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My, how baby has grown! Who would have guessed that less than a century later it would be given the run of Europe’s premier museum of modern art, occupying the top floor of the Pompidou Centre with 1,000 works by 50 artists? The first major survey of Dada since the 1966 exhibition at the old Musée National d’Art Moderne, Dada at the Pompidou Centre (until 9 January 2006) is a blockbuster and a half. Fortunately, the French know how to bust blocks gently, and have created a display that is exhaustive without being exhausting. Its checkerboard design of 40 ‘cells’ focusing on key moments, places, themes and artists allows you to plan your moves: some cells you will linger in, others you will skip. The danger is, of course, that some you will miss: I only came across the Max Ernst cell during a last-minute mopping-up operation.
As a movement Dada is difficult to pin down, both geographically and artistically. Having started out with mainly literary — or anti-literary — ambitions, it came to express itself increasingly through visual art. And without its artists — despite the constant stream of nonsense that flowed from its underground presses — the movement would probably only merit a prolix footnote in the cultural history of the 20th century, rather than the 1,000-page directory that accompanies this show.
Thoughtfully, the Pompidou has also provided a slimline album potting the history into a few hundred words. To summarise still further, Dada was launched in Zurich in 1916 by a group including the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara and painter Marcel Janco, the German writer Richard Huelsenbeck and artist Hans Richter, and the Alsatian sculptor Jean Arp and his Swiss wife-to-be Sophie Taeuber. In 1918 it was introduced by Huelsenbeck to Berlin, where it caught the satirical imaginations of George Grosz, John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann, and whence it was spread to Hanover by Kurt Schwitters (excluded from the Berlin group for being ‘too bourgeois’) and to Cologne by Max Ernst and Jean Arp. By 1920 its centre of gravity had shifted to Paris and New York, exported by Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Man Ray. As an organised movement it peaked in Berlin with the International Dada Art Fair of 1920; two years later Tzara delivered its funeral oration and in 1924 it was subsumed into Surrealism.
Though its most famous successor, Surrealism was not Dada’s only child. As this show reveals, the anti-ism to end all isms was ironically destined to become the Abraham of 20th-century isms. If you’re looking to apportion blame for the rampant found-objectification of contemporary art, Dada can take group responsibility; but it can also take credit, through its Berlin cell, for the powerful strain of political satire that British cartoonists like Scarfe and Steadman have made their own. Its ‘anti-painting’ medium of collage has passed via Pop Art into every branch of contemporary graphics, while its artistic culture of disobedience has grown into a cult. When Kurt Schwitters said that everything the artist ‘spits’ is art, he didn’t anticipate that within 40 years Piero Manzoni would have replaced the ‘p’ with an ‘h’. Nor did Duchamp dream that his moustachioed ‘Mona Lisa’ would become an anti-icon as famous as Leonardo’s original, and that a sparkling replica of his ‘Fountain’ would be a must for every modern art collection. As Norbert Lynton neatly puts it in The Story of Modern Art, Dada stretched the term art and it ‘has never been its old slim shape since’.
The show’s organisers have stretched a point by making Duchamp guest of honour at their Dada party, despite the fact that he was never a paid-up member, being too anarchic to commit even to Dada. The grandest cell, titled Fins, features a full-scale Duchamp retrospective alongside René Clair’s 1924 film Entr’ Acte, a period piece that helps to put things in perspective. From where we stand a culture of disobedience may look spoilt and tiresome, but Clair’s footage reminds us that people then still wore spats. This was an age when throwing all your toys out of the cot amounted to a dangerous political gesture. Dada manifestos were confiscated, Dada exhibitions were closed and the young Max Ernst was cursed by his father for bringing shame on the family name. (His name, as ill luck would have it, means ‘earnestness’ in German — a case of the importance of not being Ernst.)
For the serious student with a week to spare, this show could be a voyage of discovery; for the casual visitor it’s more of a pleasure cruise with stop-offs at selected islands of insanity. Top destinations include George Grosz’s drawings (several of which, such as ‘The World Made Safe for Democracy’, would not look out of place on a leader page today), Man Ray’s rayographs, transfiguring kitchen utensils with inner light, and Jean Arp’s painted wood reliefs — the sort of unaffected art objects you might expect to find on the Flintstones’ walls in Bedrock. But the main attractions, for me, were the copious collections of Max Ernst drawings and Kurt Schwitters collages (although two early drawings of 1919 almost made me sorry Schwitters picked up the scissors).
‘If there is such a thing as an undying art,’ said John Heartfield’s brother Wieland Herzfelde, ‘then demolishing the art cult won’t kill it.’ Dada didn’t demolish the art cult — if it had, then this show would not be on at the Pompidou Centre. What Dada did is set up an anti-art cult alongside it which has now been so seamlessly subsumed into the art cult that it’s almost impossible to separate them. What I noticed, however, going round this show was that I lingered longest over the Dadaists who let the side down by making art to last. So is this a pro-art or an anti-art exhibition? That’s a tough question — though for the organisers it’s a pretty safe bet that by the time we reach the exit we’ll have forgotten it.
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