Dada Magazines: The Making of a Movement 9781501342660, 9781501342691, 9781501342684

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Dada Magazines

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Dada Magazines The Making of a Movement Emily Hage

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Emily Hage, 2020 Emily Hage has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Ben Anslow Cover image © Top left: Bulletin Dada, ed. Tristan Tzara, Paris, 1920, front cover, letterpress, 14 13/16 x 10 7/8 in. (37.6 x 27.7 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries. Top right and bottom left: Dada 3, ed. Tristan Tzara, 1917, Mouvement Dada, Zurich, p. 13, c. 1917, 13 ¼ x 9 11/16 in. (33.7 x 24.6 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries. Bottom right: Der Dada 3, ed. George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Raoul Hausmann, 1920, Malik-Verlag, Berlin, p. 4, 9 1/16 x 6 ⅛ in. (23 x 15.6 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hage, Emily, author. Title: Dada magazines : the making of a movement / Emily Hage. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. | Outgrowth of the author’s thesis (Ph.D.)–University of Pennsylvania, 2005, under the title: New York and European Dada art journals, 1916-1926. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020029944 (print) | LCCN 2020029945 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501342660 (hb) | ISBN 9781501342684 (epdf) | ISBN 9781501342677 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Dadaism. | Dadaism–Periodicals. Classification: LCC NX456.5.D3 H34 2021 (print) | LCC NX456.5.D3 (ebook) | DDC 709.04/062–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029944 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029945 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4266-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4268-4 eBook: 978-1-5013-4267-7 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Kathleen and Richard Hage

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1 An Extraordinary Opportunity to Be Denounced as a Wit: How Magazines Launched “Dada,” 1916–1917 2 “Every Page Must Explode”: Manipulating the Magazine Medium, 1918–1920 3 Printing Artworks, Exhibiting Ephemera: Dada Journals and Exhibitions, 1920–1921 4 “Be on Your Guard, Madam”: New York Dada and the Magazine as Readymade, 1921 5 Contingency and Continuity: Dada Magazines and the Expanding Network, 1922–1926 Epilogue: Magazines to Zines: Echoes of Dada in 1970s America Bibliography Index

viii xii 1 25 57 91 127 157 199 209 224

Illustrations Plates Cabaret Voltaire, ed. Hugo Ball, Zurich, 1916, Meierei Verlag, front cover 2 Cabaret Voltaire, ed. Hugo Ball, Zurich, 1916, Meierei Verlag, front cover 3 Dada 3, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1918, Mouvement Dada, front cover 4 Der Dada 3, ed. George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Raoul Hausmann, Berlin, 1920, Malik-Verlag, p. 16 5 Dada 4–5: Anthologie Dada, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1919, Mouvement Dada, limited issue front cover 6 Dada 4–5: Anthologie Dada, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1919, Mouvement Dada, limited issue front cover 7 Bleu 3, ed. Gino Cantarelli, Mantua, 1921, front cover 8 “Jugoslavenski, da da, DA DA, DA, DA …: U Osijeku, Royal-kino dne 20. viii. matinée u 1/2 11 sati., Vinkovci: Stamparija D. Gruić, 1922,” Poster for Dada event, Zagreb, 1922 9 75 HP, ed. Ilarie Voronca, Victor Brauner, Bucharest, 1924, front cover 10 75 HP, ed. Ilarie Voronca, Victor Brauner, Bucharest, 1924, p. 9 1

Figures Dada-Jok, ed. Ljubomir Micic, Zagreb, 1922, front cover Tristan Tzara stationery: Mouvement Dada, Paris, 1920, letterpress Merz 1, ed. Kurt Schwitters, Hanover, 1923, p. 10, letterpress Hannah Höch with Raoul Hausmann, untitled collage on trial print of Der Dada 1, on cardboard, c. 1920 1.1 Cabaret Voltaire, ed. Hugo Ball, Zurich, 1916, Meierei Verlag, front cover I.1 I.2 I.3 I.4

2 5 6 11 28

Illustrations

1.2 Cabaret Voltaire, ed. Hugo Ball, Zurich, 1916, Meierei Verlag, front cover 1.3 Cabaret Voltaire, ed. Hugo Ball, Zurich, 1916, Meierei Verlag, p. 20  1.4 Gino Cantarelli, “Costellazione,” manuscript/mock-up of poem published in Dada 2, 1917 1.5 Dada 2, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1917, p. 8 1.6 Noi 1, ed. Enrico Prampolini, Rome, 1917, front cover 2.1 391 8, ed. Francis Picabia, Zurich, 1917, front cover 2.2 Dada 3, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1918, Mouvement Dada, front cover 2.3 Der Dada 3, ed. George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Raoul Hausmann, Berlin, 1920, Malik-Verlag, p. 4 2.4 Der Dada 3, ed. George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Raoul Hausmann, Berlin, 1920, Malik-Verlag, p. 16 2.5 Dada 3, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1918, Mouvement Dada, p. 13, c. 1917 2.6 Der Dada 2, ed. Raoul Hausmann, Berlin, 1919, p. 6 2.7 Dada 4–5: Anthologie Dada, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1919 2.8 Dada 4–5: Anthologie Dada, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1919, second front cover 2.9 Dada 4–5, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1919, Mouvement Dada, limited issue cover 2.10 Dada 4–5, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1919, Mouvement Dada, limited issue cover  2.11 Der Dada 2, ed. Raoul Hausmann, Berlin, 1919, front cover 2.12 Johannes Baader, “Collage Dada (Raoul Hausmann),” c. 1919, Kunsthaus Zurich 3.1 Postcard from Tristan Tzara, Gino Cantarelli, and Otello Rebacci to Francis Picabia, July 1920 3.2 Installation view, Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (“First International Dada Fair”), Berlin, Summer 1920 3.3 Installation view, Salon Dada Exposition Internationale (“International Exhibition”), Paris, 1921 3.4 Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (“First International Dada Fair”) catalog, ed. John Heartfield and Wieland Herzefelde, Berlin, 1920, Otto Burchard and Malik-Verlag 3.5 Salon Dada, Exposition Internationale (“International Exhibition”) catalog, Paris, 1921, front cover

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29 30 32 33 39 58 66 68 69 70 72 73 74 75 78 80 81 93 98 100

102 103

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Illustrations

3.6 391 14, ed. Francis Picabia, Paris, 1920, p. 4 105 3.7 Die Schammade, ed. Max Ernst and Johannes Baargeld, Cologne, 1920, Schloemilch-Verlag, p. 8 107 3.8 Der Dada 3, ed. George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Raoul Hausmann, Berlin, 1920, Malik-Verlag, front cover 108 3.9 Bleu 3, ed. Gino Cantarelli, Mantua, 1921, front cover 110 3.10 Bleu 2, ed. Gino Cantarelli, Mantua, 1920, p. 3 112 3.11 Bulletin Dada, ed. Tristan Tzara, Paris, 1920, front cover, letterpress 114 3.12 Dada Augrandair: Der Sängerkrieg Intirol (“Dada Outdoors: The Singers’ War in the Tirol”), ed. Tristan Tzara and Max Ernst, Paris, Au Sans Pareil, 1921, p. 4 115 4.1 The Blind Man 1, ed. Henri Pierre Roché, Beatrice Wood, and Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1917, front cover 135 4.2 New York Dada, ed. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, New York, 1921, front cover 137 4.3 Man Ray, “Belle Haleine,” (photo of Marcel Duchamp), 1921  138 4.4 Vanity Fair, ed. Frank Crowninshield, New York, November 1920, p. 67 139 4.5 Vanity Fair, ed. Frank Crowninshield, New York, November 1920, p. 121 140 4.6 New York Dada, ed. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, New York, 1921, p. 2 141 4.7 New York Dada, ed. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, New York, 1921, p. 4 142 4.8 Vanity Fair, ed. Frank Crowninshield, New York, November 1920, p. 49 143 4.9 New York Dada, ed. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, New York, 1921, p. 1 145 4.10 Vanity Fair, ed. Frank Crowninshield, New York, November 1920, p. 23 146 4.11 Rogue, ed. Louise and Allen Norton, New York, 1915  147 5.1 Dada Tank, ed. Dragan Aleksic, Zagreb, 1922, front cover 164 5.2 Dada Jazz, ed. Dragan Aleksić, Zagreb, 1922, front cover  165 5.3 “Jugoslavenski, da da, DA DA, DA, DA …: U Osijeku, Royal-kino dne 20. viii. matinée, 1922,” Poster for Dada event, Zagreb, 1922  166 5.4 Mécano 2, ed. Theo Van Doesburg, Leiden, 1922, inside pages, unfolded 170

Illustrations

5.5 Mécano 1, ed. Theo Van Doesburg, Leiden, 1922, inside pages, unfolded 5.6 G 1, ed. Hans Richter, Berlin, 1923, front cover 5.7 G 3, ed. Hans Richter, Berlin, 1923, p. 48 5.8 Merz 2, ed. Kurt Schwitters, Hanover, 1923, p. 23 5.9 Merz 6, ed. Kurt Schwitters, Hanover, 1923, pp. 8–9  5.10 75 HP, ed. Ilarie Voronca, Victor Brauner, Bucharest, 1924, front cover 5.11 75 HP, ed. Ilarie Voronca, Victor Brauner, Bucharest, 1924, p. 9 E.1 The NYCS Weekly Breeder, ed. Tim Mancusi, San Francisco, 1973, The Bay Area Dadaists E.2 The West Bay Dadaist, vol. 1, no. 2, ed. Arthur Cravan (Charles Chickadel), San Francisco, June 1973, Trinity Press/Foundling Publications, front cover

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171 174 177 181 182 183 186 200

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Acknowledgments I wish to thank the many people who helped bring about the completion of this book, which began as a dissertation. I am very grateful to my dissertation committee at the University of Pennsylvania, including Karen Beckman Redrobe and Liliane Weissberg, and in particular Christine Poggi and Michael Taylor, who guided and challenged me throughout the research and writing process from its earliest stages and helped me complete this project through their support and encouragement. My research took me to many archives around the world, and I am especially appreciative of the hospitality and insights offered by Michel and Anne Sanouillet, as well as Rudolf Kuenzli and Timothy Shipe at the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa, starting at the very beginning of this endeavor. I am indebted to Timothy Shipe for generously giving me images of the magazines in the Iowa collection. My thanks also to Helen Adkins, Henri Béhar, William Camfield, and Didier Ottinger for taking the time to meet and talk with me about the project. The librarians and archivists at the following libraries and archives patiently helped me find the materials I was seeking and more: the Spencer Collection at the New York Public Library, the Archives of American Art, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Berlinische Galerie, the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre de documentation et de recherche du Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, the George Grosz Archives, Akademie der Künste and  the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Getty Research Institute, the Musée Départemental, Rochechouart, the New York Public Library, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as the libraries at the University of Pennsylvania and Saint Joseph’s University. Several fellowships enabled me to complete the research and writing of the book: the Penfield Scholarship, the School of Arts and Sciences Fellowship, and the Mellon Regional Faculty Fellowship of the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, the Getty Library Research Grant at the Getty Research Institute, the Dissertation Fellowship in American Art from the

Acknowledgments

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American Council of Learned Societies and the Terra Foundation, as well as the Summer Research Grant from the Saint Joseph’s University. I have written articles on Dada magazines, including the Germanic Review, Dada/Surrealism, and The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and I am grateful to the readers of these articles for their suggestions and for pointing me to additional relevant sources, which helped to advance my thinking on the project significantly. I am thankful that I had the opportunity to present many of the ideas in this book as papers, including papers at the annual conferences of the College Art Association, the Modern Language Association, the Modernist Studies Association, and the International Association of Word and Image Studies, as well as the Territories of Artists’ Periodicals symposium at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, the symposium “Mediamorphosis: Print Culture and Transatlantic Public Sphere(s), 1880–1940,” and the Second Conference of the Modernist Magazine Project at the University of Sussex. The feedback I received at these events helped me to expand and sharpen my analysis of Dada magazines and Dadazines. Many thanks to my colleagues at Saint Joseph’s University, in particular Susan Fenton, for making it so that I had the time I needed to finish this project. Many individuals have kindly read and offered valuable feedback on parts of this book. They include the members of the Interdisciplinary History Writing Workshop at Saint Joseph’s University—Amber Abbas, Jay Carter, Christopher Close, Catherine Hughes, Susan Liebell, Elizabeth Morgan, Rich Warren, and Brian Yates—as well as Eric Bulson, Lori Cole, Jonathan Eburne, Alexander Eisenschmidt, Steve Hammer, Kevin Hatch, Marius Hentea, Jennie Hirsh, Melissa Kerin, Kostis Kourelis, Meredith Malone, Kirsten Olds, Adrian Sudhalter, and Jacqueline Van Rhyn. I am also thankful to the anonymous reviewers of this book, who took the time to read earlier versions, and to Bloomsbury Visual Arts editors Margaret Michniewicz, Frances Arnold, and James Thompson. Thanks, too, to Holly Tasker, for helping me gather images and the rights to reproduce them. For the encouragement and many kinds of support needed to complete a project of this scope I am deeply grateful to my friends, some of them mentioned above, as well as Anne Morrow, my siblings—Cecilia, Stephen, Margaret, Theresa, Peter, Mary, Joe, John, Rachel, Lucy, and Kristin—and my parents, Richard and Kathleen Hage. And, of course, thank you to Jules, Eddie, Ian—and Miller.

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Introduction

In 1922, Croatian painter and writer Branko Ve Poljanski published an antiDada magazine, Dada-Jok, which translates to “Yes Yes No” and “Dada No.” Besides paradoxically capturing the absurdity Dadaists prized, the publication looks like a Dada review, with jumbled graphic design and incongruous images, and its anti-Dada rhetoric recalls Dada antics: “I am a Dadaist, because I am not!” (Figure I.1).1 Indeed the extent of its parody makes one wonder if it is, effectively, Dada, despite its maker’s motives.2 Either way, Dada-Jok shows that in the early twentieth century, even Dada’s detractors, including also the  editors  of  the anti-Dada journal, Non: Critique individualiste, anti-dada (“No: Individualist Anti-Dada Critique”) (edited by René Edme and André du Bief, Paris, 1920), understood that periodicals were the primary means of responding to the increasingly pervasive Dada movement.3 Dada enthusiasts had been hijacking this print type since 1916 to launch their movement and spread its range. Dada magazines—Dada, Die Schammade, Mécano, Dada Tank, New York Dada, among others—made Dada what it was: heterogeneous, transnational, nonhierarchical, multilingual, and radically contingent. In large part because of these publications, Dada’s influence extends beyond the early 1900s through a wide range of artistic currents, from Mail Art and Fluxus in the late twentieth century to Dirty New Media and “glitch” art in the twenty-first. Like the Dadaists, such collectives formed broad nets of communication while also sabotaging celebrated, ever-more-expedient means of connecting.4 In 1916, amid the tumult and destruction of the First World War, a motley collection of artists, writers, and performers famously found each other in neutral Zurich and began putting on performances and exhibitions at the cafe they called the Cabaret Voltaire. These Dadaists, as they came to be known— Tristan Tzara, Emmy Hennings, Hugo Ball, Hannah Höch, Sophie TaeuberArp, Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, and Richard Huelsenbeck, among others— spawned Dada centers throughout Europe and beyond into the early 1920s.

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Figure I.1  Dada-Jok, ed. Ljubomir Micic, Zagreb, 1922, front cover (photo of reprint in Ranko Horetzky, Darko Simicic, Graham McMaster, Ljubomir Micic, Zenit, Svetokret, Dada jok, Dada tank, Dada jazz, 1921–1926 [Zagreb: Horetzky, 2008]).

Confronting nationalism and rationality with transnationalism and absurdity, they made numerous major contributions to the history of art, among them collage, montage, the readymade, sound poems, chaotic graphic design, and a large media network in which magazines played a major part, as detailed below.

Introduction

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Through these efforts, they capsized entrenched expectations of art’s originality, singularity, single, exalted authorship, presence, and fixed meaning as well as single authorship and the notion of the artist as a genius in ways that continue to inform artistic practices.5 Dada holds an exceptional position in the history of the avant-garde.6 Besides helping to advance art developments in individual countries, it stands out as what David Hopkins and Michael White call “the avant-garde’s paradigm case, with many of its characteristics taken to their extreme in Dada.”7 These include the Dadaists’ circulation of manifestoes and periodicals, public provocations, iconoclasm, and linking of artistic and political radicalism.8 The degree to which they manipulated the mass media, too, distinguishes them and sets a precedent for those who followed.9 Dada has a complex, unprecedented relationship with other avant-garde groups. Particularly early on, Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism greatly informed Dadaists’ paintings, drawings, collages, essays, and poems (later Dadaists allied their creative ambitions with those of Constructivists). But more than this, the Dadaists, notably, also framed work by representatives of these movements, along with their own, under the “Dada” label, as they encouraged idiosyncratic interpretations of “Dada.” Dada thereby assumed a “meta” role of sorts that is distinct from that of other twentiethcentury collectives. On a fundamental level, then, its members reinvented what it means to be an art movement, promoting extreme diversity under the single “Dada” banner and refusing to define the word. Timothy Benson observes, “Perhaps Dada’s most persistent procedure or ‘move’ is that of naming so many things besides itself, as itself, resulting in a myriad of meanings for the word ‘Dada’ so pervasive that it seems to undo the entire mechanism of meaning.”10 Geographically unmoored, the word belongs to no language and, because of its simplicity, to all languages, thereby defying traditional notions of membership and categorization.11 Dada was extraordinary in its transnationalism and networked nature; it spread to a wide geographical region and was radically diffuse and nonhierarchical.12 Dada was an active, growing complex of interrelated individuals, artworks, writings, and publications, without any fixed centers. It popped up in several cities simultaneously—in today’s well-known Dada centers like New York, Zurich, Paris, Berlin, Hanover, and Cologne, along with ones like Zagreb, Bucharest, and Mantua—and scholars are increasingly recognizing these nodes.13 The Dadaists’ peripatetic, nomadic, transitory, expatriate existence—necessitated by the war and a reaction to the nationalism that sparked it—added to Dada’s multiplicity. Most individuals who gathered

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in Zurich were expatriates and had ties to artists and writers from their native cities and elsewhere, and they and later affiliates were constantly moving around.14 As T. J. Demos points out, “Geo-political dislocation— from both national geography and nationalist ideology—is fundamental to Dada’s identity.”15 Additionally, individual affiliates, besides expressing their own eccentric readings of Dada, worked in assorted capacities, as writers, editors, performers, visual artists, curators, and editors. Dada encompassed both men and women, some of whom engaged with and questioned gender conventions.16 Dada exhibition practices, too, reconceived conventions of display and expectations of what qualifies as worth exhibiting, as recent studies have pointed out, with an emphasis on the International Dada Fair in Berlin.17 Finally, Dada encompassed a mix of visual artists, writers, and performers, who collaborated with one another, yielding a robust legacy in visual art, literature, music, theater, film, and photography.18

Dada Magazines: A New Vision of Dada The dozens of magazines the Dadaists produced between roughly 1916 and 1924 not only manifested but also engendered these central Dada contributions. A photo of Tzara posing with Dada 3 and 6 and Tzara’s 1920 stationery, which lists selected journals (Dada, DdO4H2, Littérature, M’amenez’y, Proverbe, 391, and Z), are but two obvious indicators of their centrality (Figure I.2).19 In the first two decades of the twentieth century, wartime conditions imposed strict restrictions on travel and correspondence and forced museums and galleries throughout Europe to close, severely limiting opportunities for artists to exhibit or to see each other’s latest creations in person. Though subject to censorship, Dada magazines were a central and effective means of introducing other artists and the general public to the movement and linking Dadaists to each other. Amid the tumult of the war, despite differences between them and often contradictory content, these publications offered a sense of continuity; journals are serial, at least in implication.20 Today they are invaluable records of Dada activity, containing not only Dada artworks but also Dada writings and records of Dada performances. Dada reviews were the primary venue for Dada art, and sometimes their pages are the first, and even only, place where they can be found. The most famous example is The Blind Man (edited by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, New York, 1917), which serves as our only record of Duchamp’s famous “Fountain,” but these publications also turn up all-but-unknown pieces

Introduction

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Figure I.2  Tristan Tzara stationery: Mouvement Dada, Paris, 1920, letterpress, 10 5∕8 × 8 ¼ in. (27 × 21 cm). Merrill C. Berman Collection.

by well-known Dadaists, such as a drawing by Hannah Höch in the first issue of Merz (edited by Kurt Schwitters, Hanover, 1923–1932) (Figure I.3). The magazines were the lifeblood of the movement’s far-reaching media network, and thus analyzing them nuances and improves our grasp of various  Dada characteristics. Besides reflecting Dada’s transnationalism

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Figure I.3  Merz 1, ed. Kurt Schwitters, Hanover, 1923, p. 10, letterpress, 8 7/8 × 5 11/16 inc. (22.5 × 14.4 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Introduction

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and diversity, they are uniquely positioned to capture Dada’s broad scope without losing sight of its specificity, as each issue presents sometimes dozens of images and texts by at least as many contributors. Single issues present a wide range of contributions reflecting disparate interpretations of Dada, coming from individuals in several countries. We find multiple languages— including French, German, English, Dutch, Croatian, and Romanian—among many cities, even across enemy borders, which attest to Dada’s far-flung locations.21 Their pages showcase contributions from Expressionists, Cubists, Futurists, Constructivists, as well as Dada enthusiasts’ works inspired by these movements. Allowing the periodicals to guide the conversation contributes to Dada scholarship’s effort to acknowledge Dada’s extraordinary geographical breadth. Reviews from cities such as Zagreb, Mantua, and Bucharest call attention to the movement’s multicentered nature and demonstrate that it extended far beyond Dada centers typically covered. Incorporating these cities also recommends an extension of the chronological bounds of Dada beyond 1922. Furthermore, publications like Dada Tank, Bleu, and 75 HP support scholarship that integrates Dada and Constructivism and complicate the usual linking of Dada to French Surrealism.22 The magazines make room for more individuals than many Dada accounts allow, including women—such as Céline Arnauld, Angelika Hoerle, and Katherine Dreier—thus contributing to the growing recognition of the full range of Dada membership and expression. More than just enriching our reading of Dada, however, the magazines also proffer a revised understanding of the movement. We discover it as a collective— of artists, writers, and performers, and also editors—borne of chaos and forged in the print shop for unseen audiences by an ad hoc assortment of editors and contributors, one that grew in many cities simultaneously via a network made up of people but also, critically, journals.23 These publications also propose a new understanding of the role of periodicals generally. The magazines made Dada what it was, something that becomes evident when we recognize them as active agents within the movement. Both the Dadaists and their journals were dynamic players that inflected one another through their overlapping interactions and exchanges to create the diasporic, composite network that was Dada. More than simply neutral ferries carrying reproductions from one place to another, Dada periodicals were active, creative venues.24 Turning to them out of necessity, Dadaists soon realized all that they had to offer. These individuals made journals, which, in turn, empowered and encouraged their makers to do things they would not otherwise have done.25 In

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explaining the effects of objects on people, Bruno Latour offers the following example: “You are different with a gun in hand; the gun is different with you holding it.”26 Similarly, the Dadaists were “different” with magazines in their hands and they were “different” with the Dadaists adopting and exchanging them. Their relationship was integrated; Dada would not have happened without what both the Dadaists and the journals brought to the table.27 One of the main ways these periodicals shaped Dada has to do with Dada’s unusual notions of membership. Being a part of Dada did not entail pledging commitment to any set of beliefs, as noted earlier, but it did require editing or contributing to a Dada magazine. Although some individuals whose works they featured did not wish to be associated with the movement, one could not effectively claim allegiance to the group without in some way being involved in a Dada periodical. Dadaists’ dependence on them was fundamental to the creation of the diffuse, multifarious collective that was Dada. The journals not only broadcast the group as an established collective, they effectively made it so by displaying their works and giving them a name. One of Dada’s characterizing features is that, as mentioned above, they adopted a name without defining it. The magazines were the vehicle through which they did this. They forced readers to piece together what “Dada” meant without any consistency in texts and images, communicating, ultimately, that this very indeterminacy was Dada. Their production and distribution yielded a sense of  affiliation and identity based on diversity and distance rather than on conformity and proximity. These reviews multiplied Dada’s diffuseness and encouraged it. Dadaists, like others before them and since, understood the printed medium as a requisite part of establishing a movement. However, rather than using one or two reviews to promote their ideas, as most artists did, individual Dadaists made their own, inspiring dozens of titles, each of which spurred divergent responses, thereby multiplying interpretations of Dada. We can think of them as meeting places, each one capable of collecting and redistributing Dada practices and definitions, however varied. Multiple and composite, a single review could combine materials by figures living in many cities under the “Dada” label.28 Editors gathered submissions from various locations worldwide; single issues traveled to many cities. This compilation and distribution compounded Dada’s diversity. Diasporic from the start, Dada’s distinctly networked and transnational nature would not have been possible without the journals. Scholars have noted how they formed a network, what Leah Dickerman calls their “media network,” functioning “as both conduit of ideas and images and site of practice.”29 Benson

Introduction

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cites periodicals as one of the ways that “Dada moved from a single site or place to multiple sites within a widening cultural and geographical space.”30 A growing body of writings on magazine networks is using digital technologies to generate big data and map associations among the players involved.31 Kurt Beals’s “Dada Networks Project,” for example, gives visual form to the web of connections the journals and their contributors formed, through collaboration, exchange, and by being printed in a same issue. As Beals writes, in reflecting on the results of his graphs, “If we’re trying to identify movements using network analysis, we’re better off looking not at the movements’ members, but at their magazines.”32 Dada Magazines concurs and proposes that these publications not only facilitated this network but also shaped it and were active agents within it, creating simultaneous, overlapping connections. This print medium and Dadaists’ reliance on it not only showcased but also determined the Dadaists’ questioning the very definition of art. Knowing that audiences would see their works first, and often exclusively, in periodicals, artists began creating pieces specifically for their pages, favoring media and styles made for duplication. This reconception prompted Dada drawings, collages, montages, and lively page designs.33 It also encouraged Dadaists and their audiences to approach artworks not as discrete, fixed objects but rather as multiplied images in motion, constantly changing as they moved from city to city, publication to publication, three dimensions to two, excerpted and combined with other images and with words.34

Literature on Dada Magazines and Book’s Approach The large number of studies on Dada speak to its ongoing resonance.35 Particularly since the 1960s, scores of biographical and thematic essays, monographs, and catalogs on Dada have appeared, some with discussions of Dadaists’ publishing activity and responses to mass culture. In the period surrounding the 2005–2006 exhibition on Dada at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York—where the installation and related publications offered many new approaches and insights into the movement—there was a surge of Dada scholarship.36 More recent sources—such as Virgin Microbe: Essays on Dada, Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction, Dadaglobe Reconstructed, Dada’s Boys: Masculinity after Duchamp, and A Companion to Dada and Surrealism—investigate many of

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Dada’s most distinguishing and enduring qualities, such as its transnationalism its diasporic, nomadic nature, its networked structure, and its engagement with gender issues.37 Dada and periodical studies scholars acknowledge that Dada magazines are important. Yet there is a mistaken tendency to think that we know all there is to know about them. Dawn Ades’s seminal catalog, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978), provides an important, detailed account of the context and content of the reviews. It has been the authoritative source on Dada and Surrealist periodicals for decades. Analyses of specific titles—Michel Sanouillet’s intensive studies of Dada and 391 and more recently Sophie Seita’s volume on Blind Man, for example— offer a wealth of information and insight into their given titles.38 Ades’s The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology provides very useful, first translations of journal texts and short accounts of select titles, and earlier catalogs, such as Raimund Meyer’s Dada Global, featuring Dada ephemera, provide rare documentation.39 The ambitious and invaluable multivolume Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines speaks to the magnitude and geographical range of art serials, including Dada ones, between 1880 and 1960.40 Discussions of the reviews’ importance in forming the Dada network, mentioned above, also are evidence of scholarly attention to these publications. Building on and complementing these sources, Dada Magazines delves into production and distribution and offers critical analysis of the journals as a whole—how they functioned and how they molded the movement—highlighting their distinctive nature and capturing their collective significance to the history of art and the history of periodicals. In this way, it assumes an approach similar to that of Ann Ardis, who considers links between magazine contributions as well as what she calls their “external dialogics,” namely distribution, geography, and interactions with other titles.41 Dada Magazines does not attempt to offer a comprehensive, detailed account of the publications. Rather, focusing on select titles, it provides a theoretical framework for tracing their active part in Dada, an analysis that ultimately strengthens our grasp of the history of magazines and their potential for shaping art movements and reshaping perceptions of art. This book employs a materialist approach, detailing how the Dadaists negotiated censorship and other wartime obstacles to fund, compile, print, and disseminate the reviews, using evidence such as postmarks, stamps, censors’ marks, marginal notations, as well as page proofs and correspondence. It is based on direct observation of as many original issues as possible, found in archives throughout the United States, Germany, France, and Switzerland. Reprints are very helpful for basic information, and certain websites offer an abundance of historical and bibliographical information on them: references to reproductions

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of and writings on each one, for instance.42 However, it was imperative for me to consult original issues and to analyze their physical characteristics, as paper color and thickness, print quality, ink registers, dimensions, and page order vary, even in the same issue, bringing to light the unique histories of these multiples. Such characteristics reveal how the magazines traveled and how the Dadaists even cut up their publications, sometimes using them as the backing for new collages (Figure I.4). For example, a rejected proof for Der Dada 1 served as the support for a collage by Höch, now at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin. In her collection of journals most have shapes cut out of them that she used for her collages. Select digital reproductions capture some of this kind of valuable evidence of Dadaists’ art-making process and treatment of their magazines, but facsimiles do not. By engaging the material and varying qualities of the reviews, Dada Magazines offers both a more carefully trained and a broader, contextualized view of Dada, while inviting other studies of periodicals to do the same. The Dadaists engaged the journals as works of art in their own right, where the Dadaists began experimenting with the medium. Analyzing the design of

Figure I.4  Hannah Höch with Raoul Hausmann, untitled collage on trial print of Der Dada 1, on cardboard, c. 1920, 11 2⁄5 × 17 ⅓ in. (29 × 44 cm). Hannah Höch Archiv, Berlinische Galerie © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG BildKunst, Bonn.

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pages and issues in their entirety calls attention to how the Dadaists engaged them more than just blank vehicles for showcasing preexisting compositions long before the inventive periodicals of late twentieth century, often lauded as the first to engage print media in this way. Scholarship generally prizes Dada journals for their role in disseminating Dada ideas, and many studies depend on them as sources of single texts and images. However, scholars often mine them, extracting specific texts and images out of context, thereby losing sight of their artistic merits.43 By training its attention on the journal pages, Dada Magazines puts such contributions into the context of the publication as a whole, where in some cases people first encountered them, thereby enriching our appreciation of Dada journals as constituting a major Dada artistic contribution. The magazines hold an important place in the history of graphic design. They spawned the Dadaists’ celebrated innovations in typography and layout that sabotaged legibility, a provocative, political gesture at a time of fervent attempts to streamline communication technologies, which had become weaponized in this first mechanized war. Although Dada typography and layout are well known, they are surprisingly under-examined. Besides brief mentions of some of the Dadaists’ more daring journals, the most sustained examination of Dada typography, by Johanna Drucker, focuses on Tzara alone.44 Moving beyond typographical subversions in single poems, Dada Magazines scrutinizes entire spreads, tracing how recipients adopted similar graphic tactics experiments in their own publications. Periodical studies scholars Robert Scholes, Mark Morrisson, Clifford Wulfman, and Eric Bulson have pointed out how journals—inexpensive, accessible, multiple, and distributed widely—were instrumental to artists’ identification of themselves and others as modernists. This field of research is primarily concerned with literary reviews, but a growing set of sources, most notably The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, cited above, spotlight art journals.45 Discerning the combined significance and impact of the Dada reviews as a discrete group responds to this body of literature, calling out Dada’s influential role in periodicals history. Writing about magazines is a messy enterprise. The sheer number of texts, images, and contributors, and the multiyear print span of most titles make structuring analysis of them challenging. Organized thematically and chronologically, Dada Magazines highlights the momentum and changes of the group starting in 1916 and the constant exchanges spurred by the journals that enabled Dada to branch out in several directions simultaneously. These traits often go overlooked in texts that (understandably) try to make sense of Dada by

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assessing each Dada city separately.46 The book’s chronological framework means that discussion of lesser-known Dada centers like Zagreb and Bucharest does not come until the end of the book, running the unfortunate risk of suggesting that the earlier ones take priority over those that came out later. While it is true that Dada and Der Dada, two of the first to promote Dada, were vital to the movement’s direction, later ones like Dada Jazz, Mécano, and 75 HP are critical to telling the story of Dada, as well. What is a Dada magazine? To be Dada, journals need only to identify themselves as such. Publications not intended as Dada reviews, like Blind Man, come into the fold too because of how influential they ended up being to the Dada network. I use the terms “magazine,” “review,” “serial,” “periodical,” and “journal” interchangeably, though not all titles came out in serial form; a fair number were only single-issue despite some editors’ aspirations. The publications analyzed here were ephemeral and shared some basic shared characteristics, besides their asserted affinity to Dada: a combination of materials from various contributors, advertisements (mock or otherwise), updates on members, and announcements of others. Yet at the same time, they assumed different identities. Framed as periodicals almost from the very beginning, they took on additional guises available to this medium: as strategy for launching a multifaceted movement, creative exhibition venues, models for three-dimensional exhibitions, a readymade, and a site for merging multiple artistic currents and extending Dada.

