Dada arrives at MoMA

Dada, at the Museum of Modern Art, is the first major museum exhibition in the United States to focus exclusively on one of the twentieth century’s most influential avant-garde art movements. At the entrance is a monitor playing some footage of World War I, a simple but effective reminder of the atrocities to which the artists were responding. Exhibitions are too often presented in a vacuum, with the assumption that visitors will bear in mind the historical context of the art they are seeing.

The New York Times review of the show started out by saying "Now is as good a time as any for a big museum to take another crack at Dada," which didn't sound very promising. The exhibition is effectively a survey covering all the major artists (Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters) and is divided by city (New York, Zurich, and so on). Curator Leah Dickerman of the National Gallery of Art told Modern Art Notes "I just thought Dada hadn’t been well historicized." (Modern Art Notes did a wonderful three-part post about the show, focusing mostly on the war angle.)

Because the show functions so much the way a textbook would, I'll mention what I enjoyed the most. I was not familiar with the Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber - who married and collaborated with Jean Arp, another member of the movement - and her beautiful sense of color and composition. I also was fairly transfixed by the various films on view, which seemed to encapsulate the movement's influences and humor.