RESEARCH WITH NO CORRELATION

A friend of mine posted this postcard that she found on instagram back in February and it's been eating away at my brain ever since but I finally found the 'artist' that this is in reference to. 

Taken from the BBC article 'What's the big idea? Five bizarre pieces of conceptual art' 

Alphonse Allais:

"Conceptual Art didn’t officially start until the 1960s, but it had plenty of predecessors. One of my favourites was a nineteenth-century French humorist called Alphonse Allais. Allais would do anything for a laugh. In the 1880s he turned his mischievous attentions to art, exhibiting a series of completely abstract monochrome pictures. He called his all-white picture First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls in a Snowstorm. And he called his all-red picture Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes by the Red Sea. Allais was joking, of course. But he was also making a point that became really important to conceptualism: the image is largely irrelevant; what matters is the idea behind it."

Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes on the Shore of the Red Sea (1884)

First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls in a Snowstorm (1883)

Jaundiced Cuckolds Handling Ochre (1884)

Negroes Fighting In A Tunnel By Night (1884)

Some Pimps, Known as Green Backs, on their Bellies in the Grass, Drinking Absinthe (1884)

It reminded me of the Martin Creed Talk Art episode where he said he hated titles because they were always pretentious which is why he started just numbering his works. But I'm actually quite the fan of ostentatious titles because it think they're almost funny, which is exatly what Allais achieved. He commented on the art-world-to-be over 200 years ahead of his time.

 

I lost all my notes on these bc I'm an idiot.