Surrealism. Nathalia Brodskaya

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      Marcel Duchamp was born in northern France, near Rouen, on July 28, 1887, into a family of artists. The three Duchamp brothers and their sister, like their grandfather before them, chose the path of the artist. Marcel came to Paris in 1904, where he studied at the Académie Julian. In 1910 and 1911, he was passionate about mathematics. Along with Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger and Juan Gris, Marcel Duchamp organised an association called the “Section d’Or”. They were all engaged in an enthusiastic search for the mathematical foundations of art. In 1912 Marcel Duchamp painted Nude Descending a Staircase – a Cubist picture, close to Italian Futurism. Duchamp conveyed the movement of a human figure through multiple repetitions of its outlines.

      Duchamp introduced Picabia to the circles of his patron and friend Arensberg where he met American artists and poets. They included the remarkable artist Man Ray. Picabia’s friends founded a journal which they named 291 from the number of the house on Fifth Avenue where Stieglitz’s gallery was located. To the American intellectuals, Duchamp and Picabia were the incarnation of the revolt against bourgeois art. Duchamp strove to put an end to traditional, customary easel-painting. Although they were unfamiliar with the positions of the Dadaists of Zürich, they were travelling in the same direction. “Every pictorial or visual work is useless”, Tristan Tzara declared.[28] At the same time in New York, Duchamp was exhibiting what were called ready-mades, not pictures, but objects of everyday use, elevated to the status of a work of art merely by virtue of his choice. Man Ray was the most prominent among the many Americans who understood the point of Duchamp’s original lessons. His individual exhibition took place on October 1915 at the Daniel gallery, where he demonstrated his solidarity with his French friend, as well as his talent and his sense of humour.

      The real explosion in the artistic life of New York was an exhibition at the Grand Central gallery in March, 1917. It was organised in the manner of the Paris Salon des Indépendants – each contributor who put in $6 had the right to show any work without the need for it to be approved. Under the invented name Richard Matt, Marcel Duchamp submitted to the exhibition an everyday enamelled urinal which he called Fountain. When the organisers refused to exhibit it, Duchamp stormed out of the exhibition’s organisational committee. In June 1917, Picabia published in New York three numbers of his own journal, which he named 391, in the wake of Stieglitz’s journal 291. The entry of America into the war was the impetus for Picabia’s departure for Europe and Duchamp set out on a tour around the world in August 1918, the outcome of which was that, following a stay in Buenos Aires, he eventually arrived in Paris. In this way, the most important consequence of the emergence of the American Dadaists was the formation in New York of three outstanding personalities – Duchamp, Picabia and Man Ray. During another visit to New York, Duchamp and Man Ray were involved in bringing out the journal Societé Anonyme, which publicised avant-garde art. In the summer of 1921, they both arrived in Paris where Dadaists from other European capitals were gathering.

      Fanning out from Zürich, the Dada movement acquired committed supporters in various German cities. In 1918, Dada’s own manifesto was published in Berlin. Its author was someone from Zürich, Huelsenbeck, but it was also signed by Tzara, Janko and Dadaism’s Berlin adherents – the writer Franz Jung, the psycholanalyst Otto Gross, the poet Raoul Hausman and Gerhard Preiss. It was aimed against Futurism and German Expressionism, and advocated the renewal of poetic forms. Young artists joined them as well, the most brilliant of whom were the caricaturist Georg Gross and the committed Marxist Johann Hartzfeld. Hartzfeld even changed his German name to the English-sounding John Hartfield as a gesture of protest against German patriotism. Hartfield got the nickname “the Dada-Fitter” for the witty works he produced using the photomontage technique. The Berlin Dadaists publicised their movement and read lectures on Modernist art. The turbulent political events in Germany – hunger strikes, spontaneous worker demonstrations, the brutal repression of the Sparticist uprising, the murder of its ring-leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemberg – presented the artistic avant-garde with a choice, and they had no hesitation in taking the side of socialist forces. Their journal, called Der Dada, openly incited revolt. At the beginning of 1920, the Berlin Dadaists organised a demonstration on a grand scale. In the gallery of Dr. Otto Burkhardt, they amassed 170 Dadaist works, not only from various cities in Germany, but also from Amsterdam, Antwerp, Zürich and even Paris. The exhibition was titled “Erste Internationale Dada Messe”.

      Charles Rain, The Enigmatic Game, 1945.

      Oil on canvas, 28.9 × 23.5 cm.

      Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York.

      Peter Blume, The Eternal City, 1937.

      Oil on composition board, 86.4 × 121.6 cm.

      The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

      For Surrealism, growing inside the womb of Dada, there was a movement in Hanover and Cologne with far more significance. Kurt Schwitters, who lived and worked in Hanover, was one of the most brilliant representatives of Dada, embodying its individualistic, anarchistic character. A pupil of the academies of painting in Dresden and Berlin, he completely rejected traditional painting, and СКАЧАТЬ