Artaud and American Artists

From the 1950s through the early years of the twenty-first century, the writings, works, and variously interpreted meanings of Antonin Artaud’s desperate life were persistent and influential in discussions of theatre and performance, particularly in America. The first translations of Artaud’s writings appeared in what were known as “little” journals and magazines beginning in the post-World War II era. Ranging from visionary texts on theatre and poetry to screeds against then-contemporary Euro-American culture, these writings were, initially, appealing to poets, experimental theatre companies, filmmakers, and visual artists who seized on Artaud’s aesthetic sense of unrestrained interdisciplinary forms and his personal accounts of drug addiction, mental illness, and pursuit of esoteric, non-Western sources. In our era, it is difficult to grasp how a few roughly printed publications with small audiences—origin, Evergreen Review, The Tulane Drama Review, Semina, and the more sophisticated Tiger’s Eye—could be responsible for the extensive circulation of the ideas and work of living artists. But it happened, and as Lucy Bradnock amply demonstrates in No More Masterpieces: Modern Art after Artaud, the effect on artists and the discourses surrounding avant-garde art beyond theatre was widespread, especially after San Francisco-based City Lights Books published The Theater and Its Double in 1958. Containing Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty” manifestos and other seminal writings, letters, and notes, the translations were by Mary Caroline Richards. A larger collection from City Lights, The Artaud Anthology, was released in 1965. With fourteen translators, Bradnock regards the later volume as having as an editorial bent toward accentuating Artaud’s “madness” and marginality as a writer and thinker.