Wisdom and Inspiration
Das Ist Dada–An Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC
By Robert A. Schaefer, Jr.
Sep 7, 2006

DADA on bus © Robert A. Schaefer, Jr.

Dada has come to New York City with a huge exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (http://www.moma.org) as well as several galleries in the New York City Area.

Perhaps the better title for this article would be “Was ist Dada?  (“What is Dada?”) or the Dutch version in Theo Van Doesburg’s  “Wat is Dada?”  Why would these be better?  It seems that is the question going around New York is just what Dada actually means.  For those depending on a clear, precise definition supplied by a guide or tape at the Museum, Dada may prove to be more difficult.

Unlike impressionism or expressionism, Dada as one of Tristan Tzara and Paul Eluard’s Dada Fliers says: “Dada ne signnifie Rien.” (“Dada doesn’t mean any thing.”) Hence those desiring an easy fix of what it is or what one is supposed to see, interpret and understand may need to take a deep breath and actually provide a meaning themselves.  It is obviously taken seriously or it would not have survived its beginnings in not one, but six major cities—Zürich, Berlin, Paris, Cologne, New York and Hannover in the years 1919 to 1924.  
 

DADA exhibit at Modern Museum of Art

However, when I visited the Dada Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, much of the visitors’ response to the Dada works was raucous laughter. Marcel Duchamp bears a lot of responsibility for such a seemingly  irreverent response.   His version of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa sports a moustache and goatee.  There is an old-fashioned urinal as well as a bicycle wheel attached to a stool.  Whimsical, meaningless, perhaps,  as many texts point out—the work shows that Dadaists were interested in getting away from serious discussions and deep, hidden meanings about art.  After all, they had just been through the First World War and its horrors and needed a way to lighten up.

1916 is cited as the year Dada began in the unlikely city of Zurich, Switzerland.  Café Voltaire is rumored to have combined various types such as draft-dodgers, pacifists, political immigrants and intellectual expatriates.  Hugo

Wat Is DADA by Theo Van Doesburg

Ball is viewed as the main person along with his girlfriend Emmy Hennings, whom he met in Munich during the same year.  Samuel Rosenstock, better known as Tristan Tzara—along with Marcel Janco, both from highly assimilated Jewish families in Rumania—joined them in the cabaret activities at the Café.  According to another member Richard Hulsenbeck, “Dada was a collective struggle for individual rights.  It was not interested in providing moral justification for political activism or for that matter, any political system.  The Dadaist knows that moral struggle is individual; man must arrive at his own decisions, his own values.”  

The actual word dada; however, has different meanings in different languages: it is a "crazy narrative" in German, "rocking horse" in French and

DADA cities

possibly most defined in Rumanian as "yes, yes." As Hugo Ball became tired of heading the group, Café Voltaire closed in the same year it opened, and Tristan Tzara took over the helm.  He was interested in expanding Dada beyond Zurich. The Premier Exposition of Dada was held in Zurich in 1917, and additional new members like Sophie Tauber provided dance, Hans Arp (later her husband), exhibited abstract wooden reliefs, and Hans Richter (just returned from combat on the front in World War I), produced mask paintings and films. (There is a one-person exhibition of Richter’s work at the Maya Stendhal Gallery located at 545 West 20th Street in New York City through September 16th. For more information: http://www.mayastendhalgallery.com).

 

Dada Head by Hans Richter

Christian Schad produced photo grams which were some of the first abstract photographs.  However, by 1920, the group of Dadaists had primarily dispersed—Taza to Paris, Hulsenbeck to Berlin, and Richter to his parents in Klein-Koetzig with another filmmaker Eggeling. Hugo Ball had retired to a small Swiss village, and only Janco and Arp remained in Zurich.

The Dada Movement was brought from Zurich to Berlin by Richard Hulsenbeck in 1917.  He collaborated with George Grosz and Heartfeld to publish the Neue Jugend  (New Youth), which was a publication about the Dada Movement.  The Dada Movement in Berlin had political overtones as seen in the work by George Grosz.