Chapter Descriptions Each chapter of Dada Magazines focuses on the titles that best exemplify each of the journals’ identities. Chapter 1, “An Extraordinary Opportunity to Be Denounced as a Wit: How Magazines Launched ‘Dada,’ 1916–1917,” investigates how the first Dadaists and their journals introduced and shaped Dada. Besides borrowing from Richard Huelsenbeck’s mockery of Tzara’s efforts, the chapter’s title draws out the reviews’ agency.47 Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich, 1916) and Tzara’s Dada (Zurich, Paris, 1917–1921) promoted “Dada,” though there was no specific style or platform behind the word. These publications—multipaged, multiauthored, hybrid, mechanically reproduced, and transportable—challenged people to discern the meaning of Dada without any consistency in texts and images. Chapter 1 demonstrates that early Dada editors and reviews together established a radically new kind of collective while also gaining them entry into

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an avant-garde network. It traces how Tzara framed Cabaret Voltaire, originally conceived as an anthology, as a periodical, the first of many instances in which the Dadaists took advantage of the malleability of the medium. Although the focus of the chapter is on Cabaret Voltaire and Dada, it also discusses other journals participating in the web of connections among artists and helping to promote Dada in Italian cities such as Rome, Bologna, Naples, and Mantua as well as in New York, where such consequential publications as 291, The Soil, and Blind Man were coming out. In 1918, more and more Dadaists edited magazines, realizing their potential as creative, primary artistic sites and as ersatz, transportable, reproduced, reoriented, and thus as a fundamentally new kind of exhibition venue capable of enlarging the network and expanding its artistic practices. Scholars, chiefly Howardena Pindell and Gwen Allen, have pointed out how later twentiethcentury periodicals worked as alternative types of exhibition spaces.48 Chapter 2, “‘Every Page Must Explode’: Manipulating the Magazine Medium, 1918–1920,” reveals how Dada journals, specifically Dada 3, Dada 4–5, and the first two issues of Der Dada, anticipated this function decades earlier. This chapter, whose title derives from Tzara’s directive in his famous 1918 Dada manifesto, probes the Dadaists’ graphic design techniques, which exposed the fallacy of claims to transparent transmission. Chapter 2 dialogues with media theory to explore how in adopting the periodical, the Dadaists interrogated media technologies of the time that were simultaneously trying to eliminate interference and inadvertently invite new ways of creating noise. It argues that the significance and pervasiveness of the journals affected the type of artworks Dadaists generated, steering them toward more easily reprinted media and framing artworks not as singular objects but as multiple, two-dimensional, ephemeral, black-andwhite, morphing images in circulation. The chapter also weaves in discussion of present-day derivations of the Dadaists’ challenge, specifically Dirty New Media and glitch art. The third chapter, “Printing Artworks, Exhibiting Ephemera: Dada Journals and Exhibitions, 1920–1921,” builds on Chapter 2 by investigating the interlocking histories of Dadaists’ magazines and their scandalous exhibitions after the war. It focuses on four notable shows: “Dada-Vorfrühling” (“Dada Early Spring”) in Cologne, Berlin’s “Erste Internationale Dada-Messe” (“First International Dada Fair”), Julius Evola’s “Esposizioni Dada” (“Dada Exhibition”) in Rome, and “Salon Dada Exposition Internationale” (“Salon Dada International Exhibition”) in Paris. The chapter contends that Dada reviews informed the group’s exhibition practices, chiefly the exhibition of reproductions, overlapping and combining

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pieces, demanding audience interaction, and exposing the venue as anything but a neutral backdrop. At the same time, despite the Dadaists’ production of exhibition catalogs, journals continued to expand the Dada network and to proffer several advantages to Dadaists. Whereas those in Paris and Berlin used them mainly to settle scores, new enthusiasts took advantage of them to brand themselves as Dadaists by printing writings and images alongside those of established Dadaists. Chapter 4, “‘Be on Your Guard, Madam’: New York Dada and the Magazine as Readymade,” spotlights Duchamp and Man Ray’s New York Dada (New York, 1921). The title comes from Tzara’s Dada “Authorization,” published in New York Dada, granting mock permission for its editors to call their publication “Dada.”49 After exploring Katherine Dreier’s notable efforts to bring Dada to the United States as co-founder of the Société Anonyme, Inc., the chapter argues that this publication functioned as a readymade, an everyday object reframed as a work of art. For their bid for Dada membership, Duchamp and Man Ray appropriated a commercial, ever more popular, female-targeted print type, the women’s glossy. They effectively yanked this publication type out of commercial circulation, appropriated it as an art form, and then recirculated it. Rather than moving in only one direction, from the everyday to the artistic realm, the magazine was capable of going in the other direction, as well: toward the wider context enabled by print media. Chapter 5, “Contingency and Continuity: Dada Magazines and the Expanding Network,” completes the arc begun in Chapter 1 by investigating how new Dada reviews in Zagreb, Bucharest, Leiden, Bucharest, Hanover, and Berlin perpetuated Dada in the 1920s by widening the multicentered network of exchange begun in 1916. Artists in these cities—Theo Van Doesburg, Hans Richter, Dragan Aleksić, Kurt Schwitters, Victor Brauner, and Ilarie Voronca— who had depended on journals to learn about Dada, began making their own. Dada Tank, Dada Jazz, Mécano, G, Merz, and 75 HP spurred Dadaists to enlarge and further diversify the network, thus enabling Dada to negotiate a place for itself during a period of crisis for the movement and the avant-garde overall. Audiences were starting to associate Dada with specific characteristics, an “ism” that could be packaged and surpassed. The magazines, however, dodged this fate by facilitating Dada’s ongoing contingency, its transformations and attachments to other artists. Just as the first Dada journals combined Cubism, Expressionism, and Futurism, later, in the early 1920s, publications carried on the practice of mixing “schools” on their pages, this time chiefly Dada and Constructivism. At the same time, the journals did what they had always done: they reframed,

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reinvented, and perpetuated Dada as a strategy for aggregating heterogeneous materials, a strategy that required magazines. Dada Magazines concludes with an epilogue, “Magazines to Zines: Echoes of Dada in 1970s America.” It introduces the Bay Area Dadaists, a Mail Art group with links to Fluxus, who made “Dadazines” in the 1970s and included Anna Banana, Bill Gaglione, and Tim Mancusi. These all-but-unexamined amateur, small-circulation publications (West Bay Dadaist and New York Correspondence School Weekly Breeder, e.g.) merge past and present by combining excerpts from reproductions of Dada journals and from 1970s magazines and newspapers, reaching across long distances to forge a transnational network. This chapter puts these publications in the context of other periodicals of the time, including those in the San Francisco area and Fluxus and Mail Art periodicals. By drawing out the connections between the zines and Dada magazines, it emphasizes the importance of the Dada journals in the reception of Dada in the late twentieth century and today. The adaptability, transportability, and accessibility of self-publishing shaped one of the most radical movements of the twentieth century. Exchanged in person, over enemy borders, and across the Atlantic, Dada journals facilitated the simultaneous, multicountry growth of Dada and directly affected the creative output of this distinctively diverse network of visual artists, writers, and performers in ways that anticipated later artists’ publications by decades.50 From their beginnings in Zurich, the Dadaists seized upon magazines to disseminate and expand Dada. The magazines, in turn, helped them to reinvent what it meant to be an art movement. These publications no longer play the active roles they once did, but delving into their production and circulation helps them speak for themselves and advances a fresh perspective on the individuals and periodicals that forged a network that continues to inspire artists today.

Notes 1

2

Branko Ve Pokjanski, Dada-Jok, insert in Zenit, 2, 7, 1922, trans. Maja Starćević in Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910–1930, ed. Timothy O. Benson and Éva Forgács (Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MIT Press, 2002), 345. Dada-Jok measures about 9¾ × 13¾ (25 × 35 cm), is eight pages long, and costs 4 denari. Although Dada-Jok advertises a second issue, it never materialized. Laurel Seely Voloder and Tyrus Miller, “Avant-garde Periodicals in the Yugoslavian Crucible,” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines,

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Europe 1880–1940, vol. III, part II, ed. Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1115. 3 Non was edited by René Edme and André du Bief, and it came out in Paris in 1920. 4 For more on Fluxus and Mail Art, see the epilogue. For more on Dirty New Media and glitch art, see Chapter 2. 5 As Rudolf Kuenzli argues, “Fiercely anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchical, dada questioned the myth of originality, of the artist as genius … Surrealism, Constructivism, Lettrism, Situationism, Fluxus, Pop and Op Art, Conceptual Art and Minimalism: most twentieth-century art movements after 1923 have traced their roots to Dada.” Rudolf Kuenzli, “Survey,” in Dada, ed. Rudolf Kuenzli (London and New York: Phaidon Press Ltd, 2006), 14. 6 The essays in Richard Sheppard, Modernism—Dada—Postmodernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000) position Dada in relation to the avantgarde, including essays on Dada’s connection with Futurism and Expressionism. 7 David Hopkins and Michael White also point out that “in Germany [Dada] is positioned as the link between Expressionism and the Neue Sachlichkeit, in France it is seen as proto-Surrealist, while in America Dada is considered the transformative agent which opened the country to European modernism.” David Hopkins and Michael White, “Introduction,” in Virgin Microbe: Essays on Dada, ed. David Hopkins and Michael White (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 3. 8 Ibid. 9 He writes, “Dada artists and writers were among the first to intervene in mass media: indeed interventions made up much of their activity.” Kuenzli, “Survey,” Dada, 15. 10 Timothy O. Benson, “Dada Geographies,” Virgin Microbe, 15. For more on nomination and its implications, see Benson, “Dada Geographies,” Virgin Microbe, 17–20. 11 Hugo Ball, diary entry, April 18, 1916, in Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary by Hugo Ball, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1996), 63. 12 As Benson puts it, “While Dada’s operations were not contingent on any one ideology, [its] social geography was driven by the pursuit of various ostensible meanings, most notably the quest for internationalism.” Benson, “Dada Geographies,” Virgin Microbe, 20. Adrian Sudhalter’s book on Dadaglobe, too, brings light to a major manifestation of the Dadaists internationalist ambitions. Adrian Sudhalter, ed., Dadaglobe Reconstructed (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2016). Le Bon’s exhibition and catalog in Paris in 2005 presented the movement as a network rather than as collection of Dada cities. Laurent Le Bon, ed., Dada (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2005). 13 See, for example, Krzysztof Fijałkowski, “Dada and Surrealism in Central and Eastern Europe,” 161–76; Majella Munro, “Dada and Surrealism in Japan,” 144–60, in

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A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, ed. David Hopkins (Chichester, West Sussex, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016); Gerald Janecek and Toshiharu Omuka, ed., The Eastern Dada Orbit: Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Central Europe and Japan, vol. IV, Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, ed. Stephen Foster (New York: G.K. Hall and Co., 1998); Tom Sanqvist, Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). Various essays in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, cited throughout the book, also address its wide geographical range. The following study also expands the geographical reach of Dada studies: Ralf Burmeister, Michaela Oberhofer, and Esther Tisa Francini, eds., Dada Africa: Dialogue with the Other (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie Museum für Moderne Kunst, Scheidegger & Spiess, 2016). 14 In Zurich, Tzara came from Bucharest, for example, Richard Huelsenbeck came from Berlin, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings came from Munich via Berlin. Other authors who speak to the importance of exile and movement among the Dadaists include Michael White, “Dada Migrations: Definition, Dispersal, and the Case of Schwitters,” in Hopkins, A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 54–69. As he mentions, other sources on this topic include Debbie Lewer, “The Avant-garde in Swiss Exile 1914–20,” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, Europe 1880–1940, ed. Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1034; T. J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007) and T. J. Demos, “Zurich Dada: The Aesthetics of Exile,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, 2005), 10. 15 T. J. Demos, “Circulations in and around Zurich Dada,” in “Dada: A Special Issue,” October 105, ed. Leah Dickerman (2003): 148. 16 Sources on the role of gender in the Dada movements include Naomi SawelsonGorse, ed., Women in Dada (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1998); Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2003); Ruth Hemus, Dada’s Women (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009); many sources by Amelia Jones, including Amelia Jones, “Equivocal Masculinity: New York Dada in the Context of World War I,” Art History 25, no. 2 (April 2002): 162–205 and Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Additional sources include David Hopkins, Dada’s Boys: Masculinity after Duchamp (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007); Isabel Wünsche, “Exile, the Avant-Garde, and Dada: Women Artists Active in Switzerland during the First World War,” in Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in Her Circle, ed. Tanja Malycheva and Isabel Wünsche, vol. III, Avant-Garde Critical Studies, ed. Ferd Drijkoningen, Klaus Beekman, and Geert Buelens (Leiden

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and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2017), 48–67; Patricia Allmer, “Feminist Interventions: Revising the Canon,” in A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 366–81. 17 Two such sources include Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial, Exhibitions That Made Art History, vol. I (London, New York: Phaidon, 2008) and Adam Jolles, “Artists into Curators: Dada and Surrealist Exhibition Practices,” in A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 211–24. 18 White and Hopkins, “Introduction,” Virgin Microbe, 3. 19 Ribemont-Dessaignes’s DdO4H2, Céline Arnauld’s M’amenez’y, Paul Éluard’s Proverbe, and Paul Dermée’s Z were never realized. 20 Adrian Sudhalter, in her analysis of Francis Picabia’s journal, 391 (Barcelona, New York, Zurich, Paris, 1917–1924) says that it offered “the promise of continuity, the expectation of a next issue.” She adds, “To publish 391 during the war years was to establish a site of continuity, to place a stake against an ever-changing backdrop.” Adrian Sudhalter, “War, Exile, and the Machine,” in Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction, ed. Anne Umland and Catherine Hug (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2016), 67. 21 As Dickerman notes, “Dada was notably diffuse, with activities in a handful of city centers created by a network of itinerant, often politically displaced, artists of diverse nationalities.” Leah Dickerman, “Dada Gambits,” “Dada: A Special Issue,” October 105, 8. T. J. Demos writes, “Geopolitical dislocation—from both national geography and nationalist ideology—is fundamental to Dada’s identity.” T. J. Demos, “Circulations: In and around Zurich Dada,” October 105, 148. 22 David Hopkins’s A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (2016), David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978) are three examples of this linking of Dada and Surrealism. Hopkins points out that the linking of Dada and Surrealism is really only relevant in the context of Paris. See David Hopkins, “Introduction,” in Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), np and “Dada and Surrealism: A Historical Overview,” 26–8. Others include the seminal exhibition and catalog, Alfred H. Barr, ed., Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), as well as C. W. E. Bigsby, Dada and Surrealism (London: Methuen, 1972); William Rubin, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1969). 23 As Sudhalter says of Picabia, her essay “recasts Picabia as a publisher, editor, and point person of the international avant-garde first, and as a painter second. It pictures him in the print shop, with the repetitive rhythms of the churning machinery as a backdrop, selecting and organizing content for publication and providing mock-ups to typesetters and printers for execution, and asks how such practices may have affected his approach to painting.” Sudhalter, “War, Exile, and the Machine,” in Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round, 67.

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24 Here I am borrowing from Bruno Latour’s formulation of actor-network theory (ANT). In Latour’s analysis of technology, or “technical means” and their role in society, he uses the example of the gun to explain the relationship between animate and inanimate entities. Responding to arguments about guns in America, Latour claims, “It is neither people nor guns that kill”; responsibility comes from both. Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy,” Common Knowledge III, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 34. 25 Latour writes, “In addition to ‘determining’ and serving as a ‘backdrop for human action’, things might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on.” Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 83. 26 Latour, “On Technical Mediation,” 31–3. 27 Ibid., 32. 28 Borrowing from actor-network theory, we can understand the Dadaists and magazines as having an integrated relationship. See Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation,” 31–3. 29 Leah Dickerman, “Dada Gambits,” October 105, 8. Eric Bulson, too, emphasizes the connecting qualities of magazines: “The little magazine is to the modernist network what the wires are to the radio, telephone, and telegraph.” Eric Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 34. Matthew Witkovsky writes that the Dadaists “created an operational network, a new kind of artistic formation that is de-centered, dispersed, and yet moves roughly in synch.” Matthew Witkovsky, “Pen Pals,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, The National Gallery of Art, 2005), 270. 30 Benson, “Dada Geographies,” Virgin Microbe, 22. 31 See, for example, J. Stephen Murphy, “Introduction: Visualizing Periodical Networks,” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 5, no. 1 (2014): vi. For more on literature regarding periodicals and networks, see Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey, Modernism’s Print Cultures (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 92–104. 32 Kurt Beals, “Redefining Dada: The Avant-Garde Movement as Network,” presented at the 2016 Conference of the German Studies Association. 33 Adrian Sudhalter references the influence of editing on Dadaists’ artworks in her discussion of Picabia. Sudhalter, “War, Exile, and the Machine,” in Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round, 67. 34 This notion of constantly moving and changing art objects is manifest in Tzara’s never-completed Dadaglobe, as well. See Sudhalter, “How to Make a Dada Anthology,” in Dadaglobe Reconstructed, 47. 35 In addition to the sources cited above, Stephen Foster’s ten-volume series, Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, from 1996 to 2005, is a major source of

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information on the movement, as is Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981 [1951, 1967]). For histories of literature on Dada, see Hopkins and White, “Introduction,” Virgin Microbe, 4–5; Hopkins, “Introduction,” A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 2–4; Rumold, “Dada: A Critical History of the Literature in Germany and Central Europe” and Michel Sanouillet, “Dada: A Critical History of the Literature in France and the United States,” both in Dada: The Coordinates of Cultural Politics, ed. Stephen Foster, in Crisis and the Arts, ed. Stephen Foster, 197–221, 223–60. 36 Leah Dickerman, ed., Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris (Washington, DC and New York: National Gallery of Art in association with Distributed Art Publishers, 2005); Dickerman, The Dada Seminars, Dickerman, “Dada: A Special Issue,” October 105; Le Bon, Dada, Anne Umland and Adrian Sudhalter with Scott Gerson, Dada in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008). Sources published since the exhibition include Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 2009, the translation of Dada à Paris (1965), Dawn Ades, The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Marc Dachy, Dada: The Revolt of Art (New York: Abrams, 2006); Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 37 David Hopkins and Michael White, eds., Virgin Microbe: Essays on Dada (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014); Umland and Hug, eds., Francis Picabia; Sudhalter, ed., Dadaglobe Reconstructed; Hopkins, Dada’s Boys; David Hopkins, ed., A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (Chichester, West Sussex, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). 38 Michel Sanouillet and Dominique Baudouin, eds., Dada: réimpression intégrale et dossier critique de la revue publiée de 1917 à 1922 par Tristan Tzara II (Nice: Centre du XXe siècle, 1976–1983); Michel Sanouillet, ed., 391; revue publiée de 1917 à 1924 par Francis Picabia (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1960–1966); Michel Sanouillet, Francis Picabia et 391 (Paris: E. Losfeld, 1966); Sophie Seita, “The Blind Man Sees the Fountain: New York Dada Magazines in 1917: An Introduction,” The Blind Man (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). Other sources include Michel Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, revised and expanded by Anne Sanouillet, first English-language edition, trans. Sharmila Ganguly (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2009); Andreas Berns, New York Dada Magazines, 1915–1921 (Forschungsschwerpunkt Massenmedien und Kommunikation an der Universitätsgesamthochschule des Saarlandes: Siegen 1986); G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926, ed. Detlef Mertins and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Steven Lindberg and Margareta Ingrid Christian (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010); Sherwin Simmons, “Neue Jugend: A Case Study in Berlin Dada,” in A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 38–53.

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39 Ades, The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology, 2006. The catalogs include Raimund Meyer, Dada Global (Zurich: Limmat Verlag, 1994); Giovanni Lista, Arturo Schwarz, and Rosella Siligato, eds., Dada: l’arte della negazione (Rome: De Luca, 1994); Dada Artifacts (Iowa City: The University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1978); Le Bon, Dada (2005). 40 Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds., The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 2012, 2013). 41 Ann Ardis, “Staging the Public Sphere: Magazine Dialogism and the Prosthetics of Authorship at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernism, ed. Ann L. Ardis and Patrick Collier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 38. 42 Examples include the University of Iowa’s International Dada Archive (http://sdrc. lib.uiowa.edu/dada/collection.html); Monoskop, “Avant-Garde and Modernist Magazines” (https://monoskop.org/Avant-garde_and_modernist_magazines); “Little Magazines & Modernism. A Select Bibliography,” a site maintained by Suzanne W. Churchill, Associate Professor of English, and hosted by Davidson College; Dada Companion (http://www.dada-companion.com/journals/). Until very recently, “Dada and Modernist Magazines” (http://www.dada-companion. com/journals/) was a major site for information on Dada magazines. 43 In his important book on Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” for instance, William Camfield points out that its appearance in a magazine allowed more people to see it than had seen it during the Independents’ exhibition. He refers to The Blind Man as a document that can help uncover the history of “Fountain.” William A. Camfield, Marcel Duchamp: Fountain (Houston: The Menil Collection, Houston Fine Arts Press, 1989), 37, 29. 44 Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 193–222. Other sources include Stephen Bury, ed., Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900–1937 (London: British Library, 2007), 164; Judi Freeman, The Dada and Surrealist Word-Image (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 45 Robert E. Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” PMLA 121, no. 2 (2006): 517–31; Mark S. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Bulson, Little Magazine. Other sources include Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible, eds., Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007); Ann E. Gibson, Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1990); Pamela Franks, ed., The Tiger’s Eye: The Art of a Magazine

Introduction

46

47 48 49 50

23

(New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery: Distributed by Yale University Press, 2002); Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2011). Another useful source on artists’ periodicals that calls for more research on the topic is Trevor Fawcett and Clive Phillpot, eds., The Art Press: Two Centuries of Art Magazines: Essays Published for the Art Libraries Society on the Occasion of the International Conference on Art Periodicals and the Exhibition, the Art Press at the Victoria and Albert Museum (Art Documents Number One) (London: The Art Book Company, 1976). Examples include Foster’s series, Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, in which most volumes are devoted to a particular city or region, as well as Dickerman, Dada, 2005, and Rudolf Kuenzli, ed., Dada (London and New York: Phaidon Press Ltd, 2006). Richard Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada: A History of the Dada Movement, 1920 (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 1984), 26. Howardena Pindell, “Alternative Space: Artists’ Periodicals,” Print Collectors Newsletter 4 (September–October 1977). Tristan Tzara, “Authorization,” in New York Dada, ed. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray (1921), 2. Examples of conceptual artists’ periodicals include Aspen (Phyllis Johnson, 1965– 1971, New York) and Avalanche (Liza Béar and Willoughby Sharp, 1970–1976). For more on these and other late-twentieth-century periodicals, see Allen, Artists’ Magazines.

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1

An Extraordinary Opportunity to Be Denounced as a Wit: How Magazines Launched “Dada,” 1916–1917 In 1920, German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck recalled, Tristan Tzara was devoured by ambition to move in international artistic circles as an equal or even a “leader.” He was all ambition and restlessness … And what an extraordinary, never-to-be-repeated opportunity now arose to found an artistic movement and play the part of a literary mime! … What a source of satisfaction it is to be denounced as a wit in a few cafés in Paris, Berlin, Rome!1

Intended to insult, Huelsenbeck’s words capture Romanian poet Tristan Tzara’s drive to launch an art movement in the midst of war. In 1916, when the First World War had been underway for almost two years, a small cluster not involved in the fighting—including Huelsenbeck, Tzara, Emmy Hennings, Hugo Ball, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Marcel Janco—congregated in neutral Zurich and put on performances at a café they called the “Cabaret Voltaire.”2 In 1916 and 1917, these figures, soon known as the Dadaists, also issued magazines, starting with Cabaret Voltaire, followed by Dada. These publications were their tickets into avant-garde circles in other cities despite travel and exhibition restrictions. They also enabled those involved to forge and propagate Dada even as the rampant nationalism around them exposed the dangers of forming a collective identity. But at the same time, the journals enabled their makers to mock the very idea of unifying around any single doctrine and to frustrate attempts to pin down what “Dada” stood for. Cabaret Voltaire and Dada 1 and 2 served as much more than records or purveyors of events, writings, and artworks. Indeed, at first, they were all these individuals really had. The magazines made it so that their makers could pretend they were more than they were, as it were, and “play the part,” to borrow from Huelsenbeck, while refusing to explain what they stood for and, in fact, offering “nothing.” In a way, they were the manifestation of Huelsenbeck’s

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“Erklärung” (“Declaration”), presented in spring 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire, which simultaneously sets up expectations and dashes hopes for a clarification: “We want to change the world with Nothing, we want to change poetry and painting with Nothing, and we want to end the war with Nothing.”3 Despite and because the Zurich collective had relatively little to publicize, they made magazines. This chapter begins by explicating Cabaret Voltaire’s dual identity as a cabaret-like anthology and as a periodical. German writer and dramaturg Hugo Ball originally conceived Cabaret Voltaire (June 1916, Zurich) as a means of broadcasting events and artistic styles and brazenly championing transnationalism with a cabaret-like eclecticism and dynamism.4 Tzara, on the other hand, framed Cabaret Voltaire as a distinct yet related medium, a magazine. Regardless of intent, in both guises, it advertised Tzara’s subsequent magazine, Dada, and “Dada,” even amid conflicting attitudes about their future.5 After introducing Tzara’s Dada, the chapter moves on to analyze how Tzara, Cabaret Voltaire, Dada, as well as avant-garde journals in European cities and New York promoted “Dada” without explaining it, ultimately spurring multiple interpretations.

Cabaret Voltaire: From Anthology to Magazine Thirty-two pages long with five hundred copies printed (by anarchist Julius Heuberger), Cabaret Voltaire was an ambitious undertaking on Ball’s part.6 In a June 1916 diary entry, he boasts that Cabaret Voltaire is “the first synthesis of the modern schools of art and literature.”7 Cabaret Voltaire echoes the variety of performances and the broad range of works adorning the Cabaret’s walls: paintings, collages, drawings, poems, and reproductions by local and distant artists representing Cubism, Expressionism, and Futurism.8 Among the contributions from outside of Zurich, poems by Wasilly Kandinsky and Jakob (here “Jacob”) van Hoddis exemplify Expressionism, poems by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Franceso Cangiullo speak for Futurism, and an untitled etching by Pablo Picasso, likely published without his permission, across from Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem, “Arbre,” illustrates Cubism (though a letter from Italian artist and editor Enrico Prampolini to Tzara from March 17, 1917, suggests that Picasso was not consulted).9 Alongside these pieces, Ball showed contributions by his comrades at the Cabaret, many of which reveal their indebtedness to these artists. On its striking cover, a thick strip of gold or silver foil (depending on the copy) is affixed to a deep red background, overlaid by the title and an abstract

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woodblock print by Arp in black ink (Figures 1.1 and 1.2).10 Inside, a sketch by Max Oppenheimer, Arp’s and Otto Van Rees’s collages, and a tapestry by Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp recall Cubist collages and Expressionist paintings. Marcel Slodki’s woodcut is Expressionist-inspired, while Janco’s drawing for a poster for the “Chant Nègre” (literally, “Negro Song”) (which took place on March 31, 1916) is informed by both Cubism and Expressionism. Literary contributions include texts by Ball, Hennings, and Huelsenbeck.11 In part to avoid censorship, Ball produced a German and a French version of his magazine. They are identical except for the title page and his introductory essay, originally composed in German. But both include a mix of German, French, and Italian, reinforcing Ball’s transnational goals. Cabaret Voltaire captures not only the notable pluralism and dynamism of the Cabaret Voltaire, but of cabarets in general, which Ball knew well.12 In early twentieth-century popular culture, “cabaret” denoted a playful, intimate, popular, if usually underground art form featuring a variety of acts. The emerging Dadaists’ performances also invoked the German iteration of the “Kabarett,” which was literary and artistic with a distinctive taste for parody and dark humor.13 Eclectic and provocative, Cabaret Voltaire functioned not simply as an anthology traditionally conceived, but also, with its assortment and sequencing of materials, as a lively compilation akin to a cabaret. Ball’s opening essay for Cabaret Voltaire, which begins, “When I first set up the Cabaret Voltaire,” reads like a cabaret impresario’s opening to a show. It tells the story of how he went about instituting the cabaret and attracting press coverage and announces the characters within the publication and their submissions: “And, at Mr. Tristan Tzara’s instigation, Mssrs Tzara, Huelsenbeck and Janco performed […] a simultaneous poem of his own composition.”14 What follows is a mishmash of many distinct kinds of contributions, each of which brings with it a distinct mode of address and a set of references and conventions.15 The poem “L’Amiral cherche une maison à louer” (“The admiral is looking for a house to rent”) resembles a musical score and a photograph of Hennings’s puppets that calls to mind puppet-theater plays (Figure 1.3). The text “Dada: Dialogue entre un cocher et un alouette” (“Dada: Dialogue between a coachman and a swallow”), a skit between Huelsenbeck and Tzara, reads in part like an advertisement (“the first number of the Dada Review comes out on August 1, 1916. Cost: 1 fr”), succeeded by a poster image and reproductions of artworks.16 The publication thus brings together music, theater, crafts, advertising, and fine art, each eliciting a different response from readers. Combined, they create a disjointed effect.

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Figure 1.1  Cabaret Voltaire, ed. Hugo Ball, Zurich, 1916, Meierei Verlag, front cover, 10 5∕8 × 8 11∕16 in. (27 × 22 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries (see Plate 1).

Such dynamism in Ball’s publication usually goes unnoticed. Accounts typically prioritize the stage over the page, valuing it as a source of images and writings, a record of Dada events, and demoting its reproductions to mere “reminders,” “relics of actions,” and “incomplete documentation.”17 In his famous book, Lipstick Traces, for example, Greil Marcus compares the Zurich Dada events and Cabaret Voltaire, concluding, “Whatever happened in Zurich in the spring of 1916 […] it wasn’t in the archives.”18 Yet the cabaret-like heterogeneity of Cabaret Voltaire renders it interactive, demanding that readers shift approaches with each type of text or image they encounter. Cabaret Voltaire’s graphic design is rather restrained compared to later Dada publications. The irregular spacing in Gino Cantarelli’s poem, “Costellazione,” in Dada 2, is among the more daring elements, the result of Tzara’s and Heuberger’s attempts to reproduce the poem according to Cantarelli’s mock-up, in which some

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Figure 1.2  Cabaret Voltaire, ed. Hugo Ball, Zurich, 1916, Meierei Verlag, front cover, 10 5∕8 × 8 11∕16 in. (27 × 22 cm). Spencer Collection, New York Public Library (see Plate 2).

lines begin far to the right of the page, and random elements, like the exclamation point, float in space (Figures 1.4 and 1.5).19 In Cabaret Voltaire images are in shades of black and gray on glossy stock paper and take up an entire page. For the most part, texts and images appear separately from one another and the font type and size change hardly at all throughout the issue. The staid typography and layout, however, actually heighten the absurdity of the publication’s content. For instance, the lines from Tzara’s poem, “La revue Dada 2”—“there is a young man who is eating his lungs / then has diarrhoea [sic] / then lets out a luminous fart”— appear in soberly arranged serif typeface.20 Content and formatting conspire to prevent the reader from perusing passively and relying on visual cues, evoking the deadpan humor characteristic of Dada performances. Cabaret Voltaire played a primary role in relation to Spiegelgasse 1 in another way, too: it likely gave the space its name. Ball and his cohorts did not call their

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Figure 1.3  Cabaret Voltaire, ed. Hugo Ball, Zurich, 1916, Meierei Verlag, p. 20, 10 5∕8 × 8 11∕16 in. (27 × 22 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

venue the “Cabaret Voltaire” when they established it in February 1916. As late as April 1916 Ball referred to it simply as the “Kneipe,” or pub, and the periodical De Nieuwe Amsterdammer’s account of events on Spiegelgasse refers to it as the “Künstlerkneipe ‘Voltaire’” or the “Voltaire” art pub.21 It was not until Ball’s publication came out that the place took on the appellation, “Cabaret Voltaire” with any consistency, further bolstering the prominence of Cabaret Voltaire in proffering an identifying label for the events taking place in Zurich.

