Word: dada
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Papa of Dada. Harold Loeb changed more patterns than most. His father was a Wall Street broker, his mother a Guggenheim. Like his cousin Peggy Guggenheim, Harold found the climate of wealth intellectually suffocating, the security guilt-edged. After working in a construction gang in Alberta and tending a bookstore, Harold found himself, in 1921, by founding Broom. Names famed and forgotten spill from Author Loeb's pages like unstuck pictures from a family album. There was Ezra Pound, "dressed like one of Trilby's companions" in "black velvet jacket and fawn-colored pants"; James Joyce, dour...
...owns a necktie, and he lives in a seaside slum of Los Angeles called Venice West, which is as cool and beat as a mentholated eggnog. Lipton himself is not really beat, but because of his advanced age (58) and full refrigerator, he is allowed to serve as Big Dada to the tribe...
...added up to Dada, the great antiart movement of 40 years ago. Like Johns, the Dadaists deliberately tried to strip art of all sentiment and all significance. They would exhibit a urinal as sculpture, for example, to get across the idea that a statue is no better and no worse than a urinal. Thus degraded, Dada soon grew the snaky locks of surrealism. Next year's fair-haired boy may well have his pockets full of limp watches, and may also be hailed as a pioneer...
...know Wassily Kandinsky and the proto-abstractionists of the Blue Rider school. As Jean Arp he lived in Paris, where he was a friend of Picasso, Apollinaire and Modigliani. He first made his mark in Zurich as one of the founders of the give-the-bourgeois-hell movement called Dada. So wacky did the Dadaist antics become that Arp had his application for Swiss citizenship turned down on the ground that he would shortly become a public charge in a mental institution...
...fact, says Arp, Dada was dedicated art: "My gouaches, reliefs, plastics were an attempt to teach man what he had forgotten-to dream with his eyes open." Using a jig saw, he made inexpensive wood reliefs around such motifs as forks and mustaches (a favorite theme he has found laughable ever since he watched German soldiers primping for the Kaiser's birthday). Discovering that the laws of chance underlie much in nature, Arp turned out a series of paste-ups produced by letting bits of paper float down upon a glue-coated board. Later he meticulously executed paper cutouts...