DADA Newsletter

50th anniversary : Fluxus at Rutgers

2011-10-26T09:39:00.006+02:00

at/around/beyond: Fluxus at Rutgers
September 24, 2011 - April 01, 2012
Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
71 Hamilton St., New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Tel 732.932.7237, ext. 659
Fax 732.932.8201
www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu

The spirit of Fluxus imbues Art After Hours on Wednesday, November 2, at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers. An exhibition tour, Flux Concert, and chess tournament spotlight at/around/beyond: Fluxus at Rutgers, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of this radical international art movement that has historic ties to the university. Art After Hours is the popular eclectic evening series held on the first Wednesday of the month from 5 to 9 p.m. at the Zimmerli. Admission is $6 for adults, $5 for adults over 65, and free for museum members, as well as Rutgers students, faculty and staff (with ID), and children under 18.

As a prelude to the concert, a tour of at/around/beyond: Fluxus at Rutgers begins at 5:30 p.m. More than 60 sculptural objects, games, photographs, assemblages, ephemera, books, and films are assembled from the museum’s permanent holdings and private collections. Long associated with the movement, artist Larry Miller conducts a Flux Concert at 6:30 p.m. Miller first became involved with Fluxus during his student days at Rutgers University, where he received his M.F.A. in 1970, before moving to New York City to establish a career as an installation and performance artist. The Flux Concert is free with admission, but reservations are required at 732.932.7237, ext. 615. The Zimmerli Student Advisory Board (ZSAB) hosts a chess tournament beginning at 4 p.m. Players have the unique opportunity to play Miller’s Fruit and Vegetable Chess. Finalists face off following the Flux Concert. To participate, contact ZSAB at ZimmerliStudentBoard@gmail.com.

“Fluxus has been described as an attitude, a way of experiencing the world, and as a laboratory of ideas,” notes Donna Gustafson, Andrew W. Mellon Liaison for Academic Programs and Curator. “Interaction was so integral to Fluxus attitudes towards life and art that the display of objects alone can’t completely convey the spirit of the movement.” This philosophy inspired Gustafson and Gerry Beegan, who teaches design at Mason Gross School of the Arts, to develop the Byrne Family First-Year Seminar, Artists, Musicians, and Poets in the Museum. A contingent of the students from the course is scheduled to perform with Miller.

Visitors to Fluxus at Rutgers also have the opportunity to interact with several Fluxus games during Art After Hours. Larry Miller’s Fruit and Vegetable Chess features fresh produce pieces, while Sound Chess by Mieko Shiomi (reconstructed by C. Greg Hagerty) has identical wooden chess pieces, requiring players to distinguish the hierarchy by shaking them to hear the rattles inside. Fluxus Balance, another game by Shiomi, allows visitors to conceptually weigh words and ideas on a tiny scale, and Ay-O’s Finger Boxes allows brave souls to insert their fingers into the mysterious holes of five small wooden boxes.

The exhibition has been organized by Donna Gustafson, Andrew W. Mellon Liaison for Academic Programs and Curator, and Eveline Baseggio Omiccioli, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History and Zimmerli Graduate Assistant, with the assistance of Heather Cammarata-Seale, MA Candidate in the Department of Art History, and Dodum Chun, Museum Interns.
at/around/beyond: Fluxus at Rutgers is on view through April 1, 2012. Support for the exhibition and related programs has been provided by an endowment established by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Class of 1937 Publication Fund, and the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts.

George Maciunas

Gift Box for Jerold Ordover: Spell Your Name With These Objects, ca. 1970

Assorted objects in leatherette and velvet-lined box

Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers
Museum Purchase, Class of 1921 Acquisition Fund
Photo Peter Jacobs

Publication: G: An Avant-Garde Journal

2011-09-15T10:08:00.006+02:00

G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923-1926
Edited by Detlef Mertins and Michael W. Jennings
Getty Research Institute : 2010
280 pages; 22 color and 134 b/w illustrations
ISBN 978-1-60606-039-1.

First published in 1923, the journal G: Material zur Elementaren Gestaltung (G: Materials for Elemental Form-Creation) helped shape a new phase in the history of the European avant-garde. Founded by Hans Richter, a pioneer of abstract animated film, G featured works by some of the important names in the advanced cultures of Europe: Hans Arp, Walter Benjamin, Theo van Doesburg, Viking Eggeling, Naum Gabo, Werner Graeff, George Grosz, Hugo Häring, Raoul Hausmann, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Frederick Kiesler, El Lissitzky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Antoine Pevsner, Man Ray, and Tristan Tzara.

This edition, the first in English translation, preserves the original design by Lissitzky, Richter, and Graeff, and includes essays that explore the role of the journal in its time and in relation to contemporary culture. An introduction analyzes the principles of the journal, situates it in the culture of the early 1920s, and evaluates its achievements.

This book is structured into two parts: first, a series of essays which provide analysis on the major areas of visual culture explored in G and second, the translated-to-English facsimile of the journal itself. With an overview which situates G and its major contributors in historical context begins the essay portion of the book. Other essays follow, one on each subject in the book’s title: Maria Gough on El Lissitzky’s contributions to G’s graphic design; subsequent essays by Edward Dimendberg on film, and Detlef Mertins on architecture, are also well-researched and informative.

In the second part of the book, a carefully constructed facsimile of G is presented, that is true to original documents held in the Museum of Modern Art, except the German text was translated into English.

Publication : Biography Hannah Höch

2011-09-09T09:25:00.003+02:00

Cara Schweitzer
Schrankenlose Freiheit für Hannah Höch
Osburg Verlag : Berlin 2011
439 Seiten
ISBN-10: 3940731641
ISBN-13: 978-3940731647

The life of the Dada artist under the Nazi dictatorship

With her scissors she cut art history, the collages of the grande dame of Berlin Dada movement, Hannah Höch (1889 - 1978), shook the Weimar »Beer Belly Cultural Epoch." Now for the first time a biography of the artist appears, who extensively discussed their predicament under the Nazi dictatorship. Previously undiscovered letters and documents explain why Hannah Höch could not leave Germany at the last minute.

Shortly after the outbreak of World War I in Berlin the Dada movement was formed. Hannah Höch is one of the few women in this illustrious men's club. After the takeover by the Nazis their work was considered as "degenerate". Her closest friends left the country. During the war years, she retired to spend in her garden on the outskirts of Berlin. Her house becomes a secret archive of the avant-garde. The biography focuses on the dramatic circumstances of her marriage to the 21 years younger Heinz Kurt Matthies. In 1938 he was arrested, and for the once cautious artist begins the fight for his release.

