SURREALISM Page: 3
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Surrealism:
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From the beginning Dada was consciously international-Tzara remained in close contact with Marinetti, and although the Dadaists regarded Futurism as too realistic and too programmatic, they borrowed from it, as Huelsenbeck admits, the concept of simultaneity (e.g. reciting different poems simultaneously and 'bruitism' or noise music (the precursor of musique concrète). But 'the Dadaists of the Cabaret Voltaire took over bruitism without suspecting its philosophy--basically they desired the opposite: calming of the soul, and endless lullaby, art, abstract art. The artists of the Cabaret Voltaire actually had no idea what they wanted--the wisps of "modern art" that at some time or other had clung to the minds of these individuals were gathered together and called "Dada".'
Picabia had been to New York in 1913. In 1915 he went there again, to join Marcel Duchamp, who had arrived in June of that year. They found a sympathetic patron in Walter Arensberg, and an impressario in Alfred Stieglitz, the artist-photographer, who had opened a gallery in Fifth Avenue as early as 1906, and had been the first to show not only American artists of the modern school like John Marin, Max Weber, and Man Ray but also Cèzanne, the Douanier Rousseau, ToulouseLautrec, and Picasso. At the famous Armory Show, an immense exhibition of eleven hundred works of the modern school held in New York in February 1913 (and subsequently transferred to Chicago and Boston), Duchamp Nude descending the Stairs had created as much sensation as any other exhibit and when he arrived in New York two years later, his name was already well known. Stieglitz willingly allowed his gallery to become an outpost of the European movement, and undertook to publish a review which was called '291' after the number of the apartmenthouse in Fifth Avenue where the gallery was situated. Picabia remained in New York until the end of 1916, when he made his way back to Zürich via Barcelona, where he joined forces with Arthur Cravan, Gleizes, and Marie Laurencin, and on 25 January 1917 published the first number of a new periodical called '391' in memory of the Stieglitz periodical. After a brief return to America, where he rejoined Duchamp and published further numbers of '391', he went back to Switzerland, first to Lausanne, and then, in February 1918, rejoined the Zürich group which had meanwhile intensified its activities, publishing Dada I and Dada II in 1917 and a third number in 1918.
Early in 1917 Huelsenbeck had returned to Berlin and found it easy to establish a German Dada movement in the despairful turmoil of the last year of the war. He was joined by George Grosz (b. 1893) and Raoul Hausmann. In Cologne, too, a movement took shape during 1918 under the leadership of a journalist called Baargeld and the painter Max Ernst (b. 1891), who had first met Arp in 1914. Another group was formed in Hanover with a publisher called Stegeman as a patron and Kurt Schwitters ( 1887U1948) as the leading artist. Other Dada groups were formed in Basle and Barcelona (as a result of Picabia's brief descent on that city). Meanwhile the Zürich group, now that the war was at an end, was beginning to disperse. Arp went to join the new group in Cologne. Tzara returned to Paris, where during the course of 1920 many manifestations and exhibitions took place. A Dada Festival was held at the Salle Gaveau and for the first time several names significant for the future appear--Andrè Breton, Paul Eluard, Soupault, and Aragon. In this year also an International Dada Fair was held in Berlin (June) which had been preceded (April) by an exhibition in Cologne, organized by Arp, Baargeld, and Ernst. This exhibition was closed by the police; Dada in Germany had from the beginning shown a revolutionary and politically nihilistic tendency; it had become a total social protest rather than an art movement.
But from the beginning Dada, inheriting the rhetorical propaganda of Marinetti, had claimed to be 'activist', and this in effect meant an attempt to shake off the dead-weight of all ancient traditions, social and artistic, rather than a positive attempt to create a new style in art. In the background was wide social unrest, war fever, war itself, and then the Russian Revolution. Anarchists rather than socialists, proto-fascists in some cases, the Dadaists adopted Bakunin's slogan: destruction is also creation! They were out to shock the bourgeoisie whom they held responsible for the war) and they were ready to use any means within the scope of a macabre imagination--to make pictures out of rubbish (Schwitters' Merzbilder) or to exalt scandalous objects like bottle-racks or urinals to the dignity of art-objects. Duchamp provided Mona Lisa with a moustache and Picabia painted absurd machines that had no function except to mock science and efficiency. Some of these gestures may now seem trivial, but that is to forget the task that had to be done--the breaking-up of all conventional notions of art in order to emancipate completely the visual imagination. Cubism had achieved much, but once it had rejected the laws of perspectival vision, it threatened to rest there and revert to a formal classicism more severe and rigid than the realism it had escaped. Dada was the final act of liberation, and apart from the response it elicited from Picasso and Braque, and even Léger, it provided 'a lasting slingshot' for a new and not less important generation of artists. Dada was to be largely forgotten in the inter-war period, but it had created an impetus and established a direction for the artistic development of Western art that was not to be exhausted in our time. The state of consciousness in Europe and America which evoked such manifestations as Futurism and Dadaism still prevails: we still search for images 'to express the vortex of modern life--a life of steel, fever, pride and headlong speed'.
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