distinctions. The Italian, Russian, and German poets
took their initial lead from cubist as well as futurist painting and collage, and their poetry
emerged at the same time as did European abstract and non-representational painting, which
likewise moved away from immediately comprehensible references. Just as paintings do not
require representational images to properly function, so it was reasoned that poems do not
necessarily require legible words. In 1921, Man Ray and other Paris dadaists participated in
an evening event of 21 October at the Café Caméléon showcasing Russian zaum poets such as
Ilya Zdanevich. Two years later Zdanevich recited zaum poetry at Tristan Tzara’s event, Le
coeur à gaz,52 where Man Ray first screened his film Le retour à la raison, which includes a
several-second shot of a sheet of paper bearing marks similar to those found in his later
poem.53 We know, therefore, that Man Ray was familiar with such extreme poetic material,
and certainly Picabia would have known it well given his international connections and
interests. Within Paris dada, there were additional interests in codes, formulae, and alternative
means of communication. Included in Picabia’s book of 1918, Poèmes et dessins de la fille
née sans mere, is the poem ‘Wireless Telegraphy’. Picabia’s close friend Georges Ribemont-
Dessaignes planned but failed to publish a magazine in 1920 called DdO4H2 , its title being
the chemical formula for sulphuric acid.54 Slightly later, the Paris dadaists René Crevel,
Robert Desnos, André Breton and others began investigating spiritualism and hypnotic
trances55 requiring translation and interpretation to render legible the resulting mysterious
communications. Desnos went so far as to claim to be receiving telepathic messages from
Rrose Sélavy/Marcel Duchamp, then living in New York.56 Man Ray’s employment of the
Morse code (with its relation to the telegraph system) is therefore well situated within the
practices of dada and its various avant-garde antecedents.
In Man Ray’s poem, the letters stand independently (rather than being strung together as
words) and should be interpreted in terms of their individual and syntactical significance and
possible relation to the 391 page as a collective effort. The poem’s most unusual
characteristics are Man Ray’s esoteric employment of the Morse code and, importantly, the
further levels of encoding and reference found within the poem as it is structured. A
translation of the poem through Morse is an early rather than final element of the
interpretative process because of the further codification of the letters, untranslatable lines,
and numerical relationships, all with reference to the larger page collaboration as well as to
391. The title line of Man Ray’s poem translates as the letter ‘U’, or perhaps for an English-
speaker like Man Ray, as ‘You’. Duchamp’s earlier telegram work ‘PODE BAL’ is
commonly translated as the insult: ‘Balls to you’. The rest of the translatable letters are
consonants and there is 1 number. Of the 18 lines in total, there are 12 letters and 1 number
that are translatable, making 13 identifiable lines. While perhaps a coincidence, this number
may have been formulated so as to point to the identity of the magazine because when adding
up the numbers in the magazine title one finds: 3 + 9 + 1 = 13.57 Curiously, there are also 13
musical numbers in Satie’s ballet Mercure, resulting in a possible codified connection
between Picabia’s 391, Satie’s ballet, and Man Ray’s poem. There are 17 lines in the poem
and this is issue number 17 of 391, page 3. There are 3 components to the remaining title
line.58 I have mentioned that the encoding of this page may partly refer to the cryptography
obsession of Picabia’s and Man Ray’s American friend Walter Arensberg, which makes it
reasonable to look for some coded recollection of the Arensberg circle. The illustration
provided earlier of a page from Arensberg’s book (with its dots and vertical column of letters)
is itself suggestive of the poem and the code. The title of Picabia’s 391 involves a brief chain
of historical references linked to the earlier New York magazine, gallery, and street address of
‘291’. The magazine 291 ceased publication in 1916. It is fascinating to note that adding
together the numerals that make up that date results in: 1 + 9 + 1 + 6 = 17, and ‘17’ is both the
present magazine issue number and the number of lines in the body text of the poem.
Picabia’s 391 itself began publication in 1917. Adding together the numerals that identify that
founding date results in: 1 + 9 + 1 + 7 = 18. When including the title line of Man Ray’s poem
into the line count, the total sum is 18, perhaps suggesting that both the publication dates of
the final issue of 291 and the first of 391 have been encoded into the poem and larger page.
