Category: Dada

I Believe in Artist

~ JezzieG ~ 2 Comments
Marcel Duchamp 1887- 1968

Marcel Duchamp
Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Conceptual Art, Kinetic Art
Born: 28 July 1887, Normandy, France
Nationality: French
Died: 2 October 1968, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

Duchamp was a painter, sculptor, writer, and chess player whose work is most often associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse; Duchamp is regarded as one of the three artists who defined the revolutionary development of the plastic arts in the first decades of the 20th century. Duchamp’s developments in painting and sculpture had an enormous impact on 20th-century art. By challenging the notion of what is art with his readymades, Duchamp is one of few artists that changed the course of art history. He sent shock waves across the art world that are still rippling today.

Duchamp challenged and changed art history in a way few artists did, by challenging the notion of what is art with his first readymades that sent shockwaves through the art world that are still felt today. Duchamp’s preoccupation with the mechanisms of human sexuality and desire and his fondness of wordplay aligns his work with Surrealism, although Duchamp refused to be affiliated with any specific art movement. His insistence art should be driven by ideas above all else earnt Duchamp recognition as the father of Conceptual Art. His refusal to follow art conventions and a deep fear of repetition led to Duchamp producing relatively few works in his short career, and ultimately, he retired from the art world to spend his later years playing chess

Nude Descending, 1912. Oil on canvas – The Philadelphia Museum of Art: Collection of Louise and Walter Arenberg. USA

Duchamp coined the term ‘readymade’ to designate mass-produced everyday objects taken out of context and promoted to the status of a piece of art by the choice of the artist. A category of art that was a performative act as much as it was about style. ‘Readymade’ had far-reaching implications as to what can be considered an object of art.

Rejecting the purely visual and what he referred to as ‘retinal pleasure,’ Duchamp favoured an intellectual and concept-driven approach to art, artmaking, and art viewing. However, he remained committed to the study of perspective and optics that underpinned his experiments with kinetics and kinetic devices reflecting the representations of motion and machines common to both the Futurist and Surrealist artists of the time

Duchamp’s work is characterized by his tongue-in-cheek wit and subversive humour rife with innuendo. He formed puns out of everyday phrases and expressions that he conveyed visually. It is the linguistic dimension of his work that paved the way for Conceptual art.

Raised in Normandy in a family of artists, Duchamp’s father was mayor of Blainville and his mother raised the seven children and painted landscapes portraying the French countryside. Family time consisted of playing chess, painting, reading, and playing music. One of Duchamp’s earliest works, “Landscape at Blainville (1902) which he painted at aged 15, reflected his love of Claude Monet/ He was close to his two older brothers, and after they left home to become artists, Duchamp joined them in Paris to study painting at the Académie Julian. His brother, Jacques, supported him during his studies, and Duchamp’s earned an income as a cartoonist.

Early 1900s Paris was the ideal place for Duchamp to get acquainted with modern trends in art and painting. He studied Fauvism, Cubism, and Impressionism as well as the innovative approaches to structure and colour. He favoured the Cubist concept of reordering reality instead of simply representing it. Paintings such as “Nude Descending a Staircase” (1912) illustrated Duchamp’s ideas of machinery and its connection to the movement of the human body through space. Duchamp also subscribed to the avant-garde ideals of the artist as an anti-academic and felt an affinity to artists such as Odilon Redon. From the early stages of his career, Duchamp was drawn to the Symbolistic allure of mystery such as women as the elusive femme fatale, sexual identity, and desire which eventually led him towards Dad and Surrealism.

3 Standard Stoppages. 1913-14. Mixed media – The Museum of Modern Art, New York. USA

By 1911 Duchamp met Francis Picabia and the following year attended a theatre adaption of Raymond Roussel’s “Impressions d’Afrique” with Picabia and Guillaume Apollinaire. The experience made a deep impression on Duchamp and led to his interest in cross-genre pollination which influenced the artist to develop an eclectic approach to art creation.

Duchamp emigrated to New York in 1915 and created several readymades. By signing them, Duchamp laid claim to found objects such as a snow shovel, a bicycle wheel, or even a urinal. Objects tied loosely but symbolically to themes such as desire, childhood memories, and erotica all designed to show the absurdity of the practice of canonizing avant-garde art. During 1948 to 1923 Duchamp devoted his time to planning and creating one of his two major works “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even or The Large Glass.” An installation of machinery wedged between glass panels was his first rejection of the painterly obsession with pleasing the eye.