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Promoting a Movement: Cabaret Voltaire Despite Ball’s intentions, Cabaret Voltaire also publicized “Dada,” Tzara’s serial, Dada, and thus ultimately the movement. In April 1916, while Cabaret Voltaire was still in preparation, Ball, Tzara, and their affiliates decided to collaborate on a second publication. Conflicts over what to call it manifested ongoing, competing opinions about their identity or even the desirability of having a single identity. Ball resisted, as he put it, “turn[ing] a whim into an artistic school.”22 It was in coming up with the magazine’s title that they decided on the word, “Dada,” and Cabaret Voltaire, as it turned out, proved to be its initial advocate.23 In a June 1916 entry in his journal, Tzara enthusiastically describes Ball’s publication as introducing Dada: after noting the date, price, printer, and contributors to Cabaret Voltaire, he declares, in a manner seemingly inspired by the playful tapping at a typewriter, “DaDada d a d a dadadadadada dialogue the new life.”24 “Dada” appears fifteen times in Cabaret Voltaire, and in each case, it is identified with the journal, linking Ball’s publication to Tzara’s. Ball’s essay on the first page announces Dada: “The review will be printed in Zurich and will bear the name ‘DADA.’ (‘Dada’) Dada Dada Dada.”25 In the French version, the very end of the text, “Dada Dada Dada,” stands out because it takes up an entire line just beneath the drawing of Ball. By presenting Dada, Cabaret Voltaire suggests that it was itself the first of the Dada series, and started to function in this role, since it anticipated the next publication, a defining characteristic of a serial. The most extensive reference to Dada occurs in the bilingual (German and French) “Dada: Dialogue entre un cocher et un alouette” (“Dada: Dialogue between a Coachman and a Swallow”), which publicizes the first issue of Dada. The dialogue reads, in part: Huelsenbeck (coachman): … What does your song tell me about the Dada magazine? Tzara (swallow): Because the first number of the Dada Review comes out on August 1, 1916. Cost: 1 fr. Editorial and administration: Spiegelgasse 1, Zurich; it has nothing to do with the war and is an attempt at a modern international activity hi hi hi hi. Huelsenbeck (coachman): Oh yes, I saw that … Dada emerged from the body of a horse as a basket of flowers. Dada burst like a boil from the chimney of a skyscraper, oh yes, I saw Dada—as the embryo of the purple crocodile flew his cinnabar tail …. Olululu Olululu Dada is great Dada is beautiful.26

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Figure 1.4  Gino Cantarelli, “Costellazione,” manuscript/mock-up of poem published in Dada 2, 1917, 2 pages. 8 ¾ × 14 1∕3 in. (22.3 × 14.3 cm), p. 1 of 2. Dossiers Tristan Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, Photo by Suzanne Nagy.

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Figure 1.5  Dada 2, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1917, p. 8, 14 2⁄5 × 9 in. (29 × 23 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

This exchange, besides expressing irrationality, humor, transnationalism, multilingualism, and disregard for effective communication, demonstrates Tzara’s inventive use of advertising strategies to endorse his magazine and “Dada” without explaining what it means. Cabaret Voltaire’s multiple references to Dada betray a certain cohesion that Ball resisted and Tzara endorsed. This difference between the two men relates to what type of publication they understood Cabaret Voltaire to be. Though

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today categorized as a Dada journal, since its inception it also has been referred to as an anthology. An anthology is a self-contained collection that gathers or commemorates contributions made earlier. It is typically more concerned with posterity and anticipates sitting on the shelf for long-term perusing. A magazine, by contrast, is part of a series (at least by intention), and readers expect content to be fresh, previously unpublished, ephemeral, and current. They must read it quickly before the next issue arrives, when they throw the old one out. The often-overlooked discrepancy in classifying Cabaret Voltaire stems from internecine disagreements and shifting agendas among the earliest Dadaists and from the agency of their publications. In his introductory essay to Cabaret Voltaire, Ball calls it a “kleine[s] Heft,” which can be interpreted as a booklet.27 In a letter to his cousin, in the same sentence he describes it both as “ein kleines Buch” (“a little book”) and a “Propagandaheft,” which can be understood as a propaganda brochure or magazine.28 In the same letter he adds, “I was really only concerned to document this Cabaret,” suggesting that he thought of it more as an anthologizing booklet than a magazine.29 In his text describing the publication Ball informs readers, “The next goal of the artists assembled here is the publication of an International Review” (emphasis added), implying that he did not perceive Cabaret Voltaire as a review.30 Yet his use of the term “heft” is notable, as it can be translated in various ways—as a type of printed promotional material, a booklet, or a serial. Tzara was also imprecise. In March 1917, he explained in a letter that Cabaret Voltaire was “not a journal but a documentary publication on the cabaret we founded here.”31 These early Dadaists valued Cabaret Voltaire as a publication that summarized for others what they had been doing in Zurich, evident as well as in Cabaret Voltaire’s subtitle, “Eine Sammlung Künstlerischer und Literarischer Beiträge” (“A Collection of Artistic and Literary Contributions”) in the German version, “Recueil littéraire et artistique” in the French. This publication type, a selfcontained compilation that gathers or commemorates contributions made earlier, was meaningful to them, as it signaled their internationalism and inclusivity. A few years later, Huelsenbeck reflected, “In the Cabaret Voltaire period, we wanted to ‘document’—we brought out the publication Cabaret Voltaire, a catch-all for the most diverse directions in art, which at that time seemed to us to constitute ‘Dada.’”32 The selection and presentation choices that go into compiling an anthology have imaginary and even utopian elements to them, as Walter Benjamin has pointed out.33 The very nature of anthologies has an artificial element to it—bringing together disparate materials toward another end. With Cabaret Voltaire, Ball chose carefully, leaving out, for example, the Russian balalaika

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ensemble performance at the Cabaret Voltaire and Hennings’s singing of Danish folk songs. He tried to curate their activities in Zurich while putting them in the company of avant-garde leaders of the time. Though he sought German-reading audiences, including those in Zurich, he published more French copies than German ones, suggesting that he also was eager to reach French-reading international audiences. As Debbie Lewer puts it, his review “traces a speculative and utopian mapping of an imagined international community.”34 The format of the anthology and the Dadaists’ treatment of it were in many ways more important than any particular content in forming their identity. Adrian Sudhalter argues, “The Dada anthology provided a container for heterogeneous, international contributions, though unlike its predecessors it advocated no particular artistic style or program.”35 This characterization applies to Cabaret Voltaire; if it has a unified message it is heterogeneity and internationalism, and its editor did not emphasize these as forming a strong shared identity. To the extent that Tzara understood Cabaret Voltaire as an anthology, he considered it to be less commemorative and more active, “the occasional, coterie, or interventionist anthology,” as Braddock puts it. Unlike what Jeremy Braddock calls “the more expressly canon-defining modernist anthologies,” this type not only identifies but also “interpellate[s] collective formations in the service of the volume’s social reason for being.”36 It is a form of “collective self-identification.”37 This definition accords with Tzara’s desire to have the group coalesce, if only by name. Regardless of what they called this publication, how Ball and Tzara used it indicates how each wanted it to function. In June 1916, a month after Cabaret Voltaire came out, the Cabaret closed, amid escalating differences about the direction they should take. Ball, disgusted with Dada’s growing popularity, left Zurich. In a letter to Tzara from September 27, 1916, he pans Cabaret Voltaire as “worthless, bad, decadent, militaristic,” adding, “No more blasphemy, no more irony … no more satire … no more intelligence. No! Enough of it.”38 Although Ball later returned to Zurich briefly and was marginally involved in Dada events there, his participation was minimal and unenthusiastic.39 Huelsenbeck, similarly, expressed dissatisfaction. He objected to what he saw as the changing attitude toward audiences that would manifest itself at the more decorous Galerie Corray, aka the Galerie Dada, starting in January 1917.40 Huelsenbeck disparaged the gallery as “a manicure salon of the fine arts, characterized by tea-drinking old ladies trying to revive their vanishing sexual powers with the help of ‘something mad.’”41 By early 1917, he was in Berlin, where he initiated a new branch of Dada, described in the next chapter.

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Tzara, on the other hand, wanted to make a movement and he made a serial because he knew it was the most expedient means of doing so. Tzara understood that having readers perceive of Cabaret Voltaire, and later Dada, as periodicals to trade for others was critical to becoming part of the circle of the most innovative artists and writers of the time. With this awareness of the currency of reviews, Tzara chose not only to appropriate Cabaret Voltaire but also to reframe and circulate it worldwide as a serial. Although he understood Cabaret Voltaire’s power as a collection of materials, he also embraced it as the first in a series of journals publicizing “Dada.” As noted above, by announcing Dada and repeating “Dada” on its pages, Cabaret Voltaire implied a certain link with Tzara’s publication. But more than this, Tzara suggested that Cabaret Voltaire was a magazine by naming one of his poems, which is reproduced in it, “La revue dada 2” (“Dada review no. 2”), suggesting that Ball’s publication was the first Dada review, “Dada review no. 1,” presumably (the poem itself offers no useful explanation in this regard).42 Consistencies in appearance and content between Cabaret Voltaire and Dada link the two publications. In addition to maintaining Ball’s subtitle, “A Collection of Artistic and Literary Contributions,” Dada also ties itself to its predecessor by offering more information about the poem, “L’amiral.” The red of the first two issues’ covers creates a visual continuity among the three Zurich publications as well. Notably, a (negative) review of Cabaret Voltaire from Geneva regards it as the first issue of Dada, saying that the name changed. Tzara’s response in Dada signals another bond between the two Zurich publications.43 In these ways, Tzara effectively serialized Cabaret Voltaire.

Promoting a Movement: Dada In addition to organizing events at the Galerie Dada, Tzara was consumed with publishing the first issue of Dada, which he equated with starting Dada. In July 1917, he recorded the publication of Dada 1 in these words: “The Dada Movement is launched.”44 Tzara rightly understood serials as the principal means of communication and expression among vanguard artists and writers. A spike in art magazine production occurred among members of the avant-garde between 1910 and 1916 in Europe and the United States.45 Beginning in the midnineteenth century, advances in print technology such as halftone engraving, linotype, and standardized typewriters inspired artists to create periodicals to propagate their ideas relatively cheaply and easily.46 Movements comprising both

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writers and artists especially appreciated the value of journals for disseminating ideas that were too new or subversive to be published in the mainstream press. Titles include the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s The Germ: Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art (London, 1850–1851), the Symbolists’ La Renaissance littéraire et artistique (Paris, 1879–1891), La Revue blanche (Paris, 1891–1903), and the Jugendstil periodical Ver sacrum (Vienna, 1898–1903). In the twentieth century, Der Sturm (Berlin, 1910–1932) and Die Aktion (Berlin, 1911–1932) endorsed German Expressionism; Lacerba (Florence, 1913–1915) and L’italia futurista (Florence, 1916–1918), among others, represented Futurism; and Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex (London, 1914–1915) propagated British Vorticism.47 Magazines’ hybrid nature attracted proponents of various artist/writer movements in Europe, as they offered an ever-easier means of quickly expressing their creative ambitions. By 1916 there was a network of selfedited publications that was well established, if limited by the war. These titles reflect the push toward internationalism and new forms of artistic expression that drove many editors of the time, such as Der Sturm editor Herwarth Walden’s art gallery. Some periodicals were eclectic. Les Soirées de Paris (Paris, 1912– 1914) and 291 (New York, 1915–1916) display a variety of artistic currents, for example. While clearly in dialogue with these predecessors, Dada 1 (July 1917) and Dada 2 (December 1917), both published by Heuberger, stand apart. Like magazines made to promote a movement, they linked their activities with a word, but like Les Soirées de Paris and 291 they were also decidedly eclectic. Tzara carried on Ball’s commitment to multiplicity, but with the critical difference that he gave this lack of unity a name: Dada. The word “Dada” printed all over these publications signaled to readers that this eclecticism, not a certain style or set of beliefs, was Dada.48 The first two issues of Dada proposed that variety and the absence of a prevailing set of aesthetic principles did not obviate the creation of a new movement and that the journal was the most effective means of realizing this atypical model. In an undated manuscript for a speech on Dada he explains: The name chosen for the review, finally, was Dada. Our aversion against any dogmatism meant that the name of the review was not to lead to any interpretation that would have led us towards a kind of systematization of our thoughts. […] If we mockingly called our group the Dada Movement, we were already opposed to the creation of schools, as, in any case, we wanted each one of us to maintain his personality […] total freedom of the artist was for us a crown virtue that we intended to defend with all our strength.49

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Tzara seized upon the periodical to propagate unprecedented heterogeneity. By presenting an assortment of styles under the elusive, percussive Dada label, the emerging Dadaists took advantage of the multipage format of the journal to inaugurate a movement without delimiting it. Robert Delaunay’s “La Fenêtre sur la Ville II” (“The Window on the City II”) (1912) represents Cubism, and a watercolor by Kandinsky from the Der Sturm gallery exemplifies Expressionism. Poems by Francesco Meriano, Alberto Savinio, Maria d’Arezzo, Nicola Moscardelli, Cantarelli, as well as woodcuts by Enrico Prampolini and Giorgio de Chirico’s painting, The Evil Genius of a King (1914–1915), exemplify Futurism and metaphysical painting in Italy. Dada 1 and 2 also include compositions by Dadaists who borrowed from styles associated with preceding and contemporaneous artists’ groups. For example, Arp’s collage in Dada 1, identified simply as a “painting in paper,” and Janco’s “Construction 3,” apparently made up of wire, wood, and other found materials, were inspired in part by Cubist works (Figure 1.6). This diversity of texts and images implies an inclusive, internationalist attitude, akin to Cabaret Voltaire, but Dada labels it. Tzara’s publicizing of this simple, catchy, made-up word that conjured a complex combination of meanings and impressions is much like those of the most successful brands of the time (including the soap brand called “Dada,” sold in Switzerland during the war).50 Tzara understood that by not identifying too closely to any one “product,” Dada could encompass a broad scope of artistic styles and social and political motivations. Equating “Dada” with his journal without offering any clarification, he set the stage for Dada’s unorthodox openness. Huelsenbeck acknowledged Tzara’s flair for marketing even as he scoffed his ambition: Tristan Tzara had been one of the first to grasp the suggestive power of the word Dada. From here on he worked indefatigably as the prophet of the word Dada, which only later was to be filled with a concept. He wrapped, pasted, addressed, he bombarded the French and Italians with letters; slowly he made himself the “focal point.”51

Neither Dada 1 nor Dada 2 explains “Dada,” but each issue mentions the word seven times.52 The back cover of Dada 2 gives the most official impression of Dada, listing the Zurich publications under the heading, “Mouvement Dada” (Dada Movement). Readers find no evidence of what, if anything, these works have in common, much less how they relate to “Dada.”

How Magazines Launched “Dada,” 1916–1917

Figure 1.6  Noi 1, ed. Enrico Prampolini, Rome, 1917, front cover, c. 1917. Getty Research Institute, Special Collections (85-S1332).

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Dada was a parody of the kind of publication expected of an emerging movement, a single periodical dictating and showcasing specific beliefs and aesthetics. Rather than completely shunning this requirement, the Dadaists took it on, only to highlight how fundamentally different their project was. In this way, Dada sparked an entirely novel kind of movement, one that paradoxically ridiculed the very idea of a modern art movement. With Dada they also set themselves apart, distinguishing Dada as a “meta” movement of sorts rather than advancing any specific manner of painting or writing. As Dada scholar Michel Sanouillet puts it, [Tzara] always strongly believed that Dada was essentially different: other isms were meant to structure and base in history some form of ideology, theory or aesthetic system …. Dada, on the contrary, is what Duchamp called a “Prime Word,” one which can be divided only by itself and by unity.53

They came up with the name “Dada,” as Arndt Niebisch puts it, “to subvert and distort the contemporaneous system of isms, and not to become one of them.” He adds, “Dada does not appear as an additional art movement, but as indefinable noise.”54 The magazines engendered this distinctive characteristic. To understand how they did so, it is helpful to think of Dada as analogous to photography, as André Malraux describes it in his formulation of the “museum without walls.”55 Here photography allows for the placing of any object of any period, style, or medium alongside another. Similarly, in the earliest days of Dada, Tzara welcomed a wide range of works and his magazines used photography to reproduce many artists’ styles next to one another. Using Malraux’s formulation, the Dada journal was the museum, and “Dada” an umbrella term for anything goes. As mentioned above, the 1916 and 1917 issues of Dada primarily include Expressionist, Futurist, and Cubist works. They also show pieces by individuals who would come to be known as Dadaists, but readers did not identify them with yet another movement because Dada had not yet become associated with a set of characteristics. Dada journals showed that Dada was unlike the other collectives represented. By combining a variety of artistic currents without asserting any specific characteristics, they ensured the group’s contingency and allowed them to remain agile and relevant. But more than just anthologizing publications, Cabaret Voltaire and Dada functioned as serials independent of their editors’ original intentions. They offered an “extraordinary, never-to-be-repeated opportunity,” for the small Zurich assembly to join the transnational network made up of avant-garde editors, writers, visual artists, and, critically, their magazines.

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Joining the Magazine Network: Cabaret Voltaire and Dada Locally, Cabaret Voltaire was for sale at the “Grosse Soirée der Künstlergesellschaft Voltaire” (“Great Soirée of the Voltaire Artists’ Society”) on May 31, 1916, just a few weeks before the cabaret closed.56 A Zurich bookstore, the Bookworm (Zum Bücherwrum), also sold copies.57 But beginning in 1916 Tzara co-opted Cabaret Voltaire and Dada as easily exchanged venues for advertising their nascent movement well beyond the confines of Zurich’s city limits. He mailed copies to artists and writers in New York and European cities who were editing and contributing to each other’s reviews, promising to publish contributions and advertisements for recipients’ journals and asking for the same in return.58 Tzara wanted them to know about what they were doing and he wanted contributions. Although there were no new acolytes immediately, he managed to spread the word and make connections that would prove fruitful in the United States, Italy, and France, while Huelsenbeck led the charge in Germany. Letters played a complementary role, but whereas they forged individual, one-to-one connections with members of the avant-garde, with a magazine the Zurich artists demonstrated their efforts, and they did so in a much more public way, to many readers at the same time. Magazines can combine various, even contradictory, texts and images.59 Recognizing that his involvement in Cabaret Voltaire and Dada gave him some leverage, Tzara swapped journals and submissions with other editors. The Dada publications ultimately splintered dependence on a centralized place, expanding the cabaret’s range substantially and enabling Tzara and those around him to access local and transnational, present and distant, contemporary and future readers. By asking others to advertise Dada, reproduce works by himself and others in Zurich, and send contributions for his magazine, Tzara succeeded in ingratiating himself into avant-garde periodicals circles. Cabaret Voltaire and Dada allowed them to demonstrate that they were a transnational association that encompassed many different kinds of visual art and writings. They also made their many contributors aware of one another and exposed an even broader audience to these contributors’ works. Tzara was largely successful. One of the first people he sent Cabaret Voltaire to was the famous poet and editor of the magazine Les Soirées de Paris, Guillaume Apollinaire, in Paris. This copy made it into the hands of prominent art dealer and collector Paul Guillaume, who responded encouragingly.60 Guillaume spoke to Apollinaire on Tzara’s behalf, and in December 1916, Apollinaire complimented

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Tzara on his poetry and his work in Zurich, promising to send poems and possibly prose.61 Tzara again wrote to Apollinaire in mid-October 1916, this time with one of his poems and a woodcut by Janco, presumably for publication in Les Soirées. In his letter he advocates his submissions as representative of “a new art trend Dada, which will be a very very very very very free, brutally modern and primitive art.”62 In the end, Tzara received nothing from Apollinaire, whose political concerns may have overcome his desire to support Tzara.63 But sending Cabaret Voltaire was nevertheless fruitful, as it put him in touch with Guillaume, who paved the way for Tzara’s later move to the French capital and connected him to other like-minded individuals like Marius de Zayas in New York, as described below. Tzara’s circulation of Cabaret Voltaire in Italy proved particularly productive, attracting contributions for Dada 1 and 2 from Prampolini, Meriano, Cantarelli, and Moscardelli, all of whom were involved in other reviews. Their correspondence shows Tzara tapping into a shared commitment to promoting the latest artistic developments. Italian artist Alberto Spaïni, who participated in events at the Cabaret Voltaire, gave the Romanian poet the addresses of Futurists and other artists and writers in Italy.64 Starting in early 1917, Tzara sent these editors copies of Cabaret Voltaire and Dada, asking for contributions to his new magazine and promising to do the same in return. Prampolini, who edited Noi (“We”) (Rome, 1917–1925) with Bino Sanminiatelli, was supportive.65 He had met Tzara in the summer of 1916, and in a letter from August 1917, he tells Tzara that he finds Dada 1 to be “very pleasing and interesting” and offers to find vendors for it in Rome.66 The first issue of Noi, which came out in June 1917, features Tzara’s poem, “Froid Jaune” (“Cold Yellow”) along with a woodcut by Arp and one by Janco that was famously reproduced on the cover of Dada 3 in 1918. Noi also published other Dada contributions—a poem by Tzara and woodcuts by Janco and Arp.67 The second issue of Noi mentions Dada 1 and details its contents (in addition to noting typographical errors in Tzara’s poem in the first issue).68 Both Tzara and Prampolini were eager to collaborate to achieve international recognition for themselves and for their journals. Dada 1 includes a poem, “Walk,” by Meriano, editor of the periodical La Brigata (Bologna, 1916–1919). This text represents extensive communication between him and Tzara.69 It promotes Tzara’s magazine and suggests an openness to collaboration: “Dada ultimate review of the universe / let’s see how many we are / good evening to you, Mr. Janco / and to you, Mr. Tzara / one / two / four / ten / fifty / one thousand.” Meriano published an announcement

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of the Dadaists’ exhibition at the Corray Gallery in the January 1917 issue of La Brigata. He was enthusiastic about Dada (at one point he asks Tzara, enthusiastically, “Do you want to launch the Dada movement in Italy?”), and in June 1919 he printed a woodcut by Janco in La Brigata, a delayed but strong example of how magazines manifested and encouraged their individual and shared objectives.70 Most likely because he understood that to focus solely on Dada might alienate individuals who could distribute his printed materials and thus, ultimately, spread awareness of Dada the word, the journal, and the movement.71 Other Italian reviews, too, showcase Tzara’s success in publicizing Dada. In 1917, Moscardelli’s La Pagine (Naples, 1916–1917) reproduced four poems by Tzara.72 In exchange for Tzara’s Dada 1, Cantarelli sent a copy of Procellaria (Mantua, 1917–1920), which he edited with Aldo Fiozzi.73 The fourth issue (October 1917) features two poems, “Pélamide” and “Movimento Dada,” by Tzara.74 In a letter from November 1917, Cantarelli called for solidarity among the various avant-garde journals, including Noi, Dada, and his Procellaria.75 While these journals never united behind any particular cause, his letter demonstrates that he found Tzara’s promotion of Dada compatible with their own ambitions and the centrality of periodicals for achieving them. In exchange for this publicity, Tzara, in turn, endorsed the Italians. The first two issues of Dada advertise their reviews.76 On September 22, 1916, De Pisis, then living in Ferrara, initiated contact with Tzara, after seeing Savinio’s copy of Cabaret Voltaire. In his letters he promises to publicize Tzara’s journal among his acquaintances, and he sent Tzara three texts, two paintings, and drawings for the next edition of Dada, as well as copies of Emporio, the book of his poems, for Tzara to sell.77 Although de Pisis was not a journal editor, he was a regular contributor to La Voce (edited by Giuseppe Prezzolini, Florence, 1908–1916), Le Pagine, and La Brigata, and he encouraged their editors to back Tzara.78 Despite Tzara’s apparent lack of enthusiasm, the two maintained ties. In one letter Tzara asks de Pisis to help him support the “modern movement” (“le mouvement modern”). The magazine network extended across the Atlantic, as well, to New York, where Tzara attempted to reach American audiences. At this early stage the artist, gallery owner, and former editor of 291, along with Paul B. Haviland and Agnes Ernst Meyer, Marius de Zayas, was in fact New York’s primary link to European Dada. Following up on Guillaume’s lead, on September 30, 1916, three months after Cabaret Voltaire came out, Tzara wrote a letter to de Zayas, who had moved to New York from Mexico City in 1907.79 Correspondence between

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Tzara and de Zayas in 1916 and 1917 conveys enthusiasm for supporting each other’s efforts, which ultimately advanced Dada in New York, as explored in Chapter 4. De Zayas was part of the vibrant, international circle of artists in New York, many of them congregating in the apartment of art patrons Walter and Louise Arensberg.80 New York was a hub of periodicals production. De Zayas published 291. Before that Man Ray put together his irreverent, and according to David Hopkins’s “proto-Dadaist,” Ridgefield Gazook (March 1915, Ridgefield, New Jersey) and artist Robert Coady put out The Soil (1916–1917, New York), which mixes examples of European avant-garde art and American “art,” broadly understood to encompass sports.81 In a letter from December 1916, Tzara promises to send de Zayas Cabaret Voltaire, though it is uncertain if De Zayas ever received a copy.82 We do know that de Zayas obtained Tzara’s absurdist play, La Première Aventure Céleste de M. Antipyrine (“The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Aspirin/Fire-Extinguisher”), in late 1916 or early 1917.83 After receiving Tzara’s book, de Zayas replied eagerly, promising to distribute the rest to “people interested in the modern art movement” and to try to get New York booksellers to sell it. Tzara, in turn, extended an invitation to de Zayas to send him woodcuts: I’m putting out a very simple publication with wood engravings, and I would be happy to be able to could count you (with the other advanced American painters) among its contributors. Please send me several woodcuts; I will send them back to you as soon as they are printed. The dimensions should not exceed 15/25.84

There is no record that de Zayas sent any contributions; it is possible that they were confiscated in the mail. De Zayas apparently did send Tzara copies of 291 with his first letter from November 16, 1916, although Tzara did not receive them. The two also took significant, if ultimately fruitless, steps towards organizing an exhibition together, to take place in New York and Zurich.85 It never took place, most likely due to obstacles in transportation, but the exchange expresses the men’s eagerness to collaborate. In the spring of 1917, while Tzara was still preparing Dada, Duchamp coedited two issues of the famous two-issue review, Blind Man, with Beatrice Wood and Henri-Pierre Roché, which coincided with the Independent Society of Artists’ famous exhibition featuring Duchamp’s readymade “Fountain” (1917).86 Given its subsequent place of privilege in Dada studies, Blind Man deserves attention here. When asked if this publication was Dada, Duchamp replied, “It was

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parallel, if you wish, but not directly influenced. It wasn’t Dada, but it was in the same spirit, without, however, being in the Zurich spirit.”87 Duchamp was among the first people with whom de Zayas shared Tzara’s book. Although today he is perhaps the best-known Dadaist, in 1917 he did not consider himself part of Dada. In a 1945 interview with James Johnson Sweeney, Duchamp said that his first exposure to Dada was through La Première Aventure Céleste de M. Antipyrine. Duchamp commented on the book, “It interested us but I didn’t know what Dada was, or even that the word existed,” adding that Picabia brought the word to his attention.88 The cover and back page of this publication list it as part of “Collection Dada,” although he did not know much about Dada until French itinerant artist and editor Francis Picabia became more involved with Dada in 1918. In 1960, Duchamp explained, Picabia, Man Ray and myself had already had some good reasons to “act dada” without knowing the word … The Dada movement in itself, a negative protest and a destruction of traditional values, led to a complete nihilism which may have very well hastened my decision to stop painting around 1923.89

In another interview from the same year, Duchamp retroactively assigns their activities the “Dada” label: “We saw the stupidity of the war. We were in a position to judge the results, which were no results at all. Our movement [Dada] was another form of pacifist demonstration.”90 Duchamp maintained that he and his circle in New York had a certain connection to what he calls “the Dada spirit.”91 Blind Man does not promote Dada or feature any contributions from Dada affiliates overseas, and its first audiences did not associate it with Dada. Nevertheless, the second issue in particular contains evidence of what would become Dada characteristics—an interest in cultivating a sense of scandal, in advertising, in machines, and in challenging single authorship.92 David Hopkins describes the second issue of The Blind Man as “a vehicle for Duchamps’ protoDada questioning of art.”93 It publicized the readymade, one of the best-known Dada strategies. It also made its way over the Atlantic. Roché sent a copy of the second issue of The Blind Man to Apollinaire, who wrote a short description of the journal and the scandal in an article entitled “Le cas de Richard Mutt” (“The Richard Mutt Case”) for Mercure de France on June 16, 1918, in which he sharply critiques the Society of Independent Artists, defending “Fountain” as a beautiful piece.94 It is quite possible that Tzara saw this review. Though not conceived as a Dada magazine, Blind Man came to be categorized as one, and in 1917 it was yet another one of the titles traversing the Atlantic, linking avant-garde artists, many of whom would come to identify with “Dada.”

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Tzara also was corresponding with individuals in Berlin at this time, primarily Huelsenbeck, and their letters indicate that reviews remained central to their shared goal of advancing Dada, despite their differences. Through Huelsenbeck’s efforts, Dada was taking on new life in Berlin. Despite his disillusionment with Dada in Zurich, the German writer began organizing Dada exhibitions and performances as soon as he returned to Berlin in early 1917, bringing with him what fellow Berlin Dadaist Raoul Hausmann called “a magical word that serve our purposes as a cloaked pretense: Dada.”95 Eager to publicize Dada in Berlin, Huelsenbeck also sold Zurich Dada publications, including Cabaret Voltaire, Tzara’s Monsieur Antipyrine, and his own Phantastische Gebete (“Fantastic Prayers”), illustrated by George Grosz. He asked Tzara to market Wieland Herzefelde and John Heartfield’s anti-war bimonthly Neue Jugend (“New Youth”) (Berlin, 1916–1917),96 which published Huelsenbeck’s poemmanifesto, “Der Neue Mensch” (“The New Man”).97 Requesting graphic works and paintings for an exhibition he was planning (which did not take place), Huelsenbeck insists, “You have to do everything in your power to support us in this matter, since we are here giving you publicity, which can be of the greatest use in commercial and spiritual matters for you.”98 His statement conveys how, as the Berlin Dadaists became more established, Huelsenbeck and his circle endorsed Zurich Dada with the expectation that the Dadaists in Zurich would do the same for Berlin Dada. Between 1916 and 1917, magazines transformed “Dada” from a term tied to events in Zurich to a movement known in many European cities and in New York. Cabaret Voltaire and the first two issues of Dada presented “Dada,” and recipients’ periodicals endorsed it. Portable and changing, these early Dada publications created a network that reached well beyond just a “few cafés in Paris, Berlin, Rome.” They prepared the way for more aggressive publicizing of Dada in journals in 1918, when the Dadaists began to realize the creative potential of the medium. And again the magazines’ role changed, from launching a movement and forging ties among individuals in various cities to being a venue with the capacity not only to showcase, but also to shape the Dadaists’ artistic output.

Notes 1

Richard Huelsenbeck, “En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism” (1920), in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge, MA, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), 26.