Kemzeke : E.L.T. Mesens

2011-08-03T10:34:00.012+02:00

E.L.T. MESENS comme nous l'entendons...

Retrospective exhibition

Verbeke Foundation, Kemzeke (B)

14.08.2011 - 16.10.2011

Curators: Geert Verbeke, Simon Delobel
URL: www.verbekefoundation.com/
Catalogue: download the catalogue (in Dutch; also in French)

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the death of E.L.T. Mesens the Verbeke Foundation organizes the first retrospective of his dadaist and surrealist oeuvre. The exhibition contains an exceptional selection of about 200 collages, posters, partitions, letters, magazines and books illustrating the diverse talents and activities of Mesens. He was not only a musician, composer, poet, photographer, collagist, editor and polemist but also a gallerist and art collector. In addition ninety-four window displays illustrate the personalities of as much acquaintances of Mesens: from Eileen Agar, Scottie Wilson and Salvador Dali to Desmond Morris and Peggy Guggenheim.

Berlin : Lajos Kassák

2011-08-01T13:55:00.004+02:00

Lajos Kassák
Ambassador of the Avant-Garde 1915-1927
Berlinische Galerie, Berlin
17.06. - 17.10.2011
url: www.berlinischegalerie.de/

Lajos Kassák (1887-1967) was a key figure of the Hungarian avant-garde. The exhibition focuses on his years of exile in Vienna (1920-1926) and the theory of picture architecture which Kassák understood as an emancipatory form of perception and expression. In addition, it will show his journalistic activity in the circle of the internationally influential magazine MA [Today], which reflected on expressionist, dadaist and constructivist tendencies.

For the first time, the exhibition will be showing works from a private collection in Paris. Supplemented by selected works from the collection of the Berlinische Galerie, it will trace the manifold trends of the avant-garde. In the decade beginning in 1910, Kassak had already founded an international network, which he extended continually through his contacts in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. Besides literary, artistic and theoretical works by Kassák and his contemporaries, the exhibition also visualises the geo-cultural contexts within which Kassák‘s activity unfolded. Contemporary photos, documents and films present groups, centres, publications and famous artist personalities from that period, including Sándor Bortnyik, El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, Kurt Schwitters, Tristan Tzara and Herwarth Walden. Source: Berlinische Galerie, Berlin.

From Dada to Surrealism

2011-06-13T15:07:00.003+02:00

Van Dada tot surrealisme : Joodse avant-garde kunstenaars uit Roemenië, 1910-1938
From Dada to Surrealism : Jewish Avant-Garde Artists from Romania, 1910-1938
Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam
June 1 - October 2, 2011
URL: www.jhm.nl/

From Dada to Surrealism is the first-ever survey exhibition of Jewish avant-garde artists from Romania. In the early twentieth century, the art world was taken by storm by the fearless experimentalism of Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco, who were among the founders of Dada at the renowned Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Along with Victor Brauner, M.H. Maxy, and the older artist Arthur Segal, they were present at the birth of several influential avant-garde movements. They also inspired the younger artists Jules Perahim and Paul Páun, two pioneers of Surrealism. Some of these artists are well-known to art lovers, but few people realize that they share a common background: they were all Jewish and born in Romania. The exhibition includes more than eighty works of art, most of them from Romanian museums and private collections but also from other collections worldwide. Most of these works have never been exhibited outside Romania before. A richly illustrated book accompanying the exhibition will be available at the JHM Museum Shop and elsewhere.

Virtual Exhibition: From Dada to Surrealism.

Publication: DADA Een geschiedenis

2010-08-12T10:08:00.004+02:00

Hubert van den Berg
Dada. Een geschiedenis
Van Tilt : Nijmegen, June 2010
ISBN 9789075697971.

The book Dada. A history of Hubert van den Berg drags the reader into the depths of dada and shows us its true face. Because many aspects of dada are very dada, in the past the Dadaists were more than once misunderstood and often lost in the jumble of dada. Van den Berg knows this tangle to unravel, and shows the reader the full glory and horror of dada. Dada is the mirror in which humanity could see the world in its true form, and Van den Berg helps the reader to understand what he sees. In addition, Van den Berg's book, the first Dada history of Dutch origin, offers the reader a comprehensive description of the generation, dissemination, development and finally the collapse of Dada. In Dutch.

Angelika Hoerle

2010-01-14T12:23:00.006+01:00

Angelika Hoerle. Comet of the Cologne Avant-garde
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
September 26, 2009-January 17, 2010
exhibition flyer

Angelika Fick Hoerle (1899-1923) lived hard and died young. In spite of her youth, she left a promising artistic legacy. Moving through the influences of WW I, the German Revolution and Dada, she developed artistic styles that foreshadowed Surrealism and the Cologne Progressives.

Angelika's apartment in Lindenthal, the ‘dadaheim' with its Schloemilch Verlag, was both a meeting place and the publishing house for Max Ernst's Fiat Modes and the international Dada magazine, Die Schammade. Nicknamed "Dada Angelika" by friends and dubbed the German Master of Dada by a newspaper, Angelika went on to co-found the Stupid Group and become a voice for women along with her best friend Marta Hegeman. When Angelika died of tuberculosis at 22 years of age, her brother, the artist Willy Fick, paid the back rent on the apartment where she had lived alone since the fall of 1922; he wanted to save her things. Willy Fick hid Angelika's works, and those of her politically active friends, from the National Socialists when the artists represented were labelled degenerate.

See also: Angelika Hoerle: The Comet of Cologne Dada an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).

Publication: Dada in Paris

2009-11-18T15:42:00.001+01:00

Dada in Paris
By Michel Sanouillet; Michèle Humbert, Editorial Consultant; Translated by Sharmila Ganguly; Revised and Expanded by Anne Sanouillet
MIT Press : Cambridge MA, 2009
640 pp.
ISBN-10: 0-262-01303-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-262-01303-1
Michel Sanouillet's Dada in Paris, published in France in 1965, reintroduced the Dada movement to a public that had largely ignored or forgotten it. Over forty years later, it remains both the unavoidable starting point and the essential reference for anyone interested in Dada or the early twentieth-century avant-garde. This first English-language edition of Sanouillet's definitive work (a translation of the expanded 2005 French edition) gives English-speaking readers their first direct access to the author's monumental history (based on years of research, including personal involvement with most of the Dadaists still living at the time) and massive compilation of previously unpublished correspondence, including more than 200 letters to and from such movement luminaries as Tristan Tzara, André Breton, and Francis Picabia.