The number ‘3’ appears on the sixth line from the bottom. The repetition of ‘3’ is found in all
3 contributions as well as in Satie’s ballet and the magazine’s name itself: 391, which would
be one point of departure for the use of ‘3’ as an organizational template and common
reference. But one must also consider Satie’s intense interest in numerology and the particular
attention that he gives in his music to the number ‘3’. Satie’s fixation on this number when
composing his music and experimental writings (and hence its relevance for this 391 page)
may seem problematic for some art historians due to a contemporary aversion to finding
‘hidden meanings’ in artworks, but it is a commonly known fact among musicologists. Robert
Orledge provides a detailed explanation:
At the root of Satie’s calculations lay the ‘golden number’ three, whose Trinitarian symbolism
pervaded Masonic ritual, including that of the spurious Rosicrucian movement to which Satie
adhered … In Satie too we find three Sarabandes, three Gymnopédies, and the humorous
piano pieces of 1913 arranged in nine groups of three (including the Trois Nouvelles
Enfantines). When, in the Rose-Croix period (1891–5), these groupings disappear (apart from
the Trois Sonneries), we find the Trinitarian aspect transferred to the harmonies … Satie’s
fascination with the tritone is bound in with all this numerology, a classic example being
Vexations, where all the chords are notated as 6-3s, and the upper parts are almost all tritones.
It is surely no coincidence too that each half of Vexations contains eighteen chords (six times
three), with the upper parts in the second half being a mirror image of those in the first.59
Similarly, Roger Shattuck writes: ‘There is a trivial feature of Satie’s music that takes on
significance in this context. His first major sets of pieces all contain three parts: three
Sarabandes, three Gymnopédies, three Gnossiennes. Of the fifty-odd works that followed,
almost half are similarly threefold. This trinitarian obsession was a quirk which became part
of his musical pose.’60 As the occurrences of ‘3’ rapidly accumulate on the 391 page, it
becomes increasingly unlikely that they can be accounted for purely by chance appearance.
Satie had earlier contributed a short writing entitled ‘Tale’ to the New York magazine The
Blind Man in May 1917. Arensberg and Duchamp were involved in producing the publication
as was Henri-Pierre Roché, who knew Satie. Satie’s writing was placed on page 3, apparently
at his request through Roché.61 The 391 collaborative project is also located on page 3,
making it reasonable to suggest that the repeating 3s on the page may have been included at
Satie’s urging. The repetition of 3 on the 391 page includes the 3 authors, 3 sections, 3
components to the titles, 3 bodies in Picabia’s drawing. In Satie’s text there are 3 sections
with 3 indented paragraphs for each. There are 3 dots in triangular form (emulating the
tripartite organization of the 3 contributions to page 3) that separate the 3 sections. Satie
includes 3 variations of 3 words or qualities in his text. In his ballet, there are 3 acts and 3
types of characters, among whom of which are the Three Graces!62 There are 2 recurring
‘Vs’ that link 3 verses of Man Ray’s poem. (‘V’ also serves as the connector of the first 2
letters of ‘Satie’ and the last 2 of ‘Apollyon’ in ‘SAVON’.) The number ‘3’ is written in
Morse code in the third verse of Man Ray’s poem. Three ‘Xs’ are also found in the poem. ‘X’
can be associated with both the substitute signatures of the illiterate and the signs of
cancellations. Ridicule directed outward and among friends was commonplace in dada, and it
could be assumed that most readers would indeed be illiterate when attempting to grasp the
significance of Man Ray’s apparently uncommunicative presentation. Furthermore, the poem
is typically understood to be a cancellation of text through its abstracted occupying of
inscribed space, so both interpretative possibilities of the 3 ‘Xs’ are productive.
The poem is highly complex, which raises the question as to whether it may have been a
group effort rather than being solely the work of Man Ray. The 3 ‘Xs’, those substitute
signatures of the illiterate, could indicate that possibility. Recall that Walter Arensberg had
devoted his cryptographic attentions to finding ‘hidden signatures’ of Francis Bacon in the
texts of William Shakespeare, which suggests that the 3 ‘Xs’ could be humorous references to
Arensberg’s obsessive project. One might further consider that Picabia had earlier forged his
own version of Duchamp’s work, LHOOQ, and presented it as Duchamp’s own in the 391
issue of March 1920, number 12. Given that precedent, it is even possible that the poem was
largely created by Picabia and merely modelled on Man Ray’s earlier blank-line poems, such
as the one that appears in the film Le retour à la raison of 1923. That work does not seem to
be decipherable at all in the manner that this poem is. On the other hand, the use of numbers
that correspond with those found in Satie’s text, ballet, and musical compositions more
generally, indicates a potential role for Satie in suggesting the numerical combinations and
letters found in Man Ray’s poem. Satie’s numerological interests are well known, and he
would also have no doubt been familiar with the technique of ‘soggetto cavato’ by which
composers of the early Renaissance (and some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
composers like his younger colleague Maurice Ravel) created coded verbal passages by
associating sequences of notes with their letter equivalents.63 I will, however, maintain
linking the poem’s authorship to Man Ray largely for purposes of identification as well as to
acknowledge the widespread acceptance that he was solely responsible for the work in its
presentation form, whether or not that was actually the case.