As the Surrealist movement became popular in France, Duchamp travelled between Paris and New York participating in printed textual projects, sculptural installations, and collaborative works in all mediums with the Surrealists. Duchamp always kept a distance from groups – and the politics they came with. As such he was never truly part of the Surrealist or Dada groups,

L.H.O.O.Q, 1919. Collotype – Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Nederlands

In 1920, Duchamp in an alternative female persona, Rose Selavy, in order to explore fully the ideas of sexual identity. He continued making his readymades and exhibited the famous “Bottle Rack” series in 1936. However, he secluded himself from the wider art world and kept to a tight-knit group of artists, including Man Ray, who photographed Duchamp throughout his life. For more than twenty years Duchamp worked in complete secrecy on his second masterwork, “Etant Donnes” a sexualized and elaborate diorama, Duchamp shunned the public eye, preferring to play chess with select guests until his death in 1968

Following his withdrawal from the art world, Duchamp remained an influential, if passive, presence in New York avant-garde circles until he was rediscovered by the Neo-Dadaists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in the 1950s. Duchamp welcomed an association with Dada, many years after the group’s demise, without conforming to the politics and issues of group dynamics.

Duchamp insisted that art is an expression of the mind rather than the eye or the hand which attracted Minimalists and Conceptual artists alike. It ushered in a new era where the seminal concept of the mass-produced readymade was seized upon not only by Andy Warhol and other Pop artists who claim Duchamp as their founding father but also by Fluxus, Arte Povera, and Performance artists due to its performative aspects.

Duchamp’s criticism of art institutions made him a cult figure for generations of artists refusing to go down the path of the conventional, commercial art career. The theoretical thrust of Duchamp’s eclectic and limited output accounts for his continuing impact on successive 20th and 21st-century avant-garde movements and individual artists alike.

La Boite-en-Valise, 1935-41. Mixed media – Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge, MA, USA

Resources

The Duchamp Effect by Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon

Duchamp: A Biography by Calvin Tomkins

Karawane by Hugo Ball

~ JezzieG
Karawane by Hugo Ball

Karawane
1916
Dada

As described by Ball, his poetry was an attempt to return to the innermost alchemy of the word” to create a new language outside conventionality. Ball created sound poems, combining literary and musical composition as an emphasis on the role of human speech in the recitation of the text. The art of sound poetry is focused on phonetics rather than semantics or syntax. Ball’s sound poems were intended to disconnect completely from any coherent language.

Hugo Ball 1886-1927

Hugo Ball
Dada
Born: 22 February 1886, Pirmasens, Germany
Nationality: German-Swiss
Died: 14 September 1927, Sant’Abbondio, Switzerland

Ball was an author, poet, and founder of the Dada movement in 1916. He was a pioneer in the development of sound poetry

After Picasso, God

~ JezzieG
Dora Maar 1907-1997

Artist: Dora Maar
Born: 22 November 1907, Tours, France
Nationality: French
Movements: Surrealism, Dada and Surrealist Photography, Photomontage
Died: 16 July 1997, Paris, France

Maar was a talented photographer and made work that developed quickly from acute poetic realism to Surrealist manipulations. She made images out of her own emotional interior and her desire to escape from it. Maar abandoned photography because Picasso insisted photographers were painters waiting to be released. Between 1935-45 she was in love with Picasso and became a muse for other artists as well as a practicing painter herself. Maar suffered a breakdown after separating from Picasso and recovered through the help of Jacques Lacan, the famous psychiatrist. She moved from Paris to rural Provence and in later life painted abstract landscapes and melancholic still life. A recluse, she became a devoted Catholic. Living in the shadow of Picasso she never returned to photography, the medium which exulted in her exquisite and unusual talent.

After the Rain, 1933. Photograph

Maar’s most surrealistic photographs examine recurring motifs such as hair, shells, shadows, and spirals. The images are disturbing, foreboding, and macabre. An invaluable documenter of the lives of other artists, Maar famously photographed Picasso as he completed Guernica and other female Surrealist artists. Marr surrounded the women in darkness to focus on their defiant and seductive characteristics, exposing uneasy aspects of the human subconscious.

In Picasso’s ‘The Weeping Woman’ series of portraits of Maar, she is depicted with two faces made up of a collection of sharp and violent lines. The paintings exemplify anxiety in love and the potential of harm caused by a destructive and toxic relationship. Maar’s later career was sadly tainted by her tumultuous affair with Picasso and stands as a warning to others.

Maar was born Henrietta Theodora Markovich in Tours, France. Her father was a Croatian architect; her mother was French and raised in the Catholic faith. She spent most of her childhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where her father was working on several projects. She read in English and spoke Spanish and French fluently. Naturally left-handed but her parents and teachers had forced her to use her right hand for writing, eating, and conducting daily affairs. She always used her left hand to draw and paint.