Metropolis by George Grosz

One of the earliest Dada speeches declared its newness, esthetic and opposition to cubism, futurism and most of all expressionism.  It was described as “perfectly lighthearted malice, and  alongside exact photography,  the only legitimate pictorial form of communication and balance in shared experience.”

A new invention in Berlin Dada was that of the Photomontage (note that in this case it meant cutting out images and pasting them onto a piece being created) by Raoul Hausmann and Hannna Hoech in 1918.  One of her photomontages speaks to the lack of specificity of the Dada Movement with a text in the piece sayingl, “He, he junger Mann, Dada ist  keine Kunstrichtung (Ha, ha young  man, Dada is not  an art movement.)

This discovery of Photomontage by Hausmann and Hoech was disputed by George Grosz, who gave himself and John Heartfeld credit for the discovery of the Photomontage in his Suedende Studio at 5:00 am in May, 1916.  Herzfeld included a dog food advertisement in one of his photomontages.  Perhaps this concept was an influence on Andy Warhol, who introduced Cambell’s soup and Brillo cleaning products as art in the 1960s.

 

Photomontage by Hanna Hoech

In Berlin, Walter Benjamin—who later emigrated to the United States and taught at The New School in New York—said that “Dadaism attempted to produce with means of the painting of literature the effects which the public today seeks in film.”

When the Berlin Dada Group began to fall apart, Raoul Hausmann went to Prague, and Theo Van Doesburg to the Netherlands where he collaborated with Hans Arp and El Lissitsky, who produced some exceptional experimental photographs.

In Hannover, Germany, Kurt Schwitters was a trained painter who became a late bloomer in the Dada Movement with his collages for which he adopted the term “Merz.” (Derived from Kommerz and Privatbank).  However, Hannover was not a center for Dada like Berlin or Zurich. In 1921 Hausmann, Hoech, Schwitters and his wife Helena undertook a second Dada tour to Prague.

Dada came to Cologne, Germany in 1919 and offered its own contributions to the movement.  They were more explicit than implicit and mainly implemented by four artists: Max Ernst who is better known for his surreal work which came later, Heinrich Hoele who produced Die Kripplemappe (Cripple Portfolio, portraits of physically-challenged subjects), his wife Angelika Hoele who was the only woman in this group of male artists (a crossroads of female roles in the 1920’s), and Johannes Baargeld (actually a pseudonym for Alfred Grünwald) who incorporated his own body into his work.  

 

Fruit of Long Experience by Max Ernst

In order to enter Cologne’s Dada Early Spring Exhibition visitors had to walk past the men’s toilets while a girl in a communion dress recited bawdy poetry.  Max Ernst’s participation in this exhibition created a huge split between him and his father, who was a devout catholic.  Perhaps the exhibition should have used Frank Wedekind’s very controversial (especially since it was written in 1891) tragi-comedic play; “Spring’s Awakening” for its title.  The Early Spring Exhibition was closed down by police on the grounds of obscenity.  When it was discovered that the work in question by Max Ernst was a print of Albrecht Dürer’s “Adam + Eve,” it was reopened.

One of the key artists in the New York Dada Movement was Marcel Duchamp, who submitted a white urinal for inclusion in the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists.  Although the exhibition was said to be “jury-free,” the urinal with the signature of R. Mott on the bowl (aka Duchamp) was rejected.

New York art patrons—particularly of the Dada Movement—Louise and Walter Arensberg had an incredible art collection on view in their apartment, located at 33 West 67th Street from 1915 to 1921.  One of their frequent visitors was Joseph Stella who said, “Dada means having a good time—the theatre, the dance, the dinner.  But it is a movement that does away with everything that has always been taken seriously. To poke fun at, to break down, to laugh at, that is Dadaism.”  Walter Arensberg’s cousin John Covert was a Dada artist who remained loyal to oil painting despite attacks on oil painting by Marcel Duchamp.  Covert affixed three dimensional elements such as wooden dowels, string and nails to his paintings to enliven their surfaces.  However, his most unique contribution to the Dada Movement was a series of gelatin silver photographs titled “Water Babies.”  German artist Hans Bellmer mahy have been influenced by these photographs in creating his sculptures titled Le Poupee.

Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, Covert won a scholarship from the German government and studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste (The Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich from 1909 to 1912.  He then moved to Paris where he was often accosted because of his “German” accent.  In 1915 he moved to New York and met Marcel Duchamp through Louise and Walter Arensberg.  He and Duchamp formed The Society of Independent Artists in 1916.

Katherine Dreier went to Cologne after the War (She was German-American and had established contact with her family in Bremen).  It was there where she saw the work of Max Ernst and decided it had to be seen in New York.  Upon her return to New York she established the Sociéte Anonyme, Inc.—Duchamp was president, Man Ray was secretary, and Dreier was treasurer.  The first exhibition was the work of Max Ernst and it was followed by an exhibition of Kurt Schwitters' work.

Merz 8 by Kurt Schwitters

Alfred Stieglitz was very involved with the Dada Movement and exhibited the Dada artist Francis Picabia in his 292 Gallery, who declared his intention of bringing the machine to his studio.

In 1921 Duchamp and Man Ray put together New York Dada Magazine, which was a shift from painting to photography, photomontage, graphics and film.  Man Ray’s multiple  exposures are examples of true photomontage whereby those of Berlin Dadaists are in reality collages of photographs since they are cut and pasted.  This year also signaled somewhat of an end for New York Dada because Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp left for Paris where Man Ray began working with photograms (placing objects on top of  photo sensitive paper, exposing it to light and developing it) which he termed “Rayograms.”

Dada came to Paris in 1920, and it was more literary in its emphasis as in the works by Tristian Tzara and André Breton.  The visual Dada artists were Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picaba and Man Ray.  It began with live performances—public Friday gatherings.  Music was provided by Groupe des Six, and Eric Satie was the head figure.

 

Star on the Transatlantic by Francis Picabia

The Salon Dada Exhibition in June of 1921 was the final show of Dada’s heyday.  The audience walked out of Tristan Tzara’s new play “Le cour á glas” (The glass heart). Duchamp produced a drawing of a check for $115.00 to his dentist for dental work—reducing art to a monetary value.  Unfortunately, artists no longer wanted to be a part of the very pubic stage of Dadaism and preferred to be more private in the new direction of surrealism.

 
I hope you will be able to experience the Dada Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art or the Hans Richter Exhibition at the Maya Stendhal Gallery in Chelsea. It has been refreshing that the general public in New York City has been interested in discovering  Dada.  The good news is that they basically  had to figure it out for themselves, and subsequently realized that they would be able to do that for any art direction.



References:

DADA exhibit © Robert A. Schaefer, Jr.

1.  Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris by Leah Dickerman, Brigid Doherty, Dorothea Dietrich, Sabine T. Kriebel, Distributed Art Publishers, New York, November 15, 2005

2. Masters of Modern Art by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., distributed by Simon and Schuster, New York, 1954

3. The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, Second Edition by Jack D. Flam, Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA, April 14, 2005
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Robert A. Schaefer, Jr. is a founding member of Photoworkshop.com, and has been a fine-art photographer for over thirty years. His work is displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris, France. In 1999—2000 he had a 25-year retrospective of his work at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville, Alabama, his home state. His exhibition, Two Sides of the Coin—which deals with his German family and the Holocaust—was held at the DeFrog Gallery in Houston, TX in March, April and May as a part of Fotofest.  Currently he is part of a group exhibition called “Amendicons,” which looks at the crisis in the Middle East.  It was at the Makor Gallery, and will open on Thursday, September 8th at the Haven Art Gallery in the Bronx, NY. (www.amendicons.blogspot.com).  Schaefer writes about photography for Double Exposure, Fotophile Magazine in New York City and The Photo Review in Pennsylvania. He has taught at The New School and given workshops at Pratt Institute in New York and is currently on the faculty at New York University.
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You can contact Robert Schaefer at rasjrpro@earthlink.net or visit his website at http://www.schaeferphoto.com.


 























 



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