cadavre exquis

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cadavre exquis. A game in which a small group of people contribute in turn to make up a sentence or a drawing, no member of the group being aware of what the others have contributed (in the case of a drawing, the paper is usually folded in such a way that the edge of the previous participant's work—meaningless in itself—is visible, providing a starting-point for the next person). This old party game, usually called ‘consequences', was given a new seriousness and significance by the Surrealists as a device for tapping the collective unconscious or exploiting the element of chance that they believed to be a path to creativity. In Breton's Dictionnaire abrégé du surrealisme (1938) it is described as follows: ‘A game with folded paper. Every participant makes a drawing without knowing what his predecessor has drawn, because the predecessor's contribution is concealed by the folded part of the paper. The example which has become a classic, and to which the game owes its name, was the first sentence produced by this method [in 1925] : “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau” [The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine].’ An example of a cadavre exquis drawing from 1926 is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the participants having been Breton, Tanguy, and four others.

cadavre exquis. A game in which a small group of people contribute in turn to make up a sentence or a drawing, no member of the group being aware of what the others have contributed (in the case of a drawing, the paper is usually folded in such a way that the edge of the previous participant's work—meaningless in itself—is visible, providing a starting point for the next person). This old party game, usually called ‘consequences’, was given a new seriousness and significance by the Surrealists as a device for tapping the collective subconscious or exploiting the element of chance that they believed to be a path to creativity. The name (Fr: ‘exquisite corpse’) comes from the sentence produced by this method: ‘The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine’.