The Morse code can be transcribed in dots and dashes. It can be transmitted via the clicking of
a telegraph key, but it can be voiced as well, which is where a fruitful association with the
Lautgedichte comes in.64 People learning Morse code are instructed to vocalize it. Dashes are
voiced as ‘dah’. Dots are pronounced as ‘di’, and as ‘dit’ when ending a line. The letters A B
C D are pronounced as follows:
A = di-dah
B = dah-di-di-dit
C = dah-di-dah-dit
D = dah-di-dit
Line ‘3’ of Man Ray’s poem consists of two long dashes, which corresponds to the letter ‘M’.
Remarkably enough, the two dashes of M are voiced as: ‘dah-dah’. Picabia, Man Ray, and
Satie (to a degree) were, of course, associated with Paris dada, and one of the most
recognizable characteristics of dada is the constant invocation of the word ‘dada’. So a poem
that has commonly been interpreted as refusing to signify at all in fact communicates a great
many things, among them, ‘dada’ (with all of that word’s implications) while collapsing into
abstracted utterances for four lines that are, importantly, both immediately before and after
that word, ‘dada’. Those four untranslatable lines are significant just for their lack of
correspondence to a fixable identification, while the possibility of voicing them as free-
floating utterances remains. The very untranslatability that surrounds the ‘M’ may suggest the
emergence of Man Ray’s ‘M’ as ‘dada’ as the first element of the poem’s text (apart from the
title) that declares itself out of a codified field of indeterminacy, as a kind of primal utterance
emerging out of chaos. In a similar way, the abstract sound poetry of Berlin dadaist Raoul
Hausmann was voiced as an originary cosmic text.65 Hausmann’s idea of the primal text is
visually exemplified in his photomontage of 1923–24, ABCD, where from out of his open
mouth issue the four first letters of the alphabet – and the star-filled universe (plate 13).
Figure 13. Raoul Hausmann, ABCD, 1923. Photomontage, collage, and black ink on paper,
40.4 × 28.2 cm. Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. Photo:
Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.
The letter ‘M’ pronounced as ‘dah-dah’ is of additional interest when considering that Satie’s
ballet was entitled Mercure,66 and that his writing, ‘Cahiers d’un mammifère’, is an attack on
Jean Cocteau. Robert Orledge notes that Cocteau sometimes went to masked balls dressed as
Mercury, and John Richardson unequivocally states that Cocteau was a central object of
ridicule in the basic conception of the ballet.67 In Act ‘3’ of the ballet, the god Mercury
advertises a ball with the ‘Polka of the Letters’, which partly involves presentations of
invented letters belonging to a universal alphabet. (Certainly, one could say that the Morse
code functions as a universal alphabet.) Following the polka and a further dance is the scene
‘Chaos’, during which Mercury abducts Proserpine68 (who is perhaps referred to by the ‘P’ of
the poem). Chaos is another way of understanding the indeterminacy that frames the
emergence of ‘M’ or ‘dah-dah’ in Man Ray’s poem. This leaves one unexplained
untranslatable line in the poem’s third section. That can be accounted for as a numerical
requirement due to the need to have 13 translatable lines to pair with the 13 musical pieces of
Mercure as well as the addition of the magazine’s title number sequence: 3 + 9 +1 = 13. Also,
17 lines in the body of the poem are required for it to refer to being issue number 17 of 391,
etc. The poem, then, along with the rest of the page, operates on many evolving levels
simultaneously. It may be objected that providing specific identifications and associations for
components of these works conflicts with the idea of metamorphosis that I propose as being
fundamental to the page, for flux and fixity contradict each other. However, one can only
know that change occurs by observing and recognizing the alterations of states, which are
themselves identifiable. The whole 391 page seems to require the deciphering of shifting,
densely coded references and allusions that no doubt would have thoroughly engaged the
attention of the cryptographer Walter Arensberg himself.