Publication : Dada's Women

2009-08-04T10:49:00.006+02:00

Dada's Women
Ruth Hemus
Yale University Press, New Haven
2009
250 p., 60 b/w + 20 color illus.
ISBN: 9780300141481 / 0300141483.

The European Dada movement of the early 20th century has long been regarded as a male preserve, one in which women have been relegated to footnotes or mentioned only as the wives, girlfriends, or sisters of Dada men. This fascinating book challenges that assumption, focusing on the creative contributions made to Dada by five pivotal European women.

Ruth Hemus establishes the ways in which Emmy Hennings and Sophie Taeuber in Zurich, Hannah Höch in Berlin, and Suzanne Duchamp and Céline Arnauld in Paris made important interventions across fine art, literature, and performance. Hemus highlights how their techniques and approaches were characteristic of Dada’s rebellion against aesthetic and cultural conventions, analyzes the impact of gender on each woman’s work, and shows convincingly that they were innovators and not imitators. In its new and original perspective on Dada, the book broadens our appreciation and challenges accepted understandings of this revolutionary avant-garde movement.

Reviewed by Sally O’Reilly for Frieze Issue 123 (May 2009).

Futurisms - Precursors, Protagonists, Legacies

2009-04-27T09:30:00.003+02:00

Utrecht University will held an international conference on "Futurisms: precursors, protagonists, legacies", from 1 till 3 December 2009.
Confirmed keynote speakers: Günter Berghaus (Bristol University), Giovanni Lista (CNRS, Paris), Marjorie Perloff (Stanford University) and Jeffrey Schnapp (Stanford University); confirmed invited speakers are Walter Adamson (Amory University, Atlanta), Timothy Campbell (Cornell University), Silvia Contarini (Paris-X Nanterre) and Luca Somigli (Toronto University).
Organisors: Geert Buelens (chair of modern Dutch literature, University of Utrecht), Harald Hendrix (chair of Italian Studies, University of Utrecht), Monica Jansen (assistant professor in Italian Studies, Universities of Utrecht and Antwerp) and Wanda Strauven (associate professor in Film Studies, University of Amsterdam).

Information:
Conference website: www.hum.uu.nl/futurisms
Mail: futurisms@uu.nl.

Viva il Futurismo!

2009-04-02T09:21:00.003+02:00

Kunst- und Kulturveranstaltungen zum 100-jährigen Gründungsjubiläum des Futurismus
Vorträge • Tagung • Theater • Tanz • Musik • Film • Ausstellung
Köln + Bonn + Düsseldorf • Juni–Oktober 2009

In Zusammenarbeit mit:
- Italienisches Kulturinstitut Köln
- Bonner Italien-Zentrum
- Vereinigung Deutsch-Italienischer Kultur-Gesellschaften e.V. (VDIG).

Website: www.futurismus.kulturserver.de/.

Erwin Blumenfeld - Dada Montages

2009-02-20T09:22:00.003+01:00

I WAS NOTHING BUT A BERLINER
Berlinische Galerie, Berlin
27 February through 1 June 2009.
The exhibition is curated by Helen Adkins.
A catalogue in German and English is available (More information).

During the 1940s and 1950s, Erwin Blumenfeld (born 1897 in Wilhelmstraße in Berlin, died and buried 1969 in Rome) was one of the most sought-after fashion photographers in the world. Far less known is the early work of this artist of Jewish origin raised in the late Wilhelminian German capital: the often bitingly humorous Dada collages produced between 1916 and 1933.
His friendship with Paul Citroen and Walter Mehring, who found recognition as painter and poet respectively, the association with Berlin’s bohemia surrounding Else Lasker-Schüler and Herwarth Walden’s Galerie Der Sturm, and his worship of George Grosz collided with Blumenfeld’s career in the garment trade. Blumenfeld sensed the urge to write, paint, and act on stage, but still he pursued the career of a businessman and, in 1923, opened a shop for women’s leather goods in Amsterdam. Theater, film, art, and literature are kneaded together with the artists’ daily experience of life and assembled into a visual entity of most distinct character. Blumenfeld’s cynical and extremely individualistic approach, humor, scorn, and anarchy were perfectly Dada. The bankruptcy of his shop, sealed in 1933 by the National Socialist seizure of power in Germany, finally forced him to try his luck as a professional photographer.

In this exhibition curated by Helen Adkins the focus is for the first time on the montages. The selection of some 50 montages and 30 photographs is chosen from the estate of the artist in Paris and Cambridge, the collection of the Berlinische Galerie, and other collections.

Text and Image Credits: Berlinische Galerie, Berlin

Conference Modernist Magazines Project

2009-02-05T15:02:00.007+01:00

Modernism, Cultural Exchange and Transnationality: The Second Conference of the Modernist Magazines Project
Venue: Sussex, 15-17 July 2009
Key Note Speakers: Mark Morrisson (Penn State University, author of The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences and Reception, 1905 -1920), Tim Benson (Rifkind Center, LA County Museum of Modern Art, editor of Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation 1910-1930)
More Information: Conference Folder [pdf].

The interest in much current critical debate in questions of national and transnational identities has helped restore and enliven the conception of modernism and the avant-garde as twin international formations across the arts. Magazines were instrumental in publicizing the new movements and frequently did so, singly or in the company of others, with an ambition to intervene in the public or international sphere.
The second conference of the Modernist Magazines Project invites proposals for papers which explore the role magazines have played in the broad networks of modernist art, ideas and politics in shaping and re-articulating regional, national, and cross-national identities. The conference will concentrate on but not be limited to the period 1880-1960 in Britain, Europe and the USA. Papers which fall outside these parameters but illuminate the conference themes are welcome.

The conference will be held at the University of Sussex from 15th to 17th July 2009. The deadline for the submission of proposals (200-250 words) is the 15th February 2009. Proposals for papers should be sent to: Christian Weikop(c.weikop@sussex.ac.uk), Dr Christian Weikop, School of Humanities, Arts B229 University of Sussex, Falmer Brighton BN1 9QN.

