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You can buy hand painted Max Ernst, Francis Picabia and Jasper Johns’ Fine Art Reproductions from Galerie Dada
Who's your Dada?
German-born Dada 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 avant-garde early 20th century art movement was born out of the despair many artists felt over the deaths of millions of soldiers in World War One.
Rejecting 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 Art Centre last year unveiled 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 at the unveiling of the exhi­bition, which ran from October 5 through January 9, 2006.
It grouped 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 Dada movement.
Visitors ambled through a maze of rooms setout in a checkerboard pattern, a recurring theme in Dada oil paintings and collages. Exhibits range from the porcelain urinal which Duchamp infamously elevated to the rank of art - thereby laying the foundation of conceptual art - to Picabia's target oil 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 the light.
"When you look at these Dadaist works of art, there is an energy quality in each of them which in the end is contrary to a Surrealist or Cubist work of art. There is an energy there, in any case a fundamental questioning of things," Le Bon said.
"I think that within Dada there is the idea that there is no separ­ation between art and life," he added.
Each of the Dada 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, oil painting.
"As a result, as there are roughly 100 artists, 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," said Le Bon.
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 Dada 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, DC, and New York's Museum of Modern Art, which will display a condensed version of the exhibition from February 19 to May 14 and June 18 to September 11 2006, respectively.
Le Bon said the fact that so many fragile documents from that period survived belied the accepted notion that the Dadaists were against all form of preservation.
Aside from Ernst, others "said from the start that they had to write their own history", Le Bon noted. "There were many projects for anthologies and for retrospectives, which proves that contrary to what has often been said, they were not opposed to the idea of being remembered."
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