Inside the front door of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art this week,
oblong slabs of glass painted with black stripes revolved steadily
under a six foot pair of red lips painted by Artist Man Ray. In other
galleries throughout the building were a black felt head with a
necklace of cinema film and zippers for eyes; a stuffed parrot on a
hollow log containing a doll's leg; a teacup, plate and spoon covered
entirely with fur; a picture painted on the back of a door from which
dangled a dollar watch, a plaster crab and a huge board to which were
tacked a mousetrap, a pair of baby shoes, a rubber sponge, clothespins,
a stiff collar, pearl necklace, a child's umbrella, a braid of auburn
hair and a number of hairpins twisted to form a human face. There were
in addition, books, prints and paintings ranging from the 18th to the
20th Century, from Pieter Bruegel to contemporary Peter Blume. Having
done its best to explain abstract art to the U. S. public last spring
, the Museum of Modern Art was now attempting to
explain another exotic movement with an equally important show broadly
titled Exhibition of Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, or Art of the
Marvelous and Fantastic. Fantastic Art has always existed, always will as long as men have
illogical minds and unruly imaginations. The Museum's walls
historically carried fantastic art from the horror pictures of medieval
Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, through the engravings of Hogarth,
to the comic cartoons of Rube Goldberg and the frustrated drawings of
James Thurber. Prominently displayed as examples of fantastic art were
copies of Edward Lear's Nonsense Rhymes, Lewis Carroll's
Jabber-wacky. This week's exhibition did not disdain the art of the
frankly insane. There was a panel of wild designs by a crazed French
banknote engraver, a drawing of something like a perverted rooster from
the inspired brush of an ecstatic Czech . Dada is something newer, different, a bewilderment that affected the art
world of Europe for a few shell-shocked years during and immediately
after the War. The object of dadaism was a conscious attack on reason,
a complete negation of everything, the loudest and silliest
expression of post-War cynicism. “I affirm,” wrote early Dadaist Hans
Arp, “that Tristan Tzara discovered the word dada on the 8th of
February, 1916, at 6 o'clock in the evening … in the Terrace Cafe in
Zurich. I was there with my twelve children when Tzara pronounced for
the first time this word, which aroused a legitimate enthusiasm in all
of us.” In moments
of harmony and logic which they affected to despise, dadaists admitted
that their object was “to spit in the eye of the world.” A leader of the dadaists, later to be one of the most important
surrealists, was a young German painter named Max Ernst. Cologne still
remembers the dada exhibition organized by Max Ernst and Hans Arp in
1920. The entrance to the exhibition was through a public lavatory.
Gallery-goers were given hatchets to smash any pictures they did not
approve and a young girl in a white communion dress stood on a platform
reciting obscene poems.