Christian Schad Retrospective

2009-02-02T16:50:00.009+01:00

Gemeentemuseum Den Haag
The Hague
31 January 2009 - 10 May 2009
The exhibition, a cooperation of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and the Leopold Museum in Vienna, is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue authored by Anna Auer, Thomas Richter and others.

Press release
While Christian Schad's (1894-1982)famous key works that show his decisive contribution to New Objectivity are a chief focus of the exhibition, his early work that was influenced by Cubism and Dadaism will play an equally significant role as the more abstract ones he produced in the 1950s. His multifaceted graphic oeuvre bears witness to an artist who delighted in experimentation until the very end and who was highly skilled in numerous techniques and who repeatedly tread new territory, as his Schadographs and Resopal pictures show.

A comparison with the works of younger proponents of this artistic concept will inspire a re-evaluation of his often underestimated late work in which he returned to Realism in the 1970s: in addition to the realistic painting mastered by Schad, alienated, symbolic elements appear especially in the works from the 1960s and the 1970s. In parallel to works reflecting international art movements of the day such as Pop Art or -Fantastic Realism-, his late works from the 1960s show that the artist, now over seventy years of age, was still very much in tune with the times, indeed even a model for an emerging new generation.

On the exhibition's structure:
1. Cubist, Dadaist and Expressionist early works
Influenced by the expressionist paintings of Oskar Kokoschka, Wassily Kandinsky and Robert Delaunay - which he had seen before 1914 during his years at art school in Munich - Christian Schad produced his first expressionist paintings during a journey to Volendam in 1914. When the First World War broke out in the same year, he was forced to go back to Germany. He first immigrated to Zurich in 1915, where he received key impulses from the lawyer and writer Walter Serner. In October 1915, the two of them published the first issue of their magazine Sirius, which Schad illustrated. Serner introduced him to the Zurich Dadaists around the Cabaret Voltaire, Hugo Ball and Hans Arp, amongst others. Schad's paintings from his Zurich days are grisaille-like and influenced by Cubo-Futurism. They are very often set in cafe's and cabarets; the portrait of Diseuse Marietta is a milestone in his artistic development due to his use of not just colour but also text.

Schad moved to Geneva in 1917, where his first Dadaist works emerged. This was where he invented his Schadographs - photogrammes in which he combined objet trouve's and text. Oskar Kokoschka's influence soon became apparent in some of the ensuing paintings, particularly in those where he draws out the psyche of the portrayed subjects. Schad liked to paint children because of their large eyes, which became a kind of trademark of his New Objectivity phase. In 1918, he made several portraits of patients at the Bel Air Clinic for the mentally ill, the Sonntägliche Clown [Sunday's Clown] being the most striking of all. Emotions and moods are the chief motifs in these paintings; the expressive hands of his subjects and his treatment of the background are reminiscent of Oskar Kokoschka. From 1919 to 1920 a series of Schadographies and Dadaist high reliefs emerged, however, very few of them have survived. In addition to Hugo Ball and Hans Arp, another artist to influence him was Alexander Archipenko. Schad took part in many Dada exhibitions in Geneva.

2. New Objectivity paintings from the 1920s and the 1930s
In March 1920, lack of money forced Schad to return to Munich. He had not witnessed the horrors of the war; he found Dadaist paintings to be -absurd- and Expressionism outdated. In the summer of 1920 he travelled to Rome and then to Naples, where he lived until 1925 with brief interruptions. In 1923 he got married to an Italian woman in Orvieto. Italian Realism, represented by artists like Ubaldo Oppi and Felice Casorati and the group Novecento Italiano, strongly influenced him during these years and he was much more oriented to the Italians than to the socialist inclinations of New Objectivity in Germany. Schad made his first realistic paintings in Naples where he mainly painted portraits, except for the cafe' and theatre scenes whose liveliness he particularly cherished. In the winter of 1921/22, Schad travelled across Germany, where he received several commissions for portraits and became acquainted with many New Objectivity painters.

On his return to Italy Schad visited the museums in Rome, where he had the opportunity to study the work of renaissance painters whose application of colour, -magical gaze-, clarity of form, transparency of colour and eroticism became an important source of inspiration for him. He was especially drawn to Raffael's Fiorina and the works of Botticelli and Mantegna. Schad's portrait of Pope Pius XI from 1925 was largely responsible for his international fame.

In 1925, Schad moved to Vienna, where he lived until 1928. His parents' contacts to the Austrian aristocracy got him several commissions for portraits. Many of these portraits were set before a fictive Parisian backdrop, the best known of them being Selfportrait in Transparent Green Shirt and Model. Schad's main promoter was the gallerist Lea Bondi, who exhibited his works at the Galerie Würthle in Vienna. After his separation from his wife in 1927, Schad moved to Berlin where he lived until until 1942. It was in Berlin that he made most of his important New Objectivity portraits, for which his girlfriend Maika was his favourite model. Schad not only portrayed important personages (such as Egon Erwin Kisch or Count d'Anneaucourt), but also beautiful women from modest backgrounds as well as figures from art circles. A cool expression combined with psychological intensity and a flawless complexion characterised his figures, making his women the ideals of an epoch. The technique of glazing so typical of Schad's work harks back to the Old Masters.

After the Nazis had seized power, many of his works became the target of harsh criticism, but at the same time his soft-focus portraits of ideal women also adorned the covers of magazines and were even in the Great German Art Show. By this time, -the end of New Objectivity- was becoming evident; Schad's paintings now became more expressive and he started painting landscapes. In 1942 he moved to Aschaffenburg, from where he received numerous commissions, and moved there permanently when his Berlin studio was destroyed by bombs. From now on, the semblance to his renaissance ideals became increasingly stronger in his portraits, also because he was at the time copying Matthias Grünewald's altar painting in Aschaffenburg's collegiate church. Schad had to live under extremely dire circumstances until about 1951.

3. Abstract and Resopal Paintings from the 1950s and 1960s
Schad's work from the Post-War years is barely known and several critics find its quality retrograde. This is partially because Art Informel was the only accepted form of modern art in Germany at that time, but Schad, with a few exceptions, had remained figurative. One of the aims of this exhibition is to revise the verdict of his critics. Schad's friendship with Francis Picabia, his admiration for Cocteau (he even staged one of his plays in Aschaffenburg and his line was clearly a model for Schad) and his occupation as curator of an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner exhibition left definite traces in his work. By the end of the 1940s, his work had become more linear, especially his so-called Resopal (plywood) paintings from the 1950s, which had begun to show traces of Pop Art. He now applied the principle of multiple views in his paintings and drawings as the result of his involvement with Picasso's work.

