Word: dada
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...ruddy, kindly face, under its cap of cropped grey hair, gave no hint that he was joking, and he wasn't, though in the old days he had been one of the foremost pranksters of the Dada school of art which preceded surrealism. Dada, said Arp in a recently published book of his writings (On My Way; Wittenborn, Schultz, $4.50), "gave the bourgeois a sense of confusion and distant, yet mighty rumbling, so that his bells began to buzz, his safes frowned and his honors broke out in spots...
...death of France's premier novelist, Anatole France, members of the new Surrealist movement had shown their antipathy to the old literary regime by issuing a raucous manifesto entitled Did You Ever Slap A Corpse? At the same time, followers of the deliberately infantile Dada movement were exhibiting "paintings" that showed a decisive break with the old tradition-being composed chiefly of newspaper clippings and shoelaces...
Since Max Ernst organized his first Dada exhibition in his native Cologne, 27 years had passed. That had been quite a show. The entrance had been through a public lavatory, and visitors were given hatchets to smash what they liked-since the idea was to give everybody's subconscious desires free rein. In one corner a schoolgirl in a white Communion dress pipingly recited obscene verses. Quite delightful...
...high priest of surrealism (the successor of Dada), delicate little, white-haired Max Ernst was still going strong but his new show in a Manhattan gallery last week lacked something-the schoolgirl perhaps-which made that first exhibition memorable. Dada was a granddad now. And nowadays the visitors brandished checkbooks instead of hatchets. Instead of a live little virgin they found merely a semi-abstract painting distinguished by two nobbed streaks representing breasts or eyes, and entitled Foolish Virgins...
...while Grosz indulged his bitterness in "Dada," a school of artists and poets who decided that nonsense was the only answer to the sort of "sense" they saw around them. Grosz pasted Dada slogans all over Berlin's shop windows. Sample: "Dada kicks you in the behind and you like...