How Magazines Launched “Dada,” 1916–1917 2

3

4

5 6

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Sources on the Cabaret Voltaire and the beginnings of Dada in Zurich include Leah Dickerman, “Zurich,” in Dada, 18–83; Lewer, “The Avant-Garde in Swiss Exile,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, part II, 1032–56; Hans Bolliger, Dada in Zürich. Zürich: Kunsthaus Zürich, 1985; Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha Foster, eds., A Clown’s Game for Nothing: Dada Zurich, vol. II, Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, ed. Stephen C. Foster (New York: G.K. Hall and Co., 1996); Astrid von Asten and Adrian Notz, eds., Genesis Dada: 110 Years of Dada Zurich (Zurich: Scheideger & Spiess, 2016); Ball, Flight Out of Time; Michael Howard and Debbie Lewer, A New Order: An Evening at the Cabaret Voltaire (Manchester: The Manchester Metropolitan University, 1996); Demos, “Circulations: In and around Zurich Dada,” October 105. Richard Huelsenbeck, quoted and translated in Arndt Niebisch, Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde: On the Abuse of Technology and Communication (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 31. Ball had been attracted to periodicals as a means of international collaboration before this time, most immediately with the possible involvement with Der Mistral (Hugo Kersten, Emil Szittya, Walter Serner, Zurich, 1915). Walter Serner’s Sirius (Walter Serner, Zurich, 1915–1916), which published works by Christian Schad and Hans Arp but also attacked Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck, also formed an important part of the publishing context for Cabaret Voltaire. For more on these and other avant-garde publications in Zurich as Dada took shape, see Debbie Lewer, “The Avant-Garde in Swiss Exile 1914–20,” 1032–56. Ball, April 11, 1916, Flight Out of Time, 60. Cabaret Voltaire measures approximately 27 × 21.5 cm (10½ × 8½ inches). Five hundred copies were printed. The regular edition cost two francs; issues with a cover made of heavier stock cost three francs, and there was a discount of one franc for copies purchased at the Cabaret Voltaire. Inside pages are glossy stock paper with black-and-white images. Fifty of the five hundred copies of the deluxe edition were printed. Each numbered copy featured an original print, colored by hand, and signed. In numbers one through ten, a wood engraving by Hans Arp, in numbers eleven through twenty, a woodcut by Marcel Janco, in numbers twenty-one through thirty, an etching by Max Oppenheimer, numbers thirty-one through forty, an engraving by M. Slodki, in numbers forty-one through fifty, a woodcut by Arthur Segal. In most cases, the original print was inserted separately into the journal. None of the copies of Cabaret Voltaire I examined included an original print, and descriptions of additional copies do not mention an original print. Lewer points to them as an example of the “friction between a radical and traditional aesthetic” among Zurich Dadaists, and like some of their contemporaries, she asks if they are dangerously aligned with bourgeois capitalism at a time when their oppositional stance bumped up against the exigencies of starting a movement. See Lewer, “The Avant-Garde in Swiss Exile,” 1050–1, 1055–6.

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8 9

10

11

12

13

Dada Magazines Ball, June 4, 1916, Flight Out of Time, 65. Ball approached artists he knew and asked them for a picture, drawing, or engraving for the exhibition, and Arp helped him gather from Munich and Paris. Ball, “Als ich das Cabaret Voltaire gründete … ,” Cabaret Voltaire, 5, and Alastair Grieve, “Arp in Zurich,” in Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt, ed. Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Madison: Coda Press/Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1979), 180. Cabaret Voltaire came in a wrapper reading, “Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism.” A copy including this wrapper is at the Getty Research Institute. This letter contradicts the notes at the end of Cabaret Voltaire that claim that Picasso’s drawing was reproduced with the permission of art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Most likely the image was taken from Saint Matorel (1911), written by Max Jacob with illustrations by Picasso. Enrico Prampolini to Tzara, March 17, 1917, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Fonds Tristan Tzara, TZRC 3118. Ball probably took Apollinaire’s poem, “Arbre,” from the March 1913 issue of the Paris magazine Le Gay Sçavoir. See Leroy Bruenig, “From Dada to Cubism: Apollinaire’s ‘Arbre,’” About French Poetry from Dada to “Tel Quel,” ed. Mary Ann Caws (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), 29. The copy in the Elaine Lustig Cohen Collection at the New York Public Library features a shiny silver strip of foil; copies at the Kunsthaus in Zurich and the International Dada Archive in Special Collections at the University of Iowa Libraries have a gold piece of paper. The alignment of the drawing differs between the two, but in both cases, the drawing projects out on the right, beyond the strip of paper, indicating that the strip of paper was attached to the cover before the printing. Cabaret Voltaire presents a list of works shown at the Cabaret, many of which appear in the journal. These include one of two drawings of Arp by Amedeo Modigliani, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s “Dune,” Franceso Cangiullo’s “Addioooo,” Slodki’s woodcut, and a collage by Otto van Rees. The catalog lists four etchings by Picasso, numbered I through IV, one of which is reproduced in Cabaret Voltaire. Cabaret Voltaire, 32. A former dramaturg at the renowned Kammerspiele in Munich, Ball became more familiar with cabaret and variety shows in the fall of 1915 as a pianist at a small variety theater in Zurich, where he also developed and dramatized several short plays for the ensemble. For more on this and other biographical information on Ball, see Emmy Hennings, “Foreword to the 1946 Edition,” in Ball, Flight Out of Time, xlvii and xlix–lxiv. For more on the cabaret tradition, see Lisa Appignanesi, The Cabaret (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), and Cabaret Performance, vol. I: Europe 1890–1920: Sketches, Songs, Monologues, Memoirs, ed. Laurence Senelick (New York: PAJ Publications, 1988). My thanks to Nicola Behrmann and Tobias Wilke for their insights and recommendations regarding my discussion of Cabaret Voltaire in “A ‘Living Magazine:’ Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire” Germanic Review 91, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 395–414.

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14 “Und durch die Initiative des Herrn Tristan Tzara führten die Herren Tzara, Huelsenbeck und Janco … sowie eine Poème simultan eigener Composition … ” “Als ich das Cabaret Voltaire gründete … ,” 5. 15 Approaching the journals from a semiotics framework, we can define modes of address as how the relationship between addresser and addressee is constructed in a text, including how placement, formatting, degrees of directness and formality, point of view, tone, references, language, and content communicate with readers. Daniel Chandler identifies three factors: textual context, social context, and technological constraints. For more on modes of address, see Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics (London/New York: Routledge, 2002), 190–4. 16 Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara, “Dada: Dialogue entre un cocher et un alouette,” Cabaret Voltaire, 31, trans. Christina Mills, in Dada Reader, 28. 17 According to Gundolf Winter, for example, they were “only a part of those live images that the cabaret itself produced as communicative works of art, for the moment, accidentally, irrepeatably.” Gundolf Winter, “Zurich Dada and the Visual Arts,” A Clown’s Game for Nothing: Dada Zurich, 144. 18 Notably, Marcus bases this interpretation on a microfilm copy of the anthology, which yields a more removed interaction than handling the actual object affords. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990), 188. This prioritization of performance over print repeats in accounts of Zurich Dada. See, for instance, Annabelle Melzer, Latest Rage the Big Drum: Dada and Surrealist Performance (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980), 36; Katherine Weinstein, “Subversive Women: Female Performing Artists in Zurich Dada” (PhD diss., Tufts University, 2001), 15; Michael Kimmelman, “‘Dada’ at MoMA: The Moment When Artists Took over the Asylum,” The New York Times (June 16, 2006). 19 Gino Cantarelli to Tristan Tzara, February 24, 1917, Dossiers Tristan Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, TZRC 676. 20 “il y a un jeune homme qui mange ses poumons / puis a la diarrhée / puis il fait un pet lumineux” Tristan Tzara, “La revue Dada 2,” Cabaret Voltaire, 19, trans. Michelle Owoo, in Dada Reader, 24. 21 Hugo Ball, Letter to Maria Hildebrand, April 13, 1916, in Emmy Hennings Dada, ed. Christa Baumberger and Nicola Behrmann (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2015), 155; Adrianus Baltus van Tienhoven, in De Nieuwe Amsterdammer, quoted in Emmy Hennings Dada, 161. In an article published on April 26, 1916, the Züricher Post refers to the cafe appropriated by Ball and his cohorts as “Cabaret Voltaire.” L. E., Züricher Post (April 26, 1916), quoted in Emmy Hennings Dada, 156. 22 Ball, April 11, 1916, Flight Out of Time, 60. 23 Richard Huelsenbeck, “Dada Lives,” Transition 25 (Fall 1916), 77–8; Ball, April 18, 1916, Flight Out of Time, 63. 24 Tristan Tzara, “Zurich Chronicle 1915–1919,” trans. Manheim, The Dada Painters and Poets, 236.

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25 Ball, “Als ich das Cabaret Voltaire gründete … ,” 5. Emphasis mine. 26 “ … Huelsenbeck (cocher): … Was sagt mir Dein Gesang von der Zeitschrift Dada?/Tzara (alouette): Parce que le premier numéro de la Revue Dada paraît le 1 août 1916. Prix: 1 fr. Rédaction et administration: Spiegelgasse 1, Zurich; elle n’a aucune relation avec la guerre et tente une activité moderne internationale hi hi hi hi … / Huelsenbeck (cocher): o ja, ich sah—Dada kam aus dem Leib eines Pferds als Blumenkorb. Dada platzte als Eiterbeule aus dem Schornstein eines Wolkenkratzers, o ja, ich sah Dada—als Embryo der violetten Krokodile flog Zinnoberschwanz Olululu Olululu Dada ist gross Dada ist schön … ” Huelsenbeck and Tzara, “DADA, dialogue entre un cocher et un alouette,” Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara, “Dada: Dialogue entre un cocher et un alouette,” Cabaret Voltaire, np, trans. Christina Mills, in Dada Reader, 27–8. My translation is based on that of Mills with two changes: I take “Zeitschrift” to mean magazine, not newspaper, and “numéro” (line six) as issue, not “edition.” 27 Hugo Ball, “Als ich das Cabaret Voltaire gründete … ” in Cabaret Voltaire, ed. Hugo Ball (Zurich 1916), 5, trans. Christina Mills in The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press and Tate Publishing, 2006), 20. 28 Hugo Ball to August Hoffmann, June 2, 1916. Quoted in Lewer, “The Avant-Garde in Swiss Exile,” 1038. Lewer translates “Propagandaheft” to mean “propaganda magazine.” 29 Hugo Ball, Letter to August Hoffmann, June 2, 1916, quoted in Lewer, “The AvantGarde in Swiss Exile,” 1038. 30 “Das nächste Ziel der hier vereinigten Künstler ist die Herausgabe einer internationalen Revue Internationale.” Ball, “Als ich das Cabaret Voltaire gründete … ,” Cabaret Voltaire, 5. 31 Tristan Tzara to Giuseppe Raimondi, March 17, 1917, quoted in Dickerman, “Zurich,” Dada, 32. 32 Huelsenbeck, “En Avant Dada,” 27. 33 Benjamin says that the anthology belongs in the category of “completeness,” “a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object’s mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection … ” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999 [written between 1927 and 1940]), 204–5. 34 Lewer, “The Avant-Garde in Swiss Exile 1914–20,” 1039. 35 Sudhalter, “How to Make a Dada Anthology,” Dadaglobe Reconstructed, 25. Emphasis added. 36 Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 16.

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37 Braddock, 159. He references literary anthologies like the Futurists’ I poeti futuristi (“The Futurist Poets”) (1912) and Ezra Pound’s Des Imagistes (“Imagists”) (1914). 38 Hugo Ball, Letter to Tristan Tzara, September 27, 1916, trans. Trevor Stark, “Complexio Oppositorum: Hugo Ball and Carl Schmitt,” October 146 (Fall 2013), 47. 39 He edited Almanach der Freien Zeitung, an anthology of political materials published in Die Freie Zeitung, in 1917 and 1918. For more on this publication, see Lewer, “The Avant-Garde in Swiss Exile,” 1053–5. 40 For more on Tzara’s efforts in Zurich at this time, see Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 81–101. 41 Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada, 33. 42 Tristan Tzara, “La Revue Dada No. 2,” Cabaret Voltaire, 19. 43 It reads, “The first issue is titled cabaret [sic] Voltaire and will now be called Dada.” Henri Guilbeaux, “L’art de demain,” La Guerre Mondiale 6, no. 580 (July 18, 1916), 4634. Ball, notably, affirmed Guilbeaux’s harsh critique in a letter to Tzara in fall 1916. Hugo Ball, Letter to Tristan Tzara, September 27, 1916, trans. Stark, “Complexio Oppositorum,” 47. Notes, Dada 1, 16. 44 “On lance le mouvement dada.” Tristan Tzara, “Chronique Zurichoise,” in Œuvres Complètes, ed. Henri Béhar, Tome I (1912–1924) (Paris: Flammarion, 1975–1982), 565. 45 For a history of magazine production in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see S. Morrisson, “Introduction: Mass Market Publicity—Modernism’s Crisis and Opportunity,” The Public Face of Modernism, 3–16; Scholes and Wulfman, “Modernity and the Rise of Modernism: A Review,” in Modernism in the Magazines, 26–43; Hammill and Hussey, Modernism’s Print Cultures, 1–11. 46 See Anthony Burton, “Nineteenth-Century Periodicals” and Trevor Fawcett, “Scholarly Journals,” both in The Art Press. See also Cynthia Lee Patterson, Art for the Middle Classes: America’s Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010). 47 Lacerba promoted Futurism briefly, from March 1913 to March 1914. Christine Poggi, “Lacerba: Interventionist Art and Politics in Pre-World War I Italy,” in Art and Journals on the Political Front, 1910–1940, ed. Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), 19. 48 Dada 1 and Dada 2 measure about 7 ¾ × 9 inches (19.7 cm × 22.8); the deluxe issues approximately 9 × 10 inches (23 × 26 cm). The first issue is eighteen pages long; the second twenty-two. Both cost two francs for the regular edition and six and eight francs for the deluxe editions of the first and second issues, respectively. Funding came mostly from proceeds from the Galerie Dada. The print runs of these two journals are not known. However, based on the print runs of the following two issues, it was probably around 2,000 regular issues and between

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thirty and thirty-eight deluxe editions. For more details on these two publications, see Sanouillet and Baudouin, Dada. 49 Tristan Tzara, “Texte sur Dada” (c. 1930s), Dossiers Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire, Jacques Doucet, TZR 534. 50 See Raimond Meyer, Dada Global, 282. For more on how their branding mirrored that of commercial products, see Kurt Beals, “Dada: Art and the Discourse of Advertising,” New German Critique 44, no. 2 (2017): 45–50. 51 Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada, 26. 52 References to Dada in Dada 1 are the title, two mentions of “Anthologie Dada,” which eventually came out as Dada 4–5, Francesco Meriano’s reference to Dada as the “ultima rivista dell’universo” (ultimate review of the universe), references to “la première soirée de manifestation Dada” and mention of an event at the Galerie Dada. “Notes,” Dada, no. 1 (July 1917): 16–17. Francesco Meriano, “Walk,” 2; “Notes,” Dada, no. 1 (July 1917): 16–17. In Dada 2, besides the title, the word appears in the title of Pierre Albert-Birot’s poem, “Pour Dada,” in the notes, which mention “Les Cahiers Dada,” and two references to Dada 1 and two to the “Dada movement.” Pierre Albert-Birot, “Pour Dada”; “Notes,” “Mouvement Dada,” Dada no. 2 (December 1917): np. 53 Michel Sanouillet, “Dada: A Definition,” Dada Spectrum, 21. 54 Niebisch, “Dada Media Subversion,” Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde, 33. 55 André Malraux, Museum without Walls (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1967), 12. 56 Hugo Ball to Kathe Brodnitz, June 3, 1916, quoted in Lewer, “The Avant-Garde in Swiss Exile 1914–20,” 1043. 57 Lewer, “The Avant-Garde in Swiss Exile 1914–20,” 1043. 58 As Arnauld Pierre points out, there was a “porous interpenetration between manifestations of the modern spirit and Dada.” Arnauld Pierre, “The ‘Confrontation of Modern Values’: A Moral History of Dada in Paris,” The Dada Seminars, 247. 59 Jay Bochner, “Dadamags,” in Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York, ed. Francis M. Naumann and Beth Venn (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1996), 215–16. 60 Paul Guillaume, letter to Tzara, June 28, 1916, quoted in Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 485. 61 Paul Guillaume to Tzara, October 3, 1916, in Dada in Paris, 486; Guillaume Apollinaire to Tristan Tzara, December 6, 1916, quoted in Adriana M. Paliyenko, “Apollinaire and Dada: Influence Matters,” in Paris Dada: The Barbarians Storm the Gates, ed. Elmer Peterson (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group, Inc., 2001), 74, trans. 89, note 35. 62 “einer neuen Kunstrichtung Dada dar, die eine sehr sehr sehr sehr sehr freie, brutal moderne und primitive Kunst sein wird.” Tzara to Apollinaire, October 1916,

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64

65

66 67 68

69

70

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quoted in Dada 15/25: Dokumentation und chronologischer Überblick zu Tzara & Co. Neuauflage, ed. Raoul Schrott (DuMont Verlag, 2005), 71. Although he had fought for the French army, he was particularly cautious at this time because he had recently applied for naturalization and was under close scrutiny. He feared being perceived as a German sympathizer, particularly because of his former connections with Herwarth Walden and Der Sturm, and he had been linked with (and then cleared of) the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. In his first letter to Tzara, Apollinaire apologizes to Tzara for not writing earlier, admitting that he was concerned before that Tzara had an “above the mêlée” (“au dessus de la mêlée”) attitude. Apollinaire to Tzara, December 6, 1916, quoted in Paliyenko, “Apollinaire and Dada,” Paris Dada, 73–4, trans. 88, note 33. Among the figures for whom he provided contact information were Enrico Prampolini, Anton Bragaglia, and Giacomo Balla, Giorgio de Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio, and Carlo Carrà. Spaïni, who met Ball, Hennings, and Richter in Berlin in 1912 when he was involved in the Der Sturm circle, moved to Zurich in the summer of 1916 and immediately began participating in activities at the Cabaret Voltaire. He translated Italian Futurist texts into German, and because he had seen Futurist serate he could advise the Dadaists on their performances. Richard Sheppard, “Chronology,” in Dada Artifacts, 30; Enrico Crispolti, “Dada a Roma: Contributo alla partecipazione italiana al Dadaismo (Dada in Rome Contribution to the Italian participation to the Dadaism)” Palatino: Rivista Romana di Cultura 1, nos. 3–4 (July–December, 1966): 242. For more on Noi, see Chris Michaelides, “Futurist Periodicals in Rome (1916–39): From Effervescence to Disillusionment,” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, part I, 568–71. Enrico Prampolini to Tristan Tzara, August 4, 1917, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Fonds Tristan Tzara, TZRC 3121. Michaelides, “Futurist Periodicals in Rome,” 569. Tzara suggests that they embark on some kind of collective activity, and in a letter from October 1917, Prampolini writes, enthusiastically, that they can do many things together if they continue to collaborate. Prampolini to Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Fonds Tristan Tzara, TZRC 3120. In an earlier letter, he writes that only Tzara can offer him “intellectual exchange.” Prampolini to Tzara, January 1917, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Fonds Tristan Tzara, TZRC 3116. Tzara was also interested at this time in collecting materials for his anthology, Dadaglobe, which never materialized. For more on Dadaglobe, see Sudhalter, Dadaglobe Reconstructed. Tristan Tzara to Francesco Meriano, June 12, 1917, quoted in Dada 15/25 (2005), 83, 140; Tzara to Meriano, August 1, 1917, quoted in Giovanni Lista, “Encore sur Tzara et le futurisme,” Les Lettres Nouvelles (December 1974): 141–2.

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71 Tzara to de Pisis, quoted in Sanouillet, Dada: réimpression intégrale II, 185. 72 “Mouvement” (“Movement”) and “La grande complainte de mon obsurité” (“A great complaint of my obscurity”) in February, “Mouvement Dada-Marcel Janco,” in July, and “Pelamide” in October. 73 On the manuscript of the poem that Cantarelli sent to Tzara, the title is “Costellazione Vita,” literally, “Constellation Life.” TZR C 783 64, Dossiers Tristan Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet. Tzara requested that all Italian contributions to his journal be translated into French. He nevertheless printed this poem in Italian. Cantarelli also submitted two additional poems, “Cristal-prélude” and “Dieux-Lumière,” which are translated into French. However, the French manuscripts of both poems are riddled with grammatical errors. These manuscripts include many corrections, written in pencil. TZR C 783 65–6, Dossiers Tristan Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet. 74 There are many mistakes in the printing of “Movimento Dada.” Corrections are marked in pencil on the copy of this issue in the Special Collections at the Getty Research Institute Research Library, probably Tzara’s copy, given the handwriting and the fact that other journals from his collection are housed at the Getty Research Institute. Most likely the mistakes occurred because Tzara submitted his poem in writing and the typist’s and/or editors’ French was weak. Procellaria 4, Jean Brown Collection, Getty Research Institute. 75 Gino Cantarelli to Tristan Tzara, November 23, 1917, Dossiers Tristan Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, TZRC 681. 76 Dada 1 lists La Pagine and La Brigata, as well as L’Italia Futurista (ed. Arnaldo Ginna and Emilio Settimelli, Florence, 1916–1918), along with other publications by Italians, such as Emporio by Filippo de Pisis. “Notes,” Dada 1, 17. Dada 2 lists La Pagine, La Brigata, Noi, and Procellaria. Dada 2, 20. 77 Filippo de Pisis to Tzara, September 22, 1916 and Cantarelli to Tzara, October 1916, quoted in Filippo de Pisis, Futurismo, Dadaismo, Metafisica (Milan: Libri Scheiwiller, 1981), 85, 86–7. 78 de Pisis, Futurismo, Dadaismo, Metafisica, 92. 79 Guillaume had helped de Zayas acquire works of art for his gallery in New York beginning in 1915. In Guillaume’s letter to Tzara from June 28, 1916, concerning Apollinaire, Guillaume also gave the Romanian poet the address of de Zayas’s gallery (500 Fifth Avenue), identifying him as the editor of 291 and “the most widely known man in the progressive milieus of the United States.” Paul Guillaume to Tristan Tzara, June 28, 1916, quoted in Dada in Paris, 485. 80 Chapter 4 includes discussion of Dada in New York. 81 For more on 291 and Ridgefield Gazook, see David Hopkins, “Proto-Dada: The New York Connection,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, part I, 161–3.

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82 Tristan Tzara to Marius de Zayas, December 28, 1916, Schrott, Dada 15/25 (2005), 76. Scholars disagree about what he sent, Cabaret Voltaire or The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine. Francis Naumann proposes that this publication was the magazine Cabaret Voltaire, based on the fact that de Zayas placed the word “Dada” in inverted commas, as Ball did in his introduction to the magazine. Francis Naumann, “The New York Dada Movement: Better Late Than Never,” Arts Magazine 54, no. 6 (February 1980): 143. Dawn Ades concurs. Dawn Ades, “Introduction,” in Three New York Dadas and the Blind Man: Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, Beatrice Wood, ed. Dawn Ades and Alastair Brotchie (London: Atlas Press, 2013), 8, note 3. Ileana Leavens argues that the publication was Tzara’s The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine, since the words “collection dada” to which de Zayas may have been referring appear underneath the title in the frontispiece. Ileana B. Leavens, From “291” to Zurich: The Birth of Dada. Studies in the Fine Arts: The Avant-Garde, No. 39, ed. Stephen C. Foster (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 116. 83 Antipyrine was the name of a headache medicine at the time. Elmer Peterson, Tristan Tzara: Dada and Surrational Theorist (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1971), 8–9; Michael Taylor, “New York,” Dada, ed. Dickerman, 298, n. 41. 84 Tzara to de Zayas, December 28, 1916 Dada in Paris, 504. 85 Marius de Zayas to Tristan Tzara, November 16, 1916; Tristan Tzara to de Zayas, December 28, 1916, quoted in Dada in Paris, 507, 503–4. 86 For a discussion of The Blind Man, see Ades, “Introduction,” Three New York Dadas and The Blind Man, 9–23. This book also includes notes on each page: “The Blind Man, Note and Commentary,” 147–53. For a discussion of the second issue of The Blind Man, particularly regarding “Fountain,” see Hopkins, “Proto-Dada: The New York Connection,” 166–8. Hopkins also offers a brief analysis of Rongwrong, also published in 1917, and edited by Duchamp, Roché, Wood, and Man Ray, likely to celebrate Picabia’s return to the United States. Hopkins, “Proto-Dada: The New York Connection,” 168–70. 87 Marcel Duchamp, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, interview by Pierre Cabanne, trans. Ron Padgett (London: De Capo Press, 1979), 56. 88 Duchamp, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 55. In an unpublished interview with James Johnson Sweeney in 1945, Duchamp made the following, rather ambiguous statement: “1917—I got Monsieur Antipyrine of Tzara to Arensberg.” Marcel Duchamp, August 5, 1945, interview by James Johnson Sweeney, Marcel Duchamp Archives, Philadelphia Museum of Art. For more on “proto-dada attitudes in America,” see David Hopkins, “New York Dada: From End to Beginning,” in A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 70–88. Additional sources on Dada in New York include the anthology of essays, Martin Ignatius Gaughan, ed., Dada New York: New World for Old, vol. 8, Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, ed.

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92 93 94 95

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Dada Magazines Stephen C. Foster (New Haven: G.K. Hall, 2003). Dickran Tashjian, Skyscraper Primitives: Dada and the American Avant-Garde, 1910–1925 (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), and Francis M. Naumann, ed., Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996). Typed sheet of questions with Duchamp’s written replies, in preparation for Duchamp’s lecture at the Detroit Institute of the Arts, November 28, 1961, Teeny Duchamp Papers, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Duchamp, interview with art critic Hubert Crehan, New York, 1960, “Dada,” Evidence (Toronto), no. 3 (Fall 1961), 36. Quoted in Michael Taylor, “New York,” Dada, ed. Dickerman, 280. Ibid. Calvin Tomkins calls attention to the resonances between the ideas of Duchamp and the Zurich collective: Dada’s rejection of all traditions, its nosethumbing attitude toward social values (including art), its indifference, and at a deeper level its denial of art’s interpretive function—Dada demanded that art be a part of life rather than a commentary on life or an improvement on life—all this was very close to Duchamp’s own thinking. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: H. Holt, 1996), 192. Bochner, “Dadamags,” Making Mischief, 220. Hopkins, “Proto-Dada: The New York Connection,” 166. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Le cas de Richard Mutt,” Mercure de France 16, VI (June 16, 1918), 764. Raoul Hausmann, quoted in Karin Füllner, Richard Huelsenbeck: Texte und Aktionen eines Dadaisten (Carl Winter Universitatsverlag: Heidelberg, 1983), 18. On February 16, 1917, Huelsenbeck wrote to Tzara, sharing his plans for a “Propaganda evening,” for example, to be held on January 20, 1918, at the Saal der Neuen Sezession in Berlin, and asking Tzara for manuscripts and graphic artworks for the event. Richard Huelsenbeck to Tristan Tzara, February 16, 1917, Zurich— Dadaco—Dadaglobe: The Correspondence between Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara and Kurt Wolff (1916–1924), ed. Richard Sheppard (Fife, Scotland: Hutten Press, 1982), 10. Huelsenbeck to Tzara, quoted in Sheppard, Zürich—Dadaco—Dadaglobe, most likely May 1917, 10–11. For more on Neue Jugend, see Simmons, “Neue Jugend”: in A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 38–53. It appeared in the May 23, 1917 issue. Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, 80. “Sie müssen Ihre ganz Kraft daran setzen uns hierbei zu unterstützen, da wir Ihnen hier eine Propaganda machen, die Ihnen geschäftlich und ideell von allergrößtemNutzen sein kann.” Huelsenbeck to Tzara, August 2, 1917, quoted in Zürich—Dadaco—Dadaglobe, 12.

2

“Every Page Must Explode”: Manipulating the Magazine Medium, 1918–1920

“Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed.”1 Tzara’s directive conveys the centrality of serials and inventive graphic design for the Dadaists beginning in 1918. The First World War officially ended in November 1918, and though limitations on travel and censorship persisted, and in some areas even increased, Dada kept growing. By 2020, its magazines had transformed the group from a relatively small cluster of artists in Zurich and Berlin to a widely known, if marginally understood, movement with affiliates well beyond these two cities.2 A month after the armistice, Tzara’s Dada 3 came out in Zurich, and five months later he and Picabia collaborated with Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia and Jean (Hans) Arp to produce Dada 4–5 (May 1919).3 In Berlin, Dada events promoted the movement, and June and September 1919 saw the publication of the first two issues of Der Dada, the first and second edited by Hausmann with Johannes Baader’s help, and the third by Hausmann, John Heartfield, and George Grosz.4 As Tzara’s relations with Italian editors cooled, he developed stronger ties in Paris.5 Francis Picabia’s cover design for the eighth issue of his itinerant 391 (Barcelona, New York, Zurich, Paris, 1917–1924)—showing the names of publications and people (from New York and Paris) arranged on a grid—manifests how various periodicals and individuals formed the fabric, or network, of exchange that was Dada (Figure 2.1).6 In 1918, Dada editors appropriated a medium predicated on communication only to sabotage legibility and playfully uproot assumptions about their chosen medium. Dada magazines, particularly Dada 3 and Dada 4–5, and the first two issues of Der Dada defied standard practices in formatting, typography, and the very division between art and venue, making easy page navigation impossible.7 These pages call for active involvement and direct (even destructive) interaction.

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Figure 2.1  391 8, ed. Francis Picabia, Zurich, 1917, front cover, c. 1917, 17 ¼ × 10 13∕16 in. (43.8 × 27.5 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

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By thwarting readability, they call attention to magazines’ mediated quality.8 Dada editors were engaging the periodical as an artistic medium, recognizing it as critical not only to advancing inventive graphic design but also to reimagining the very definition of art, both major contributions of the group as a whole. In all of these ways, these serials enabled the Dadaists to defy pretenses of transparency and unmitigated communication championed in political and military realms in the early twentieth century. Tzara, Huelsenbeck, Heartfield, Grosz, and others involved with these periodicals manipulated them as ersatz, transportable, reproduced, reoriented, and thus fundamentally new kinds of exhibition spaces. These venues offered many advantages over three-dimensional exhibitions spaces. They did not require a space or the transportation or installation of (often fragile) pieces but are relatively easy and inexpensive to compile and distribute. Whereas an exhibition lasts only a brief period, a journal, though categorized as ephemera, can survive for many generations. Contributors made choices regarding images and texts with magazines, now the primary venue for their works, in mind. This determined the types of artworks Dadaists made and questioned the privileging of originality, singularity, single authorship, presence, and fixed meaning. Dada journals not only functioned as alternative sites—long before artists’ experimentations with periodicals in late twentieth century—but also as models for novel display techniques in “regular” three-dimensional exhibitions (as explored in the next chapter).9 This chapter opens with an exploration of how Dada magazines’ combinations of materials continued to engender diverse interpretations of Dada. It then probes their unorthodox typography and layout and how the chaotic juxtaposition of disparate materials calls attention to the editorial process and the venue itself, prompting interaction and anticipating such contemporary practices as Dirty New Media and glitch art. After demonstrating how magazines’ importance to Dada and material nature determined the types of art Dadaists created, it ends by showing how these publications worked to reorient perceptions of display venues.