4. The Realistic Late Work
Schad remained true to the realistic form of painting - especially in the few pictures (about one or two per year) that he painted in the final years - which became increasingly characterised by a collage-like technique in which he combined motifs and symbolic content. In the 1950s and the 1960s, exhibitions in East Berlin made his work better known in the GDR which made him an ideal for many artists. Nevertheless, Schad, turned down a professorship offered to him by the art academy in East Berlin. In Aschaffenburg, he studied Joyce's Ulysses, East Asian Philosophy and contemporary history (e.g. monetary reform), aspects of which also flowed into his work in Aschaffenburg.

Later, in the 1960s, he returned to -Magical Realism- by tying in the themes he had addressed in his Berlin days. Paintings like Engel im Separe'e [Angel in the Separe'e] or Pavonia emerged, which symbolically addressed sexuality in bohemian environments. His symbol-laden self-portrait titled Umgebung [Environment], the allegory Das Geld [Money, 1970], Werdandi (1978/80) or his late portraits such as Michael or the last Bettina portraits - even surpass the formal clarity of his works from the 1920s. They remain until today a source of inspiration for artists, e.g., Michael Triegel.

5. Collages and Prints and Drawings
From 1954 onwards, Schad began to produce woodcut prints and lithographies which were partially inspired by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's. He often underlayed the woodcuts with linoleum prints in the form of colourful surfaces. His woodcuts refer back to the early, dadaist reliefs he had made in Switzerland. These works were better known in America where they had been exhibited often. At the end of the 1960s, a series of collages that has never been published emerged at the same time as Pop Art. His highly simplified woodcuts from the 1970s also find parallels in American Pop Art and commercial graphics.

6. Schadographies
A whole chapter of the exhibition is dedicated to the so-called Schadographs. These combinations of objets trouve's and text as artistic medium were Schad's contribution to the Dada movement during his Geneva days. They were also the reason why he was acclaimed in several exhibitions since the 1930s - especially overseas - and often without his knowledge. Numerous high ranking artists, amongst them Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, adopted this technique. In the Post-War years, Schad started making Schadographs once again; new series emerged. Since very few of the early Schadographs have survived, or are in a condition to be loaned, this chapter of the exhibition will especially focus on this unusual medium of art by juxtaposing Schad's early and late Schadographies against the works of other artists.

Text credits: Press Release Leopold Museum, Vienna.
Image credits: Christian Schad, Sonja, 1928 (c) Christian-Schad-Stiftung, Aschaffenburg.

Man Ray in The Hague

2009-01-21T14:55:00.000+01:00

Man Ray - "Unconcerned But Not Indifferent"
Fotomuseum Den Haag
January 17-April 19, 2009
Curators Noriko Fuku and John Jacob.
Other venues: Berlin (2008) and Paris (2008).
Catalogue available.

The Man Ray: Unconcerned But Not Indifferent exhibition comprises drawings, photos, paintings and sculptures from the Man Ray Trust collection in Long Island, New York. The Man Ray Trust collection has never gone on show before. In juxtaposing Man Ray’s artistic works, tools, documents, objects and pictures which gave the artist his inspiration, the exhibition creates a distinctive setting allowing visitors to experience and enjoy his wide-ranging artistic work.

The Man Ray Trust collection
After his death in 1976 Man Ray’s estate passed into the hands of his wife, Juliet, who was joined by her brothers in setting up the Man Ray Trust to preserve and promote the artist’s legacy. Part of the estate was donated to the French national museums, while the trust selected artworks, objects, documents and personal items for the American collection designed to provide a comprehensive overview of Man Ray’s creative period spanning over 60 years.

The trust has so far catalogued over 2,000 works and confirmed their authenticity. However, research work into all the facets of the collection has not yet been completed. Man Ray: Unconcerned But Not Indifferent is the first exhibition to provide a comprehensive insight into the collection. The unique feature of the trust’s collection is that it encompasses items from all Man Ray’s creative periods, including little-known early works, documents from his private life, sketches for large-scale works and their documentation as well as numerous masterpieces. As was stated in an article about the trust in the magazine ArtNews in June 2002, the collection is “perfect”.

The exhibition
The inscription on Man Ray’s gravestone Unconcerned But Not Indifferent was chosen as the title of the exhibition. Comprising over 300 exhibits, it is the first of its kind to relate Man Ray’s artistic works to the objects and images from which he derived his inspiration – his bowler hat and walking stick, items from the shelves of his studio in Rue de Ferou in Paris, his collection of erotic photographs and the objects he used for the camera-less photographic technique he called ‘rayography’.

Profiting from the abundance of material available in the Man Ray Trust, the exhibition looks at the development of numerous motifs from sketches up to the masterpiece and shows the occasional use Man Ray made of photographic material for paintings and works of graphic art. The exhibition also gives visitors an opportunity to form a picture of Man Ray’s life and his creative processes. Among the objects on display are personal items, such as pieces of jewellery that Man Ray made for his wife Juliet, private letters, drawings and manuscripts, including two early drafts of Man Ray’s autobiography, a formula for photographic chemicals and a patent application for a magnetic chess set. Also on show are documents never exhibited before, which Man Ray used as source material for his paintings and prints, as well as proofs containing comments Man Ray made for himself and his printers. These exhibits are assigned to the finished works to which they refer, thus offering a new insight into Ray’s life and artistic work.

The Unconcerned But Not Indifferent exhibition has been arranged in accordance with Man Ray’s four creative periods: New York (1890–1921), Paris (1921–1940), Los Angeles (1940–1951) and Paris (1950–1976). It begins with New York and a collection of proofs from Man Ray’s personal card files, in which he kept a record of his early works. These card files, the originals of which were stolen from Man Ray’s studio after his death and have never reappeared, were the subject of considerable controversy and have never been exhibited before. Wherever possible they are assigned to the works they document. Among the items on display from Man Ray’s years in Paris are the records of his own works and those of other artists, including Duchamp, Picasso, Miro and Leger, as well as a little book of Rousseau’s work that he produced. It was through Rousseau’s work that Man Ray learned to become a photographer, thus enabling him to gain entry to the Paris art world in the 1920s. Most of these works are likewise unknown.

