Word: dada
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...split in American taste revealed itself with the first impact of Modernist art--Cubist, Fauvist, Dada--at the scandalous Armory Show in New York in 1913. Conservatives decried Modernism as un-American, an imported madness, and connected it to the paranoia many Americans felt at the rapid change of their society under the pressure of immigration--"Ellis Island art." But early American Modernists were concerned, sometimes obsessed, with rendering peculiarly American experience. Charles Demuth (1883-1935) was fascinated by the blaring contrasts of signs and numbers on the new urban surface; John Marin (1870-1953) believed that "you cannot create...
...part in Manhattan and Los Angeles. Among them, from Paris, were Fernand Leger, Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian, Jacques Lipchitz and the core group of Surrealists who went to New York City: Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Yves Tanguy, Andre Masson and Roberto Matta. From Germany, Kokoschka, Kurt Schwitters and the Dada collagist John Heartfield reached London, while Max Beckmann, Josef Albers and George Grosz made it to America...
...Dada left its traces in America, but never struck deep roots there. It never acquired the criticality, the indignation or the longing for social subversion that marked it in Europe. It devolved into amusing in-jokes and tended to preciosity and quirkiness. This grew out of the tiny clique of self-professed illuminati that sustained it. Its sense of humor never grew as robust as the work of the professional funny guys who helped inspire it, like Rube Goldberg or the Marx Brothers. In America the Dadas were plagued by the thought that American popular culture was more Dada than...
...soon become the center of modernist effort because its reality had made it the modernist site to beat all others. "Your New York," he told the press, "is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses modern thinking in its architecture, its life, its spirit"--everything but its art, which Dada would supply. This image of the city as social compressor also comes out in Man Ray's neatly epigrammatic New York, 1917--a bunch of slats, stacked to mimic the setbacks of skyscrapers, held together by a C clamp...
There wasn't much social criticism in New York Dada, though some of its members were clearly ticked off by the conservative character of the American art world. Picabia even satirized Alfred Stieglitz--whose 291 gallery was the main rallying point for modernist artists like Constantin Brancusi, Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley--as an impotent figure, a camera with a collapsed bellows. Dove himself had a prod at the reviewing establishment in The Critic, 1925--a figure meant to represent Royal Cortissoz, the much feared conservative who had dubbed modernism "Ellis Island art." It is a paper...