When Man Ray’s poem, Picabia’s drawing, and Satie’s text are thought of in terms of coded
references, among other things, one begins to understand the full 391 page as operating as a
complete exercise in interrelated forms of communication. The Gesamtkunstwerk ideal of
saturated communication working through all sensual possibilities becomes realized on this
page.69 The mutative quality of possible interpretations suggests that the page is meant to be
understood through multiple, even divergent and simultaneous readings. The resulting
interpretative flux recalls Picabia’s own multi-layered approach to painting, which may serve
as a model for understanding the operations of this 391 page. Picabia’s poetry provides further
structural parallels. In a similar way, Marinetti’s earlier idea of the ‘wireless imagination’
pointed to a new compositional approach when he stated that the new poet ‘will cast immense
nets of analogy across the world. In this way he will reveal the analogical foundation of life,
telegraphically.’70 The interpretation of this 391 page that I have provided points to the
importance of considering the context in which works appear. By segregating Man Ray’s
poem from its original page surroundings, the poem would seem to be essentially a statement
of negation. One thereby misses a wealth of additional possibilities that come from reading
the 391 page as an integrated system of proliferating codes. The same is true of Satie’s text
and ballet that informs both Man Ray’s poem and Picabia’s complex, almost scholarly
drawing that itself emerged out of a remarkable process of citation and transformation. The
collaborative orchestration carried out by these three diverse characters set into play the
operations of metamorphosis and translation that drive the functionality of the 391 page and
allow for its intelligibility as a project.
Notes
1
391, 17, June 1924, 3. This issue was published in Paris. Francis Picabia’s 391 (published
between 1917 and 1924) served partly to bridge his own diverse relationships with European
dada (specifically the French variant) and the Arensberg circle in New York. The magazine’s
title derives from 291, an earlier New York publication of Marius de Zayas in which Picabia
published his well-known mechanical portraits of individuals involved in the local cultural
scene. The magazine 291 was in turn related to the ‘291’ art gallery run by Alfred Stieglitz at
291 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The magazine 291 concluded its short run in 1916 and the
‘291’ gallery closed in 1917, the same year that Picabia founded his magazine 391 in
Barcelona. The choice of 391 as a title, therefore, involves a sequence of evolving references.
2
Of the three contributions, it is the seemingly abstract poem by Man Ray that is most
celebrated for its radicalism and implications for advanced art.
3
The collaborative aspect and technical devices found on this page of 391 can be compared
with the third issue of the Berlin-produced Der Dada, published in 1918. The three directors
of that magazine are given as: groszfield, hearthaus, and georgemann, a violent collage on the
names and identities of George Grosz, John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann. Picabia makes
an appearance in this issue, with his ‘Manifeste Cannibale Dada’ occupying almost an entire
page. Instead of page numbers appearing at the bottom of each page of this third issue, other
measurements are substituted in their place, such as: 254 km, 437 l, 642 kg, A 50, 6 ZB, 4/1,
75%, 1920, 100M., 1 mm, W E, h m, TOM 2, and OH 61. By placing various types of
measurements in place of page numbers, the Berlin dadaists interrupted the assumed
transparency of written language and undermined the publishing conventions whereby
pagination serves as a unifying organizational system. Because there is no continuity between
the different measurements as page numbers, each page comes to possess its own unique
assigned identity. At the same time, the markings do not identify their context, but instead
direct the readers’ attention to vastly different areas of thought such as weight, distance, and
time. It is possible that Picabia, Man Ray, and Satie may have recalled this issue of Der Dada
when formulating the devices found on the 391 page under consideration in this essay.
4
Picabia’s poetry exemplifies this quality of transformation, as seen in the following lines from
1918: ‘watch the stepladder hesitations / of falcon symbols / and the model hat. / Weeping
hypothesis of the fish cricket / of pleasure in chopped-up petals, / the husband’s plants
altered / into grass close the eyes of the specialized / apparatus.’ Francis Picabia, ‘Canto I:
Salt Water’, from The Mortician’s Athlete, in I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry Prose, and
Provocation, trans. Marc Lowenthal, Cambridge, MA, 2007, 99.
5
George Baker does present the complete page in a recent book, but does not mention the Man
Ray and Satie contributions, and just briefly points to the character of Satie in Picabia’s
drawing. See George Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in
Paris, Cambridge, MA, 2007, 394. Man Ray’s poem was presented as a single work removed
from its original page presentation in Benjamin Buchloh’s ‘Open letters, industrial poems’,
October, 42, Autumn 1987, 76. Dawn Ades also reproduced the poem alone in Dada and
Surrealism Reviewed, although many other pages of the various magazines are presented
whole. See Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, London, 1978, 149. Hans Richter
earlier reproduced Man Ray’s poem by itself, though he paired it with a pictorial sign poem
by Christian Morgenstern. Richter writes of Man Ray’s poem as being a ‘dumb poem’, but it
is captioned as a ‘phonetic poem’. Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, 1964. London,
1978, 120–1. I have not encountered commentary that discusses the 391 page as an
interrelated whole. The interpretation that follows of the page and individual works (along
with the positing of sources) is my own, apart from acknowledged references.
6
Jean-Gérard Lapacherie, ‘Typographic characters: Tension between text and drawing’, trans.