Maar returned to Paris to study painting in 1925. She attended the École des Arts Décoratifs, Académie Julien, and Académie da Passy. She also spent time studying with the Cubist André Lhote. She abandoned painting for photography and studied at the École de Photographie de la Ville de Paris. It was at this time she shortened her name and became Dora Maar.

Untitled, 1934. Gelatin silver print Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France

The French set designer and photographer Pierre Kéfer noticed Maar’s talents and around 1930 asked to share his studio in Neuilly. They worked together on advertising, portraits, and fashion photography. Maar also depicted nudes for erotic publications, posed for artists such as Man Ray, and took photographs for the books of art critic, historian, and Louvre curator, Germain Bazin.

Maar began associating with some of the most prominent intellectuals in Europe at the time. She considered the advertising photographer and director of a French weekly newspaper, Louis-Victor Emmanuel Sougez, as her mentor. With Henri Cartier-Bresson, she studied photography and he encouraged her to become a photojournalist. Driven by Sougez, Maar’s exploration of photography deepened. She opened her own studio at 29 Rue d’Astorg when the Kéfer-Maar studio closed.

Maar worked from her studio through the early to mid-1930s and began creating some of her most well-known Surrealist photographs. She immersed herself in the Surrealist circles and was admired by the leading poets and artists of the movement. Many of her photographic portraits from the 1930s were included in Paul Eluard’s Le Temps Déboirde (1947).

A committed and active leftist, Maar joined and supported anti-Fascist political groups, including Contre-Attaque, Masses, and Octobre. Wearing her passions and beliefs on her sleeve she was known to be inclined to stormy, reactionary outbursts.

Pére Ubu, 1936. Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA

Picasso and Maar met on a movie set in 1935, although Picasso did not recall the encounter. Maar engineered a meeting with Picasso the following year by sitting at a table at the Café de Deux Magots, knowing the artist was a frequent patron. She played a game involving stabbing a small knife between her fingers and Picasso watched as she occasionally jabbed her fingers and small drops of blood appeared on her lacy black gloves. This enchanted the narcissistic artist and led to a tempestuous love affair between the two. Picasso painted Maar many times and she became renowned as the model for the Weeping Woman canvases made between 1937 and 1944. Most of these portraits appeared tortured and distorted.

Despite the dysfunction between Maar and Picasso, she was the only person Picasso permitted in his studio while he was working on ‘Guernica’, his 1937 groundbreaking painting. Maar extensively photographed the piece, was the model for the woman with the lamp, and painted a few brushstrokes on the canvas. The Guernica series of photographs were among the last of Maar’s photographic work as she followed Picasso who convinced her painting was a superior medium.

Maar’s relationship with Picasso deteriorated along with her mental health. Picasso left for Francoise Gilot and Maar was sent to St. Anne’s Hospital for electroshock therapy. The Neo-Freudian psychiatrist, Jacques Lacon, took over her care. Under his reluctant guidance, Maar turned to religion, and following experiments with Buddhism and the occult she became a fervent Roman Catholic. She became reclusive but began to focus on painting. Maar concentrated on still life and landscapes creating a large body of work in the remaining decades of her life. Maar divided her time between Paris and Ménerbes, eventually living full-time in the latter. She was devout for the rest of her life and most people in Ménerbes only saw her when she went to church services.

Rue d’Astorg, 1936. Gelatin silver print

In 1990 the final exhibition of Maar’s work before her death was held at the 1900-2000 gallery in Paris. At this time, Maar was a dedicated follower of the auction results for the works of Picasso and lived off the sales of the ones in her possession at the end of her life. Maar passed away in 1997. She kept everything that Picasso had given her, no matter how bizarre, strange, or grim; including paintings, newspaper cuttings, and sketches on random pieces of paper. Following her death, Maar’s collection was sold at auction, worth millions of dollars which were given to distant relatives as she had never married nor had children

Resources:

Finding Dora Maar: An Artist, an Address Book, a Life by Brigitte Benkemoun

God by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

~ JezzieG
God by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

God
1917
Dada
Plumbing trap mounted on mitre box
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA

“God,” a readymade sculpture exemplifies the spirit and avant-garde strategies of New York Dada. Made in the same year as Duchamp’s “Fountain” it consists of a cast iron drain trap set on its end and mounted on a mitre box. The Baroness elevates everyday and industrial art and questions the view on the use value and aesthetic value of art. The piece shows a Dadaist irreverence towards the authority of higher powers, substituting the holy with lowly plumbing materials. The sculpture, a pipe no longer fit for purpose is also suggestive of a twisted phallus and perhaps the Baroness is making a critique of a male-dominated, phallocentric society.