Disseminating “Dada,” Multiplying Interpretations Texts in the 1918–1920 magazines are consistently unhelpful for the reader seeking to understand Dada. Tzara’s “Manifeste Dada 1918” (“Dada Manifesto 1918”) in Dada 3 directly defies attempts to delimit the movement. “Dada ne

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signifie rien” (“Dada means nothing”) appears in bold, a hand pointing to it. Tzara further encouraged multiple responses with statements like “I speak only for myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way.”10 In Dada 4–5, his “Proclamation sans Pretension” (“Proclamation without Pretension”) comes closest to characterizing the movement, presenting Dada as an alternative to “art,” but it is still not very helpful: “Art goes to sleep for the birth of a new world/‘ART’—a parrot word—replaced by DADA.”11 The essay “Der Letze Lockerung” (“The Ultimate Loosening Up”) by German writer and early Dada enthusiast Walter Serner, published in the German Dada 4–5, echoes Tzara’s words: “World views are world mixtures. A dog is a hammock. Art is dead. Viva Dada!”12 German artist Hans Richter’s essay “Gegen ohne für Dada” (“Against without for Dada”) in the same issue is similarly confounding, though it does express suspicion toward collective membership: ?! Dada!!—Nobody belongs to it!?—We nevertheless belong to it … The obligation which we took upon ourselves, the avowal ‘of belonging to something,’ is an error that you thank yourselves for …13

Later, the line “Our companionship … lies beyond any group, movement or Dada magazine” confirms that no single publication speaks for all Dadaists.14 The first two issues of Der Dada characterize Dada as a mix between a product and a governmental institution. In his “Erklärung Dada” (“Dada Declaration”) in Der Dada 1, Baader tells readers that if they want to stay informed about Dada they must consult documents available in the State Chancery and Office of the President of the Republic. His formal announcement ends enigmatically: “In spite of everything the heart of Dada remains secret. Freemasons and Jesuits are not Dada.”15 They tout Dada as a means to financial success. Der Dada 1 promotes the movement, albeit in off-putting terms: “Advertise in Dada! Dada spreads your business like an infection over the whole world.”16 The essay “Legen Sie Ihr Geld in Dada an!” (“Invest your money in Dada!”), in Der Dada 1, by the “Zentralamt des Dadaismus” (“Central Office of Dada”) promises, “Dada is more than Tao and Brahma,” adding, “Dada doubles your income.”17 Such enigmatic texts confuse any single perception of what, if anything, is officially Dada. Images, too, signal the Dadaists’ defiant heterogeneity. In addition to contributions from Richter, Arp, Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Arthur Segal, Dada 3 combines poems, essays, drawings, and prints from members of the Parisian avant-garde, including Philippe Soupault, Dermée, Albert-Birot, Pierre

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Reverdy, and Chilean poet Vincente Huidobro (then living in Paris), and Picabia and from Italy Enrico Prampolini, Alberto Savinio, Giuseppe Raimondi, and Camillo Sbarbaro. The German version also shows works by Huelsenbeck and Jakob van Hoddis.18 Despite a tendency toward abstraction, these pieces have no inherent connection and the magazines’ titles suggest that this is exactly what Dada is. Even single issues came out in different versions. To avoid censors, Dada 3 and Dada 4–5 was in two versions—French and German—and they are more distinct from each other than previous pairs had been. In Dada 4–5, while the German one includes German texts from several Dada events in Zurich, in the French the only record of an event is Tzara’s “Proclamation without Pretension.”19 The contents of nine pages of Dada 4–5 are entirely different, making the two more distinct than those of Dada 3.20 Because of readers’ dependence on the magazines for grasping Dada, these two iterations of Dada 4–5 not only described, but also effectively created two distinct Dada movements from Zurich. Deluxe issues further complicated matters, as they included special limited-edition prints.21 As the war came to an end and Dada became more widely known, affiliates made efforts to actually establish their claim on Dada. The Berlin Dadaists began to distinguish themselves from their colleagues in Zurich, anticipating future divisions. The editors of Der Dada used the magazine to promote themselves as the center of Dada.22 Der Dada 1 announces, “The Central Office of Dada is now in Berlin,” and declarations in both the first and second issues of Der Dada are signed by the “Zentralamt des Dadaismus” (“Central Office of Dada”).23 Besides manifesting the Berlin Dadaists’ parody of a governmental bureaucracy, such statements reflect a change in their attitude toward their colleagues in Zurich directly. Neither Der Dada 1 nor Der Dada 2 mentions Zurich at all. A May 3, 1919 letter from Huelsenbeck (who had arrived in Berlin from Zurich in January 1917) to Tzara begins, sarcastically, “Dada Greetings leader!” and goes on, I just received from Hausmann your impertinent controlling words putting down guidelines and program points. We are of the opinion that you in your village there have no idea at all. We refuse to tolerate any interference into our affairs. The Center of Dada is in Berlin. It seems that the success of your last soirée turned your head.24

In response, Tzara reminded Huelsenbeck that Dada was born in Zurich, but Huelsenbeck, unheeding, continued to insist on the centrality of Berlin, scrawling, “Zentrale der Dadaistischen Bewegung” (“Center Office of the Dada

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movement”) on the top of a later letter to Tzara.25 There is only one submission from Tzara in any of the three issues of Der Dada: his poem, “Ange” (“Angel”), and it does not associate him with the Dada movement. At the same time, their journals were already beginning to spawn new interpretations of Dada internationally. The multicentered, nonhierarchical, open-ended, permissive system these publications initiated prompted others to make magazines that in turn had various contributions. In this way they expanded the number of potential interpretations and set into motion a movement that transcended Tzara and Huelsenbeck’s individual concerns and convictions, as we will see in later chapters.

Models to Be Outdone: Avant-Garde Magazines in the 1910s Dada editors looked for inspiration regarding graphic design to preceding and contemporary magazines, mentioned in Chapter 1, who manipulated typography in their periodicals.26 Les Soirées de Paris presents Apollinaire’s calligrammes, in which he altered the typeface and placement of the letters to form images related to the content of the poem. Lacerba contains large pages of parole in libertà, combining letters and mathematical, diacritical, musical, and graphic marks in various typefaces and font sizes to create explosive, dynamic spreads. The Vorticists’ Blast was one of the brashest predecessors to the Dada publications. In the first issue, which measures over a foot high, its impudent title blares diagonally across the cover in bold sans serif caps against a bright pink background. Inside, the disjointedness of staccato phrases, many of them texts addressing readers in a confrontational manner, is reinforced by the graphic design, which imitates newspapers, posters, and advertisements, with at least two font sizes on each page, some underlined, with vertical lines framing parts of the text.27 Finally, the stunning caricatures, calligrammes, and “psychotype” (offshoots of calligrammes) in 291 made it particularly influential.28 Earlier magazines by current and future Dada affiliates served as models for the editors of Dada and Der Dada, as well. Heartfield’s cover of the June 1917 issue of Herzefelde’s version of Neue Jugend (“New Youth”) (Heinz Barger and Friedrich Hollaender, Wieland Herzfelde, Berlin, 1914, 1916–1917), for instance, anticipated the jumbled typography of Dada publications. The cover of Jedermann sein eigner Fußball: Illustrierte Halbmonatsschrift (“Everyman His Own Football: Illustrated Fortnightly Magazine”) (Wieland Herzfelde, Berlin, 1919) features the first published photomontages: Grosz’s showing photos of Weimar cabinet members arranged on a photo of a fan, with the

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header, “Preisausschreiben! Wer ist der Schönste??” (“Competition! Who is the Fairest??”) and Heartfield’s of his brother Herzfelde wearing a huge ball and holding a cane and bowler hat in either hand.29 The single-issue Club Dada (Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, Franz Jung, Berlin, 1918) also predicts Der Dada tactics.30 In Hausmann’s woodcut cover design, a hen seems to be “hatching” Dada, with letters spelling “Club Dada” floating randomly in the center.31 The names of the publisher and editors appear just below, with arbitrary capitalization with variations in font size in a disjointed arrangement. Picabia’s 391, too, was a model. Though most of its spreads are elegantly composed, in the fifth issue from June 1917, a text by Albert Gleizes, “La Peinture Moderne” (“The Modern Painter”), appears in Globe Gothic, a popular sans serif font type in 1917 that fell out of use because it is practically illegible.32 The eighth issue of 391 reveals another graphic subversion: the top shows a text by Tzara and Picabia, half of which appears upside down.33 Yet it could be said that all of these magazines bracket experimentation; graphic design is otherwise unremarkable, with texts and images clearly legible and separated from one another. The title and printing intervals of these publications adhere to a uniform format, as well.34 Most issues of Lacerba arrange texts in two regular columns, and even some parole in libertà are squeezed into this format, and its page numbers are continuous from issue to issue. In Der Sturm small woodblock images consistently punctuate texts. In 291, textual and visual entries usually are clearly separate, leaving readers’ basic expectations unchallenged.35 Dadaists’ experiments went further, undermining print conventions and upending assumptions about the role of art and magazine production. At a time when technologies like the radio and the typewriter were feeding an ever-growing drive for clearer and faster communication, particularly in the military, the Dadaists generated noise.36 They did so in various ways. They combined various kinds of texts and images, scrambled layouts and font types and sizes, provoked readers, crafted works explicitly for reproduction, and used the publications themselves as sources and sites for collages. In these ways the editors, working with printers, resisted the notion of transparency and called attention to magazines as creative sites.

Printing Eclecticism, Making Noise “If code, signal processing and network flow have become the dominant tropes of our time, then it is perhaps only through error, failure and breakdown that

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one may find a temporary reprieve.”37 These words by “glitch” artists of the early twenty-first century capture parallels between their efforts and those of the Dadaists. Both aim to expose the mediated nature of communication technology in an age of urgent efforts to alleviate noise and increase connectedness.38 With an emphasis on materiality, glitch artists, as well as Dirty New Media (DNM) artists like Jon Cates and Rosa Menkman, highlight materiality and conventions in a manner that questions the possibility of straightforward communication.39 In so doing they reveal that, as Cates points out, “our technologies are not neutral.”40 Alfredo Salazar-Caro, digital artist and cofounder of the Digital Museum of Digital Art (DiMoDa), explains that Dirty New Media involves “exploiting error.”41 Like the Dadaists, they “[embrace] the cyber flaws, short circuits, and disjointed components” and their art conveys very little actual content.42 Besides the confusing variety of texts and images described above, the Dada reviews from this time showcase a striking jumble of genres tied to special material characteristics. Poems presented at scandalous Dada performances, announcements and manifestoes posted on city walls, clippings from popular magazines and newspapers, and cutouts from earlier Dada journals. In Dada 3, an untitled woodcut by Prampolini, a mechanomorphic drawing, “Abri” (“Shelter”), and a poem by Picabia, and an excerpt of a text by Pierre Albert-Birot combine with advertisements for Picabia’s Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère (“Poems and Drawings of the Girl Born without a Mother”), the review SIC (Pierre Albert-Birot, Paris, 1916–1919), and a Dada aphorism: “Taste is tiring like good company.”43 In Der Dada 2, the poem that begins “Was ist Dada?” (“What is Dada?”) butts up against Baader’s self-advertisement, “Reklame für mich” (“Advertisement for myself ”), and Grosz’s crude “self-portrait” of a man and his dog arranged off-kilter on the top left.44 Each of these eclectic materials still carries with its some of its original impact (as a poem or ad, e.g.), and the printing, arrangement, and typography of these materials tell readers that they come from many sources. Dada editors did not try to mitigate the potential dissonance created by this intermingling. Instead, they intentionally botched the transposition of the assorted media—handwritten poems, drawings, photographs, for example—that they received. Furthermore, they “primitivized” the media they employed, as Matthew Witkovsky puts it.45 They chose a broad range of techniques that were not new, such as photolithography, wood engraving, line block reproduction (a  form of etching), halftone block printing, letterpress, and linotype.46 Misregisters, sloppy applications of color, jagged cuts, typos, and combinations

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of various kinds of contributions and arbitrarily assorted font types and sizes accentuate the multiplicity of sources and processes for composing each page. Rather than trying to silence inevitable interferences, they juxtaposed various media and amplified the noise generated by resorting to antiquated processes, emphasizing the kinds of mistakes (typos, unaligned or uneven print registrations, for example) enabled by them.47 The resultant pages manifest their resistance to a prevailing preoccupation with streamlining interactions.48 The appearance of the magazines enabled and expressed the Dadaists’ resistance to being defined and delimited. As Arndt Niebisch explains, “Dada cannot be translated into a communicable content that is a noise-free message, precisely because it is not a message but rather an intended disturbance of communication.”49 Creating clatter, they also exposed the underlying codes of exchange and, as Witkovsky points out, “interrogate[ed] the production and distribution of information in the media age.”50 They exposed the weaknesses of media systems. They lambasted the codes, while also resisting the strategies of hegemonic powers seeking to control exchange in the early twentieth century.

Exposing Codes, Sabotaging Communication, Provoking Interaction: Layout and Typography The layout of the Dada magazines highlights the diversity of materials it presents all the more. These publications foreground process and production, reminding readers that these pages comprise materials collected from various sources, then arranged, and printed horizontally. The Dadaists’ harnessing of the creative potential of journals is immediately obvious from the cover of Dada 3 (Figure 2.2). Tzara dropped the subtitle, “Literary and Artistic Collection,” and the publication is much larger than the first two issues. Instead of Dada 1 and 2’s sober, spare cover featuring the title, subtitle, and date on the upper left with a small print below, here the title, in bold orange-red letters, crowns a dynamic composition. The statement, “Je ne veux meme pas savoir s’il y a eu des hommes avant moi” (“I do not even want to know if there have been men before me”), spans diagonally across the cover, expressing Dadaists’ professed disregard for not only earlier literary and artistic traditions, but also standard printing practices. Janco’s abstract woodcut (which had appeared in the first issue of Noi in 1917) is not unlike those on the covers of the two first issues of Dada and Cabaret Voltaire, but it is much larger and interacts with the texts to create an animated composition not found in earlier Dada journals. In deluxe

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Figure 2.2  Dada 3, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1918, Mouvement Dada, front cover, c. 1917, 13 ¼ × 9 11∕16 in. (33.7 × 24.6 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries (see Plate 3).

issues, the woodcut is hand-painted in pale salmon and green watercolor, highlighted on the bottom right with what looks like a thumbprint in the same colors, from which the address of “Mouvement DADA” radiates. Throughout Der Dada 1 and 2 and Dada 3 and 4/5, poems, slogans, drawings, and prints appear in many directions, and their jumbled juxtaposition upsets conventions that readers rely on to comprehend content or even to distinguish between texts. The composition encourages readers’ eyes to jump around among the texts and images at various speeds, effecting what Hanne Bergius calls in her analysis of Berlin periodicals “the dynamization of the reading process.”51 The entire cover of Der Dada 1, for instance, forms a dynamic composition of letters printed in various type fonts, sizes, and styles in many directions. The title alone is in two fonts, two sizes, and in two different directions. “Der” is capitalized and is set diagonally,

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and “dada” is in lowercase but in a larger font size. In Zurich, Tzara treated each letter and graphic element as “a rigid readymade,” according to Ellen Lupton, and then experimented with the associated conventions. Disparate typographic pieces arranged in seemingly haphazard ways work in tension with the strictures of the printing press, specifically the grid of letterpress.52 In Dada 3, a dedication to Picabia bumps up against the first line of Tzara’s poem, “Bulletin,” in the same font type and size, and an announcement for his compilation, 25 poèmes, appears sideways, right next to the poem.53 In Dada 4/5, on a page of announcements and poetry, texts appear in several font types in two directions. Tzara’s poem “Raccroc” receives no priority over the advertisements, usually relegated to the back. Further upending expected divisions, Dada editors also began stripping away framing devices for images. In the first two issues of Dada Tzara had tried to make the reproduction of each image as close as possible to the original by giving each its own page and labeling it. Here, as Tzara explained, “drawings, poems, notes, and advertisements intertwined with one another to make clear the position of the Dadaists who, wanting to confuse everything, disregarded aesthetic requirements.”54 Frames disappear and works encroach upon each other, sometimes even overlapping one another. In Der Dada 1 and 2, too, commercial and literary texts, slogans, announcements, manifestoes, and essays intermingle with images. In Der Dada 3 (April 1920), for instance, a false ad for Charlie Chaplin bisects Hausmann’s essay, “Dada in Europa,” with photos in opposite corners (Figure 2.3).55 On another page, a text by “Popocabia” overlaps with figure sketches, a photo of a pair of socks, ads for Dada and for magazines, as well as random statements printed in red and black ink in various font types and angles (Figure 2.4). Increasingly, titles and the names of artists are missing, another example of the editors’ moving away from the prioritization of the original artwork-withlabel format. Images dialogue with poems, announcements, and manifestoes, thus emphasizing the printed nature of the journal. Layout emphasizes the shape, alignment, font, and spacing of texts. A page from Dada 3 shows two abstract woodblock prints placed directly alongside texts (Figure 2.5). The diagonal on the left side of Janco’s architectonic, almost calligraphic, composition accentuates the jagged left edge formed by the lines of the poem below, and the tentacles of Arp’s biomorphic shape reach up to the advertisement. In Dada 4–5, an excerpt from a Pierre Albert-Birot calligrammic poem, “le triangle,” forms a triangle, forcing many words, even two-letter words like “un,” to split between two lines to maintain the triangular shape. It rhymes with Hausmann’s

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Figure 2.3  Der Dada 3, ed. George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Raoul Hausmann, Berlin, 1920, Malik-Verlag, p. 4, 9 1∕16 × 6 1∕8 in. (23 × 15.6 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

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Figure 2.4  Der Dada 3, ed. George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Raoul Hausmann, Berlin, 1920, Malik-Verlag, p. 16, 9 1∕16 × 6 1∕8 in. (23 × 15.6 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries (see Plate 4).

triangular woodcut on the same page. In Der Dada 1, a woodcut by Hausmann appears unlabeled, and the texts move to the right to accommodate the image. On page twelve of Der Dada 3, three photos of Gerhard Preiss doing the “DadaTrott” dance up and down across the top, with the words, “Dada-Trott” repeated as if in accompaniment, with various texts printed in different fonts below it. A profile sketch overlaps with Wieland Herzfelde’s text. In all of these examples, page designs privilege neither texts nor images. The magazines’ typography, too, underlines disjointedness and exposes visual codes. In Dada 3, Tzara explained, “[T]ypographic order is ignored.” Typography “is a demonstration in itself.”56 One could say the same about the other Dada titles discussed in this chapter. By combining various font types and sizes on a page, a text, a line, or even a word, and by disobeying rules for helping readers navigate the reviews, the Dadaists resisted communications priorities

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Figure 2.5  Dada 3, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1918, Mouvement Dada, p. 13, 13 ¼ × 9 11∕16 in. (33.7 × 24.6 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

of the time. They made readers notice the visual nature of words, even to the detriment of comprehending them. As Arthur Cohen observes, with Dada, “Type came alive, living things squirming on the page, requiring that the words be re-read and reconceived, that the writing itself be composed as typography and reapprehended as a living voice.”57 Words typically emphasized, such as

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titles, appear in relatively small print, and font types vary arbitrarily within a single text, with random letters in boldface and underlined. In issues of Der Dada texts are in many font types and sizes, from Fraktur to contemporary types then common for commercial texts.58 An advertisement in Der Dada 2 asks, “What is Dada? An Art? A Philosophy? A Policy? A Fire Insurance? Or: State Religion? Is Dada really Energy? Or is it Nothing at all i.e., everything?” This short passage is written in at least three font types and in more than four font sizes (Figure 2.6). Certain words, like “Energie,” stand out because they appear in boldface or with a shadow outline, while graphic elements such as borders and a pointing hand highlight parts of the text. Similarly, in Dada 3, Tzara’s poem “Bulletin,” mentioned above, is in ten font types in five sizes, accentuating the disjointedness of the poem’s words, many of them seemingly lifted from placards and headlines. The poem’s title is in large, bold, capitalized letters and thus is the only conventionally formatted part of the page. The font size of the title of Paul Dermée’s poem, “à Kisling,” printed just above Tzara’s is smaller than that of the rest of the poem, and the title, poem, and author’s name are each in a different font. The lines of the poem do not keep to any specific left margin, and the end of the poem, “Mécanique de ma vie” (“Machinery of My Life”), is arbitrarily in all caps. As marked texts, they broadcast their visuality, the arbitrariness of printing practices, and how words’ appearances affect reception.59 As Johanna Drucker clarifies, the Dadaists tried “to disrupt, subvert, and call attention to the very mechanisms of production used in signification as a socially and culturally bound system of order.”60 They also either substituted page numbers, a mainstay of periodicals, usually continuous from issue to issue to aid navigation, with fractions and algebraic equations (Der Dada 3), or excluded them altogether (Dada 3). Dadaists’ unorthodox engagement with the magazine forced readers into an active role. Dada texts address audiences directly, often borrowing from advertising language, again mockingly exposing the obsessively guarded, if artificial, barriers between arts with the mass-produced commodity. We find appeals like “Invest Your Money in Dada” and “If you find it futile and don’t want to waste your time on a word that means nothing.”61 Rather than serving as absent conduits of information, Dadaists also interjected themselves by using photographs. On page three of Der Dada 2, Hausmann and Baader’s essay, “Tretet Dada bei” (“Join Dada”), is accompanied by a photo of the authors, with Baader staring down the camera. Graphic design reinforces this call for reader interaction. The foregrounding of the intervention of the author and printer disrupts the assumed transparency and authority of the text, which was particularly alarming when applied to literary texts, which are usually left unmarked, that is, uniformly, without any typographical experimentation.62 As

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Figure 2.6  Der Dada 2, ed. Raoul Hausmann, Berlin, 1919, p. 6, 14 2⁄5 × 9 in. (29 × 23 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

a result, rather than focusing solely on the literary merits of the poem or the persuasiveness of an ad, readers have to work to determine even what kind of text it is. No longer able to depend on visual clues regarding the relative significance or content of texts, readers had to involve themselves. The ensuing confusion exposes the mediation inherent in any form of communication.

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Dada magazines’ graphic design thereby stalled efforts to get through issues quickly and thus interrogated their own seriality, a defining characteristic of periodicals. Unlike a book, an issue of a journal speaks of the next one. Readers assume that design will allow them to take in each page as quickly and easily as possible before the next issue, already in production, arrives. Dada editors enforced a slowing down and wrestling with the materiality of the magazine. They further challenged the notion of seriality by printing issues at irregular intervals and changing the format and sometimes even the title from issue to issue. Dada journals did not appear at standard intervals, and the format and sometimes even the title changed from issue to issue. For example, a particularly confusing case is Dada 4–5, which doubled as both the fourth and fifth issues of the magazine and as an anthology.63 Each regular issue had two covers: one reading Dada 4/5, indicating that it succeeded Dada 3, the other Anthologie Dada (“Dada Anthology”) (Figures 2.7 and 2.8), evidence of the fact that it functioned as a preview of sorts for his planned anthology,

Figure 2.7  Dada 4–5: Anthologie Dada, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1919, front cover, 10 13∕16 × 7 5∕16 in. (27.4 × 18.5 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

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Figure 2.8  Dada 4–5: Anthologie Dada, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1919, second front cover, 10 13∕16 × 7 5∕16 in. (27.4 × 18.5 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

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Dadaglobe.64 In a limited edition, deluxe issue of Dada 4/5, a woodblock print by Arp, part of a short edition, adorns the cover along with the word “Dada,” stenciled onto a cutout from the classified section of La tribune de Genève, suggesting that “Dada” is something for sale. This combination emphasizes the publication’s simultaneously multiple and unique characteristics (Figures 2.9 and 2.10). Although the Dadaists used the same section of the same newspaper issue in at least two versions, each cover of the deluxe edition differs slightly: the placement of the woodcut and stencil and the cutting of the newspaper vary slightly.65 Additionally, the Dadaists maintained the practice of publishing deluxe versions that presented limited edition prints, and Dada 3 and Dada 4/5 came out in a French and German version, as mentioned above. In these ways,

Figure 2.9  Dada 4–5: Anthologie Dada, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1919, Mouvement Dada, limited issue cover, letterpress and collage on newsprint, 10 13∕16 × 7 5∕16 in. (27.4 × 18.5 cm), Bibliotheque des Musees de Strasbourg, Photo by Mathieu Bertola. Licensed under Creative Commons © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (see Plate 5).

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they introduced an element of singularity and variation into what are usually identical copies even as they continued to prize magazines’ multiplicity and broad circulation, which continued to drive and shape the movement.

From Reproductions of Art to Art for Reproduction The Dadaists’ attention to the journal page as a creative site determined the artistic strategies they employed and spurred their ground-breaking interrogation of the expected uniqueness of artworks. In 1916 and 1917, editors were still married to traditional notions of original artworks and they tried to recreate the experience of seeing a piece in person by producing halftone illustrations of paintings and sculptures (usually as low-quality black-and-white reproductions) and separating illustrations from texts. The only text on the page offers the information one might expect on a wall label: artist, title, and collection.66 By 1918, however, because magazines were the primary means of conveying images, artists started to take the physical restrictions and possibilities of this printed, paper medium into account when making their works. They created pieces with reproduction in mind, mainly line drawings, prints, and collages and moved away from paintings, as they require perceiving subtle variations in color and brushwork for their full effect. The Dadaists’ dependence on magazines encouraged them to create easily duplicated images, as enthusiasts understood that they were the primary circulators of their creative output. Dada publications from this period printed fewer and fewer reproductions of preexisting objects and more and more images specifically for their journals, using media made for duplication: woodcuts, linocuts, line drawings, and, in Berlin, collage. Dada 3 and Dada 4–5 included images of paintings by Wassily Kandinsky and Augusto Giacometti, but the majority of images are woodcuts by Richter, Arp, Janco, Prampolini, and Arthur Segal. The first two issues of Der Dada, similarly, show woodcuts by Hausmann and Berlin Dadaist Hannah Höch, as well as a drawing by Grosz. Even the prints in deluxe issues of the Zurich titles were multiple, if in limited edition. Works in all of these issues thereby manifest Walter Benjamin’s formulation in “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that “the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.”67 Richter’s letters from 1918 about his contributions to Dada 3 reveal the extent to which the expected journal venue informed artists’ conception of their works. He makes requests about how he wants a drawing and a linocut to appear, explaining that the drawing relates to a poem by Ferdinand Hardekopf

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and specifying that he wants an entire page to be devoted to it.68 He asks Tzara to alter a linocut that he had sent for Dada 3, which appeared on page eight of both versions. Enclosing a corrected print of it as an example, Richter suggests that someone correct the original based on the one he sent by using a new piece of linoleum.69 Aware that his images would be reproduced in a journal, he was thinking in terms of the page. The Dadaists recognized in the magazines a space removed from an original, preceding encounter, or auratic work of art on a wall. Dada magazines catalyzed what Benjamin called the Dadaists’ “relentless destruction of the aura.”70 The journals encouraged a shift from uniqueness and single authorship toward reproducibility and collaboration. They circulated artworks across borders, but more than shuttling them from point A to point B. By their nature, they altered what they transmitted.71 Beginning in 1918, Dadaists embraced what their magazines had been doing from the start: changing artworks from single objects in space to flat, ephemeral, black-and-white images. They thus spawned a fundamentally new perception of artworks as multiple, moving, and mutable materials to be reused, reframed, cut up, and altered.72 The Dadaists’ development of their influential and celebrated collage techniques stemmed from this dependence on magazines, whose history intertwines with that of collage.73 Der Dada 2 features many “Klebebilder,” or glued pictures, which notably incorporate cutouts from earlier Dada-affiliated journals and related print media.74 Its cover collage by Hausmann juxtaposes the top of Hausmann and Huelsenbeck’s essay, co-signed by composer Jefim Golyscheff, “Was ist der Dadaismus und was will er in Deutschland?” (“What Is Dadaism and What Does It Want in Germany?”) and an insert in Der Dada 1 (Figure 2.11).75 The orientation of the letters suggests that he rotated the original piece 90 degrees counterclockwise to fit the given space in Dada 2. Hausmann also includes Johannes Baader’s text “Jesus redivivus: Der da wiederkam in den Wolken des Himmels zu richten die Lebendigen und die Toten” (“Jesus resurrected: Who came back in the clouds of the sky to judge the living and the dead”) on the top left. Hausmann signs the entire composition with a clipping of his name in type, as it had appeared in the table of contents of the April 15, 1919 issue of another magazine, Die Erde (ed. Walter Rilla, Breslau, and Berlin, 1919–1920). Certain letters—“HU,” “M,” “A,” “r,” and “aa”— and isolated words—“Künste” (art), “Saal,” (hall), “Lebendig” (the living), and “Spiesser” (bourgeois)—taken from other Dada sources, are inserted randomly into the piece as well. Because most of the texts Hausmann used are by him, this collage can be interpreted as a self-portrait. In his collage “anti-portrait”

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Figure 2.10  Dada 4–5: Anthologie Dada, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1919, Mouvement Dada, limited issue cover, letterpress and collage on newsprint, 10 13∕16 × 7 5∕16 in. (27.4 × 18.5 cm). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (85-S55) © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (see Plate 6).

of poet Paul Gurk in the back of Der Dada 2, Hausmann cut out Arthur Segal’s woodcut from page nine of Dada 3 for the hair and left eyebrow. For the forehead, he inserted a clipping of the first five lines of Pierre Albert-Birot’s phonetic poem, “Crayon Bleu,” published on page eight of Dada 3. The poem is cut off by another piece of paper that forms the nose, but certain words are clearly legible: “is nice,” “good evening,” “pan pan,” “krill,” and “cinema of my mind.” These isolated words and phrases recall the disjunction of a poem full of non-sequiturs. Such reuses of earlier magazines move away from a reading of magazine pages as merely transparent venues and emphasize that they are a printed medium, one that can be cut up for another collage reproduced in another publication.

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Similarly, Baader used the Dada 2 cover collage to make another assemblage, which also can be interpreted as a self-portrait: he cut out the collage, turned it 90 degrees clockwise, and inserted a photograph of himself on the top (Figure 2.12). Höch and Hausmann salvaged a rejected proof for Der Dada 1 as the support for collages (Figure I.4), and Höch cut shapes out of her copies of Berlin Dada journals that she presumably used for collages.76 Heartfield’s collage, “The Pneuma Travels around the World” (“Das Pneuma umreist die Welt”) (1920), dominates the cover of Der Dada 3 (Figure 3.8).77 This busy combination of texts and images from popular sources and Dada publications situates the Dadaists in their context. Heartfield cut out the word “dada” and the names of the Dadaists—Baader, Grosz, and Hausmann—from Dada publications. “Nein! Nein! Nein!” is from Huelsenbeck’s “Collective Dada Manifesto” from 1920, which had been printed as a leaflet, and the letters “eue” and the tops of the “j” and “u” are from the cover of Neue Jugend. “Dada,” printed in lowercase letters, comes from the cover of Der Dada 1. By including cutouts of the word “Dada,” Heartfield places Dada in the context of advertising, cinema, and contemporary urban life in postwar Germany. He interspersed these texts with photographs of an automobile tire, a toothbrush, an iron, and bicycles. Certain words stand out, such as “Circus” (“Zirkus”) and “Never imagined change” (“Nie geahnten Umschwung”). “Pro-phy-lac-tic” is printed on the toothbrush, and the words “Are you true to me?” (“Bist du mir treu?”) appear on the far right. In each case, artists moved away from the wall as the point of reference, and far from an unchanging, neutral, transparent, blank ground for hosting pictures and texts, the magazine was becoming a dynamic, destructible, and reusable surface. The magazines from 1918 to 1920 manifest a fundamental reorientation, a move from a vertical to a horizontal point of reference. By combining a wide range of texts and images on a given page, the Dadaists emphasized that unlike paintings in a museum, which seek to bring the viewer into a world corresponding to his or her upright position, their journals were assemblages of materials arranged for printing, akin to what Leo Steinberg calls the “flatbed picture plane.” Steinberg writes that artworks from the 1950s and 1960s “insist on a radically new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of the visual experience of nature but of operational processes.”78 Although we can read the journals horizontally or vertically, what he refers to as their “psychic address,” or how one perceives its orientation, is horizontal. We no longer read the top of the page as up in a manner corresponding to nature or gravity. The Dadaists were moving away from trying to approximate phenomenological

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Figure 2.11  Der Dada 2, ed. Raoul Hausmann, Berlin, 1919, front cover, 14 2⁄5 × 9 in. (29 × 23 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

characteristics of exhibitions; they stressed the printed nature of the magazine. Instead of attempting to overcome the physical properties of the page to present paintings in a manner as close to the original as possible, they underscored the tactile, opaque, horizontal, inky nature of the printing process and therefore the materiality of the magazine itself. Dada artists made more and more art for printing. They engaged with the magazine constantly, making decisions in the

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Figure 2.12  Johannes Baader, “Collage Dada (Raoul Hausmann),” c. 1919, Kunsthaus Zurich. Department of Prints and Drawings, 1989.

print shop, which offered a logic of its own and offered new insights, with one idea leading to another. In 1918 and 1919, amid ongoing turmoil, Dadaists increasingly embraced the magazines as a creative site and exhibition venue, a primary site of production. Their involvement with journals determined their creative choices, and their art, in turn, demanded a new kind of mediation. These publications catalyzed

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the diverse group’s shared commitment to inviting copies and multiplicity into art and exhibitions, realms historically tied to singularity, authenticity, and originality. In taking advantage of the distinct material characteristics of the journal, Dada editors defied conventions of artistic creation, distribution, and display. In these ways, these Dada magazines from this period were foundational for the Dadaists’ exceptional exhibitions in 1920 and 1921, as explored in the next chapter.