Anna Lehmann, Yale French Studies, 84, 1994, 72.
7
Lapacherie, ‘Typographic characters’, 72.
8
In an essay on the ‘industrial poems’ of Belgian poet and artist Marcel Broodthaers, Benjamin
Buchloh included an illustration of this poem by Man Ray. Its appearance follows a
discussion of Broodthaers’ work of the 1960s and early 1970s in which it is said that he partly
engages in a ‘modernist strategy of hermetic resistance by which the visual or linguistic sign
constitutes itself to refuse the visual or sensual data which the viewer demands’. See Buchloh,
‘Open letters, industrial poems’, 73. The poem’s illustration serves as a visual component of
the essay’s argument. Although Buchloh illustrates but does not discuss Man Ray’s poem
directly, it appears in a section of the essay dealing with ‘semantic deletion and visual
erasure’, leading one to assume that Man Ray’s poem is understood to be engaged with
similar issues. That would certainly be a useful reading to apply to Man Ray’s poem, although
it works best when the poem is presented (as it generally is) as a unique and autonomous
work, in isolation from its original published context. Applying the deletion and erasure
notion to the poem results in a partial reading, however, that does not sufficiently account for
the calculation that went into its design and presentation. See Buchloh, ‘Open letters,
industrial poems’, 75. Buchloh also includes an illustration of four cartoons from Man Ray’s
March 1915 publication The Ridgefield Gazook that make references to censorship through
the blanking out of spaces. In a later article, Craig Douglas Dworkin mentions what he calls
Marcel Broodthaers’ restaging of Man Ray’s ‘series of “lautgedicte”’ in an article on Vito
Acconci. See Dworkin’s ‘Fugitive signs’, October, 95, Winter 2001, 92.
9
Although censorship is generally understood to be an undesirable action, it (like any other
action) can result in aesthetic consequences. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine the
unfolding of twentieth-century art were there not such a negative model for emulation.
10
Groups of three found in Western artworks often refer to the Holy Trinity (the three in one).
Perhaps, by appropriating for this page Satie’s numerological obsession, Picabia is making a
humorous suggestion of a three in one of 391? The ‘3’ is found all over the page, appearing in
different forms while retaining the same identity as the number ‘3’. Two articles that examine
the sacrilegious aspects of Picabia’s earlier drawing in 391, La Sainte Vierge of March 1920,
are Elizabeth Legge’s ‘Thirteen ways of looking at a virgin: Francis Picabia’s La Sainte
Vierge’, Word & Image, 12: 2, April–June 1996, 218–42, and David Hopkins’‘Questioning
dada’s potency: Picabia’s ‘La Sainte Vierge’ and the dialogue with Duchamp’, Art History,
15: 3, September 1992, 317–33. A more recent essay dealing with Picabia and religion is
William Camfield’s ‘“Dieu est partout, sauf dans les églises”: du religieux et du blaspheme
dans l’oeuvre de Picabia’, Francis Picabia: Singulier ideal, trans. Jeanne Bouniort, Paris,
2002, 74–9. Picabia’s mockery of religion is well demonstrated in his book of 1920, Jesus-
Christ Rastaquouère, in which he writes: ‘One should take communion with chewing-gum,
that way God will strengthen your jaws.’ Francis Picabia, I Am a Beautiful Monster, 228. Erik
Satie had earlier created an imaginary version of his own church for which he produced two
satirical publications. This was the Église Métropolitaine d’Art de Jésus Conducteur. See
Nigel Wilkins, ‘The writings of Erik Satie: Miscellaneous fragments’, Music & Letters, 56:
3–4, July–October 1975, 292.
11
Picabia, I Am a Beautiful Monster, 98.
12
Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada, 1915–23, New York, 1994, 31.
13
Walter Conrad Arensberg, The Cryptography of Shakespeare, Los Angeles, CA, 1922, 3.
14
Picabia sometimes made humorous references to himself in his writings, as with his ‘Francis
merci!’ in Littérature 2nd series, 8, January 1923, 16–17.
15
This was the Hôtel Istria on Rue Campagne Première. See Billy Klüver and Julie Martin,
‘Man Ray, Paris’, in Gaye Brown and Alan Axelrod, eds, Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man
Ray, Washington, DC and New York, 1988, 125.
16
Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer, Cambridge, 1990, xxxix.
17
Dawn Ades writes of Picabia’s drawing as representing ‘Satie as a merman blowing bubbles’
in Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, 153. Valentine Hugo writes in her 1958 ‘Notes for a
Portrait of Satie’: ‘He … was much like the satyr Marsyas: a short greying goatee; rather thick
lips, twisted into a teasing smile which could at times be cruel; a sensual, greedy nose.’
