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Recent Books on Dada
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Michel SANOUILLET - Dada in Paris
Revised and expanded by Anne SANOUILLET
Michel Sanouillet's Dada in Paris, published in France in 1965, reintroduced the Dada movement to a public that had largely ignored or forgotten it. Over forty years later, it remains both the unavoidable starting point and the essential reference for anyone interested in Dada or the early twentieth-century avant-garde. This first English-language edition of Sanouillet's definitive work (a translation of the expanded 2005 French edition) gives English-speaking readers their first direct access to the author's monumental history (based on years of research, including personal involvement with most of the Dadaists still living at the time) and massive compilation of previously unpublished correspondence, including more than 200 letters to and from such movement luminaries as Tristan Tzara, André Breton, and Francis Picabia.
In the years after Dada's relatively brief Paris flowering in the 1920s, its members were often depicted as opportunistic youths, hedonistic jokers engrossed in a monstrous solipsism. Sanouillet was the first to see them instead as the most gifted and sensitive representatives of a generation, intent on finding a new way of living, writing, and feeling. Dada in Paris offers a behind-the-scenes account of the French avant-garde's riotous adolescence, with a timeline that begins with Tzara and Picabia and stretches to include Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, and Paul Éluard. Sanouillet describes the pre-Dada Parisian milieu, the connection made with Zurich Dada, and Parisian Dada projects and their reception. Finally, by 1923, Dada-according-to-Tzara gave way to Dada-according-to-Breton—which a few months later, under tumultuous circumstances, took on the new name of Surrealism. The longer-lasting, more conservative Surrealism would overshadow Dada for decades to come.
MIT Press
Revised edition (November 13, 2009)
Language: English
640 pages
Price: $26.37 from amazon.com
ISBN: 0262013037
Dada in Paris
by Michel Sanouillet; trans. by Sharmila Ganguly; revised and expanded by Anne Sanouillet
This grand Dada doorstop of book is a narrative of constant action. We are immediately immersed in the War ("to End All Wars", sigh) and intellectual temper of the times, circa 1915. From writings of Mallarmé to Marinetti, Paul Lafargue and Carl Gustav Jung, multiple currents shaped the society and the world of ideas, a world that a certain bristling group of young artists and writers defined themselves against. The Cubism of the previous, prewar decade came to be seen as old news, while individual cubist artists were accepted or castigated by Dada according to the whim of the moment. Cinema was embraced as a promising new medium and creative vehicle; there's certainly a rousing narrative (Hollywood or indie) screenplay bubbling within this book.
André Breton, ambitious and productive, felt deeply inspired by the postwar spirit of newness and unprecedented possibility, and began to assemble poets around him. Francis Picabia, wealthy and overweight, appeared in Paris to paint, write, pronounce opinions and throw his weight around. Tristan Tzara, born Sammy Rosenstock in Romania, proved an energized bantam of poetry, rhetoric, and organizational ideas and opinions. He sported a monocle, an affirmative affectation of cool much like the "z" in his chosen name; my high school Dada gang envied a classmate named Danny Terrazas for this very reason. Though previously in communication with Breton, his arrival in Paris in 1918 gave Paris its third great locus of dada energy.
These three and their colleagues involved themselves in a ferment of publications --—Littérature, 391, Magnetic Fields, Funny Guy -- —whose Contents pages defined with immediacy who's in and who's out. Half the time they were inviting each other to participate in journals or exhibitions or events, and the other half of the time they were excoriating each other in sharp criticism or gossipy invective. Literary Dada in Paris established and defined itself in a contemporary realm that included writers Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Raymond Radiguet, Rene Crevel, Robert Desnos, and the composer Erik Satie. A "trial" of the older writer Maurice Barrés consumed a lot of energy, a matter of great seriousness to Breton, which Tzara finally turned into farce.