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven 1874-1927

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
Dada, Performance Art, Readymade and The Found Object, Modern Photography, Proto-Feminist Artists
Born: 12 July 1874, Swinemunde, Germany
Nationality: German-American
Died: 14 December 1927, Paris, France

The Baroness, as Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was known, was a living legend in the bohemian enclave of Greenwich Village, New York in the years before and after the First World War. She was a catalyst and provocateur of the burgeoning Dada movement in New York, and the Baroness obliterated the conventional boundaries and norms of womanhood and femininity whilst upending the notions of what was considered to be art

Nothing, Nothing, Nothing

~ JezzieG

Dada
Started: 1916
Ended: 1924

An artistic and literary movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland arose as a reaction to WWI and the nationalism that many thoughts had led to the war. Influenced by the avant-garde movements of Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism and Expressionism the artistic output was wildly diverse, ranging from art to performance art, poetry to photography, sculpture, painting and collage. Mark by its mockery of materialistic and nationalistic attitudes Dada’s aesthetic proved a powerful influence on artists in many cities including Berlin, Paris, New York and London.

Ici, C’est Stieglitz (Here, This is Stieglitz) by Francis Picabia, 1915

Dada was the precedent to the Conceptual Art movement, where the artists focussed not on the making of aesthetically pleasant objects but on works that upended bourgeois sensitivities and asked difficult questions about society, the role of artists, and the purpose of art. So intent were the Dada artists on opposing bourgeois culture that they barely favoured themselves. Appropriately the group was founded in the Cabaret Voltaire, named after the 18th-century satirist, Voltaire, whose novella Candide mocked the idiocies of society. Going against all the normalities of traditional art production artists such as Hans Arp incorporated chance into the creation of their works. Chance enabled the Dadaists to challenge the norms of the art world and to question the role played by the artist in the artistic process. Dada artists were also known for their use of the readymade – everyday objects that could be purchased and with a little manipulation by the artist be presented as works of art. Readymades questioned artistic creativity and the definition of art in society.

During World War I Switzerland was neutral with limited censorship and it was in Zurich that Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings founded the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 in a tavern back room on Spielgelasse. Ball put out a press release to attract artists and intellectuals. The first Dada evening was held in July 1916 at which the movement’s first manifesto was read out by Ball. It is not clear how the word Dad was invented but the most common theory is Richard Huelsenbeck found the name by randomly plunging a knife in a dictionary. A colloquial French term for a hobbyhorse it also echoes some of the first words of a child and these impressions of childishness and absurdity appealed to the group. Dad put a distance between the group and conventional society. Many of the group members also acknowledged that it meant the same or nothing in all languages. The aim of Dada was to help stop the war and to air the frustrations with nationalist and bourgeois attitudes that led up to it. The anti-authoritarian stance opposing any form of group leadership or ideology made for a protean movement.

Reciting the Sound Poem “Karawane” by Hugo Ball, 1916

In Zürich, the artists published a Dada magazine and held exhibitions to spread their anti-war, anti-art message. Tzara founded Galerie Dada after Ball left to pursue journalism in 1917. Tzara went on to become the leader of the movement with his unrelenting campaigns to spread the ideals of Dada by showering French and Italian writers and artists with letters. In July 1917, the group published Dada, an art and literature review, with five editions from Zürich and two final ones from Paris.

Many of the artists returned to their home counties when the war ended in 1918, spreading the movement further. The end of Dada in Zurich followed the event in April 1919 that, by design, turned into a riot that Tzara thought furthered the aims of Dada, undermining art convention through audience participation. It attracted over 1000 people and involved speeches intended to anger the crowd, discordant music, and encouragement of crowd participation until the crowd lost control and began to destroy several props. This was a total negation of traditional art and for Tzara, the success of the riot was the audience participation. Soon after, Tzara journeyed to Paris, where he met André Breton and they began formulating the theories that would eventually echo through Surrealism. Dadaists did not set out to consciously form micro-regional movements of Dada. Dada spread throughout Europe and into New York with the movement of a few key artists, and each city influenced the aesthetics of the respective Dada groups.

Huelsenbeck returned from Zurich in 1917 and founded Club Dada in Berlin, and included Johannes Baader and Hannah Höch as attendees. Close to a war zone, the Berlin Dadaists came out publicly against the Weimar Republic and produced art that was more political in nature, including satirical paintings and collages featuring wartime imagery, government figures, and political cartoon clippings contextualized into biting commentaries. The photomontage technique was also developed in Berlin during this period.

Excluded from the Berlin Group because of links to Der Sturm gallery and the Expressionist style, Kurt Schwitters formed his own Dada group in Hanover in 1919; however, he was the only practitioner. His Merz, as he referred to his art, was less political in its motivation than Club Dada and instead examined modernist preoccupation with shape and colour.