Quoted. in Orledge, Satie the Composer, xli.
18
Maria Lluïsa Borràs notes the relation to this earlier untitled drawing, writing that the later
one ‘may be a profile of Satie, taken from an earlier watercolour which is here transformed
into a caricature’. See Maria Lluïsa Borràs, Picabia, trans. Kenneth Lyons, New York, 1985,
241.
19
William Camfield has pointed out some of Picabia’s many Renaissance borrowings, as with
his Venus and Adonis of 1924 to 1927 that derives from Titian’s painting of around 1553. See
William Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, Princeton, NJ, 1979, 224.
20
Earlier, Picabia had appropriated mechanical images from published sources, and he later
borrowed heavily from photographic images in popular magazines.
21
My proposal is new regarding Picabia’s use of Raphael’s Galatea, but it is indebted to
Camfield’s recognition of Picabia’s Renaissance appropriations.
22
Picabia had earlier referenced Ovid when entitling both a drawing of 1915 and a book of
poetry from 1918, The Daughter Born without a Mother, or La fille née sans mere. It comes
from verse 553 of the second Metamorphosis by way of Montesquieu and the Petit Larousse
dictionary. Marc Lowenthal in Francis Picabia’s I Am a Beautiful Monster, 58–9.
23
It has been suggested recently that Thermomètre Rimbaud functions as a parody of Max
Ernst’s work, specifically his painting Pietà or Revolution by Night of 1923, in which it is
said that the repressive father is pictured carrying a clothed Ernst. See Baker, The Artwork
Caught by the Tail, 389–95. However, Emily Braun has subsequently demonstrated that the
figure actually represents Giorgio di Chirico. Braun suggests that the figure carrying di
Chirico portrays Picasso, while the bearded figure with closed eyes and bandaged head
depicts the wounded Apollinaire. See Emily Braun, Théâtre d’ombres: Picasso et Chirico’,
Giorgio di Chirico, la fabrique des rêves, Paris, 2009, 78–9.
24
Beverly Calté, ‘La vie de Picabia’, Francis Picabia, Tokyo, 1999, 44. Calté does not discuss
the 391 Satie drawing, or the two others that I discuss, or make links between them and the
Dürer engravings.
25
A further connection can be made between this Dürer engraving and Thermomètre Rimbaud.
Just as the upper half of Satie seems clearly modelled on the corresponding parts of St
Eustace, so too are the trunk and legs of Picabia’s carried woman in Thermomètre Rimbaud
very like those of St Eustace. From the woman’s backside hangs the scandalous thermometer,
while in a similar orientation is St Eustace’s sword that hangs on his left side, with a knife on
his right.
26
Mercure premiered on 15 June 1924 at La Cigale Theatre in Montmartre, Paris. Pablo Picasso
designed the costumes and sets, while Léonide Massine choreographed. Robert Orledge, ‘Erik
Satie’s Ballet “Mercure” (1924): From Mount Etna to Montmartre’, Journal of the Royal
Musical Association, 123: 2, 1998, 229.
27
William Camfield writes that André Breton led an attempt to disrupt the second performance
of Mercure on 15 June. Georges Auric (criticized in Satie’s article) was in Breton’s circle at
the time. The performance was interrupted with shouting in favour of the show’s designer
Picasso and against Satie. Breton and Satie got along poorly. See Camfield, Francis Picabia,
205–6. This would suggest that Breton, Auric and the others may have been reacting in part
against Satie’s provocative criticism in this June issue of 391. The subsequent July magazine
issue comments on the disruption. John Richardson mentions that Breton may have decided to
attack Satie as a proxy for his main enemy of the moment Tristan Tzara. Breton was then in
the process of correcting the galleys of the first surrealist manifesto. John Richardson, with
Marilyn McCully, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years 1917–1932, New York, 2007,
260. Throughout his book, Michel Sanouillet discusses the tenseness and friction created
between Breton, Tzara, and Picabia by Breton’s frequent undermining of the anarchic
radicalism of dada during his passage toward surrealism. See Michel Sanouillet, Dada in
Paris, revised and expanded by Anne Sanouillet, trans. Sharmila Ganguly, Cambridge, MA,
2009.
28
Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 75.
29
Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 252.
30
Satie writes: ‘Cocteau has a thousand arguments: –“More scandal” he says … / In fact, the
scandals are too scandalous and are scandalizing everyone. He likewise advises his friends
Laloy and Auric to avoid scandals – also to be small, colourless and invisible. / For in
reaching the age of 40, one becomes serious – very serious – massively serious – grave (and
also low)…’. My translation. Note the 3 uses of ‘serious’ that follow the 3 variations on
‘scandal’, as well as the 3 qualities advised for Cocteau’s friends.