Between 1917 and 1923, the Dadaists published, promoted, went on vacation excursions together, argued, and reconciled. They influenced Russian expatriates in Paris, plus numerous other manifesto-driven bands of artists and writers. They were hotly debated in the popular press, whose outraged reviewers gave them much ink, hence notoriety and lasting fame. Events like the Salon d'automne 1919, and performances at the Grand Palais, Club du Faubourg and various incendiary salons are recounted. Sanouillet sagaciously laments the greater— more pervasive and lasting— influence of Surrealism, essentially more conservative (and easily assimilated by bourgeois institutions) in its project and products. André Breton can be thanked, or damned, for this accomplishment.
The artist who most maintains his dignity throughout the story is Marcel Duchamp, who kept his distance from the petty rivalries and arguments that consumed others. He submitted his artwork without comment to let it affirm itself in its droll uniqueness, and otherwise used silence as a strategy (Duchamp abstained from the Dada Salon of 1920). Relocation to New York helped him to achieve this.
Dada in Paris originally appeared in 1965, and was revised and expanded by Anne Sanouillet, and translated, for this first English edition, by Sharmila Ganguly. Beyond the main text is a large appendix of correspondence between the Breton, Picabia and Tzara (alternately effusive, chilly, apologetic), then significant letters to others and some additional texts of historical interest. There follows a useful bibliography of books, articles and exhibition catalogs sorted by decade.
A reader's only regret might be that examples from the short-lived Dada publications discussed aren't present, to illustrate the story of their rambunctious creators, though these works may be readily available elsewhere. This book stands as a formidable piece of serious scholarship, a monument and national archive of the Dada movement in France's capital city in its time. And that's exactly the kind of respectable edifice the Dadaists resolved to disrupt, overturn, burn and eradicate.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
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Tristan TZARA - Dada
A complete photocopy and critical apparatus of the review
published from 1916 to 1922 by Tristan Tzara.
Centre du XXe siècle
Volume I
ISBN 2-902311-17-6
134 pages
Volume II
ISBN 2-902311-19-2
282 pages
The two volumes (not sold separately): 40,00 euros
+ shipping charges
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Francis PICABIA : 391
Full reprint (with the author's permission) of the periodical
published from 1917 to 1924 by Francis Picabia.
Centre du XXe siècle
Vol. I : ISBN 2-902311-33-8
158 pages
Vol. II : ISBN 2-902311-34-6
286 pages
The two volumes (not sold separately): 40,00 euros +
shipping charges
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Helen ADKINS - Erwin Blumenfeld: I Was Nothing but a Berliner :
Dada Montages 1916 - 1933
Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) was born into a Jewish family in Berlin. In 1941, after being interned in a concentration camp, he left Europe for the United States, where he eventually became a citizen; during the 40s and 50s, he was to make his name [there] as one of the most sought-after fashion photographers in the world. But most people are unfamiliar with Blumenfeld's early work, the often bitingly satiric Dada photomontages and collages he produced between 1916 and 1933.
2008
Hatje Cantz
46,50 euros (bound)
224 pages + 97 color and 130 duotone illustrations
ISBN : 3775721274
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George BAKER - The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and
Dada in Paris
Baker's mannered yet often luminous [book] represents a major contribution to the study of avant-garde art ... the project harbours ambitions that lie beyond the monographic ... [It] unfolds around a central problematic first voiced by the poet Apollinaire, the project of "artists who want to become inhuman" ... What is ultimately most impressive about Baker's book, in spite of its occasional excess, is its consistent pursuit of the conceptual work of the Dada movement ... It is for this reason that Baker's book will be of interest as much to scholars of photography as to theorists and specialists in other media ... Baker unfolds what comes close to a unified field theory of Dada art. (Jon Lackman in The Art History Newsletter.)
2007
MIT Press
472 pages
24,47 euros
ISBN: 026202618X
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Matthew BIRO - The Dada Cyborg :
Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin
Biro's unique and interdisciplinary analysis offers a substantially new account of the Berlin Dada movement, one that integrates the group's poetic, theoretical, and performative practices with its famous visual strategies of photomontage, assemblage, and mixed-media painting to reveal radical images of a "new human."
