Disumbrationism
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Disumbrationism was a hoax masquerading as an artistic school that was launched in 1924 by Paul Jordan-Smith, a novelist, Latin scholar, and authority on Robert Burton from Los Angeles, California.
Annoyed at the cold reception his wife's realistic still lifes had received from an art exhibition jury, Smith sought revenge by styling himself as "Pavel Jerdanowitch", a variation on his own name, and entering a blurry, badly painted picture of a Pacific islander woman brandishing a bunch of bananas, under the title Exaltation. He made a suitably dark and brooding photograph of himself as Jerdanowitch, and submitted the work to the same group of critics as representative of the new school, "Disumbrationism." He explained Exaltation as a symbol of "breaking the chains of womanhood." To his dismay, if not to his surprise, the Disumbrationist daub won praise from the critics who had belittled his wife's realistic painting.
More Disumbrationist paintings followed: a composition of zig-zag lines and eyeballs he called Illumination; a garish picture of an African-American doing laundry which he called Aspiration, and which a critic praised as "a delightful jumble of Gauguin, Pop Hart and Negro minstrelsy, with a lot of Jerdanowitch individuality." Gination was an ugly, lopsided portrait; and an image of a woman worshipping an obvious phallic symbol which Smith called Adoration, was exhibited in New York City in 1927.
The same year, Smith confessed to the Los Angeles Times that the Disumbrationist paintings were meant as a spoof.
External link
- The Disumbrationist School of Art (http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/disumbrationist.html) at The Museum of Hoaxes (http://www.museumofhoaxes.com)