Untitled (Squares Arranged according to the Laws of Chance) by Hans Arp, 1917

In 1918 another Dada group was formed in Cologne by Max Ernst and Johannes Theodor Baargeld. Hans Arp in 1919 and make breakthroughs in his collage experiments. Exhibits focused on the anti-bourgeois and nonsensical art. German Dada began to diminish in 1922 when Ernst left Cologne for Paris, effectively dissolving the group. In 1924 Breton published the Surrealist manifesto and many of the remaining Dadaists joined the Surrealist movement.

On hearing of the Dada movement in Zürich, Parisian artists including Andre Breton, Paul Eluard., and others became interested. Tzara left Zürich for Paris in 1919 and Arp arrived there from Cologne the next year. In May 1920 a Dada festival took place after many of the originators of Dada had gathered in Paris. The festival included demonstrations, exhibitions, and live performances organized alongside the Dada manifestos and journals, including Dada and Le Cannibale.

Picabia and Breton withdrew from the Dada movement in 1921 and Picabia published a special issue of 391 claiming Paris Dada had become a mediocre established movement, the one thing it had originally fought against. Two final Dada stage performances were held in Paris in 1923 before internal fighting collapsed the group and ceded into Surrealism. A crucial creative link between Zürich Dadaists and Parisian proto-Surrealists, such as Breton, was provided by Marcel Duchamp. The Swiss croup considered Duchamp’s readymades to be Dada artworks and appreciated Duchamp’s refusal to define art.

New York City, like Zürich during the war, was a refuge for artists and writers. Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia arrived in the city in 1915 and soon after met Man Ray. Duchamp, a critical communicator, brought the concept of anti-art to the group and their art took a mechanistic turn. One of Duchamp’s most important pieces, The Large Glass was started in 1915 in New York and is regarded as a major milestone in its depiction of strange and erotic drama using mechanical forms.

Duchamp, Picabia and Man Ray were joined by American artist Beatrice Wood in 1916, followed by the writers Henri-Pierre Roche and Minna Loy. Most of the anti-art activity occurred in Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery or at the studio of Walter and Louise Arensberg. Publications including Rongwrong, The Blind Man, and New York Dada challenged the conventions of museum art with humour rather than the bitterness of the European groups. During this time Duchamp began exhibiting readymade (found objects) such as a bottle rack and got involved with the Society of Independent Artists.

The New York, Zürich and Paris Dadaist groups are tied together by Picabia’s travels from 1917 to 1924 he also published the Dada periodical 391. First published in 1920 391 was stylised on Stiegeltz’s 291. Picabia went on to publish 391 in various cities, including New York, Paris and Zürich, depending on where he was residing at the time and with the assistance of friends in various other places.

With intriguing overlaps and paradoxes, Dada seeks to demystify art in the populist sense yet remain cryptic enough to permit the viewer to interpret artworks in various ways. Some Dada artists depicted people and scenes in order to analyse movement and form whilst others, such as Man Ray, employed abstraction to express the metaphysical essence of the subject matter. Both methods sought to deconstruct the daily experience in challenging and rebellious ways. To fully understand Dada the viewer needs to reconcile the silly and slapdash styles with the deep anti-bourgeois message

A crucial component of Dada art was irreverence, whether by lack of respect for the bourgeois convention, authority, conventional creative methods, or the artistic canon. Each group varied in its focus with the Berlin group being the most anti-government and the New York group being the most anti-art.

Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany by Hannah Höch, 1919

A readymade, an object that already existed and commandeered by Dada artists as a work of art, often combined with other readymades such as Duchamp’s “Bicycle Wheel.” creating an assemblage. The works were often created by chance to challenge bourgeois ideas about art and artistic creativity. Many of the readymades and assemblages were of a bizarre nature, a quality that enabled the group to merge in with Surrealism,

Chance was an underpinning concept of most Dada art from the abstract and beautiful compositions of Schwitters to the large assemblages of Duchamp. Chance embraced the random and the accidental to release creativity from rational control. In addition to the loss of rational control, Dada lacked preparatory work and embraced artworks that were flawed and fitted well with the Dada irreverence for traditional art methods.

Closely tied to the irreverence of Dada was humour, often in the form of irony. The use of the readymade is integral to Dada’s irony showing the awareness that there is nothing with intrinsic value. Irony also provided the artists with some flexibility and expressed their embracing of a crazy world and not taking themselves or their work too seriously. The Dada humour is a resounding YES to everything being art.