Introduction: Cyborgs, Hybridity, and Identity
1. Berlin Dada: Origins, Practices, and Institutions
2. Hannah Höch's Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Photomontage, Signification, and the Mass Media
3. Raoul Hausmann's Revolutionary Media: Dada Performance, Photomontage, and the Cyborg
4. The Militarized Cyborg: Soldier Portraits, War Cripples, and the Deconstruction of the Authoritarian Subject
5. The New Woman as Cyborg: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in the Photomontages of Hannah Höch
Conclusion: Dada Cyborgs in the Twenty-first Century
2009
University of Minnesota Press
400 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8166-3620-4
20,75 euros
50 b&w photos
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| Leah DICKERMAN and Brigid DOHERTY - Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris
Dada--the catalogue to the 2006 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and The Museum of Modern Art in New York presents the hybrid forms of Dada art through an examination of city centers where Dada emerged: Zürich, Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, New York, and Paris. Covered here are works by some 40 artists made in the period from circa 1916, when the Cabaret Voltaire was founded in Zürich, to 1926, by which time most of the Dada groups had dispersed or significantly transformed. The city sections bring together painting, sculpture, photography, collage, photomontage, prints and graphic work. Relying on dynamic design and vivid documentary images, Dada takes us through these six cities via topical essays and extensive plate sections; an illustrated chronology of the movement; witty chronicles of events in each city center; a selected bibliography; and biographies of each artist--accompanied by Dada-era photographs.
Illustrated edition (9 April 2008)
536 pages / 400 colour and 150 b&w.
37,96 euros
National Gallery of Art, Washington
ISBN-10: 0894683136
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Andrei CODRESCU - The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess
"Dadaists were anti-everything, including art, so it wasn't much of a coherent aesthetic, and that was the point. Ideologies were out, flexibility, irony and free love were in. They were ur-bohemians, whose predecessors and heirs include Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, yippies, hippies and punks. Dada, says Codrescu, still has much important nonsense to impart." (Carly Berwick, – Los Angeles Times)
2009
248 pages
Princeton University Press (February 22, 2009)
Collection : Public Square
7,12 euros / $11.53
ISBN-10: 0691137781
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Julian Jason HALADYN - Marcel Duchamp: Étant Donnés
Duchamp's famous last artwork, seen not as a summation of his work but as an invitation to endless interpretation. Haladyn is a writer and artist based in Canada. He teaches at the University of Western Ontario.
2010
Afterall Publishing - Collection: One Work Series
112 pages
11,47 euros
ISBN-10: 1846380596
Please join us to celebrate the launch of the latest title from the One Work series Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés by Julian Jason Haladyn.
Art Metropole
788 King Street
West 2nd Floor
Toronto Canada M5V 1N6
For further information on Afterall One Work titles see
http://www.afterall.org/books/one.work/
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Ruth HEMUS - Dada's Women
Ruth Hemus establishes the ways in which Emmy Hennings and Sophie Taeuber in Zurich, Hannah Höch in Berlin, and Suzanne Duchamp and Céline Arnauld in Paris made important interventions across fine art, literature, and performance. Hemus highlights how their techniques and approaches were characteristic of Dada's rebellion against aesthetic and cultural conventions, analyzes the impact of gender on each woman's work, and shows convincingly that they were innovators and not imitators. In its new and original perspective on Dada, the book broadens our appreciation and challenges accepted understandings of this revolutionary avant-garde movement.
2009
Yale University Press (March 3, 2009)
250 pages
33,73 euros
ISBN-10: 0300141483
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David HOPKINS - Dada's Boys: Masculinity after Duchamp
In this provocative and stimulating book, David Hopkins addresses the homosocial structures in Dada and Surrealist art with an eye to their relevance to current artistic and theoretical debate. Bestriding the book is the pivotal figure of the artist Marcel Duchamp, who was at the center of various groups of artistic and literary figures —predominantly male— in Europe and America.