Notes 1

2

3

4

“Chaque page doit exploder [sic], soit par le sérieux profond et lourd, le tourbillon, le vertige, le nouveau, l’éternel, par la blague écrasante, par l’enthousiasme des principes, ou par la façon d’être imprimée.” Tzara, “Manifeste Dada 1918,” Dada 3, 2, trans. Manheim, The Dada Painters and Poets, 78. Emphasis added. Tzara used almost the exact same words to describe his planned anthology in a letter to Paul Dermée, but it was more widely disseminated as part of the manifesto Tzara writes of his anthology, Tzara to Dermée, June 27, 1918, Tzara to Dermée, June 24, 1918, Jean Brown Papers, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. For more on the press’s coverage of Dada, see Harriett Watts, ed., Dada and the Press, vol. IX, Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, ed. Stephen C. Foster (Farmington Hills: G.K. Hall, 2004). Picabia and Tzara had been corresponding since Tzara’s first letter to Picabia from August 1918. Explaining that he received Picabia’s address from artist Félix Vallotton, Tzara identifies himself as the editor of Dada and expresses his interest in collaborating with Picabia on future issues. Picabia, in turn, sent him issues of 391. Tristan Tzara to Francis Picabia, August 21, 1918, in Dada in Paris, 381. In January 1918, for example, they turned a lecture evening at I. B. Neumann’s Berlin gallery into a Dada demonstration, and at the first Dada soirée in the Berliner Sezession building in April 1918 Huelsenbeck read his famous Dadaistsches Manifest. Füllner, Richard Huelsenbeck, 18. Accounts of Dada in Berlin include Hanne Bergius, Dada Triumphs! Dada Berlin, 1917–1923: Artistry of Polarities: Montages, Metamechanics, Manifestations, vol. V, Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, ed. Stephen C. Foster (Farmington Hills, MI; New Haven: G.K. Hall, 2003); Brigid Doherty, “Berlin,” in Dada, ed. Dickerman, 90–9; Timothy O. Benson, ed., Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987). Christian Weikop discusses Der Dada and highlights particularly significant Dada events in Berlin. See Christian Weikop, “Berlin Dada and the Carnivalesque,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, 822–34.

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Evidence of this shift can be found in later issues of Noi, which criticized Vingtcinq poèmes (“Twenty-Five Poems”) and the typography of Dada 3 and gave an unfavorable review of the Galerie Dada show in Zurich in October 1918. Chris Michaelides, “Futurist Periodicals in Rome,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, part I, 569. For more details, see Enrico Crispolti, “Dada a Roma: Contributo alla partecipazione italiana al Dadaismo (Dada in Rome Contribution to the Italian participation to the Dadaism),” Palatino: Rivista Romana di Cultura 1, nos. 3–4 (July–December, 1966): 241–58. The second series of Noi strongly promoted Futurism. Picabia published this issue in Zurich in 1919 while he was visiting Tzara. Matthew Witkovsky, similarly, describes this piece as expressing Dada’s networked nature. Witkovsky, “Pen Pals,” in The Dada Seminars, 270. For a full discussion of 391, see Sanouillet, 391 and Sanouillet, Francis Picabia et 391. See also Sudhalter, “War, Exile, and the Machine,” in Francis Picabia, 66–75. Ruth Hemus also offers a detailed, if briefer, account of the nine issues of the journal published in Paris between 1919 and 1924: Ruth Hemus, “Dada’s Paris Season,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, part I, 180–8. Dada 3 (Tzara, Zurich, 1918) is sixteen pages long; the ordinary version measures approximately 13 × 9½ inches (33.7 × 24.6 cm), larger than the first two issues of Dada, and the deluxe is even larger, at 14 × 10 inches (35.8 × 25.4 cm). The Dadaists charged 1.50 Swiss francs for the ordinary edition and an astronomical 20 francs for the deluxe edition. Heuberger printed 2,000 copies of the regular edition and twenty of the projected thirty numbered copies of the deluxe edition. For the regular edition, he used white paper, although in some copies pages five through twelve are blue-green. Funding came from its contributors and revenue from the Galerie Dada, but money was tight, as Tzara regularly complains in letters.Dada 4–5 was funded by Picabia, who had met Tzara in Zurich in early 1919 and helped edit and produce the issue, along with Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia and Arp. Likely because of this additional backing, it is notably longer (thirty pages) and measures about 11 × 7½ inches (28 × 19 cm). Again Heuberger printed 2,000 regular edition issues, as well as thirty-eight numbered deluxe issues, signed by Tzara, which contained two original woodcuts, one by Arp and one by Hausmann. The ordinary edition sold for 4 Swiss francs, and the deluxe version was again 20 francs. The list of distributors on the back cover indicates that the journal was sold in Paris, New York (at de Zayas’s Modern Gallery), Barcelona, Brussels, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. Funding came from the sale of Dada publications and contributions from wealthy supporters such as Picabia. More details about the deluxe issues as well as information about the French and German versions of Dada 3 and Dada 4/5 are below.Der Dada 1 sold for 50 pfennigs and Der Dada 2 sold for 1 mark. Like all of the Berlin Dada journals, there was no deluxe edition of either edition. Both are

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9 10 11

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Dada Magazines printed on thin, inexpensive paper measuring 9 × 11½ inches (22¾ × 29¼ cm), but the paper used for Der Dada 1 is salmon colored; the paper for Der Dada 2 is white. See Matthew S. Witkovsky, “Pen Pals,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, The National Gallery of Art; New York: Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2005), 282. Pindell, “Alternative Space: Artists’ Periodicals,” Print Collectors Newsletter, 96, 97; Allen, Artists’ Magazines, 7–8, 121–3. Tristan Tzara, “Manifeste Dada 3,” Dada 3, 1, trans. Manheim, The Dada Painters and Poets, 77. Tristan Tzara, “Proclamation sans prétention,” Dada 4–5 (French version), 16, trans. Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 310. “Weltanschauungen sind Vokabelmischungen. Ein Hund ist eine Hängematte. L’art est mort. Viva Dada!” Walter Serner, “Letze Lockerung Manifeste,” Dada 4–5 (German version), 17. “?! Dada!!—Niemand gehört dazu!?—Dass wir doch dazu gehören … Die Verpflichtung, die wir ihnen gegenüber damit übernahmen das Bekenntnis, „Zu etwas zu gehören,“ ist ein Irrtum, den Sie sich selbst zu verdanken haben.” Hans Richter, “Gegen Ohne Für Dada,” Dada 4/5, 25, trans. Caws, 320–1. “Unsere Gemeinsamkeit … liegt ganz ausserhalb der Gruppe, des Mouvement der Zeitschrift Dada … ” Hans Richter, “Gegen Ohne Für Dada,” Dada 4/5, trans. Caws, 321. “Trotzalledem bleibt das Innerste des Dada Geheimnis—Freimaurer und Jesuite sind nicht Dada.” Johannes Baader, “Erklärung Dada,” Der Dada 1, 4. “Inserieren Sie im Dada! Dada verbreitet Ihre Geschäfte wie eine Infektion über den ganzen Erdenball … ” “Die Rekaktion [sic] [editorial staff] des Dada,” Der Dada 1, 6. “Dada ist mehr als tao und brama. Dada verdoppelt Ihre Einnahmen.” “Zentralamt des Dadaismus” “Legen Sie Ihr Geld in Dada an!” Der Dada 1, 6. The two versions of Dada 3 are identical except for pages seven and ten, which present entirely different materials. In the French/Italian version, page seven features Phillipe Soupault’s poem, “Flamme” (“Flame”) or (“Passion”), Camillo Sbarbaro’s “Mörar,” and a woodcut by Hans Richter, while in the German version we find Ferdinand Hardekopf ’s poem, “Regie” (“Production”), and two woodcuts by Richter on page seven. Page ten of the French and Italian version features Savinio’s text “Seconde origine de la voie lactée” (“Second origin of the Milky Way”) and one of the woodcuts by Richter that is on page seven of the German version. Page ten of the German version reproduces a poem, “Der Idealist” (“The Idealist”), by Jakob Van Hoddis, and Huelsenbeck’s essay, “Die Arbeiten von Hans Arp” (“The Works of Hans Arp”).

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19 German texts include Hans Richter’s “Gegen Ohne Für Dada” (“Against Without for Dada”), Jean (Hans) Arp’s “Aus die Wolkenpumpe” (“Out of the Cloud Pump”), and Walter Serner’s “Letzte Lockerung Manifesto” (“The Ultimate Loosening Up Manifesto”). 20 The following pages are entirely different—8, 11 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 25, 26. 21 The deluxe edition of Dada 3 includes two limited-edition prints by Janco and one wood engraving by Arp and was sold in a gray cardboard folder with a handpainted gauche yellow and brown organic design by Arp. An example of this folder is in the Elaine Lustig Cohen Dada Collection at the New York Public Library. In this copy, the image is 10¼ × 8½ inches and the folder measures 14 × 10 inches. Written on this copy is, “Exemplaire No. 19 TRISTAN TZARA.” Another example of this folder is at the Kunsthaus in Zurich. The image is the same size and format. It also includes a cover showing “Dada” stamped onto the classifieds section of a newspaper, as discussed below. 22 In accord with their lampooning of commercial enterprises, Raoul Hausmann distinguishes himself as responsible for the “Direktion,” or “management,” rather than the “Redakteur,” or editor, of Der Dada 1. 23 “Das Zentralamt des Dadaismus befindet sich jetzt in Berlin.” Der Dada 1, 3. 24 “Dada Gruss furor [sic], Ich erfahre eben von Hausmann Eure in unverschämtem magistraien Tone aufgesetzten Richtlinien und Programmpunkte. Wir sind der Ansicht, dass Ihr in Eurem Nest dort überhaupt keine Ahnung habt. Wir verbitten uns jede Einmischung in unsere Angelegenheiten. Die Centrale des Dadaismus ist in Berlin. Es scheint, dass der Erfolg Ihrer letzten Soirée Euch den Kopf verdreht hat.” Richard Huelsenbeck to Tristan Tzara, May 3, 1919, Zürich-DadacoDadaglobe, 17. 25 Richard Huelsenbeck to Tristan Tzara, August 29, 1919, Zürich-Dadaco-Dadaglobe, 20. 26 For more on the history of avant-garde typography in the twentieth century, see Drucker, The Visible Word, Bury, Breaking the Rules, and Arthur Cohen, “The Typographic Revolution: Antecedents and Legacy of Dada Graphic Design,” in New York Dada, ed. Rudolf Kuenzli (New York: Willis Locker and Owens, 1986), 71–89. 27 For more on Blast, see Andrezej Gasiorek, “The ‘Little Magazine’ as Weapon: BLAST (1914–1915),” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. I: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 294–9. 28 For more on these calligrammes, see Timothy O. Benson, “Conventions and Constructions: The Performative Text in Dada,” in Dada: The Coordinates of Cultural Politics, Crisis and the Arts, ed. Foster, 85.

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29 For more on this publication, and its connection to the carnivalesque, see Christian Weikop, “Berlin Dada and the Carnivalesque,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, part II, 817–22. Herzfelde instituted the influential publishing house, Malik-Verlag, known for its experimental graphic design, in 1917, as editor of Neue Jugend. For more on Neue Jugend, see Christian Weikop, “Transitions: From Expressionism to Dada,” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, part II, 798–806 and Simmons, “Neue Jugend,” in A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 38–53. 30 This publication, a special issue of Die freie Straße, was prepared in secret and distributed at a soirée at the Berliner Sezession building in April 1918. Wiekop, “Transitions: From Expressionism to Dada,” 808. For more on Club Dada, see Weikop, “Transitions: From Expressionism to Dada,” 808–12. 31 Weikop, “Transitions: From Expressionism to Dada,” 811. 32 In 1918, when Tzara was compiling Dada 3, Picabia sent him copies of 391. See Tristan Tzara to Francis Picabia, September 7, 1918. See Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 383. Picabia and Tzara had been corresponding since Tzara’s first letter to Picabia from August 21, 1918. Explaining that he received Picabia’s address from Valloton, Tzara identifies himself as the editor of Dada and expresses his interest in collaborating with Picabia for future issues. Tristan Tzara to Francis Picabia, August 21, 1918, Dada in Paris, 381. 33 For more on this text and its significance, see Sanouillet, Francis Picabia et “391,” Tome II, 90. 34 For more on Marinetti’s typography, see Drucker, The Visible Word, 105–40. 35 One exception is a two-page spread in the May 1915 issue of 291 (no. 3) featuring Agnes Ernst Meyer’s poem, “Woman,” printed at a right angle with a poem by Katharine Nash Rhoades, both of which are framed by Marius de Zayas’s caricature of Rhoades a bold triangle of blue ink that sweeps across both pages, accented by a pendulum-like form and a series of intersecting lines, de Zayas’s caricature of Rhoades. 291, no. 3 (May 1915): 2–3. 36 Witkovsky, “Pen Pals,” The Dada Seminars, 271–2. 37 Carolyn L. Kane, Cory Arcangel, Jon Satrom, Rosa Menkman, Team Doyobi, and Andrew Benson, “Exhaustion Aesthetics,” Leonardo 50, no. 1 (2017): 5. See also Carolyn L. Kane “Glitch Art: Failure from the Avant-Garde to Kanye West,” Journal of InVisible Culture 50, no. 21 (October 2014). http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/portfolio/ compression-aesthetics-glitch-from-the-avant-garde-to-kanye-west/ 38 My thanks to Steve Hammer for leading me to the scholarship on glitch art and Dirty New Media. 39 Janna Avner, “How the Dirty New Media Movement Informed the First Virtual Art Galleries,” Locating Technology, Art Practical, February 27, 2018. https://www. artpractical.com/column/how-the-dirty-new-media-movement-informed-thefirst-virtual-art-galleries/

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40 Randall Packer, “Glitch Expectations: A Conversation with Jon Cates,” Hyperallergic, June 25, 2014. https://hyperallergic.com/134709/glitch-expectationsa-conversation-with-jon-cates/ 41 Alfredo Salazar-Caro, quoted in Janna Avner “How the Dirty New Media Movement Informed the First Virtual Art Galleries,” Locating Technology, Art Practical February 27, 2018. https://www.artpractical.com/column/how-the-dirtynew-media-movement-informed-the-first-virtual-art-galleries/ 42 See [staff] “Dirty New Media Art” Chicago Art Magazine (October 25, 2011). http:// chicagoartmagazine.com/2011/10/dirty-new-media-art2/ and Carolyn L. Kane, Cory Arcangel, Jon Satrom, Rosa Menkman, Team Doyobi, and Andrew Benson, “Exhaustion Aesthetics,” Leonardo 50, no. 1 (2017): 5–11. 43 “Le goût est fatiguant commes a bonne compagnie.” Dada 3, 5. 44 Weikop points out that this emphasis on advertising was characteristic of the faction of Berlin Dada associated with Malik-Verlag—Herzefelde, Heartfield, and Grosz—whose affiliation for Marxism led them to use marketing language to satirize bourgeois capitalism. The other faction, led by Hausmann and Baader, propagated a type of “anarcho-communism,” which Weikop describes as “a fusion of revolutionary politics and psychoanalysis.” Both groups published Huelsenbeck’s contributions in their publications. Weikop, “Transitions: From Expressionism to Dada,” 798–9. 45 Witkovsky, “Pen Pals,” The Dada Seminars, 271. Focusing on Dada, Witkovsky writes that the Dadaists “systematically augmented the distortion or ‘noise’ generated by shifts of medium.” Witkovsky, “Pen Pals,” The Dada Seminars, 270. 46 The Berlin Dadaists used photolithography, from the nineteenth century; Dada 3 includes wood engravings; line block reproductions (a form of etching) can be found in 391 and Dada. Other techniques include halftone blocks, letterpress, linotype, and typewriters. 47 Niebisch, Media Parasites, 109; Witkovsky, “Pen Pals,” The Dada Seminars, 270. 48 This strategy coincides with media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s recognition of the lack of meaning tied to emerging media technology at the start of the early twentieth century. Media such as the typewriter, with its letters and diacritical signs, can inscribe new things never previously voiced, though they mean nothing and, as Kittler puts it, “have no purpose beyond notation itself.” Freidrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 206. Witkovsky points out the relevance of Kittler. See Witkovsky, “Pen Pals,” in The Dada Seminars, 271. 49 Niebisch, Media Parasites, 33. 50 Witkovsky, “Pen Pals,” The Dada Seminars, 270. See also Sarah Bay-Cheng and Martin Harries, Foreword, in Niebisch, Media Parasites, xi. 51 Bergius, Dada Triumphs! 90.

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52 Ellen Lupton, “Design and Production in the Mechanical Age,” in Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age: Selections from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, ed. Deborah Menaker Rothschild, Ellen Lupton, and Darra Goldstein (New Haven: Yale University Press in conjunction with Williams College Museum of Art and CooperHewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 1998), 60. 53 Drucker, The Visible Word, 206–12. 54 Tristan Tzara, “Les Revues d’avant-garde” (1950), Œuvres complètes, Tome V (1924–1963), ed. Henri Béhar (Les Écluses de la poésie. Appendices) (Paris: Flammarion, 1975–1982), 509. 55 Sherwin Simmons, “Advertising Seizes Control of Life: Berlin Dada and the Power of Advertising,” Oxford Art Journal 22, no.1 (1999): 131. 56 Tzara, “Les Revues d’avant-garde,” Œuvres complètes, Tome V, 59. 57 Cohen, “The Typographic Revolution: Antecedents and Legazy of Dada Graphic Design,” in Dada Spectrum, ed. Foster and Kuenzli, 88. 58 This is an example of editors’ willingness to make connections between their own efforts and those in the commercial realm, a Dada tendency explored in Chapter 4. For more on the importance of advertising on Dada design, see Beals, 67; Simmons, “Advertising Seizes Control of Life,” Drucker, “Tzara: Advertising Language of Commodity Culture,” The Visible Word, 193–222, and Lupton, “Design and Production in the Mechanical Age.” 59 For more on the difference between marked and unmarked texts, see Drucker, The Visible Word, 94–5. 60 Drucker, The Visible Word, 225. 61 “Legen Sie Ihr Geld in dada an!”) Der Dada 1 (Berlin, ed. Raoul Hausmann, 1919), 6; “Si l’on trouve futile et si l’on ne perd son temps pour un mot qui ne signifie rien … ” Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto, Dada 3, 1, trans. Ralph Manheim, Dada Reader, 36. 62 See also Drucker, The Visible Word, 95–6. 63 Lewer writes, “Dada 4–5 emerged from, anthologized, canonized, and mythologized the triumph of the eighth Dada Soirée.” Lewer, “The Avant-Garde in Swiss Exile,” 1052. 64 Sudhalter, “How to Make a Dada Anthology,” Dadaglobe Reconstructed, 54–5. 65 On the cover of the issues of the deluxe version at the Getty Research Institute and at the Bibliothèque des Musées de Strasbourg, the words “on offre à vendre” (offered for sale) stand out in the center page, and “a Vendre … ” (for sale) is repeated on the bottom right. These passages read as advertisements for the journal itself. 66 Because illustrations were particularly expensive, Tzara asked many of his correspondents to provide their own negatives. See, for example, Tristan Tzara to Paul Dermée, June 24, 1918, Jean Brown Papers, Getty Research Institute.

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67 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 6. 68 Richter to Tzara, September 23, 1918, September 26, 1918, and November 3, 1918, quoted in New Studies in Dada: Essays and Documents, ed. Richard Sheppard (Driffield: Hutton Press, 1981), 124, 127. 69 “Wenn es möglich ist DV bitte ich Sie betreffs eines der 3 Schnitte die ich Ihnen sandte um folgendes. Dieser Schnit soll anstatt des Auges • = ein Oval haben so wie in der beiliegenden Fassung. Vielleicht könnte einer der Kollegen das Original dem beiliegenden Abzug entsprechend corrigieren (durch Einsetzen eines neuen Stück Linoleums)?!” Richter to Tzara, November 3, 1918, quoted in New Studies in Dada, 127. This change was not made, either because Tzara ignored the request or because it came too late. 70 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 238. 71 In this way, they worked as what Latour, in his explanation of actor-network theory, calls mediators. That is, entities that “transform, translate, distort, and modify meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry.” Latour, “On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy,” 39. 72 Such works are akin to works produced for Dadaglobe, which Sudhalter calls “a new category of artistic production: artworks made for reproduction.” Sudhalter, “How to Make a Dada Anthology,” Dadaglobe Reconstructed, 47. 73 The histories of magazines and collage are intertwined. David Banash traces collage practice to magazines. David Banash, “From Advertising to the AvantGarde: Rethinking the Invention of Collage,” in Postmodern Culture 14, no. 2 (January 2004): paragraphs 12, 24. Recent analyses of photomontage and collage include Sabine T. Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014) and Andrés Mario Zervigón, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 74 Exactly who invented this technique and when has been debated among scholars and Dadaists alike. For more on Dada collage, see Timothy O. Benson, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), 110–16; Brigid Doherty, “Berlin,” in Dada, ed. Dickerman, 90–9. 75 For more on the first issue of Der Dada and its importance in Hausmann’s role in the Dada movement, see Weikop, “Berlin Dada and the Carnivalesque,” 823. 76 Page 4, Der Dada 1, Hannah Höch Archive, Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, Berlin. 77 “Pneuma” refers to the photograph of a tire in the collage, most likely taken from an advertisement. 78 Leo Steinberg, “Reflections on the State of Criticism,” Artforum 10, no. 7 (March 1972), 44.

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Printing Artworks, Exhibiting Ephemera: Dada Journals and Exhibitions, 1920–1921 A looming effigy of a German officer with a pig’s head, a girl wearing a First Communion dress and spouting obscene poetry, a mirror entitled “Portrait of a Fool,” and posters screaming “Down with Art!” and “Finally open your mind!”: the Dadaists’ provocative exhibitions, particularly Berlin’s First International Dada Fair, are well known.1 Yet the significance of Dada art journals to these bizarre presentations has gone largely unexplored. The inventive magazines from 1918 to 1919 set the stage for the Dadaists’ expositions in 1920 and 1921, when staging an exhibition was more plausible than it had been during wartime. Among the most notable were the extraordinarily irreverent “Dada-Vorfrühling” (“Dada Early Spring”) (April 1920), organized by Max Ernst and Johannes Baargeld (née Alfred E. Gruenwald) in Cologne; the “Erste Internationale DadaMesse” (“First International Dada Fair”) (June 1920), put on by Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, and George Grosz in Berlin; Julius Evola’s “Esposizioni Dada” (“Dada Exhibition”) in Rome (April 1921); and Tzara’s “Salon Dada Exposition Internationale” (“Salon Dada International Exhibition”) (June 1921) in Paris. As curators, members translated into three-dimensional space the tactics they had developed as editors. They activated audiences, upending presentation codes and expectations of originality, uniqueness, and transparency. Dadaists recognized that both magazines and exhibitions are display sites that present a selection of pieces and disseminate information.2 The two venues also share roots in design and are collaborative efforts that require requesting, choosing, compiling, and arranging materials, as well as framing and describing these works. Like walking through a gallery, leafing through a periodical is both a public and a private endeavor, one that an individual undergoes on a personal level yet knows is shared by many, often simultaneously.3 Exhibitions are critical to the history of the avant-garde. As Bruce Altshuler explains:

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Dada Magazines [The avant-garde’s] force depended on confrontation with a complex social world. The central node of that confrontation was the exhibition, where artists, critics, dealers, collectors, and the public met and responded in their various ways to what the artists had done. Group exhibitions bring its social aspect to the fore.4

The Dadaists had many models. The German Expressionists, Italian Futurists, and Suprematists, for instance, had designed expositions in the years immediately preceding the war. Wasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc’s Erste Ausstellung der Redaktion Der Blaue Reiter (“First Exhibition of the Editors of the Blaue Reiter”) in Munich in 1911 stands out as it, too, was tied to a publication, Der Blaue Reiter Almanach (“The Blue Rider Almanac”), and like the Almanac it brought together a broad variety of works.5 The “0–10, The Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures,” in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) (December 1915–January 1916), is known for its experimental hanging: Vladimir Tatlin’s corner counter-reliefs shared space with Kazimir Malevich’s iconic Black Square, hung in a high corner of a gallery, surrounded by other paintings covering the walls in an allover composition.6 Building on such installations, Dada shows also appealed to participation, questioned originality, and destabilized the venue, thereby anticipating strategies adopted by installation artists decades later. By 1920 and 1921, Dada had gained varying degrees of recognition and notoriety in different cities’ artistic circles, the press, and the general public.7 In Cologne, Ernst’s first corresponded with Tzara in December 1919, and Ernst, Baargeld, Angelika Fick Hoerle, and Heinrich Hoerle identified themselves with Dada.8 In Berlin, provocative performances, collages, and handbills propelled Hausmann, Baader, Huelsenbeck, Höch, Grosz, Heartfield, and their cohort into the spotlight. Tzara arrived in Paris in January 1920 and soon thereafter he and his supporters made a spectacle of themselves, organizing events, hanging posters, and they succeeded in attracting the attention of the press and its readers.9 Dada’s fame in the French capital is captured by a quip from The Chapbook (London): “If you ask an intelligent Parisian for news of the younger French poets, the first, second or third word of his reply will probably be ‘Dada.’”10 In Rome, and Italy generally, Dada enthusiasm picked up some, reflected in Bulletin Dada (March 1920) and a photograph Tzara sent to Picabia from Lido, Italy, of himself with Fiozzi, Cantarelli, and Otello Rebecchi, which he labeled “Venetian Dadaism” (“Dadaïsme Vénitien”) (Figure 3.1).11 Evola, Dada’s chief proponent after the war, reported to Tzara: “Presently, you and Dadaism are finally starting to be spoken about a little everywhere finally: the newspapers are going on a strike of silence to try to stifle the Dada invasion in Italy. The futurists are furious.”12

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Figure 3.1  Postcard from Tristan Tzara, Gino Cantarelli, and Otello Rebacci to Francis Picabia, July 1920. Dossiers Picabia, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris.

With eased, if lingering, travel restrictions after the war, Dadaists did not depend on journals to communicate. They did not even need them to record and describe the shows, as organizers began to make separate catalogs. Yet these artists, writers, and performers continued to produce magazines. They continued to recognize their distinctive qualities, and interrogating traditional types of display remained a driving strategy for them. Their ongoing experimentation with these publications manifests a sustained recognition of them as major drivers in their artistic pursuits rather than merely expedient means of communication. This chapter begins by tracing the intertwined histories of Dada periodicals and exhibitions from 1916 to 1918. It next explores how the journals informed these shows, starting with a brief background on the motivations and objectives of the organizers, followed by exploration of key strategies carried on from one display type to the next. Chief among these are combining disparate materials, incorporating print media and visual reproductions, chaotic layout, provoking audience interaction, and calling out the venue as a reoriented, non-neutral site. The chapter then assesses Dada catalogs’ place vis-à-vis the magazines and exhibitions, finishing with a discussion of the reviews’ ongoing centrality in Dada’s expanding network.

