When the young Turks of the Brazilian avant-garde in the 1920s named their manifesto and review "Antropofagia," was it in the knowledge of Francis Picabia's dada review Cannibale? This was possible, but unlikely, and in any case unnecessary to explain their choice of this word which so aptly refers to the complexity of the contemporaneous neocolonial cultural conditions in Brazil, and their reactions against them. What is interesting though, is to consider why this word should also come to the fore in the rebellious atmosphere of dada, where it is also telling, but for rather different reasons.

Dada thrived on the little magazines that proliferated in the 1910s and '20s, and numerous publications, some only lasting for one issue, appeared in its name. These magazines, together with the public "literary" evenings and exhibitions, constitute its true life, and its anti-art and anti-literature stance. When Picabia produced the first issue of Cannibale in April 1920, his peripatetic review 391 was already over three years old. He had published the first four numbers in Barcelona in the spring of 1917, then moved to New York, where the next three issues appeared; here, it coincided with the Fountain scandal orchestrated by Picabia's close friend Marcel Duchamp, whose little review The blind man ceded to 391 as the result of a chess game. Always contentious and inventive, 391 was a significant conduit for the idea, originating with Duchamp, of the ready-made, and for the dry machine drawings and paintings with their sexual innuendoes developed by both Duchamp and Picabia. There was no significant link with the dada movement, born in Zurich in 1916, until Picabia visited Switzerland in 1918, where he met the Rumanian poet Tristan Tzara. Tzara's Dada 4/5, and 391 no. 8 witness their mutual stimulation; one interesting text in 391 no. 8 was "Proses," a virtually automatic text, half of it printed upside down to show the positions of the two men when writing it on opposite sides of a hotel table, while the cover of Dada 4/5 was Picabia's Rèveil matin, the dismembered parts of a watch dipped in ink and printed on paper. Picabia returned to Paris, and when Tzara arrived in January 1920 an alliance was formed with a group of young Paris poets, whose magazine Littérature had in 1919 announced its allegiance to dada. Picabia was already notorious for his contributions to the Autumn and Spring Salons where he regularly created a scandal with works that tested the tolerance of the official representatives of modern art; this reached a peak with the 1922 Indépendents. Picabia sent in three works: Dance de Saint-Guy, The merry widow and The straw hat. The straw hat was refused because of the implied obscenity in its inscription ("m. . . pour celui qui regarde"), and the Merry widow because it contained a photograph, and the Indépendents did not accept photographs. So the only exhibit was, ironically, the Dance de Saint-Guy, aesthetically the most provocative of them all: an empty picture frame laced with string. Originally, it seems, Picabia had intended a "living installation" including white mice-one can imagine a cage-a labyrinth functioning as an insolent metaphor for the "behaviourist" repetitive taste of the "art-lover."

Picabia was the most notorious of the Paris dadas, and he, Tzara and Breton led the dada activities in 1920 and the spring of 1921. Cannibale, launched in April 1920, was intended as an international dada review to unite all its different tendencies: "Monthly review under the direction of Francis Picabia with the collaboration of all the dadaists in the world." Cannibale was less visually electric than 391, though it still used a variety of typefaces and conflicting layouts. It was longer than 391, consisting of twenty rather than 391's maximum of eight pages, and including not just core dadaists but marginal figures like Cocteau. It only lasted for two issues, and 391 no. 13 celebrated its demise with the note "Really it's impossible for me to produce CANNIBALE regularly, it's too stupid. I hope you'll accept 391 this time." Among the notable contributions in Cannibale were Picabia's Tableau dada: a toy monkey clutching its tail as a phallic paint brush, fixed to a base surrounded by the "titles": Portrait of Cézanne, Portrait of Renoir and Portrait of Rembrandt: Natures mortes; Duchamp's Tzank cheque: a meticulously hand-drawn cheque to his dentist, a kind of reversed ready-made; and Aragon's poem "Suicide": which consisted simply of the letters of the alphabet.

As an attempt to consume the whole of dada, CannibaleËs title was appropriate, but the title invites other speculations about its meanings in the context of dada. The primitive connotations of "cannibal" were possibly an ironic reference to the claims put out by the futurists to be the "primitives of a new sensibility," as well as to the precubist Africanist paintings of Picasso. Dada of course to an extent participated in the primitivising strand of modernism, particularly when it could be turned to polemical use against its own bankrupt civilisation. But dada did not claim to be part of the modernist avant-garde; ("Dada is not modern," it insisted). Its sense of the inadequacy of the "schools of formal ideas" as such, for their purposes, reveals one of the underlying impulses behind dada: that of restoring to art an immediacy, a direct relationship with life. The dadaist as far as possible was to be the opposite of the "men of the spirit" who, as Richard Huelsenbeck said, "sat in the cities, painted their little pictures, ground out their verses, and in their whole human structure [. . .] were hopelessly deformed, with weak muscles, without interest in the things of the day, enemies of the advertisement, enemies of the street, of bluff, of the big transactions which everyday menaced the lives of thousands. Of life itself. But the dadaist loves life [. . .]."1 The extreme situation in war-devastated Berlin coloured the tone of HuelsenbeckËs text, its attack on the "art for artËs sake mood" that lay over Zurich dada, which "failed to advance along the abstract road, which ultimately leads from the painted surface to the reality of the post-office form,"² and finally his statement that in Germany, "dadaism became political, it drew the ultimate consequences of its position and renounced art completely."³ In Paris dada worked out its aggression and rudeness at a more individual rather than political level·under the sign of anarchy·but there too it was a question of life rather than art. So perhaps Picabia, whose little magazines were full of anecdotes, aphorisms and gossip, and whose visual productions incorporated words, photographs, ordinary objects and, in theory if not in practice, living animals, thought of the dadaist as a cannibal in the sense that his materials were life rather than art.