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but the very fact of tracing anything on a piece of paper or a 
bit of glass is within the realm of the plastic after all. 
But the dada painters have broken with sight. They paint or 
design as if they did not see. This thanks to the dexterity of 
dada. They have materially speaking neither technique nor 
method, of which one can say—Oh, how very dada! Each one 
follows his own bent without bothering about dada laws of 
colour, form or logic. Dada if you can! 
There was once a painter-pope who called himself Papadada, 
iand who was sent by Dada; since then one perceives his pop- 
valve letting off the steam of a personality like that of an ordinary 
great painter: those like Raphael, Rembrandt and Ziem sign 
many more pictures than they make. He says not to be dada. 
One believes him without difficulty. 
Three dadapainters: Arp, Man Ray, and Max Ernst. 
Arp in his wood cuts and reliefs is the most free from any 
adherence to the visual sense. He is the only one for whom the 
eye is not the monkey-face tyrant. At least with him it is a mat 
ter of an eye which has never seen the light nor the world and 
which has thrown nothing on the interior screen. He is the 
blind painter. It could be said that his hand paints by hearsay. 
He who looks enters with him into the harshness of the night. 
You walk along a corridor where there is no ray of light. 
Doubtless you pass a man or a woman. Sometimes something 
sharp penetrates you from a distance without a shock except that 
of an unconscious revolt of the useless eye, but you do not know 
of what familiarity it is the promontory nor where the inevitable 
little wardrobe of sentiments is to be found. So well concealed, 
so perfectly absent from the bath-room and pyrotechnic cham 
ber. Arp is Arp. 
Man Ray is the subtle chemist of mysteries who sleeps with 
the metrical fairies of spirals and steel wool. He invents a new 
world and photographs it to prove that it exists. But as the 
camera also has an eye, although without a heart, he suppresses 
it. It is no longer a question of preserving images in a box; but 
of making an astonishing destructive projection of all formal 
art which never the less recreates for the love of the external 
thing the most unexpected and the most precious relativity of 
time and of space. One finds one’s self belonging to many fields