After the disbanding of a number of Dada groups, many artists joined other art movements, especially Surrealism. Dada’s irrationality and chance led directly to the Surrealist love of fantasy and expression of the imaginary. Artists such as Picabia, Arp, and Ernst were members of both movements and their works were a catalyst in art based on the relaxation of conscious control over art creation.

Considered a watershed moment in 20th-century art, Dada is the antecedent of Conceptual Art. Without Dada, there would be no post-modernism as we know it. Almost all the underlying postmodern theory in visual, written, musical, and dramatic art was at the very least utilized by Dada artists.

Many artistic movements since Dada can trace their influences to Dada. Other than the obvious Surrealism, Neo, Dada and Conceptual Art these movements also include Pop Art, Fluxus, Situationist International, Feminist Art, Minimalism, and Performance Art. Dada has been a profound influence on graphic design and the fields of advertising

Resources:

Dada: Art and Anti-Art (World of Art) by Hans Richter

Dada & Surrealism (Art and Ideas) by Matthew Gale

Dada Portrait of Berenice Abbott by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

~ JezzieG

Dada Portrait of Berenice Abbott
1923-1926
Dada
Gouache, metallic paint, and tinted lacquer with varnish, metal foil, celluloid, fiberglass, glass beads, metal objects, cut-and-pasted painted paper, gesso, and cloth on paperboard
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bernice Abbot was a lifelong friend of the Baroness. They met in New York in 1919 and Abbott was taken with the Baroness’s performance transgressions. The portrait is rich with references to Abbott’s appearance and life and captures the close relationship they shared. The Baroness’s dog is pictured at the bottom of the canvas, symbolic of the animal’s fondness for Abbott.

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven 1874-1927

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Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
Dada, Performance Art, Readymade and The Found Object, Modern Photography, Proto-Feminist Artists
Born: 12 July 1874, Swinemunde, Germany
Nationality: German-American
Died: 14 December 1927, Paris, France

The Baroness, as Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was known, was a living legend in the bohemian enclave of Greenwich Village, New York in the years before and after the First World War. She was a catalyst and provocateur of the burgeoning Dada movement in New York, and the Baroness obliterated the conventional boundaries and norms of woman hood and femininity whilst upending the notions of what was considered to be art

Duo-Collage by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hans Arp

~ JezzieG
Duo-Collage by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hans Arp

Duo-Collage
1918
Dada
Paper Collage
Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museum, Berlin, Germany

An example of a set of works created by Taeuber-Arp and her then-future husband Hans Arp, “Duo-Collage” is formally characterized by strictly vertical-horizontal geometry. Consisting of paper squares arranged to form a precise collage the artist used a paper cutter to remove all traces of the human hand. The resulting impersonal geometric forms symbolize the pure, the absolute, and the infinite. Never exhibited in Taeuber-Arp’s lifetime “Duo-Collage” radically overturns the notion of making and gender the meaning of art in favour of shared equality in its creation.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp 1889-1943

Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Dada, Constructivism, Performance Art, Readymade, and The Found Object
Born: 19 January 1889, Davos, Switzerland
Nationality: Swiss
Died: 13 January 1943, Zurich, Switzerland

A prominent figure in many of the important European art scenes of pre-World War II, Taeuber-Arp was one of the most active figures around the Café Voltaire in Zurich. She dedicated her career to the breakdown of static, artificial boundaries between genres and forms, and celebrating creative energy such as liberation released. Her work attempted to destabilize the traditional norms in art and society, questioning the fixed ideas of gender, class, and nationality. For Taeuber-Arp art was both political and integrated into everyday life. She embraced the principles of Constructivism and was its most important practitioner outside of Russia.

Mask for Firdusi by Marcel Janco

~ JezzieG
Mask for Firdusi by Marcel Janco

Mask for Firdusi
1917-18
Dada
Paper, board, paint, and twine
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA

Janco’s masks played a large role in the anarchic dances at the Cabaret Voltaire. Created from various materials including scraps of cardboard, glue, paint, and hessian cloth they were left crumpled and torn with ragged edges and patch paint. Rough and crude the details of “Mask for Firdusi” with its beard, angular facial features, and flattened planes indicate influences of Expressionism, Cubist collage, and Braque. The dancer was meant to feel possessed by the mask transforming into a shaman-like figure as found in primitive culture.

Marcel Janco

Marcel Janco
Dada, Expressionism, Constructivism
Born: 24 May 1895, Bucharest, Romania
Nationality: Romanian-Israeli
Died: 21 April 1984, Ein Hod, Israel

Janco was a visual artist, art theorist, and architect. A co-inventor of Dadaism, he was also a leading exponent of Constructivism in Eastern Europe. In the 1910s he coedited the Romanian art magazine Simbolul and was a practitioner of Art Nouveau, Expressionism, and Futurism before his painting and stage design led him to Dadaism. He departed the company with Dadaism in 1919 and, with the artist Hans Arp, founded Das Neue Leben, a Constructivist circle.