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Interleaved Trajectories of Display: Dada Journals and Exhibitions 1916–1918 Dada reviews and shows intermingled from the start. In Zurich, the walls of the smoky, seedy, cramped Cabaret Voltaire presented a wide array of materials— from paintings, reliefs, and drawings to objects like collages, masks, and parole in libertà—made by members of the newly formed group and by Cubists, Expressionists, and Futurists. Details regarding display design are elusive, but given the raucous atmosphere of the Cabaret, it is unlikely that organizers prioritized order. Tzara’s description of the space from February 1916 intimates a certain chaos: “On the walls: van Rees and Arp, Picasso and Eggeling, Segal and Janco, Slodky, Nadelmann, colored papers, ascendancy of the new art, abstract art and geographic futurist map-poems: Marinetti, Cangiullo, Buzzi.”13 At the Cabaret, the emerging Dadaists distributed Cabaret Voltaire and Dada, which functioned as both journals and illustrated catalogs. Cabaret Voltaire offers a checklist of objects presented at the Cabaret Voltaire, and a German supplement to Dada 1 lists events held at Galerie Dada. Both reproduce works on view. Although the space of the upscale Galerie Corray, later the Galerie Dada, has been described as a Gesamtkunstwerk mixing many kinds of art, beginning in January 1917, exhibitions there were probably more spare and orderly than those at the Cabaret Voltaire, with pieces arranged on eye level, one or two next to the other, with ample space around each one.14 The first show there, Erste Dada-Austellung: Modernste Malerei, Negerplastik, alte Kunst (“First Dada Exhibition: Modern Painters, Negro Art, Old Masters”), was accompanied by a sixteen-page catalog illustrating images on view. Der Zeltweg (Otto Flake, Zurich, 1919) grew out of the exposition, Das neue Leben (“New Life”) at the Kunsthaus in Zurich in early 1919 featuring pieces by Dadaists, though the magazine was not distributed until 1920. In New York, the relationship between the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition and the two issues of the proto-Dada publication, Blind Man, exemplifies the potential for interdependency between these two media and thus deserves deeper analysis here. For the show, Duchamp hung works alphabetically by artists’ last names, rather than by typical hierarchical categories like genre, chronology, style, or prestige of the artist. The two issues of Blind Man reproduce works on view: Louis Eilshemius’s “Supplication” (c. 1915) and Joseph Stella’s painting, “Battle of Lights, Mardi Gras, Coney Island” (1913), for instance, and famously, one piece not on view, Duchamp’s readymade, “Fountain”, the urinal he bought, turned 90 degrees, and signed, “R. Mutt 1917,”

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which the Independents had rejected. This second issue of Blind Man therefore changed “Fountain” from a bizarre, even offensive, and invisible submission by an unknown artist (“R. Mutt”) to a scandal invoked by the revered Duchamp at the center of what the publication calls “The Richard Mutt Case.” “In The Blind Man it was above all a matter of justifying the ‘Fountain-Urinal’,” as Duchamp put it.15 Henri-Pierre Roché’s narrative, Victor, indicates that he agreed that The Blind Man was central to the “Fountain” affair.16 In Cologne, the single-issue Bulletin D (November 1919), edited by Ernst and Baargeld, served as the catalog for Dada’s public debut, the “Dada” section (“Section D”) of the 1919 Society of Arts exhibition at the Kölner Kunstverein (“Cologne Art Association”).17 This presentation included collages, drawings, and assemblages by Ernst, Baargeld, and Angelika and Heinrich Hoerle, among others, alongside photos and such manufactured objects as a piano hammer, flowerpots, and a pipe, hung over the entrance. It also displayed children’s art and African art. In addition to texts taking aim at the editors’ artistic predecessors and contemporaries, Bulletin D, where many readers saw the word, “Dada,” in print, lists the pieces on view, and although it does not illustrate the exhibited commercial products, it captures the show’s catholic parameters.18 As well as reproductions of paintings, including Ernst’s 1919 painting, “Aquis submerses” (“Submerged in Water”), and Heinrich Hoerle’s “Porträt einer Liliputanerin” (“Portrait of a Dwarf ”), it reproduces an industrial drawing of manufacturing equipment, images ranging from doodles to assemblages and vaguely figural sculptures to drawings such as Angelika Hoerle’s 1919 “Reiterin” (“Horseback Rider”). Texts reinforce anti-canonical views of the history of art, as well. The haphazard design of Bulletin D’s pages, a marked break from Der Ventilator, can be attributed to these Cologne Dadaists’ exposure to Dada publications, in particular Dada 4–5, in the summer of 1919, which they received in the mail and which was for sale at Hanz Goltz’s bookstore in Munich.19

Learning from the Magazines: Dada Exhibitions 1920–1921 Growing out of this history, in 1920, the Dadaists began adopting for their exhibitions many of the strategies they had developed in their magazines in the previous two years. The shows in Cologne, Berlin, Rome, and Paris manifest enthusiasts’ local and transnational aspirations, and their distinct contexts and incentives. In Cologne, where Dada was not yet well established, Ernst and Baargeld put their exposition together after the ostensibly “jury-free” show at

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the Arbeitsgemeinschaft bildender Künstler (Association of Fine Artists, or Artists’ Union) as the Kölner Kunstgewerbemuseum (Cologne Museum of Arts and Crafts) rejected their unusual submissions. Ernst and Baargeld’s works made up most of what was on view, but the inclusion of pieces by Jean (Hans) Arp and Francis Picabia demonstrates their transnational goals. In Berlin, where Dada was well established, the Dadaists’ “Fair” marked a culmination of the many Dada activities in the city. The objects on display were by both Berlin Dadaists and artists in other European cities, signaling the movement’s scope. In Rome, Evola’s April 1921 Dada exposition mixed artworks, posters, and poems from local artists and known Dadaists, apparently in his attempt to ally himself with Dada.20 His show contained abstract paintings by himself, Aldo Fiozzi, and Gino Cantarelli.21 However, he expanded its geographical reach with events. The opening and closing included poems and music by individuals from many countries, including not only Evola and Cantarelli but also Tzara, Louis Aragon, Arnold Schönberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Béla Bartok.22 In a city where Dada was well known, if not universally accepted, the Paris show demonstrated the movement’s prankish manner while telegraphing its transnational scope and effectively anthologizing the movement.23 Of the twenty-one individuals who submitted the eighty-one works on view, the majority were living in the French capital; others were mostly affiliates in Cologne, New York, Berlin, and cities throughout Italy. Despite their differences, the organizers of these exhibitions experimented with display, and they employed many of the same strategies to do so, strategies they had first tried out in their journals. The shows combined disparate types of objects: in addition to drawings and collages, they included such objects as mannequins, ties, a fish tank, a stuffed military uniform, and a chunk of asphalt. They also, significantly, included printed materials. The Berlin Dadaists, for instance, presented programs for past Dada events, like Tzara’s program for the Festival Dada at the Salle Gaveau in Paris, held a month earlier. In Paris, posters from earlier events—Geneva Grand Dada Ball and the Dada Early Spring Show in Cologne—hung above the artworks, and the Rome presentation featured print media from Paris and Rome.24 Most notable for our purposes is the fact that the Dada magazines also were on view. The Dadaists spotlighted the relationship between these publications and exhibitions by juxtaposing print materials, artworks made for the publications, and even pieces incorporating their pages. In Berlin, magazines were part of Johannes Baader’s seven-foot semiautobiographical assemblage, “Das Grosse Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: Deutschlands Grösse und Untergang oder Die Phantastische Lebensgeschichte

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des Oberdada” (“The Great Plasto Dio-Dada-Drama: Germany’s Greatness and Decline or the Fantastic Life of the Superdada”), along with mousetraps, a powder keg, an advertising dummy, and newspapers.25 Arranged on tables, integrated into assemblages, and hanging on walls, Dada journals functioned simultaneously as artistically inventive publications, publicity materials, items for sale, and valuable records of the movement’s history.26 The magazines also reinforced the Dadaists’ shift from thinking of artworks as one-of-a-kind objects to images subject to multiple reiterations. Many contained reproductions of these pieces, and some of the collages comprised reproductions of texts and images printed in the Dada journals. The Berlin installation featured original drawings and collages from Paris and Cologne Dada publications: Johannes Baargeld’s “Antropofiler Bandwurm” (“Anthopophile Tapeworm”) (1920), Arp’s “Der Arp is da!” (“Arp Is Here!”) (1920) from Die Schammade, and Picabia’s “Tamis du vent” (“Sieve of the Wind”) (c. 1918) from the eighth issue of 391, for instance. It also contained a photo of Hausmann and Baader from Der Dada 2 and all the images in Der Dada 3, recirculated and reframed in different media. For example, an image of Grosz from Der Dada 3 was hung as an individual photograph in the show and was enlarged and reproduced on two posters, one with the caption, “Dada is the deliberate subversion of bourgeois terminology. Dada is on the side of the revolutionary proletariat!” (the poster is on the left of the installation photo)27 (Figures 2.3 and 3.2). Grosz’s profile, again showing the right side of his face, appears twice in the Dadaists’ posed photographs of the installation, repeating this same image in their documentation of the exhibition, this time with the artist himself among the various reproductions of his visage. The Dadaists were approaching the walls much as they had magazine spreads, as planes for excerpting, combining, and overlapping texts and images. This layering and constant referencing of printed materials and the reprinting of images alter what Steinberg calls the exhibition’s “psychic address,” as discussed in Chapter 2. Thirty years before the artists that Steinberg discusses, who, as he puts it, “no longer simulate vertical fields, but opaque flatbed horizontals,” Dada presentations reversed the typical expectation that artworks on a wall address viewers vertically, corresponding to our upright position.28 And the reviews—which themselves functioned as venues, arranged amid paintings, drawings, collages, found objects, and other printed materials that overlap and repeat images—encouraged viewers to approach the curated spaces as threedimensional collages of sorts, akin to Rauschenberg’s combines or assemblages, with a horizontal orientation.

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Figure 3.2  Installation view, Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (“First International Dada Fair”), Berlin, Summer 1920. Hannah Hoch Archiv, Berlinische Galerie. Image courtesy of the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, acquired with funds from the DKLB Foundation, Berlin, 1979 © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG BildKunst, Bonn.

Like the journals, Dada exhibitions goaded audience interaction. Rather than feeling comfortable as spectators and evaluators, visitors discovered the spotlight turned on them. Most of the pieces on view, particularly in Cologne, Berlin, and Paris, did not invite aesthetic interpretation. Instead, they confronted viewers, challenging them to forge a connection between titles and objects and even to destroy what they saw. In Paris, most works were by writers and did not last beyond the show. Philippe Soupault submitted an eighteenth-century mirror, “Portrait of a Fool,” for instance. Part of the Dadaists’ attempts to activate visitors entailed foregrounding their presence and appealing to them as bodies in space. A sign hanging from Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter’s “Prussian Archangel” in Berlin declared that to grasp the piece one had to perform military drills. A text next to Otto Dix’s “Bewegliches Figurenbild” (“Montage of Movable Figures”) (c. 1920) ordered visitors to grab it. In Paris, a handwritten sign addressed viewers directly, borrowing from advertising strategies: “This summer elephants will be wearing moustaches …. what about you?”29 The Dadaists participated in the spectacle, often by

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juxtaposing photographs of themselves with slogans and imperatives, as if they are speaking directly to visitors. A poster in Berlin showed Hausmann’s profile yelling, “Down with art!” “Finally open your mind!” and “Free it for the demands of the times!” [the poster is on the left of the photo] (Figure 3.2).30 At the Salon Dada, signs read, “Dada is the world’s biggest hoax” and “Has Dada ever spoken to you?”31 Shouting at visitors, asking them questions, and making incendiary, if nonsensical, declarations, the Dadaists encouraged guests to shout back, inviting a riotous state of affairs. In Cologne, Ernst submitted a drawing with a note instructing readers to write on it, countering the “do not touch” atmosphere typical of most galleries and museums. Perhaps the most extreme example of audience involvement was Baargeld’s “Fluidoskeptrik” (“Fluid spectrum”) (c. 1920), an aquarium filled with blood red water, a woman’s wig, a fake hand, and an alarm clock. An axe sat next to this bizarre assemblage, with a label telling visitors to smash it (as many did). The Cologne Dadaists succeeded in activating visitors, who not only destroyed pieces, but also demanded their money back.32 In Berlin, the Dadaists’ installation led to the arraignment of five Berlin Dadaists, charged with insulting the German army, and the press, overwhelmingly citing the peculiarity of the exhibits and how they were hung.33 Compounding the effects of the works cited above, the Dadaists assaulted the assumed neutrality of the venue itself. Cologne’s Dada Early Spring show setting was chosen to confuse and offend and it was perhaps the most alarming: a brewery, the Brauhaus Winter (Winter Brewery) on Schildergasse 37. Written reports help recreate the unusual display. An unsigned review describes the entrance: You go through a door in a building behind a Cologne bar and run into an old stove; to your left is a vista of stacked-up bar chairs, and to your right, the art begins (my companion thought the left-hand view was nicer.) At first the room is a little dark … but around the corner to the right it gets lighter, though here the rain starts dripping on your head.34

According to some accounts, visitors entered through the men’s bathroom, where they came upon a girl wearing a First Communion dress. The exhibition locations in Berlin, Rome, and Paris, by contrast, were conservative, incongruously so. Berlin’s First International Dada Fair took place at Dr. Otto Burchard’s tworoom art gallery on the ground floor of a five-story apartment building; Evola’s show was at the relatively small and eclectic Casa d’Arte Bragaglia; the Salon Dada was held on the top floor of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (which they

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Figure 3.3  Installation view, Salon Dada Exposition Internationale (“International Exhibition”), Paris, 1921 © Maurice Branger/Roger-Viollet/The Image Works.

renamed the Galerie Montaigne—the building is located on avenue Montaigne), a space with oriental rugs and wainscoting.35 To varying degrees, the Dadaists in these cities transformed their venues into chaotic, bewildering spaces akin to their collaged magazine pages. In Berlin, for example, posters, paintings, drawings, photographs, and journals lay on the ground, dangled overhead, and covered the walls from floor to ceiling, sometimes overlapping. Like “Prussian Archangel,” hung from the ceiling at the Berlin Fair, in Paris a mannequin of a man in a suit perched precariously overhead on the outside edge of a balcony. Dozens of men’s ties hung down below the balcony’s railing, telling readers, “You see here ties and not violins. You see here bonbons and not marriages” (Figure 3.3). Much like the Dadaists’ tactics for defying the illusion of transparency in their publications, creating static that shifted attention to the manipulation of the printed medium, here the Dadaists’ presentation choices were inescapable and likely alarming to many guests. The Dadaists’ startling proto-late-twentieth-century art installation practices, informed by their involvement with magazines, implicated the venues themselves, involving the walls and spaces in a manner that countered presumptions about the neutrality of venues as well as divisions between spectators and artworks.

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The Dada Exhibition Catalog: A Medium in Between Catalogs accompanied the Berlin, Cologne, and Paris exhibitions described above, functioning as secondary, supplemental source with checklists, illustrations of works shown, and texts by participants, making them very similar to the journals.36 Uniquely positioned between the exhibitions and the reviews, these publications took on some of the magazines’ former functions without replacing them, and they manifest the Dadaists’ strong commitment to graphic design. In the early twentieth century, catalogs were usually small booklets, not weighty tomes, but then, as now, they served as a guide for visitors and as a record, explaining general themes and specific objects for both  visitors. The Dada catalogs fulfilled these functions for the most part, but not surprisingly, the Dadaists also lampooned this requisite part of expositions. The Berlin catalog lampoons the expectation that a catalog should celebrate the art on view. Hausmann’s text, “Was die Kunstkritik nach Ansicht des Dadasophen zur Dadaausstellung sagen wird” (“What Art Critics Have to Say about the Dada exhibition, according to the Dadasoph”), opens by borrowing language from an actual review of the show, discouraging attendance: “Let it be said right from the beginning that this Dada exhibition is simply another common bluff and not worth visiting.”37 The Cologne catalog, too, assumes the stance of Dada’s detractors: “Do you visit DADA? / I do not have a need.”38 Graphic design, too, is impossible to ignore and obstructs the typical functions of a catalog. Berlin’s catalog, designed by Heartfield, is the most visually daring of the three, with texts printed in several directions overlying images, printed in black and red (Figure 3.4). Announcements like “Max Liebermann illustrates the Bible!” surround its main essay, Herzfelde’s introduction, interspersed with reproductions of two “corrected masterpieces” that were on view—collages by Grosz and Heartfield that superimpose cutouts over existing works of art: Picasso’s “Girl’s Head with Small Bird” (1913) and Henri Rousseau’s 1890 self-portrait.39 As on the front cover, on the back, texts and images in red and black overlap, and we find a photograph of Gerhard Preiss, or “Super-Musicdada,” from the series of him doing the “Dada Trott” in Der Dada 3, and small bicycles stamped indiscriminately across the page, all printed over the long list of works on view. The cover of the Paris catalog is a drawing of placards and signs hanging on a wall, notably with phrases written in a lively combination of fonts that recall passages in earlier journals in their absurdity and unhelpfulness: “No one is

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Figure 3.4  Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (“First International Dada Fair”) catalog, ed. John Heartfield and Wieland Herzefelde, Berlin, 1920, Otto Burchard and Malik-Verlag, 12 3∕16 × 15 3∕8 in. (31 × 39 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

not supposed to be unaware of Dada,” “athletes sought” (Figure 3.5).40 In the Cologne catalog, a somewhat cryptic composition on the back page also nods toward the collage-inspired layout of earlier magazines. A drawing depicts a hand tattooed with an anchor and star. The first edition includes words written in Hebrew, including “Kosher for Passover.” In the second edition, the editors replaced them with a short text about Dada that references “Ass Wednesday,” impudently referencing Catholicism instead.41 The exhibitions’ direct, provocative engagement with visitors also comes through in the catalogs. The Berlin catalog reinforces the Berlin fair’s treatment of visitors as bodies in space. Wieland Herzefelde tells viewers of Heartfield’s montage, “Leben und Treiben in Universal City um 12:05 Uhr” (“Life and Bustle at Universal City at 12:05 noon”) (1920), reproduced on the cover of the Berlin catalog:42 In order to arrive at a proper overall impression, it is best to step back up about 40 paces through the wall (Attention: Watch out for the Stairs!). It follows, then,

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Figure 3.5  Salon Dada, Exposition Internationale (“International Exhibition”) catalog, Paris, 1921, front cover, letterpress, 10 5∕8 × 8 1∕4 in. (26.9 × 20.9 cm). Merrill C. Berman Collection. that the Dadaist John Heartfield is the enemy of the picture. In fact he destroyed it himself. A very simple and useful test of this can be performed on any street with ordinary street lamps.43

Rather than instructing visitors to stand forty paces away from the wall, he instructs them to step through (“durch”) the wall, where we find ourselves on

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the street. He calls for destruction, not contemplation. The Cologne catalog is similarly provocative, apparently aiming to make skeptical audiences indignant: Each visitor is a predestined Dadaist. Either he laughed frankly [and] one can address him as a noble Dadaist or he falls prey to the illusion of anti-Dadaism to realize too late that he is the sacrificial lamb of the union of butchers and that he himself is simply a dadaist.44

Similarly, in the Paris catalog, anonymous, absurd statements on the tops of most pages set out to confound and alarm rather than elucidate: Dada is not impossible. If you would like to die, continue. A state in the Dada state, it is Dada without Dada. It is necessary to be perfectly idiotic.45

Complementing and supplementing Dada shows, these catalogs testify to the Dadaists’ commitment to display, as well as their ongoing interest in parody and graphic design.

Dada Journals’ Continued Currency The catalogs take over many of the functions magazines from 1916 to 1917 had provided. By the early 1920s, Tzara, Hausmann, Ernst, and their fellow Dadaists were able to travel and communicate much more freely than was possible earlier; they no longer depended on journals to share works or publicize their movement. Yet Dadaists continued to value them as venues, as distinctive, viable vehicles of artistic production and distribution, as sites for hashing out disagreements and, increasingly, as historicizing venues. They could access a transnational audience and settle scores about the origins and status of Dada. Tzara’s composition, “Une nuit d’échecs gras” (“A night of fat chess”), a collage of texts in the fourteenth issue of 391 (November 1920) made up of Dada publication titles (including 391, Cannibale, Dada, and Bleu), signals their ongoing importance (Figure 3.6). Nevertheless, amid this flurry of activity, the organizers of the Cologne, Berlin, and Paris exhibitions made magazines. Even as Dadaists began organizing shows and publishing catalogs, the journals maintained a life of their own. In April 1920, Ernst and Baargeld produced Die Schammade, the month of their Dada Early Spring exposition, and Berlin Dadaists Grosz, Heartfield, and Hausmann published Der Dada 3 two months prior to the landmark “Dada

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Figure 3.6  391 14, ed. Francis Picabia, Paris, 1920, p. 4, letterpress, 23 3∕16 × 12 5∕8 in. (58.9 × 32.1 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

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Fair.” Evola’s Bleu came out three months before his Dada show. Tzara compiled the eighth and final issue of Dada in the Tyrolean Alps in Austria shortly after his “Salon Dada” closed, in September 1921. Again the Dadaists harnessed the many advantages of magazines they had recognized with their earlier publications: their adaptability, transportability, their ability present contributions from various contributors from many cities, the fact that they are easier and less expensive to produce and distribute, and they last longer. Regardless of their editors’ specific motives, each journal continued to showcase the Dadaists’ prioritization of manipulating graphic design, to declare their commitment to transnationalism, to expand the movement, and to declare its editor’s place in the movement. Of these four Dada groups, the Cologne Dadaists most fully utilized the unique characteristics of periodicals in the early 1920s. Ernst’s and Baargeld’s decision to publish Die Schammade (ed. Ernst and Baargeld, 1920, Cologne) indicates how central this printed medium had become to Dada practice.46 Recent affiliates, these two individuals were eager to connect with readers in other cities and to establish themselves as players among the more recognized artists in the Dada network. The Cologne catalog is entirely in German, and the only reference to Dadaists outside of the city comes in the list of names, presumably the creators of “Simultantriptychon: die dadaisten und die dadaistinnen” (“Simultaneous Triptych: Male and Female Dadaists”). In Die Schammade, by contrast, we find both German and French texts. Additionally, contributions from Cologne appear alongside pieces by Dadaists from Paris and Berlin, namely Tzara, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Soupault, Paul Éluard, and Huelsenbeck, whose names they proudly printed on the cover, interspersed with the title of the magazine. Advertisements for publications by Dadaists in Paris and Berlin announce their transnational connections and aspirations. Typography and layout conspire to lively effect, directly inspired by the Dada journals Ernst and Baargeld had received. For instance, Tzara’s poem, “Bulletin,” is printed in many font types and sizes, mimicking its appearance in Dada 3. Many of the reproductions in Die Schammade are cutouts of images on white paper pasted onto the page, so they stand out from the texts, but the inclusion of pinup photographs among them emphasizes that all are reproductions, implying that they are of equal worth (Figure 3.7). The pink and sparkling paper stock used for some copies also calls attention to the materiality of the page. The relationship between Der Dada 3 (April 1920) and the First International Dada Fair, which was held over two months later, was stronger

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Figure 3.7  Die Schammade, ed. Max Ernst and Johannes Baargeld, Cologne, 1920, Schloemilch-Verlag, p. 8, 12 ¾ × 9 13∕16 in. (32.4 × 25 cm). Image courtesy of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

(Figure 3.8).47 Der Dada 3 presents a brief announcement of the show and a profile photograph of Grosz that he had used in posters hung in the gallery space. Grosz’s well-known collage and watercolor, “‘Daum’ marries her pedantic automaton ‘George’ in May 1920. John Heartfield is very glad of it (Meta-Mech. constr. nach [according to] Prof. R. Hausmann)” (1920), printed

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Figure 3.8  Der Dada 3, ed. George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Raoul Hausmann, Berlin, 1920, Malik-Verlag, front cover, 9 1∕16 × 6 1∕8 in. (23 × 15.6 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

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on page three, was on view at the fair. But there is no checklist of works on view; the emphasis is on explicating the Berlin Dadaists’ transnational, antibourgeois, and anti-aesthetic stance while showcasing their experimentation with collage and the creative integration of texts and images. Fewer submissions by artists from outside Berlin are in Der Dada 3 than in their exhibition, yet this magazine nevertheless expresses the movement’s global nature. It features Picabia’s “Manifeste Cannibale Dada,” as well as various epigrams and gossip about Dada members that had appeared in Dadaphone. In his essay, “Dada in Europa,” Hausmann attributes the founding of Dada not only to Huelsenbeck, but also to Ball and Tzara, and page sixteen lists Dada journals from Paris and Zurich.48 Like the Berlin catalog, graphically, Der Dada 3 is outstanding. Slogans, announcements, manifestoes, and essays in various font types and sizes and colors (black and red) are arranged in many directions and combine and overlap with collages, photographs, sketches, drawings and what look like commercial photographs of banal subject matter such as a pair of socks and a spoon. Instead of numbers, each page is assigned a non-sequential measurement, such as “254 km,” “4/1,” “75%,” “1920,” and “TOM 2.” Berlin witnessed a series of left-leaning periodicals by individuals who had made earlier Dada magazines, though these later publications were not devoted to promoting Dada. They include the graphically conservative but politically provocative Die Pleite (“Bankruptcy”) (Heartfield, Groz, Herzfelde, Berlin, 1919–1924), published by Malik-Verlag and filled with drawings by Grosz with captions by Herzfelde, and Der blutige Ernst (“Bloody Earnest”) (John Höxter, Carl Einstein, George Grosz, Berlin, 1919), which carried on Dada’s defiant and sardonic tendencies.49 In Italy, Gino Cantarelli, with the help of Aldo Fiozzi set out to make Bleu (Mantua, July and August 1920, January 1921), an international avant-garde magazine (Figure 3.9). But through Evola’s efforts, Bleu became the primary vehicle for the promotion of the Dada movement in Italy. In his first letter to Tzara, Evola tells him that he is planning to produce his own journal, a “review of modern art,” and he invites Tzara and his colleagues to contribute.50 Animated by the Dada poems, essays, paintings, drawings, and collages that he saw in Dada publications, Evola committed to being a part of a transnational artistic movement that allowed him to pursue his individual artistic goals and the promise of what he called “a new life” (“une nouvelle vie”).51 Bleu featured texts (almost all of them translated into Italian) and images by Dadaists Tzara, Picabia, Ernst, Baargeld, Serner, Aragon, Éluard, Reverdy, and even Van Doesburg, who increasingly allied himself with the movement, as discussed in the next chapter.

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Figure 3.9  Bleu 3, ed. Gino Cantarelli, Mantua, 1921, front cover. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S869) (see Plate 7).

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These contributions manifest the editors’ international ties and eagerness to bring Dada to Italian readers, something they did not achieve in their exhibitions. Most of these images evidence the editors’ exposure to and excerpting from other Dada-affiliated journals. Examples include Baargeld’s Picabia-like drawing, “Le Dirigeable Dada” (“The Dada Airship”) (Figure 3.10),52 and a collage by Ernst, “Parafulmine giurabacco dei dada arp tzara ERNST baargeld picabia ecc” (“Lightning rod of the dada arp tzara ERNST baargeld picabia etc.”) (c.1919–1920), which only survives in this periodical,53 Louis Aragon’s essay, “Rivelazioni sensazionali” (“Sensational revelations”), which had been printed as “Révélations sensationnelles” in the May 1920 issue of Littérature, and Tzara’s “Ange” (“Angel”) 1916, which had appeared in Der Dada 1.54 Compared to earlier reviews discussed in this chapter, the graphic design of Bleu was conservative. The covers have a uniform design, with the title in large block letters, printed in the same color as the cover image (blue, green, and red, respectively). Most inside content is printed in black ink in two regular columns, and most inside pictures either adhere to this format or, as in the second issue, are on a separate insert, with the exception of the first issue, which features a print by Fiozzi printed in green overlaying the text. Typographically, the most pronounced experimentation is in an article about Dada in the first issue by critic Renée Dunan. Here “Dada” is bolded and in all caps throughout. Bleu offers two essays on Dada, both by Dunan, and they give readers the lengthiest, if idiosyncratic, account of the movement. In “Dada?” published in Bleu 1, she calls Dada “the entire ‘phenomenon of the future,’” adding, “to kill DADA is to sacrifice the beauty of the future.”55 Her article in the second issue of Bleu begins by distinguishing between Dadaism and Futurism: “Dadaism was not born from an aesthetic theory pushed to its final consequences like Futurism.”56 Just as magazines had encouraged Tzara and the other early Dadaists to combine their own works with those by established members of the avant-garde, here Evola aims to associate these Italian works with those by Dadaists and their fans. The words, “Parigi Roma Dada” (“Paris Rome Dada”), running across the top of a page of the third issue of Bleu, the most Dada-filled issue, make the connection explicit. Lists of reviews at the end of the second and third issues of Bleu—Cannibale, Projecteur, and Proverbe from Paris, Die Schammade from Cologne, as well as Littérature, Grecia, Der Sturm, and De Stijl—also expose the editors’ debt and desire to tie themselves to earlier Dada publications.57 The third issue of Bleu on January 1, 1921, launched a “Dada Season” in Rome, modeled after Tzara’s Dada Season in Paris. Evola tells Tzara, “Because of me, it is completely Dada here.”58 Besides the group show in April 1921, Evola

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Figure 3.10  Bleu 2, ed. Gino Cantarelli, Mantua, 1920, p. 3. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S869).

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exhibited his paintings alone in May 1921, this time at Arturo Ciacelli’s new Grotte dell’Augusteo in Rome.59 On July 2, 1921, he wrote to Tzara, telling him of the success of his efforts to promote Dada in Italy, “Many people are interested now in Dada, and, if the season were not finished we would undoubtedly have been the fashion of intellectual Rome.”60 However, in that very same month, Evola abruptly stopped all Dada activity, yet his brief stint with Dada exemplifies the journals’ ability to spawn increasingly idiosyncratic interpretations of the movement.61 In Paris, where many Dada enthusiasts used magazines to express their interpretations of the movement, Tzara promoted the movement in two issues of Dada from 1920: Bulletin Dada (February 1920) and Dada Augrandair: Der Sängerkrieg Intirol (“Dada Outdoors: The Singers’ War in the Tirol”) (September 1921—though the cover says September 16, 1886) (Figures 3.11 and 3.12).62 Bulletin Dada also served as a handbill and a program for a Dada performance at the Salon des Indépendants at the Grand Palais des Champs Elysées.63 Dada Augrandair bears little connection to the Salon Dada show, containing only an incomplete correction to the catalog.64 It focuses almost entirely on proving Tzara’s primacy in Dada’s creation and Dada’s range. This last issue of Dada, compiled in Tirol, where Tzara, Arp, and Ernst gathered in late August and early September, reveals Tzara’s increasing preoccupation with settling scores. A text by Arp emphatically, if nonsensically, asserts that Tzara invented the word “Dada,” simultaneously enacting and mocking such efforts: I declare that Tristan Tzara found the word DADA on February 8, 1916, at 6 in the evening; I was present with my twelve children when Tzara pronounced for the first time this word which has aroused in us such legitimate enthusiasm.65

In response to Picabia’s accusation that Dada had become a movement like any other, Dada Augrandair declares that Picabia, or “Funiguy,” “invented Dadaism in 1899, Cubism in 1870, Futurism in 1867, and Impressionism in 1856,” suggesting that it was in fact Picabia who was attached to “isms.” In addition to such territory marking, Dada Augrandair bears signs of Tzara’s ongoing commitment to expanding Dada and maintaining relations with Dada enthusiasts worldwide. It is bilingual, the full title combines French and German words, and although most contributors lived in Paris, some, like Arp, Ernst, Baargeld, did not. Experimental graphic design is not emphasized; nor is it completely forgotten. The journal opens from the left, and all of the words of the title except for “Dada” are printed backward and upside down and out of order.

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Figure 3.11  Bulletin Dada, ed. Tristan Tzara, Paris, 1920, front cover, letterpress, 14 13∕16 × 10 7∕8 in. (37.6 × 27.7 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

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Figure 3.12  Dada Augrandair: Der Sängerkrieg Intirol (“Dada Outdoors: The Singers’ War in the Tirol”), ed. Tristan Tzara and Max Ernst, Paris, Au Sans Pareil, 1921, p. 4, letterpress, 13 ¼ × 8 ¼ in. (33.7 × 21 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

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In 1920 and 1921, as Dada became more widely known, Dadaists became ever more cognizant of the comparatively long-lasting nature of printed materials after the war.66 Regardless of their exact link to exhibitions, all of these magazines attest to Dadaists’ ongoing valuing of this print medium and its continued ability to develop the movement. With the war’s end, Dadaists depended on their journals less and their ongoing engagement with them shows that these publications were much more than expedient means of communication but remained at the heart of their creative practice. In his analysis of gallery space, Thomas McEvilley comments, “It has been the special genius of the [twentieth] century to investigate things in relation to their context, to come to see the context as formative on the thing, and, finally, to see the context as a thing itself.”67 Throughout the 1900s, particularly starting in the 1920s, members of the avant-garde linked graphic and exhibition design.68 Figures such as El Lissitzky and Duchamp stand out for their involvement with both printed publications and expositions after the Dada ones explored in this chapter. Among their more notable undertakings are the review, Veshch-Gegenstand-Objet (“Object”) (Berlin, edited by El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg, 1922–1923), Lissitzky’s designs for the book, Dlia Golosa (“For the Voice”) (1923), and his work for the Internationale Kunstausstellung (“International Art Exhibition”) in Dresden (1926). Lissitzky said of his display design, “If he [the viewer] was usually lulled into a certain passivity as he filed past the picture-filled walls, in our arrangement he will be activated. This is to be the objective of the room.”69 Duchamp’s Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (“International Surrealist Exhibition”) at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris (1938), the First Papers of Surrealism show he curated with André Breton in New York in 1942, and his collaboration on View magazine (New York, edited by David Hare, 1942–1944) also testify to his concurrent interests in the printed page and presentation space.70 At this time museum directors and curators, too, began interrogating established installation designs and debating how best to involve visitors as embodied spectators sharing a given space.71 Training programs and journals in Europe prescribed strict, if varied, guidelines about exhibitions for professional curators in the 1920s. The Dadaists’ experiments in the years previous helped spur this focus on display design, although their tactics often were at odds with museum goals.72 In particular, they resisted the passive, visual contemplation most museums encouraged at this time.73 Instead the Dadaists overturned display conventions, harnessing the creative potential of magazines’ printed, multiple nature, and, in so doing, reimagined spatial exhibitions and even

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the very definition of art. At this same time, across the Atlantic in New York, enthusiasts appropriated the periodical in another guise, a readymade, as explored in the following chapter.