Text Credits: The Berliner Festspiele, Berlin.
Image Credits: Poster of the exhibition “Man Ray: Unconcerned But Not Indifferent” (Design: Steenbrink Vormgeving, Berlin).

Futurismo 100

2009-01-03T14:05:00.007+01:00

ROVERETO
Futurismo 100: Illuminations
Avant-gardes compared. Italy, Germany, Russia
Mart
17 January 2009 to 7 June 2009
Curated by Ester Coen.

One hundred years after the publication of the Futurist manifesto, the innovative force of the highly important art movement launched by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909 has lost none of its power. The Mart celebrates the centenary of Italy’s leading avant-garde movement by taking a fresh look at it in an exhibition curated by Ester Coen, reconstructing its development within the historical context of the early 20th century.

VENICE
Astrazioni
Museo Correr
5 June to 4 October 2009.

MILAN
Simultaneità
Palazzo Reale
15 October 2009 to 25 January 2010
Curated by Ester Coen.

The last of the cycle of art exhibitions concludes the centenary celebrations of Futurism with a tribute to Umberto Boccioni. With Umberto Boccioni as the point of reference, Simultaneita' compares a sequence of Futurist works by Carlo Carrà and Luigi Russolo to avant-garde European sculpture of the same period, exploring some of the most significant stages of the movement. On display at Simultaneita' are collections from the Tate in London, Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, including Alexander Archipenko, Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Jacob Epstein, Jacques Lipchitz, Antoine Pevsner, Naum Gabo and Vladimir Tatlin.

ROME
Futurismo
Scuderie del Quirinale
20 February to 24 May 2009.

Starting with the early Futurist period, the exhibition offers works from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to weave a path around a central core - the reconstruction of the 1912 Futurist exhibition held at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris.

Futurism in Paris

2008-10-02T16:49:00.006+02:00

Le Futurisme à Paris
Une avant-garde explosive
Centre Georges Pompidou
October 15, 2008 - January 26, 2009
The exhibition will travel to Rome and London
Press Release [pdf]

Catalogue: Le Futurisme à Paris: Une avant-garde explosive / ed. by Didier Ottinger (Forthcoming 2008)
ISBN 9782844263599

To mark the centenary of the publication of the Futurist Manifesto of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, the Centre Pompidou presents 'Le Futurisme à Paris – une avant-garde explosive'.

Futurism, the first avant-garde movement of the 20th century, celebrated technical progress, the energy of crowds, and the hectic activity of modern cities. In place of the balance and stability inherited from classical models, it wished to substitute modern vigorousness, dynamism and speed that disintegrate forms.

The Centre Pompidou has made the re-interpretation of the principal movements in the history of art in the 20th century one of the key directions of its new strategy for temporary exhibitions. In this framework, the exhibition's ambition is to re-assess the place and the status of Futurism, a fundamental source of modern art, and to examine its impact on the French avant-garde, Cubism, inviting viewers to make a fresh analysis of the relations between these two movements through more than 200 works and documents.

All the Futurist painters, as well as Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, Félix Del Marle, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Frantisek Kupka, Fernand Léger, Kasimir Malévitch, Jean Metzinger, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso and Ardengo Soffici are the protagonists of this dialogue whose echo was international in scope, as Futurist concepts became a source of inspiration for numerous artists, from London to Moscow. Decidedly optimistic about the future, Futurism invented a new relationship between man and the modern world based on unconditional faith in mankind's prospects. By focusing on the Futurist adventure, the Centre Pompidou is realizing its primary ambition: to show how the creative vision of artists shapes the thinking, action and perception of each epoch.

DADA at MoMA

2008-06-02T09:31:00.007+02:00

Exhibition
The Museum of Modern Art, New York NY
May 21–July 28, 2008
The exhibition was organized by Michelle Elligott, Museum Archivist
More about the exhibition.

To coincide with the launch of the Museum's ambitious publication Dada in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, the ninth volume of MoMA's Studies in Modern Art series, this exhibition provides an overview of the Museum's long and rich history of collecting, documenting, interpreting, and exhibiting works of the Dada era. This display of original documents, letters, floor plans, installation photographs, and oral history commentary highlights landmark exhibitions at MoMA; addresses significant Dada acquisitions, key donors, and innovative film programs and scholarship at the Museum throughout the years; and documents the evolution of the installation of Dada works in the Museum's collection.

Catalogue
Dada in the Collection features some seventy works in various mediums—including books, collages, drawings, films, paintings, and reliefs—presented in large-scale reproductions and accompanied by in depth, object-focused entries by an interdepartmental group of the Museum's curators.
Catalyzed by the major Dada exhibition that appeared in 2005 and 2006 in Paris and Washington, D.C. and at MoMA, the book benefits from new scholarship generated by the extraordinary opportunity the exhibitions created for an international community of scholars to examine the Museum's objects beside those on loan from other institutions. This is the ninth volume of Studies in Modern Art, the Museum's publication series devoted to scholarly research on its collection. Includes 242 illustrations.

Dada in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art
Edited by Anne Umland and Adrian Sudhalter, with Scott Gerson
ISBN 9780870706684
Published in 2008
Pages 352.

Surrealism and Situtationism

2008-06-02T05:38:00.002+02:00

Surréalistes et situationnistes, vies parallèles
"Histoire et documents"
Jérôme Duwa. Préface de Christophe Bourseiller
Editions Dilecta : Paris 2008
237 pp.

André Breton and Guy Debord never met. It seems indeed that both were mutually exclusive, so to speak.in the sense that Breton and surrealism were said to belong to the past, which World War II had just erased, so that everything had to start from scratch again. But such ahasty judgment on surrealism has to be reconsidered in a spirit which refuses to settle old scores. Was the reason, then, a fundamental divergence or a profound, secret likeness hidden behind superficial rivalry? A detailed history of the up and down relationships between the Paris and Brussels surrealists on the one hand, and Guy Debord and the Situationnists on the other, remained to be written so as to understand one of the mainsprings of the construction of the Situationnist identity. This essay, which includes an anthology of declarations and pamphlets,a dozen illustrations and texts by Jean-Louis Bédouin, André Breton, Claude Courtot, Adrien Dax, Guy Debord, Tom Gutt, Simon Hantaï, Gérard Legrand, Marcel Mariën, Benjamin Péret, José Pierre, Jean Schuster, Jan Strijbosch, Raoul Vaneigem and Joseph Wolman, helps follow the tumultuous course of those parallel lives.

