Cadavre Exquis

Cadavre Exquis

Cadavre Exquis is not an artist, but rather a collaborative drawing game invented by Surrealist artists in the 1920s. The game involves a group of artists creating a drawing or collage together, with each artist contributing one section without seeing the previous sections. The result is a strange and often surreal composition that is greater than the sum of its parts. The name Cadavre Exquis translates to exquisite corpse, which is a reference to the way the final image appears as a unified whole despite being made up of disparate parts. The game was invented by Surrealist artists André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, and Marcel Duchamp, among others. They would often play the game at cafes and gatherings, with each artist contributing a section to a drawing or collage without knowing what the others had done. The resulting images were often bizarre and dreamlike, reflecting the Surrealist interest in the unconscious mind and the irrational. The game of Cadavre Exquis became popular among Surrealist artists and was later adapted to other mediums, such as writing and music. In the literary version of the game, each writer would contribute a sentence to a story without seeing the previous sentences. The resulting story would be a disjointed and surreal narrative that defied traditional storytelling conventions. In summary, Cadavre Exquis is a collaborative drawing game invented by Surrealist artists in the 1920s. The game involves each artist contributing a section to a drawing or collage without seeing the previous sections, resulting in a strange and often surreal composition. The game reflects the Surrealist interest in the unconscious mind and the irrational, and has been adapted to other mediums such as writing and music.

Surrealism, collaboration, drawing game, unconscious mind, irrational

— Daniel Thompson