http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051003/ap_en_ot/art_dada&printer=1
Paris' Pompidou Defies Dadaism Prediction
By JOELLE DIDERICH, Associated Press Writer
Mon Oct 3, 1:38 PM ET
German-born artist Max Ernst once quipped that it was impossible to
stage an exhibition on Dadaism, saying it was like trying to capture
the violence of an explosion by presenting the shrapnel.
The early 20th-century avant-garde art movement was born out of the
despair many artists felt over the deaths of millions of soldiers in
World War I. As they rejected the society they considered responsible
for the slaughter, these poets, painters and photographers lashed out
at establishment values with absurdist slogans and provocative images.
In a bid to capture the explosive energy of the era, France's Pompidou
Center has staged a sprawling dada retrospective which it billed as the
largest in 40 years.
"Max Ernst said that a dada exhibition was impossible, so you are no
doubt going to see a failure, but a slightly surprising failure,"
curator Laurent Le Bon joked Monday at the unveiling of the exhibition,
which opens Wednesday and runs through Jan. 9, 2006.
It groups more than 1,000 works by 50 artists, ranging from luminaries
like Jean Arp, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray to
lesser-known figures, including the many women who contributed to the
movement.
Visitors amble through a maze of rooms set out in a checkerboard
pattern, a recurring theme in dada paintings and collages.
Exhibits range from the porcelain urinal that Duchamp famously elevated
to the rank of art — thereby laying the foundation of conceptual art —
to Picabia's target paintings, which prefigure those of American pop
artist Jasper Johns.
Fans of Man Ray's modernist photographic experiments will find a number
of his so-called rayographs, stark black-and-white prints obtained by
placing objects directly on photographic paper and exposing them to
light.
"When you look at these dadaist works of art, there is an explosive
quality to each of them which in the end is contrary to a surrealist or
cubist work of art," Le Bon told The Associated Press in an interview.
"I think that within dada there is the idea that there is no separation
between art and life."
Each of the movement's artists was prolific across a wide variety of
disciplines, so that Man Ray was also turning out sculptures while
Ernst wrote poems alongside his main activity, painting.
"As a result, as there are roughly 100 artists," Le Bon said. "To show
only one work per artist would have been a bit of a shame. We could
have shown only masterpieces and that would have made 50 masterpieces,
but that's not the spirit of dada."
Instead, the Pompidou is also showcasing hundreds of pamphlets,
manuscripts and letters signed by the leading writers of the era —
among them Andre Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Eluard. The
movement valued the written word as much as it did images.
The exhibition was put together with the help of the National Gallery
in Washington, D.C., and New York's Museum of Modern Art, which will
display a condensed version of the exhibition next year from Feb.
19-May 14 and June 18-Sept. 11, respectively.