Breaking the Rules

2008-03-11T10:02:00.008+01:00

The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900 - 1937
British Library, London
9 November 2007 - 30 March 2008

Mainly through the medium of print, 'Breaking the Rules' throws new light on Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Surrealism and other movements; on the artists who changed the face of modern culture for ever; and on the cities that experienced their work, from Brussels to Budapest, Vienna to Vitebsk.

Star items include Marinetti's futurist experiment with words, type and visual text, Zang Tumb Tuum; the Burliuk Brothers' Tango with Cows; and the notebooks and corrected proofs of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

In addition to browsing books, manifestos, flyers, posters and even album covers, you can see remarkable films and listen to rare historic recordings.

The exhibition came quite late to my attention. I visited London this weekend and found the announcement in a bookshop. If you have the opportunity to see it: do it! It is worth while.

A fine catalogue is available.

The exhibition (and catalogue) is reviewed by Antoine Capet for The Art Tribune (March 2008) and by Mick Herron for Bookdealer No. 1790 (March 2008).

Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia

2008-02-26T09:49:00.005+01:00

The Moment Art Changed for Ever
21 February – 26 May 2008
Tate Modern, London

Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia were at the cutting edge of art in the first half of the twentieth century, and made a lasting impression on modern and contemporary art. Duchamp invented the concept of the ‘readymade’: presenting an everyday object as an artwork, Man Ray pioneered avant-garde photographic and film techniques and Picabia’s use of kitsch, popular or low-brow imagery in his paintings undermined artistic conventions.

Their shared outlook on life and art, with a taste for jokes, irony and the erotic, forged a friendship that provided support and inspiration. At the heart of the Dada movement and moving in the same artistic circles, they discussed ideas and collaborated, echoing and responding to each other’s works. Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia explores their affinities and parallels, uncovering a shared approach to questioning the nature of art.

Progressive Cologne 1920-33

2008-02-19T09:22:00.005+01:00

Progressive Cologne 1920-33
Seiwert-Hoerle-Arntz
Museum Ludwig Cologne : March 15 - June 15, 2008

Over thirty years have passed since the Cologne Progressives were last the subject of a large-scale exhibition. Based in Cologne, the loosely organized artistic circle rejected the notion that art stand in the service of radical politics. Instead, they sought a new and unique formal language re-shaped by class consciousness. The end of the Cologne Progressives coincided with the end of the Weimar Republic. During the Nazi period their art was declared "degenerate."

The Museum Ludwig introduces a new generation to the art of the Cologne Progressives. With an eye to the leftist political aims of the group, the exhibition is, crucially, an examination of their artistic practice. Critical of the contemporaneous Neue Sachlichkeit, the group looked to modern impulses from France, the Netherlands and the Soviet Union. By focusing on three core members, Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, Heinrich Hoerle and Gerd Arntz, the exhibition will reveal the group’s shared project as never before.

In addition to works from the collection of the Museum Ludwig, over forty paintings and seventy works on paper from an international array of museums and private collections will be on view - some for the very first time. Original issues of their programmatic journal a bis z, as well as key catalogs and documents from the 1920s and 1930s, will point to the group’s motives and their resonance in Germany and beyond.

A Symposium 'Form & Gesellschaft' on 4-5 April 2008 will accompany the exhibition.

Picabia and Paris Dada

2008-02-12T17:03:00.001+01:00

The Artwork Caught by the Tail
Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris
George Baker
MIT Press, Cambridge MA
October 2007
472 pp., 122 illus.
ISBN-10: 0-262-02618-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-262-02618-5
Page of the Publisher.

The artist Francis Picabia--notorious dandy, bon vivant, painter, poet, filmmaker, and polemicist--has emerged as the Dadaist with postmodern appeal, and one of the most enigmatic forces behind the enigma that was Dada. In this first book in English to focus on Picabia's work in Paris during the Dada years, art historian and critic George Baker reimagines Dada through Picabia's eyes.

Such reimagining involves a new account of the readymade--Marcel Duchamp's anti-art invention, which opened fine art to mass culture and the commodity. But in Picabia's hands, Baker argues, the Dada readymade aimed to reinvent art rather than destroy it. Picabia's readymade opened art not just to the commodity, but to the larger world from which the commodity stems: the fluid sea of capital and money that transforms all objects and experiences in its wake. The book thus tells the story of a set of newly transformed artistic practices, claiming them for art history--and naming them--for the first time: Dada Drawing, Dada Painting, Dada Photography, Dada Abstraction, Dada Cinema, Dada Montage. Along the way, Baker describes a series of nearly forgotten objects and events, from the almost lunatic range of the Paris Dada "manifestations" to Picabia's polemical writings; from a lost work by Picabia in the form of a hole (called, suggestively, The Young Girl ) to his "painting" Cacodylic Eye, covered in autographs by luminaries ranging from Ezra Pound to Fatty Arbuckle.

Baker ends with readymades in prose: a vast interweaving of citations and quotations that converge to create a heated conversation among Picabia, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. Art history has never looked like this before. But then again, Dada has never looked like art history.

Reviewed by Peter Read for Times Online.

Kurt Schwitters and the Avant-Garde

2008-02-12T12:14:00.001+01:00

Symposium 2007
Kurt Schwitters und die Avantgarde

Proceedings presented at the symposium held on June 29 through July 1, 2007 at the Sprengel Museum Hannover:

Neue Kunst – Kunstismen – Merzgebiete, Hubert van den Berg
Der Merzbau im Kontext des Architektonischen, Hanne Bergius
Kurt Schwitters und die Mystik, Götz-Lothar Darsow
Die „Kathedrale“ im Werk von Kurt Schwitters, Curt Germundson
Cicero, the Roman Hitler, Karin Orchard
Künstlerinnen im Umfeld von Kurt Schwitter, Isabel Schulz
Kurt Schwitters and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Adrian Sudhalter
Der unzeitgemässe Schwitters, Beat Wyss

Hannah Höch – All Beginnings are DADA!