31
Orledge, ‘Erik Satie’s Ballet “Mercure”’, 231.
32
From a letter to Picasso of 21 February 1924, translated in Orledge, ‘Erik Satie’s Ballet
“Mercure”’, 234.
33
An English critic for London’s The Observer, who reviewed the revival of the ballet in 1927,
reported that the male figure was Apollyon. See Alan M. Gillmor, ‘Erik Satie and the concept
of the avant-garde’, The Musical Quarterly, 69: 1, Winter 1983, 105. However, Robert
Orledge more recently suggests that it was Apollo. See Orledge, ‘Erik Satie’s Ballet
“Mercure”’, 238. In early Christian writing, Apollyon can figure as a destructive alter ego to
Apollo. I believe the Apollyon identification is more productive, for reasons that will become
clearer as my discussion continues.
34
Raphael’s Galatea is itself indebted to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
35
Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 256.
36
On page 3 of the 391 page, it is ‘3’ that is repeated. In Revelation, it was ‘7’ repeated in
reference to Apollyon and elsewhere, with 7 angels, seals, trumpets, churches, candlesticks,
stars, lamps of fire, Spirits of God, horns, eyes, etc.
37
Revelation 9: 1 (King James Version).
38
Rev. 9: 7–10.
39
Rev. 9: 11.
40
As another possible allusion, Satie had earlier referred to Georges Bizet’s suite of piano duets,
Jeux d’enfants, in his own set of compositions, Sports et divertissements, of 1914. One of
Bizet’s songs from the suite is entitled ‘Les Bulles de Savon’, or ‘Soap Bubbles’. See Mary E.
Davis, ‘Modernity à la mode: Popular culture and avant-gardism in Erik Satie’s “Sports et
divertissements”’, The Musical Quarterly, 83: 3, Autumn 1999, 455.
41
There is yet another possible association to be made. In René Clair’s and Picabia’s film
Entr’acte, created in late 1924 as an introduction and intermission feature for Satie’s and
Picabia’s ballet Relâche, there is one shot that dwells briefly on a billboard with an image of a
baby. The camera pans across this advertisement for the soap product ‘Savon cadum’ for four
to five seconds, for no apparent reason. However, Michel Sanouillet has noted the existence
of a ‘Savon dada’, a Belgian soap that predated the dada movement, but that gained added
cachet through the later association. This could suggest that the soap bubble in Picabia’s
drawing is, among other things, also a reference to dada. See Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 616,
n58.
42
In their articles on La Sainte Vierge, Elizabeth Legge and David Hopkins both discuss the
portrait character of that inkblot drawing in the earlier issue of 391.
43
I first presented the idea of a relation between Man Ray’s poem and the Morse code at my
public lecture at Concordia University in Montreal on 27 February 2006.
44
As an American photographer in Paris, Man Ray may have been aware of the famous meeting
between the artists Samuel Morse (American inventor of the Morse code and telegraph) and
Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (inventor of the Daguerreotype) to discuss their respective
inventions on 7 March 1839 at the very moment that Daguerre’s studio burnt to the ground.
During the period of 1821 to 1823 Morse himself had tried photographic experiments with the
camera obscura, but came up with only non-permanent negatives. Oxford Companion to the
Photograph, ed. Robin Lenman, Oxford, 2005, 423.
45
The illustration is from Rhey T. Snodgrass’ and Victor F. Camp’s Radio Receiving for
Beginners, New York, 1922, 96.
46
See The Borough of Ridgefield, New Jersey,
http://www.ridgefieldboro.com/about/index.html.
47
Francis Picabia, ‘With Francis Picabia’, I Am a Beautiful Monster, 306.
48
William Austin, ‘Satie before and after Cocteau’, The Musical Quarterly, 48: 2, April 1962,
216–33.
49
Kurt Schwitters’ experimental poetry consisting of vertically aligned sets of numbers or
letters of the alphabet are also related to Man Ray’s poem. See especially Schwitters’ poems
of 1922 entitled ‘Poem 25’, ‘ZA’, and ‘Register’. Kurt Schwitters, Poems Performance Pieces
Proses Plays Poetics, ed. and trans. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, Philadelphia, PA,
1993, 48–9.
50
F. T. Marinetti, ‘Destruction of syntax – imagination without strings – words-in-freedom’,
Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio, trans. R. W. Flint, London, 1972, 100.
51
Marinetti, ‘Destruction of syntax’, 104. My italics.
