Product Description

Now available in paperback, this lavishly illustrated and astonishingly comprehensive volume stands as the definitive study of the influential but deliberately elusive international Dada movement of the early twentieth century. Organized according to the primary city centers where this shifting, quintessentially avant garde movement emerged, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris features the work of 40 key artists, both infamous and lesser-known, including Louis Aragon, Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, Andre Breton, Otto Dix, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hoch, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara and Kurt Schwitters, to name just a few, in media spanning painting, sculpture, photography, collage, photomontage, prints and graphic work. Dynamically designed with an uncommon intelligence suited to the complexity of the movement itself, it contains hundreds of reproductions of works which, until the major traveling exhibition of 2005 and 2006 for which this book was originally produced, had for the most part never been seen in one place together. Documentary images, topical essays and an invaluable illustrated chronology of the movement make this volume uniquely essential, along with witty chronicles of events in each city center; a selected bibliography; and biographies of each artist accompanied by Dada-era photographs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #159624 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-01
• Released on: 2008-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 536 pages

About the Author
Kurt Schwitters was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1887. He studied at the Hanover School for Applied Arts and the Art Academy in Dresden. In 1911 he participated in his first exhibition. In 1919 the first pictures of his Merz were published, as was his poem An Anna Blume. Throughout the 20s, he devoted most of his energy to working on the Merzbau and Merz magazine, and also founded a successful advertising agency in 1924. Upon the Nazi defamation of his work in 1937, he emigrated to Norway, later continuing on to England, where he died in 1948. Five years earlier, an air raid over his home in Hanover had destroyed the original Merzbau.

Born in Philadelphia in 1890, Man Ray began his professional life as a painter before taking up photography in 1915. In Paris during the 1920s his career as a fashion photographer and portraitist took off, and it was there that he discovered the possibilities of cameraless photography. He continued to paint and take photographs both in the United States and Paris until his death in 1976. He has been the subject of major exhibitions at museums throughout the world, and is one of the best-known photographers of the twentieth century.

Leah Dickerman is Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Art.

Leah Dickerman is Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Art.

Dorothea Dietrich is Chair of Academic Studies and Associate Professor of Art History at the Corcoran College of Art + Design, Washington.

Brigid Doherty is Associate Professor of German and Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.

Sabine T. Kriebel is a Lecturer of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University College, Cork, Ireland.

Janine Mileaf is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA.

Michael R. Taylor is the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Matthew S. Witkovsky is Assistant Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Customer Reviews

Abundant DADA
A remarkable and concise history of the art movement DADA. Beautifully illustrated and designed...easy to manuveur between the cities where DADA was happening after the first world war. I would heartily suggest the purchase of this wonderous publication.

the world turned upside down...
This catalogue illustrates and compliments the DaDa show in Paris, Washington DC, and New York. DaDa was a hugely influential avant-gardist art movement at the end of the 1910's and the beginning of the 1920's, reacting amongst other things to the shocking experience of WWI and the evident failure of conventional institutions. It's typically said that this movement was "anti-art" -- but this is not wholly the case. It is better described as a strategy, encompassing a messy fountain of creativity, some of it quite artful.

This work brings together a whole cast of characters and diverse approaches to what DaDa means or might have meant, and the show barely holds it together. This curatorial approach might actually be best for a movement as elusive and unconventional as DaDa, where tightly focused and carefully defined parameters for an "art movement" might be out of place. So the fact that the show's a bit of a mess is actually good news.

The book explores DaDa thematically city by city - a more reasonable grouping than artist by artist or chronological approaches. DaDa was an urban phenomena, a cacophony of performance that needed the bustle of city life to sustain it.

Dada: The Movement of Absurdity and its Profound Effect on Art
With the world wholly at war in WW I everything sane seemed challenged - to a few artists. These important minds gathered into a movement that at the time seem absurd - straying away from the expected paintings and drawings and sculpture that had become the norm for the definition of Art: names such as Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber, Hans Richter, Hannah H?ch, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp challenged every aspect of the establishment and raucously boasted works consisting of photographs, collage, commonplace items such as the infamous urinal, performance, and poetry. The ultimate result of this at first dismissed movement (a movement which lasted only ten short years form 1916 to 1926) is now patently obvious in the manner in which art has been transformed in the post-Dada world.

This very fine catalogue for the both the National Gallery of Art in Washington and The Museum of Modern Art in New York wisely elects to divide the movement not into art forms but rather into the specific sites where history was changed. The divisions are by city: Z?rich, Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, New York, and Paris. Lavishly illustrated with the works of the forty artists included in the exhibition, the book is graced by superb writing with essays by Brigid Doherty, Sabine T. Kriebel, Dorothea Dietrich, Michael R. Taylor, Janine Mileaf and Matthew S. Witkovsky and one of the most sound introductions by Rusty Powell. The exhibition and catalogue are the results of curator and editor Leah Dickerman who deserves recognition for the finest book on the Dada movement in print! Highly recommended. Grady Harp, April 06