2008
Yale University Press
256 pages
42,60 euros
ISBN-10: 0300108958
ISBN-13: 978-0300108958
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Hannah HOCH & Gunda LUYKEN - Picture Book
Picture Book contains nineteen horizontal spreads, each of which features one poem and a corresponding collage. The photographs from which Höch sourced her image-parts are mostly in black and white. But in each composition, she added brightly colored paper fibers, whose airy strands resemble feathers— appropriate not only for the many birds that populate the book, but also for the extraterrestrial flora and fauna that exist alongside them and Höch's other chimeric creatures, who are festooned with tinted tufts.
The hybrid animals are every bit the hobbyhorse—syntheses of diverse objects that, united as a single image, receive new life in the reader's imagination. In one case, Höch uses only slightly trimmed photographs of Komondor dogs, whose long coats resemble the white, twisted cords of a mop. Their appellation, Longfringes, mimics their alien, ropy appearance, but in the context of the book, the animals become something else altogether. The transformation is aided by Höch's brief nursery rhymes; some offer light morals, others are gently subversive, but all elicit a delightful naivete.
15 August 2010
The Green Box Kunstedition
Bound: 44 pages
29,04 euros
ISBN-10: 3941644130
ISBN-13: 978-3941644137
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Jennifer HIGGIE (Editor) - The Artist's Joke: Documents of Contemporary Art
Ever since Freud's 'Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious' appeared in 1905, humor both light and dark has frequently surfaced as a subversive, troubling, or liberating element in art. 'The Artist's Joke' surveys the rich and diverse uses of humor by avant-garde and contemporary artists. The texts collected in this new reader from London's Whitechapel Gallery examine what Andre Breton called the 'lightning bolt' of the unsettlingly comic, as seen in the anarchic wordplay of Duchamp, Picasso, the Dadaists, and Surrealists; Pop's fetish for kitsch and the comic strip; Bruce Nauman's sinister clowns and twisted puns; Richard Prince's joke paintings; art ambushed by feminist wit, from the Dadaism of Hannah Hoch in the 1920s to the politicized conceptualism of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger in the 1980s...
2007
MIT Press
Paperback: 237 pages
18,44 euros
ISBN: 0262582740
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Mason KLEIN - Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention
Contents: Mason Klein - "Alias Man Ray; Lost in translation"; Merry A. Foresta - "Man Ray and the shifting milieu of modernism"; George Baker - "Man Ray's culture industry"; Lauren Schell Dickens - "Man Ray: a cultural timeline, 1890-1976".
2010
Yale University Press
Collection: Jewish Museum
256 pages
36,80 euros
ISBN-10: 0300146833
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Sabine KRIEBEL, Angie LITTLEFIELD, Dorothy ROWE, Michael PARKE-TAYLOR (Editor) - Angelika Hoerle: The Comet of Cologne Dada
2009
Buchhandlung Walther Konig GmbH & Co. KG. Abt. Verlag
128 pages
28,52 euros
ISBN-10: 3865606318
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Jennifer MUNDY (Editor) - Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia
This book examines the work of Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia, three pioneering figures in the history of modernism. It explores the points of convergence and the parallels in their development throughout their careers. Central to this is their response to photography and film, and to the challenges posed to fine art by the development of mass production.
2008
Tate Publishing
256 pages
56,95 euros
ISBN: 1854377310
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Benjamin PÉRET - A Menagerie in Revolt: Selected Writings. Introduction by Franklin ROSEMONT
January 2009
Charles H Kerr
Paperback: 148 pages
10,21 euros
ISBN-10: 0882862995
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Benjamin PÉRET - The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works. Translated, with an introduction, by Marc LOWENTHAL
Publication date: March 2011
Wakefield Press (Cambridge MA)
The arch-Surrealist's own edited anthology of his short prose, ranging from 1922 - the era of Surrealism’s infamous "sleeping fits" - to 1950. Relentlessly intransigent and dizzyingly buffoonish, The Leg of Lamb is a true Surrealist classic and offers the purest example of what André Breton had termed "Black Humor."
