Breaking the Rules

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

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

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

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

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:

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

Hannah Höch – All Beginnings are DADA!

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.

See also Hannah Höch, June 2007.

Anarchy and Art

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)