Konig Deramo (King Deramo) by Sophie Taeuber-Arp

~ JezzieG
Konig Deramo (King Deramo) by Sophie Taeuber-Arp

Konig Deramo (King Deramo)
1918
Dada
Wood, Metal, Brass (painted), and Textile
Museum Bellerive, Zurich, Switzerland

One of the marionettes created for Alfred Altherr’s Dada puppet show of Carlo Gozzi’s fairy-tale King Stag, Taeuber captured the satire of the 1913 split between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in her dream-like designs. She based the movements of the figures on her own studies and subsequent Dada dance productions. Taeuber also applied abstraction and Dada to her designs of the marionettes, translating the elements of textiles and elementary shapes into the three-dimensional form of the puppet bodies. Described as subversive due to the inhumanity of the figurines acts as a social commentary on the inhumanity of militarism and imperialism reflecting the absurdity of European culture of the time.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp

Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Dada, Constructivism, Performance Art, Readymade, and The Found Object
Born: 19 January 1889, Davos, Switzerland
Nationality: Swiss
Died: 13 January 1943, Zurich, Switzerland

A prominent figure in many of the important European art scenes of pre-World War II, Taeuber-Arp was one of the most active figures around the Café Voltaire in Zurich. She dedicated her career to the breakdown of static, artificial boundaries between genres and forms, and to celebrating creative energy such as liberation released. Her work attempted to destabilize the traditional norms in art and society, questioning the fixed ideas of gender, class, and nationality. For Taeuber-Arp art was both political and integrated into everyday life. She embraced the principles of Constructivism and was its most important practitioner outside of Russia.

Imaginary Animals (Urmuz) by Marcel Janco

~ JezzieG
Imaginary Animals (Urmuz) by Marcel Janco

Imaginary Animals (Urmuz)
1976
Dada
Oil on canvas
Janco-Dada Museum, Ein Hod, Israel

In the 1960s and 1970s, Janco created a cycle of work known as Imaginary Animals. Creatures depicted from his imagination in a naturalistic style with imagined abstract shapes and fantastic colours. In Urmuz Janco creates an illusion of an animal paradise from abstract invented shapes seemingly flying through the sky, digging in the dirt, and parading through their natural world.

Marcel Janco

Marcel Janco
Dada, Expressionism, Constructivism
Born: 24 May 1895, Bucharest, Romania
Nationality: Romanian-Israeli
Died: 21 April 1984, Ein Hod, Israel

Janco was a visual artist, art theorist, and architect. A co-inventor of Dadaism, he was also a leading exponent of Constructivism in Eastern Europe. In the 1910s he coedited the Romanian art magazine Simbolul, and was a practitioner of Art Nouveau, Expressionism, and Futurism before his painting and stage design led him to Dadaism. He departed company with Dadaism in 1919 and, with the artist Hans Arp, founded Das Neue Leben, a Constructivist circle

Cabaret Voltaire by Marcel Janco

~ JezzieG
Cabaret Voltaire by Marcel Janco

Cabaret Voltaire
1916
Dada
Acrylic on canvas
Unknown

A crowded canvas portrays the chaotic action, sound, and fury of a night at the Cabaret Voltaire. A jumble of performers, spectators, and inanimate objects fill the space so it is overcrowded and almost bursting. The artist makes little distinction between the performers and the audience, placing the emphasis on the mass of individuals as a whole. A vital visual record of sensory overload in sight and sound and the Dada concept for the Cabaret that hoped to eliminate the distinction between art and life, performer and audience

Marcel Janco

Marcel Janco
Dada, Expressionism, Constructivism
Born: 24 May 1895, Bucharest, Romania
Nationality: Romanian-Israeli
Died: 21 April 1984, Ein Hod, Israel

Janco was a visual artist, art theorist, and architect. A co-inventor of Dadaism, he was also a leading exponent of Constructivism in Eastern Europe. In the 1910s he coedited the Romanian art magazine Simbolul, and was a practitioner of Art Nouveau, Expressionism and Futurism before his painting and stage design led him to Dadaism. He departed company with Dadaism in 1919 and, with the artist Hans Arp, founded Das Neue Leben, a Constructivist circle

Wounded Soldier in the Night by Marcel Janco

~ JezzieG
Wounded Soldier in the Night by Marcel Janco

Wounded Soldier in the Night
1949
Dada
Oil on cardboard
Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Following the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948, Janco created a number of pieces that capture the injured, the praying, and the ones in retreat. In Wounded Soldier in the Night, the soldier is depicted curled up in a foetal position, his body enclosed within a mandala shape. He is shown injured and weakened, his body retreating into itself. Janco’s use of solid areas of bold colour and black delineating lines adds an aesthetic expression to the work, appropriate to the existential theme. Far from the bloody reality of war, this soldier impresses the viewer with a sense of defeat.