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Francis PICABIA (Author) and Marc LOWENTHAL (Translator) - I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation
Poet, painter, self-described funny guy, idiot, failure, pickpocket, and anti-artist par excellence, Francis Picabia was a defining figure in the Dada movement; indeed, Andre Breton called Picabia one of the only "true" Dadas. Yet very little of Picabia's poetry and prose has been translated into English, and his literary experiments have never been the subject of close critical study. I Am a Beautiful Monster is the first definitive edition in English of Picabia's writings, gathering a sizable array of Picabia's poetry and prose and, most importantly, providing a critical context for it with an extensive introduction and detailed notes by the translator.
2007
MIT Press
560 pages
35,78 euros
ISBN : 0262162431
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Vasile ROBCIUC - A Key to the Horizon :
21 contemporary composers meeting Dada. Musics for Tristan Tzara.
This unusual volume is Mr. Robciuc's latest original idea. He has encouraged 21 Romanian musicians to compose music inspired by Tzara's poems. The sober presentation in 3 languages with 290 pages of scores will be of interest to music specialists and Dada buffs.
2006
522 p.
Editura Priftis, Darmanesti, Roumanie
21 x 29 cm
ISBN 973-87609-5-X
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Michel SANOUILLET and Elmer PETERSON, editors
Marcel DUCHAMP - The Writings of Marcel Duchamp
The book contains Duchamp's experimental writings, the long and extraordinary notes he wrote for The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (also known as The Large Glass), and the outrageous puns and alter-ego he constructed for his female self, Rrose Sélavy ("Eros, c'est la vie" or "arroser la vie"—"drink it up"; "celebrate life").
1989
Da Capo Press Inc.
208 p.
11,06 euros
ISBN: 0306803410
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Kurt SCHWITTERS (author), Jack ZIPES (translator) - Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales
"Kurt Schwitters's fairy tales can be safely read to children, without boring the parents. While children will be delightfully dreaming themselves in wondrous worlds, the parents can contemplate existential questions and take shortcuts to understanding the absurdity of war, the vacuity of power, and the vanity of wealth. Schwitters, the most childlike Dadaist, was a fierce defender of innocence and an equally fierce critic of society. His tales are well drawn paths in a magically lit moral landscape."--Andrei Codrescu, author of The Posthuman Dada Guide
2009
Princeton University Press
Collection : Oddly Modern Fairy Tales
248 pages
16,93 euros
ISBN-10: 0691139679
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Martin E. SULLIVAN, Anne Collins GOODYEAR, and James W. McMANUS
Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture
One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was a master of self-invention who carefully regulated the image he projected through self-portraiture and through his collaboration with those who portrayed him. During his long career, Duchamp recast accepted modes for assembling and describing identity, indelibly altering the terrain of portraiture. This groundbreaking book demonstrates the ways in which Duchamp willfully manipulated the techniques of portraiture both to secure his reputation as an iconoclast and to establish himself as a major figure in the art world.
2009
308 p.
34,26 euros or $36.46
The MIT Press
ISBN: 0262013002
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Michael R. TAYLOR - Marcel DUCHAMP - Étant donnés
Celebrating the 40th anniversary of its public unveiling, Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés situates the extraordinary assemblage within the context of almost 100 related works of art, including all of its known studies and related materials, including books, photographs, and works on paper. Duchamp also made a number of "erotic objects," small-scale sculptures that directly relate to the casting process of the female nude in Étant donnés. This exhibition brings these known works together with more than twenty previously unknown sculptures and studies. These unpublished works include erotic objects, body casts, prints, and notes, as well as over seventy Polaroid photographs taken by Duchamp of Étant donnés in his New York studio that provide the missing link in our understanding of the origins and evolution of Duchamp's final masterwork.
2009
448 p.
45,72 euros
Yale University Press - Collection : Philadelphia Museum of Art
ISBN: 0300149794
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Thomas Deane TUCKER - Derridada: Duchamp as Readymade Deconstruction
The 110-page compilation explores the works of artist Marcel Duchamp and the philosopher Jacques Derrida. The book is aimed at undergraduate students of art history, modernism, and critical theory, as well as for graduate students of philosophy, visual culture studies and art theory.
2008
110 p.
Lexington Books
39,75 euros
ISBN 0739116223
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