52
Klüver and Martin, ‘Man Ray, Paris’, 104, and Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 230. Michel
Sanouillet discusses Zdanevich’s peripheral presence in Paris dada, but he does not
acknowledge that the Russian zaum idea and sensibility predate even Zurich dada by several
years and hence cannot be derivative or of a ‘Dadaish nature’. See Sanouillet, Dada in Paris,
219–21. As with dada’s relation to futurism and the anarchist wing of German expressionism,
it was dada that was the beneficiary of earlier innovations.
53
In Man Ray’s 1923 film Le retour à la raison, the similar page of line markings is followed by
what appears to be an unfurling and rotating section of a roll of perforated paper fabricated for
player pianos. The horizontal perforations provide immediate references for the preceding
marked page. Though less central, they may also be associated with the far more complex 391
poem.
54
Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 155.
55
Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 259.
56
Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 261.
57
Although the 391 poem is credited to Man Ray, the use of mathematics and numerical
relations is found in a recently published poem, ‘ZUT’, by Picabia (apparently written
between 1919 and 1921) in Francis Picabia: Singulier ideal, 344: ‘1149 est 434 Léon 98624
vend / l’escargot 00 000 10 Papa 2 le public / 48 et 49 la roue 24 le caca 000 et / le pipi 126 +
33 = 8 / Léon 45 121 893 question 21 mais / je suis bien tranquille aujourd’hui 25 / à la mode
2222 + 333 = 0 / 22 + 1 = 22 / 22 – 1 = 22 / 22 + 22 = 22 / 22 = 22 = 44 / 34 987 6 c’est
d’abord la cherté du 30 / comme la danse 9 et le pipi 10 / deux fois / trois fois’.
58
My colleague Anne Dymond pointed out this latter fact.
59
Orledge, Satie the Composer, 168. Note also that Man Ray’s poem contains 18 lines in total.
60
Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to
World War I, New York, 1968, 141.
61
Robert Orledge, ‘Satie & America’, American Music, 18: 1, Spring 2000, 87.
62
The reference to the Three Graces is found in Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 259.
63
I thank Ed Jurkowski for drawing my attention to the compositional practice of ‘soggetto
cavato’.
64
The Dutch sound poet Jaap Blonk has used Man Ray’s work as a score, understanding it to
represent a crossed-out, censored poem, functioning as a Lautgedichte, German for ‘sound
poem’. In the 1960s Hans Richter’s book on dada indicated that it was phonetic, though it is
not specified as such on the 391 page. Kenneth Goldsmith, the American experimental poet
and founder of the avant-garde media website Ubu Web, writes of Blonk’s recording: ‘he
simply intones every duration in an obnoxious, nasaly, guttural honk which lasts about seven
minutes.’ See Kenneth Goldsmith, ‘Bring da noise: A brief survey of sound art’, New Music
Box: The Web Magazine from the American Music Center, 1 March 2004,
http://www.newmusicbox.org/page.nmbxid=59tp01. Blonk’s is an equivalent rendering of the
poem as an unmodulated abstract sound image in which the grating sound is meant to be a
sonic analogy to the act of censorship.
65
For more on Raoul Hausmann’s poetry see Timothy O. Benson’s Raoul Hausmann and Berlin
Dada, Ann Arbor, MI, 1987.
66
Picabia’s painting, Chapeau de paille? of 1922 was rejected from the Salon des Indépendants
because of the text inscribed on the work: ‘M…….. pour celui qui le regarde!’ Picabia
claimed that the ‘M’ stood for ‘Merci’, but the Salon committee and later journalistic reports
suggested that it stood for ‘Merde’. Camfield, Francis Picabia, 172–5. The ‘M’ in Man Ray’s
poem, could perhaps involve a further reference to this earlier controversy. However, it is also
possible that Picabia may have already known in 1922 that when voiced in Morse code, ‘M’
becomes ‘dah-dah’.
67
See Orledge, Satie the Composer, 362, and Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 175 and 258.
68
Orledge, ‘Erik Satie’s Ballet “Mercure”’, 235.
69
Arnauld Pierre writes of two of Picabia’s orphist paintings from 1913 and 1914 that have the
word ‘Udnie’ in their titles. Pierre sees these as tributes involving anagrams of the name Jean
d’Udine, a musical theorist specializing in synaesthesia. Pierre writes of the orphist paintings
as involving a densification of aesthetic experience and a polysensorial multiplication of
sensations by means of synaesthesia. Arnauld Pierre, Francis Picabia: La peinture sans aura,
Paris, 2002, 98–109. The devices of simultaneity, metamorphosis, and translations involved in
the 391 page would then seem to be related to long-standing interests of Picabia.
70