Marcel Janco
Dada, Expressionism, Constructivism
Born: 24 May 1895, Bucharest, Romania
Nationality: Romanian-Israeli
Died: 21 April 1984, Ein Hod, Israel

Janco was a visual artist, art theorist, and architect. A co-inventor of Dadaism, he was also a leading exponent of Constructivism in Eastern Europe. In the 1910s he coedited the Romanian art magazine Simbolul, and was a practitioner of Art Nouveau, Expressionism and Futurism before his painting and stage design led him to Dadaism. He departed company with Dadaism in 1919 and, with the artist Hans Arp, founded Das Neue Leben, a Constructivist circle

Elementary Forms by Sophie Taeuber-Arp

~ JezzieG

Elementary Forms
1917
Constructivism
Embroidery

Elementary Forms was made to hang on a wall, unlike most other textile at the time. By treating embroidery like a painting Taeuber-Arp attempted to erode the ideas of what materials could be used to create art. The weft changes how the viewer sees the embroidery, forcing the consideration of texture and the implication of the hand that made it. Taeuber-Arp’s radical notions of non-representational art apply the tenets of colour and form to traditional women’s work. She is unexpectedly empowered by the traditional gender roles in an avant-garde pursuit.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Dada, Constructivism, Performance Art, Readymade and The Found Object
Born: 19 January 1889, Davos, Switzerland
Nationality: Swiss
Died: 13 January 1943, Zurich, Switzerland

A prominent figure in many of the important European art scene of pre-World War II, Taeuber-Arp was one of the most active figures around the Café Voltaire in Zurich. She dedicated her career to the break down of static, artificial boundaries between genres and forms, and celebrating creative energy such liberation released. Her work attempted to destabilize the traditional norms in art and society, questioning the fixed ideas f gender, class, and nationality. For Taeuber-Arp art was both political and integrated into everyday life. She embraced the principles of Constructivism, and was its most important practitioner outside of Russia.

Dada Bowl by Sophie Taeuber-Arp

~ JezzieG

Dada Bowl
1916
Dada
Varnished/Lacquered Wood
Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA

With this almost-minimal object of turned wood Taeuber-Arp demonstrates the possibilities of infusing a functional every day thing with a radical aesthetic. Using the nascent Dada strategy she attacks the bourgeois sensibilities of the corrupt world to the decorative arts. The Dada Bowl straddles boundaries. It is abstract yet representational, made by hand yet uniform as if mass-produced, aesthetic yet utilitarian.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Dada, Constructivism, Performance Art, Readymade and The Found Object
Born: 19 January 1889, Davos, Switzerland
Nationality: Swiss
Died: 13 January 1943, Zurich, Switzerland

A prominent figure in many of the important European art scene of pre-World War II, Taeuber-Arp was one of the most active figures around the Café Voltaire in Zurich. She dedicated her career to the breakdown of static, artificial boundaries between genres and forms, and celebrating creative energy such liberation released. Her work attempted to destabilize the traditional norms in art and society, questioning the fixed ideas of gender, class, and nationality. For Taeuber-Arp art was both political and integrated into everyday life. She embraced the principles of Constructivism, and was its most important practitioner outside of Russia.

Ici, C’est Stieglitz by Francis Picabia

~ JezzieG

Title: Ici, C’est Stieglitz
Date: 1915
Movement: Dada
Media: Ink, graphite, and cut-and-pasted painted and printed papers on paperboard
Location: Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Picabia worked closely with gallerist Stieglitz but later criticised him, as seen in this ‘portrait’ depicting the gallerist as a bellows camera, a gearshift, a brake lever and the word ‘IDEAL’. The camera is broken, the gear is in neutral, and the lettering is decorative Gothic to symbolize the past. The drawing is one of a series of mechanistic imagery portraits created by Picabla and demonstrates that the subject matter could provide an alternative to the more tradition artistic symbolry.

Artist: Francis Picabia
Born: 22 January 1879, Paris, France
French
Died: 30 November 1953, Paris, France

Francis Picabia was an avant-garde painter, poet and typographist. After experimentations with Impressionism and Pointillism, he became associated with Cubism. An early major figure of the Dada movement his work consisted of highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. Later he was briefly associated with Surrealism before he turned his back on the art establishment. Picabla died in Paris in 1953 and was interred in the Cimetière de Montmartre, Paris, France.