Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York

For about ten years, beginning with the Armory Show in 1913, New York City was host to the odd-sounding accents and queerer-looking paintings and constructions of a mixed bag of European and American avant-gardists. Besides the inscrutable figure of artist Marcel Duchamp, the European contingent included such iconoclastic visitors as the playboy painter Francis Picabia, the composer Edgard Varese, the diplomat Henri-Pierre Roche (author of Jules et Jim and adviser to the extraordinary collector John Quinn), and painters Albert Gleizes and Jean Crotti. Among the Americans were the photographer/painter/constructor Man Ray, the Precisionist painter and Fortune photographer Charles Sheeler, the Futurist Joseph Stella, and the Pennsylvania artists Charles Demuth and Morton Schamberg. New York Dada is the first comprehensive study devoted exclusively to the accomplishments of these vanguard artists in America in the period 1915-23 - among the most underappraised, though most influential periods in the history of American art. Within months after the word "Dada" was discovered by a group of refugee artists and writers living in Switzerland, news of the movement reached artists in New York, who, by then, had already made works of art and engaged in activities that were similar in spirit to those produced by their European counterparts. For this groundbreaking book, Francis M. Naumann has interviewed virtually all the survivors and has amassed a wealth of rare photographs and newspaper clippings, including pictures of early installations of modern art in homes and exhibitions, to capture the spirit of New York Dada in a work that is both informative and captivating. In view of the current trendto investigate the potential of a conceptually oriented approach to art and to the art-making process, it is perhaps no coincidence that New York Dada is now finally recognized for the important role it played in the formative phases of a modernist aesthetic.

Francis M. Naumann has taught at Parsons School of Design and the City University of New York.