2008-01-05T19:46:00.001+01:00

Hannah Höch – All Beginnings are DADA!
Museum Tinguely, Basel
January 16 through May 4, 2008

On the site of the museum: press releases in English, French and German and Pressphotos

The Museum Tinguely presents the first extensive survey in Switzerland dedicated to Hannah Höch (1889-1978), the sole woman member of the group Dada Berlin. The exhibition covers the period from her early Dada years during and immediately following the First World War through the 1920s, a fertile phase in her career during which Höch was in contact with numerous important avant-garde artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp, Theo van Doesburg. She collaborated in part with them, producing masterly collages, profound yet ironical. During the 1930s and ‘40s, she worked in total retirement and secrecy – and her works contain a cryptic criticism of the National Socialist regime. Her late works, less known, in which she appears to anticipate Pop Art by her themes and colours, were her reaction to new scientific discoveries of the day. To close the exhibition, a section will be dedicated to Höch’s garden – a recurrent theme throughout the artist’s oeuvre.

The exhibition was conceived in close collaboration with the Berlinische Galerie, seat of the Hannah Höch archives; it is organised in a chronological order and divided into five sections, opening with Höch’s large-scale photo-collage 'Lebensbild' that the artist created in 1972/1973 so to speak as a sort of visual autobiography. The collage harks back to numerous important works that the visitor can encounter throughout the exhibition.

Anarchy and Art

2007-10-10T14:55:00.003+02:00

Allan Antliff
Anarchy and Art. From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Arsenal Pulp Press : Vancouver, 2007)
224 pp.
ISBN: 1551522187 / ISBN13: 9781551522180
Publishers Page.

In numerous essays, Allan Antliff interrogates moments of engagement when artists, poets, philosophers, and critics have confronted pivotal events over the past 140 years. The survey begins with artist Gustave Courbet and writer Emile Zola's activism during the 1871 Paris Commune (which established the modern-day French republic), and ends with an examination of anarchist art during the fall of the Soviet empire. Other subjects include the Neo-Impressionists and their depictions of the homeless in the 1890s; the Dada movement in New York City during World War I; the decline of the Russian Avant-Garde during the 1920s and 30s; the West Coast Beats of the 1940s and 50s; the Modernists of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s; and anarchistic responses to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by visual artists.

Reviewed by Irene Gammel for bookforum.

Also by Allan Antliff:
* Avant-garde Fascism. The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909-1939 (Durham DC 2007)
* Anarchist Modernism. Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (Vancouver 2004)
* The Culture of Revolt. Art and Anarchism in America, 1908-1920, dissertation, accepted by the University of Delaware (1998)
* Making Mischief. Dada Invades New York / by Francis M. Naumann, Beth Venn, Allan Antliff (New York 1996)

Avant-Garde and Criticism

2007-09-23T10:55:00.001+02:00

Avant-Garde and Criticism
Klaus Beekman and Jan de Vries (Eds.)
Amsterdam/New York NY, 2007
361 pp.
ISBN 978-90-420-2152-5
Series: Avant-Garde Critical Studies 21

Table of Contents:

Klaus BEEKMAN and Jan de VRIES: Introduction. Criticism and Avant-Garde
Jean-Roch BOUILLER: Art Criticism and Avant-Garde: André Lhote’s Written Works
Ben REBEL: Architectural Criticism in de 8 en OPBOUW
Ansje van BEUSEKOM: Theo van Doesburg and Writings on Film in De Stijl
Peter G.F. EVERSMANN: The International Theatre Exhibition of 1922 and the Critics
Nico LAAN: The Making of a Reputation: the Case of Cobra
Hugo VERDAASDONK: Avant-Garde Reviewing of New Book Releases. A Case Study from The Netherlands
Willem G. WESTSTEIJN: Mayakovsky as Literary Critic
Gregor LANGFELD: German Art in The Netherlands before and after World War II
Arie HARTOG: Banality in Art Criticism. Comments on the Reception of Art in the German Daily Press of the 1920s
Hubert F. van den BERG: A Victorious Campaign for Dadaism? On the Press Coverage of the Dutch Dada Tour of 1923
Klaus BEEKMAN: The Inevitability of Argumentative Criticism. Theo van Doesburg and the Constructive Review
Ralf GRÜTTEMEIER: On Intentionality and Avant-Garde Criticism
Wiljan van den AKKER and Gillis DORLEIJN: Resistance to the Avant-Garde. Criticism of the Avant-Garde in Dutch Literary Periodicals
Sabine van WESEMAEL: Dutch Contemporaries on Proust and the Historic Avant-Garde
Hestia BAVELAAR: The Writing Artists of the Magazine Kroniek van Kunst en Kultuur (Chronicle of Art and Culture) in the Period 1935-1941

Read more on the page of the publisher and Amazon.com [search inside].

Picabia - Poetry, Prose, and Provocation

2007-09-17T13:05:00.001+02:00

Francis Picabia
I Am a Beautiful Monster. Poetry, Prose, and Provocation
Translated by Marc Lowenthal
The MIT Press : Cambridger MA, September 30, 2007
560 pp. ISBN-10: 0262162431 / ISBN-13: 978-0262162432

Very little of Picabia's poetry and prose has been translated into English, and his literary experiments have never been the subject of close critical study. I Am a Beautiful Monster is the first definitive edition in English of Picabia's writings, gathering a sizable array of Picabia's poetry and prose and, most importantly, providing a critical context for it with an extensive introduction and detailed notes by the translator.
I Am a Beautiful Monster provides the texts of all of Picabia's significant publications, his books Fifty-two Mirrors, Poems and Drawings of the Daughter Born without a Mother, Purring Poetry, Unique Eunuch, Yes No, Chi-lo-sa, Thoughts without Language, and others, all presented complete, many of them accompanied by their original illustrations.

Hannah Höch - Aller Anfang ist Dada

2007-06-24T14:54:00.002+02:00

This exhibition is devoted to the probably most significant female German artist of the classical modern period: Hannah Höch. Her œuvre has recently found new international recognition and Höch, who was particularly famous for her collages, will now be honoured with a major show again. This will be the first exhibition in her home city of Berlin for more than 15 years. Around 160 works drawn from all her creative periods will showcase the extraordinary variety of her artistic production, which always kept pace with the latest techniques of her time.

Hannah Höch - Aller Anfang ist Dada, Berlinische Galerie Berlin (April 6 to July 2, 2007). Press Release (English). Catalogue available (see image). Video Interview with curator Ralf Burmeister.