Notes The effigy, John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter’s Preussischer Erzengel (“Prussian Archangel”) (1920) was in the Berlin Dadaists’ First International Dada Fair in 1920; the girl reading poetry was in the 1920 Dada Spring Fair in Cologne; Philippe Soupault submitted an eighteenth-century mirror entitled “Portrait d’un imbécile” (“Portrait of a Fool”) (c. 1920) to the Salon Dada exhibition in Paris in 1921; the posters, which read, “Nieder die Kunst” and “Sperren Sie endlich Ihren Kopf auf!,” were hung at the Berlin exhibition. 2 Adam Jolles writes that Dadaists, along with Surrealists, “used exhibitions—much as they did journals—as a means to address a much broader field of art history.” Adam Jolles, “Artist into Curators: Dada and Surrealist Exhibition Practices,” in A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 212. 3 Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2009), 8. 4 Bruce Altshuler, “Introduction,” in The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century, ed. Bruce Altshuler (New York: Abrams, 1994), 8. 5 Bruce Altshuler, “From Almanac to Exhibitions: The First Exhibition of the Editors of the Blaue Reiter, Munich, 1911,” The Avant-Garde in Exhibition, 50. See also Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial, Exhibitions that Made Art History, vol. I (London, New York: Phaidon, 2008). 6 Bruce Altshuler, “In the Zero of Form: 0–10, The Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures, Petrograd,” December 19, 1915–January 19, 1916,” The Avant-Garde in Exhibition, 78–97. 7 For more on press coverage of the Dadaists from this period, see Dada in the Press. 8 Ernst met Ball and Hennings in Munich in 1919 and heard about performances, exhibitions that combined works of established artists and unknown ones. He read Berlin Dadaists’ “Was ist der Dadaismus und was will er in Deutschland?” (“What Is Dadaism and What Does It Want in Germany”) in a Cologne newspaper in 1919. Kriebel, “Cologne,” Dada, ed. Dickerman, 221. 9 For a full account of Dada in Paris, see Sanouillet, Dada in Paris. Other accounts include Janine Mileaf and Matthew S. Witkovsky, “Paris.” Dada, ed. Dickerman, 354, and Elizabeth Legge, “Nothing, Ventured: Paris Dada into Surrealism,” A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 89–109. 10 F. S. Flint, “The Younger French Poets: The Dada Movement,” The Chapbook (A Monthly Miscellany) 2, no. 17 (November 1920): 3. 1

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11 Tristan Tzara to Francis Picabia, July 1920, Dossiers Picabia, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, document #159, TZRC 696. In Bulletin Dada, Tzara listed several Italians among the Dada presidents: d’Arezzo, Cantarelli, Evola, and Meriano. He also printed a poem, “The fibre ignites and the pyramids (very quickly)” (“la fibre s’enflamme et les pyramides (très vite)”) by Evola. 12 “ … à présent, on commence à la fin a parler un peu partout de Dadaisme et de vous: les journaux font la grève du silence pour chercher de suffoquer l’invasion Dada en Italie. Les futuristes se sont … furieux.” Evola to Tzara, May 1, 1921, Dossiers Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, TZRC 1506. Evola had found out about Dada in late 1918 or 1919 when Prampolini showed him Tzara’s Vingt-Cinq poèmes (“Twenty-five poems”) and Dada 3. Tzara’s 1918 Dada Manifesto, published in Dada 3, served as the basis of Evola’s interpretation of Dada. Evola had read Tzara’s poems in Italian periodicals, as well. In a letter dated October 7, 1919, Evola tells Tzara that he has read Tzara’s poems in the Italian journals, Diana, Pagine, and Cronache Letterarie. Evola to Tzara, October 7, 1919, Dossiers Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, TZRC 1484.1; Sheppard, “Julius Evola, Futurism and Dada,” New Studies in Dada, 87. 13 Tristan Tzara, “Zurich Chronicle. 1915–1919,” trans. Manheim, The Dada Painters and Poets, 235. 14 A photograph of a fall 1918 exposition at the Kunstsalon Wolfsberg in Zurich, which included contributions from Dada affiliates Arp, Janco, Richter, shows works arranged in this way, suggesting that the style of this earlier exposition was similar. Galerie Dada hosted four exhibitions between January and June 1917: the “First Dada Exhibition” (Première exposition Dada) in January 1917, two presenting German Expressionist pieces from Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, and the “Ausstellung von Graphik, Broderie, Relief ” (“Exhibition of Graphic Art, Embroidery, and Reliefs”). Tanja Buchholz describes Galerie Dada as a Gesamtkunstwerk in its first few months. Tanja Buchholz, “Galerie Dada,” Genesis Dada, 54. 15 Marcel Duchamp, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Interview by Pierre Cabanne. Translated by Ron Padgett (London: De Capo Press, 1979), 56. 16 Dawn Ades, Three New York Dadas and the Blind Man (London: Atlas Press, 2013). According to Roché’s Victor, originally The Blind Man was for sale at the show and then offered for free, eliciting little interest, after which a bookseller sold them. Henri-Pierre Roché, Victor, trans. Chris Allen, in Three New York Dadas and the Blind Man, ed. Ades, 55–6. 17 Before this, they had collaborated with Otto Freundlich, Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, Heinrich Hoerle, and Josef Smeets, among others, to produce the politically satirical, and according to some, Proto-Dada Der Ventilator (“The Fan”) (Cologne, 1919). For more on Der Ventilator, see Lynette Roth, “Cologne: The Magazine

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19 20

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as Artistic and Political Imperative,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, part II, 927–32. In 1920, even as they were contributing to Die Schammade, some members of the Cologne Dada circle published a single issue of Stupid, which was affiliated with their group and exhibition of the same name. Pieces by Franz Wilhelm Seiwart and Anton Räderscheidt, though listed in the publication, were not in Section D, due to a rift between them and the others. Roth, “The Magazine as Artistic and Political Imperative,” 934. Copies of Bulletin D, measuring 31.5 × 24 cm (approximately 12.5 × 9.5 in.), which were not distributed, were confiscated by British police. Roth, “The Magazine as Artistic and Political Imperative,” 932. Roth, “The Magazine as Artistic and Political Imperative,” 933–4. Evola also organized a solo show in May 1921 at Arturo Ciacelli’s Grotte dell’Augusteo in Rome, and events surrounding it included a reading of Tzara’s “Manifesto of bitter and feeble love” and of poems by Picabia and Dermée, as well as Evola. Invitation card for Dada exhibition, reproduced in Meyer, Dada Global, 68. Originally the show was to include the work of Evola and German painter and Dada affiliate Christian Schad. The opening featured poems by Evola, Tzara, Louis Aragon, Cantarelli as well as music by Georges Auric, Arnold Schönberg, and Igor Stravinsky. Evola marked the closing of the exhibition by reading the 1918 Dada Manifesto and excerpts of Tzara’s First Celestial Adventure of M. Antipyrine. A recitation of poems by Tzara, Evola, and Aragon and again music—by Alfredo Casella, Stravinsky, Béla Bartok, Zoltán Kodály, and Schönberg—followed. Giovanni Lista, “Tristan Tzara et le Dadaïsme italien,” Europe 53, no. 555–6 (July–August 1975): 188. Evola also had two solo shows at around this time, at the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia in Rome in January 1920 and in May 1921 at Arturo Ciacelli’s Grotte dell’Augusteo in Rome (where he staged a reading of Tzara’s “Manifesto of bitter and feeble love” and of poems by himself, Picabia, and Dermée). Tzara and Picabia, who later withdrew from the exhibition, conceived “Salon Dada” as a dissenting response to the long history of the esteemed art salons of Paris, most pointedly the Salon des Indépendants, whose 1920 exposition the Dadaists had sabotaged, prompting organizers to exclude them. Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 201–2. Janine Mileaf and Matthew S. Witkovsky. “Paris.” Dada, ed. Dickerman, 354; Lista, “Tristan Tzara et le Dadaïsme italien,” 188. The Cologne exhibition catalog announces that the show included reviews, presumably including Dada reviews. Dada-Vorfrühling: Gemälde, Skulpturen, Zeichnungen, Fluidoskeptrik, Vulgärdilettantismus Brauhaus Winter, 1920. Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Katherine Dreier Papers. The Berlin Dadaists exhibited Neue Jugend, 391, Der Dada 1, and Der Dada 3. Hanne Bergius, “First International Dada-Fair,” Dada Triumphs!, 15, 16, 23, 48, 49, 58.

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26 The magazines in the assemblage were “Franz Jung’s Die freie Straße (“The Open Road”), to which Baader had been a contributor, and at the summit an issue of Die Pleite (“Bankruptcy”). For more on the piece, see Michael White, “Johannes Baader’s Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: the Mysticism of the Mass Media,” Modernism/ modernity 8, no. 4 (November 2001): 583–602. For more on Die freie Straße, see Weikop, “Transitions: From Expressionism to Dada,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines III, part II, 806–15. 27 “Dada ist die willentliche Zersetzung der bürgerlichen Begriffswelt. Dada steht auf Seiten des revolutionären Proletariats!” 28 Steinberg, “Reflections on the State of Criticism,” 44. 29 “Cet été les éléphants porteront des moustaches … et vous?” trans. Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 203. 30 “Nieder die Kunst.” “Sperren Sie endlich Ihren Kopf auf!” and “Machen Sie ihn frei fur die Forderungen der Zeit!” 31 “Dada est le plus gros canular du monde.” “Dada vous a-t-il déjà parlé?” 32 In the end, the Dadaists prevailed, although local police shut down the exhibition briefly on grounds of indecency. Charlotte Stokes, “Rage and Liberation: Cologne Dada,” in Dada Cologne Hanover, ed. Charlotte Stokes and Stephen C. Foster, Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada III, ed. Stephen C. Foster (New York: G.K. Hall & Company, 1997), 53. 33 For a detailed description of the trial, see Bruce Altshulter, “Dada ist politisch: The First International Dada Fair, Berlin, June 30–August 25, 1920,” The Avant-Garde in Exhibition, 110–12, and Bergius, Berlin Dada, 277–9. 34 Unsigned review, “Der Letzte Schrei,” Kölnischer Volzeitung, May 1, 1920, trans. Werner Spies, Max Ernst Collages: The Invention of the Surrealist Universe. Translated by John William Gabriel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1991), 280. 35 Apparently as a result of the controversy caused by Evola’s Dada exhibition, Bragaglia severed relations with the Dadaists soon after the exhibition closed. 36 Dada-Vorfrühling: Gemälde, Skulpturen, Zeichnungen, Fluidoskeptrik, Vulgärdilettantismus Brauhaus Winter, 1920; Erste internationale Dada-Messe: Katalog. Berlin: Kunsthandlung Dr. Otto Burchard, 1920; Salon Dada: exposition international, Galerie Montaigne. 1921. 37 Raoul Hausmann, “Erste international Dada-Messe: Katalog” (“First International Dada Exhibition catalog”), 1. The review appeared in the article, “Dada Bolshevism,” in Neue Preussische (Kreuz-Zeitung) (July 3, 1920), trans. Bergius, Berlin Dada, 276. 38 “Besuchen Sie DADA? Ich habe kein bedürfnis.” 39 “Max Liebermann illustriert die Bibel!” Bergius, “First International Dada-Fair” section, Dada Triumphs!, 39.

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40 “Nul n’est censé ignorer Dada.” “On cherche des athlètes.” “No. 7” appears on the top right-hand side of the cover of the Salon Dada catalog, likely meant to mislead readers into thinking that is part of a series (it came out after the seventh issue of Dada). The other difference between the poster and the catalog cover is the name of the printer on the bottom right-hand side of the poster (“H. Chachoin, impr., Paris”). This catalog is a single, two-toned sheet measuring 6¼ × 8 5/16 inches and folded to form four separate pages. The catalog appeared in two editions. The first was printed on cream stock, with black ink on the outside pages and red ink inside. The second is printed entirely in black ink, but the inside pages are blue. This catalog is now extremely rare. The copy described here is in the Katherine Dreier Papers at Beinecke Library at Yale University. 41 Ernst may have chosen to include this because he had seen Hebrew letters on the cover of Der Dada 1. However, because these words upset his father-in-law, who was Jewish and presumably found their reproduction here inappropriate, he rewrote this part. 42 This piece was also in the show and used for posters. 43 Wiland Herzefelde, First International Dada Fair catalog, 1920, trans. Doherty, October 105 (Summer 2003): 104. 44 “Jeder besucher dieser ausstellung ist prädestinierter dadaist entweder lächelt er freimütig man kann ihn sodann als edeldadaisansprechen, oder er fällt dem Irrwahn des antidadaismus anheim zu spät bemerkt er die personalunion von metzger und opferlamm in sich er ist dadaist schlechthin.” Dada Austellung: Dada Vorfrühling, 4. 45 “Impossible n’est pas Dada,” “Si vous voulez mourir continuez,” “Un état dans l’état dada c’est dada dans dada,” “Garçon!!! Une patrie et une crise de nerfs!” “Il faut être parfaitement imbecile.” Salon Dada: Exposition Internationale, exhibition catalog (Paris, Galerie Montaigne, 1921), 3, 2, 5, 8. The copy consulted is in the collection of the University of Iowa Libraries. 46 Die Schammade was printed by Druckerei Hertz in Cologne, which had also done Bulletin D and some issues of Der Ventilator. It is made up of thirty-two pages of pale green or pink paper, with most of the images in red ink. Its cover measures 32.5 × 24.8 cm (about 13 × 10 in.) and its inside pages measure 29.5 × 22.8 cm (11.5 × 9 in.). It cost 14.50 marks. Notably, a flyer advertising the publication indicates, falsely, that certain works are for sale, again blurring the lines between periodical and catalog. Roth, “The Magazine as Artistic and Political Imperative,” 937. Baargeld’s father, a wealthy local businessman, funded the publication. German, French, as well as some English, are interspersed in the journal. The title is a neologism that has been interpreted in many ways. “Schammade” calls to mind the words “Shamane” (shaman) and “Sharade (charade). According to Werner Spies, “Schammade schlagen” means to sound a retreat. It also can be

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52 53 54

Dada Magazines interpreted as having sexual implications: “Scham” means “shame” or “genitals,” and “Made” means maggot or worm. William A. Camfield, Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism (Munich: Prestel-Verlag; Houston: The Menil Collection, 1993), 67. Hal Foster, “Dada Mime,” October 105 (Summer 2003), 172. All of these interpretations are plausible, and Ernst no doubt sought out this ambiguity. For more interpretations of the title, see Kriebel, “Cologne,” Dada, ed. Dickerman, 230. Der Dada 3 was published by Der Malik Verlag in Berlin. Measuring 16 × 24 cm (about 6¼ × 9½ inches), it is much smaller than the first two issues of the journal. The cover and back page are printed on pink paper, and the publication is eighteen pages long, including the front and back pages. The editors of the journal are listed as “Groszfield, Hearthaus, Georgemann” or Grosz, Heartfield, and Hausmann. They include Cannibale (Francis Picabia, Paris, 1920), Proverbe (Paul Éluard, Paris, 1920–1921), and Der Zeltweg (Otto Flake, Walter Serner and Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1919). For more on these publications and others from the time in Berlin, see Sabine T. Kriebel, “Radical Left Magazines in Berlin,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines III, part II, 835–54. Evola to Tzara, October 7, 1919, Dossiers Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, TZRC 1484.1. The envelope for this letter is addressed to “Mr. Tristan Tzara de la revue ‘Dada’ Zurich Svizzera” (“Mr. Tristan Tzara of the review, ‘Dada’ from Zurich, Switzerland”), pointing out that for Evola Tzara’s identity was inextricably linked to his journal. Presumably Tzara gave Evola permission to publish his poem, “Acrobats” (“Saltimbanques)” (1916), which appears in the January 1920 issue of Noi. This version of the poem is the first, written in 1914. Evola sent a copy of this issue of Noi to Tzara on January 5, 1920, accompanied by a letter expressing his interest in Dada, though Dada is not mentioned in this issue of Noi. He writes, “[A]lthough from the point of view of substance we are the same, there is, from the point of view of forms, an essential difference between us. While for you all is natural, for me all is desired; while Dada, it is you, it is your immediate given, for me dada is a new life that I have built after having destroyed, always with awareness and will, another life ….” “Pourtant, bien qu’au point de veu [sic] substance il y a identité, il y a, au point de vue forme, une différence essentielle entre nous deux. Pendant que chez vous tout est naturel, chez moi tout est voulu; pendant que Dada, c’est vous, c’est votre donnée immédiate, pour moi Dada c’est une nouvelle vie que j’ai bâtie après avoir détruit, toujours avec conscience et volonté, une autre vie …” Evola to Tzara, December 29, 1920, Dossiers Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, TZRC 1500. Bleu 2, 3. Johannes Baargeld would have seen Picabia’s drawings in 391 and Dada. Bleu 3, 4. Other Dada affiliates represented in Bleu are Picabia, Serner, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Céline Arnauld, Éluard, and Aragon.

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55 Renee Dunan, “Dada?” Bleu 1, 2. This essay had been published in Journal du peuple in Paris (March 1920). 56 Renée Dunan, “Assassiniamo l’intelligenza e l’estetica se vogliamo comprendere la bellezza,” Bleu 2, front cover. This essay had been published as “Assassinons l’intelligence et l’esthétique si nous voulons comprendre la beauté” in La Vie Nouvelle Revue Mensuelle de Littérature et d’Art, no. 1 (December 1920): 17–20. 57 Surprisingly, Tzara’s Dada is not mentioned, most likely an oversight, as letters indicate that Tzara sent copies of Dada to Evola. 58 Evola to Tzara, not dated, Dossiers Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, TZRC 1501. 59 The opening began with a simultaneous reading of Tzara’s “Manifesto of bitter and feeble love,” accompanied by Bruitist drumming and poetic recitations written by Picabia, Dermée, and Evola. A Dada conference in the Great Hall at the University of Rome took place on May 16, poetry readings at the Grotte dell’Augusteo on May 18 and the Salle de Danse Giovanelli on May 23, and a Dada performance at the Grotte dell’Augusteo on June 15, when Evola read poems by himself, Tzara, Picabia, and Ribemont-Dessaignes. Lista, “Tristan Tzara et le Dadaïsme italien,” 188–9. 60 Evola to Tzara, July 2, 1921, Dossiers Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, TZRC 1508. Summer events included a Dada conference in the Great Hall at the University of Rome on May 16, poetry readings at the Grotte dell’Augusteo on May 18 and the Salle de Danse Giovanelli on May 23, and a Dada performance at the Grotte dell’Augusteo on June 15, where Evola read poems by himself, Tzara, Picabia, and Ribemont-Dessaignes. 61 Lista, “Tristan Tzara et le Dadaïsme italien,” 189. 62 At 15¼ × 11 inches (38.7 × 27.7 cm), Bulletin Dada is much larger than its predecessors and more like a newspaper than an art journal. The entire publication, including the cover, is only four pages long. Five thousand copies were printed by Société Parisienne d’Imprimerie, Passy, Paris, and it cost 2 French francs. There was no deluxe version. 63 Attendance at the Dada event was high, so presumably many people read Bulletin Dada. The issue is extremely rare, suggesting that the large numbers of people who attended the Dada event understood it to be the handbill, to be purchased for the event and discarded afterward, or as an ephemeral magazine. Other magazines from this time include Paul Dermée’s single-issue Z (March 1920) and 391, which in 1920 (issues number 11 to 14, from February, March, July, and November) carried on Tzara’s nihilistic bent and manifested Picabia’s close relationship with Tzara and New York Dadaists Man Ray and Duchamp. Littérature (1919–1924), edited by Aragon, Soupault, and Breton, supported Dada at this time, regularly publishing contributions from Tzara, Picabia, and other Dadaists. The May 1920 issue, devoted to Dada, features twenty-three Dada manifestoes. Dadaists also found platforms in other artists’ magazines, such

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Dada Magazines as L’Esprit Nouveau (ed. Le Corbusier, poet Paul Dermée, and painter Amédée Ozenfant, 1920–1925). Chapter 5 discusses some of the dialogues carried out in such magazines. For more on these magazines, see Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, “Dada Publications: 1920,” 149–60, and “Dada Publications: 1921,” 223–32, and Emily Hage, “Dissemination: The Dada and Surrealist Journals,” in A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, ed. David Hopkins (Chichester, West Sussex, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 199–210. The correction says that the piece was painted in 1912, not 1914, as the catalog indicates, and that Duchamp painted this first mechanical picture in Munich. It fails to mention that the piece was not, in the end, on view at the Salon Dada. Tristan Tzara, untitled text, Dada Augrandair: Der Sängerkrieg in Tirol, front cover. Tzara named it Dada Augrandair and Maya Chrusecz nicknamed it Der Sängerkrieg in Tirol. In the end they combined both names. Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 210. “Je déclare que Tristan Tzara a trouvé le mot DADA le 8 février 1916 à 6h. du soir; j’étais présent avec mes 12 enfants lorsque Tzara a prononcé pour la première fois ce mot qui a déchaîné en nous en enthousiasme légitime.” Arp, “Déclaration,” Dada Augrandair trans. William A. Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life, and Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 167. They also published anthologies—Dadaco, Dadaglobe, and Dada Almanac—that they intended to publish after the war. Although Dadaco and Dadaglobe were never realized, Huelsenbeck published Dada Almanac in 1920, to coincide with the end of the Dada Fair in Berlin. Richard Huelsenbeck, The Dada Almanac, ed. Malcolm Green, trans. Derk Wynand (London: Atlas Press, 1993). For more on the other publications, see Zürich—Dadaco—Dadaglobe and Sudhalter, Dadaglobe. Thomas McEvilley, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986), 7. Adam Jolles emphasizes the importance of exhibitions between the First and Second World Wars: “The emergence of a rich discourse on exhibition practices ranks among the European art world’s signature developments during the interwar period.” Jolles, “Artists into Curators: Dada and Surrealist Exhibition Practices,” 211. El Lissitzky, “Demonstrationsräume,” typed MSS. Archives of the Sprengel Museum Hanover, 362, trans. El Lissitzky, 1890–1941: Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer (Eindhoven: Municipal Van Abbemuseum; New York: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 47. For more on Lissitzky’s and Duchamp’s efforts, see Altshuler, Salon to Biennial. See Klonk, Spaces of Experience, 8, 9, 16; Mieke Bal, “On Grouping: The Caravaggio Corner,” in Looking In: The Art of Viewing (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2001. 161–90), 8; Julia Noordegraaf, Strategies of Display: Museum Presentation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Visual Culture (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen: NAi Publishers, 2004), 16.

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72 As Jolles points out, “[T]he dadaists and surrealists contributed decisively to this evolving discourse on curating and installation design, outside of and occasionally in flagrant opposition to the museum.” Jolles, “Artists into Curators: Dada and Surrealist Exhibition Practices,” 211. 73 Ibid., 212.

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“Be on Your Guard, Madam”: New York Dada and the Magazine as Readymade, 1921 For the Dadaists, magazines’ chameleon nature was one of their most advantageous qualities. Starting in 1916, these publications worked as embodiments and propagators of the movement, as dynamic, ersatz exhibition venues, and as models for irreverent exhibitions. In 1921, Dada had gained international acclaim, and artists in New York more and more began to associate with Dada. New York Dada, edited by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, assumed yet another guise, a readymade, an object found by an artist and presented as a work of art. Duchamp and Man Ray recognized the art journal as the primary means of expression and membership in Dada, and in making theirs they coopted another kind of publication, one with local relevance: the ever more popular, female-targeted, American glossy.1 While they did not submit an issue of, say, Vanity Fair or Vogue, they did produce a magazine with the material markers, or identifying features, of such serials. More than bringing a readymade to light and defending it as a work of art, as Blind Man had done, New York Dada positioned itself as a readymade. Understanding New York Dada as a readymade broadens perceptions of the readymade and periodicals. On the one hand, as Duchamp had done with “Fountain,” here he and Man Ray placed something that posed as a massproduced, everyday object into the comparatively rarefied realm of Dada journals.2 As if to emphasize the singularity of New York Dada, Duchamp later framed it as a work of art in his “Boîte-en-valise” (“Box in a Valise”) (1935–1941), which includes a facsimile of New York Dada alongside miniature replicas of his other works. Yet at the same time, in 1921, instead of placing this object on a pedestal and effectively yanking it out of circulation, Duchamp and Man Ray threw it back in. The publication is mobile and multiple, with copies distributed beyond a singular museum or gallery display and beyond their immediate circle to readers internationally, including

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visitors to at least one New York bookstore and individuals in Europe. Rather than moving in only one direction, from the everyday to the artistic realm, New York Dada shuttled between the two. In some ways, this characteristic is common to all readymades. Hal Foster hints at this two-way street when he observes, “Although celebrated as the artist who opened high art to the common thing, Duchamp also did the opposite, rarefying the everyday object through the magic trick of the readymade.”3 New York Dada literalized what Foster describes, as it moved different contexts and therefore assumed two identities simultaneously. The title of this chapter comes from Tzara’s “Dada Authorization,” published in New York Dada, which grants mock permission to its editors to call their publication “Dada.” Tzara’s warning to “Be on your guard, Madam” is in keeping with the magazine’s commercial bent and its selling of Dada as a product. This chapter begins with the wider international and New York City context of Dada and Dada journals, tracing Katherine Dreier’s efforts to bring Dada to Americans, noting the centrality of magazines in this endeavor. It goes on to detail how New York Dada imitates women’s magazines in the United States not only in specific texts and images, but also as an entity. It then points out connections between this review’s contents and images in Vanity Fair as well as to earlier Dada-affiliated journals. Finally, it reflects on what the distribution of New York Dada tells us about its function as a readymade.

Bringing Dada to New York: Katherine Dreier, the Société Anonyme, and a Dada Exhibition The last page of New York Dada presents an ad, printed sideways: “Don’t miss Kurt Schwitters and other Anonymphs at the Société Anonyme, Inc.” This short, easily overlooked, text represents Katherine Dreier’s ambitious and broadreaching attempts to host a Dada show in New York. As we saw in Chapter 1, Duchamp, Man Ray, Wood, and others gathered in New York were engaging in Dada-like activities during the war. Similar to Duchamp’s remarks that what they were doing was in a similar “spirit” to events in Zurich, in January 1921, Man Ray described Dada as “a state of mind” made up “largely of negations” and “the tail of every other movement—Cubism, Futurism, Simultanism.”4 His words acknowledge Dada’s links to preceding movements and suggest that it resisted being tied to any particular style. Dada publications brought the movement to American shores as early as 1916 (as detailed in Chapter 1) and

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continued to do so in the early 1920s. In 1921, Picabia sent copies of 391 and Dada, and likely others, to Duchamp and Man Ray, who helped sell them.5 But the most fertile ground for Dada in the United States was the Société Anonyme, Museum of Modern Art, which Dreier founded, along with Duchamp, Man Ray, and her sister, Dorothea A. Dreier, and Caroline Goodwin O’Day, among others, in April 1920.6 Although they may have borrowed the name from the Dadaists (Tzara sometimes identified Dada as a “Société Anonyme” or anonymous company), the group’s goal was at once much broader and more geographically specific: to “promote a better understanding of modern art throughout the country, as well as in New York City.”7 They set out to achieve this objective by showing art that most American galleries were too conservative to show in a non-commercial setting. The Société Anonyme’s treasure trove of Dada journals and books, its lectures, and its exhibitions actively brought Dada—from both France and Germany—to New York. Its library is particularly notable for our purposes. Taking advantage of contacts in the United States and Europe, Dreier compiled a library of 209 titles of books and serials, including at least one copy of the first seven issues of Tzara’s Dada, as well as Der Dada 1, 2, and 3, six of his 391, the first two of Bleu, and The Blind Man.8 Dreier likely received many of these from Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia.9 In addition, it housed two copies of the catalog for the Berlin Dada exhibition and Evola’s Arte Astratta (“Abstract Art”), identified as a “Magazine Dada.” These publications served as the primary source of information for members of the Société Anonyme and other visitors to the library, which was open to the public, in keeping with the Société’s mission to educate a wide audience.10 The Société Anonyme also hosted exhibitions, and Dreier was eager to show the works of European Dadaists.11 Whereas Duchamp, Man Ray, and most other Dada enthusiasts in the United States maintained ties primarily with the Parisian Dadaists, Dreier, the daughter of German immigrants, focused on Dada in Cologne, Hanover, and Berlin. Like Dadaists in Europe, Dreier took advantage of more fluid travel and transportation after the war to organize international exhibitions. She met Max Ernst and Johannes Baargeld in October 1919 in Cologne, as they were hanging their works in the “Dada” section of the Society of Arts exhibition, mentioned in Chapter 3, and offered to host a similar exhibition in New York.12 Ernst agreed and sent her the catalog of the Early Spring Dada exhibition, and Die Schammade.13 He promised to send copies of Bulletin D, though they never arrived, presumably because the British confiscated his copies.14 Apparently keen to establish his Dada credibility, Ernst

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emphasizes to Dreier his ties to other Dadaists, which center on his exposure to their magazines: “I have been in constant communication with Paris Dada since the beginning of this year. I saw drawings by Duchamp in 391 and Cannibale and a beautiful Dada painting.”15 Ultimately, however, both the British authorities in Cologne and the German government prevented her from receiving any Cologne Dada works. In the summer of 1920, Dreier, significantly, went to the International Dada Fair in Berlin and met Grosz, Heartfield, and Herzfelde.16 Just afterward, she wrote to Heartfield and Grosz, apparently in response to a letter from them, including postcards of works by Duchamp and Man Ray, asking if they would be interested in exhibiting in New York.17 The Berlin catalog, printed in the middle of July 1920, suggests that they said yes. It lists over twenty pieces in the show, by Berlin and Cologne Dadaists, some marked with an asterisk. A note tells readers, After the end of this exhibition the works marked with an asterisk in the catalog (*) will be exhibited at the Société Anonyme, Inc., open [sic] its First Exhibition of Modern Art, 19 East 47th Street, New York. These will be the first German Dada works to be shown in America.18

Yet these works never made it to the walls of the Société Anonyme, apparently due at least in part to Burchard’s and Grosz’s lack of enthusiasm.19 Indeed, a trivializing and sexist account of Dreier’s exertions, in the magazine Sinn und Form (“Sense and Form”) in November 1921, signed by Herzfelde, indicates that the Berlin Dadaists never had any serious intention to show their works in New York: A fat old lady, a museum director and patron of the arts from Boston, Massachusetts [sic], was so impressed by, even shrilly enthusiastic about, the exhibits she saw in the arts salon of Dr. Otto Burchard on Lützowufer, that she insisted on showing the ‘Dada-Fair’ in Boston [sic]. Well could we understand her wish, the more so as we had already anticipated it in an utterly fictitious final note in the catalog.20

In his letter to Dreier from almost a year later, Grosz blames the “official discredit” their show earned stood in the way of realizing a New York show.21 In the end, none of the leading Berlin Dadaists exhibited at the Société Anonyme. Endeavors to host a Paris Dada exhibition did not fare much better. A letter from Dreier to Tzara from August 1920 proposes that she show the “Paris” Dadaists—she lists Picabia, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Evola, and Fiozzi—separately from those from Berlin and Cologne.22 However, the closest she came to showing French Dada works was in the Société Anonyme’s first and third (untitled)

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exhibitions, from April and August 1920, respectively. They featured works by, among others, Picabia, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Duchamp, all of whom the Société Anonyme considered Dadaists, as their 1920–1921 report indicates. However it did not explicitly frame them as representatives of the movement in these exhibitions, and no Dadaists then living in Paris were represented.23 Despite such frustrations, the Société Anonyme did succeed in carrying on the inventiveness of the earlier Dada shows, at least initially. For the first show, held the same month as Dada Early Spring in Cologne, the exhibitions committee, led by Duchamp but also including Dreier, Man Ray, and Joseph Stella, hung works in a conventional manner (a photo of the Société Anonyme shows pieces hung soberly, several feet apart).24 Yet there were some inventive parts: the organizers lined the walls with a light blue oilcloth, painted the fireplace and woodwork to match it, and covered the floor with “grey ribbed rubber.”25 They affixed lace paper edging to the frames, and Man Ray arranged for blue lighting.26 Although hardly as radical as Dadaists’ antics overseas, these techniques do indicate some degree of interest in experimental display. In the end, the only Société Anonyme shows explicitly linked with Dada highlighted the works of Schwitters. This choice is somewhat ironic, given that Dadaists and Berlin and Cologne distanced themselves from him and he himself hesitated to link himself with “Dada,” as examined in the next chapter.27 The handbill for the first of these shows, at the end of 1920, reads, “Kurt Schwitters— German—one of the first dadas, who despite the fact refuses to be called a DADAIST.”28 This exhibition presented his Merz collages, along with pieces by ten other artists, including Kandinsky, Man Ray, Stella, Derain, and Hartley, the only other artist the Société Anonyme identified as a Dadaist (in its 1920–1921 report), as well as German artists who had shown at Herwarth Walden’s Berlin gallery, Der Sturm. The Société’s eighth exhibition, from March 15 to April 12, 1921, also showed works by Schwitters, along with some by other artists, again from Der Sturm.29 The flyer for the show, printed on a small piece of light blue paper, leads visitors to believe that more than one Dadaist’s works are on view, although it mentions only Schwitters in the headline: THE DADAS HAVE COME TO TOWN! ! Kurt Schwitters acclaimed by the dadaists as one of their very own is the first dadaist to reach New York. DER STURM REFUSES TO CALL HIM A DADA !!30

Schwitters alone is the representative of “The Dadas” announced here.

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The Société Anonyme used the exhibition to launch a brief Dada season of sorts. On April Fool’s Day, 1921, it hosted a Dada evening. Hartley delivered a lecture, “What is Dadaism?” followed by a talk “in opposition” by Mrs. Claire Dana Mumford, a painter, writer, and psychologist, and a “summing up” by retired philosophy professor Phyllis Ackerman. Hartley’s speech reveals that Dada journals were his primary source of information on the movement. He mimes Dadaists’ dismissal of dogma, evident in their publications: If I announce on this bright morning that I am a “Dada-ist” it is not because I find the slightest need for, or importance in, a doctrine of any sort, it is only for convenience of myself and a few others that I take up the issue of adherence.31

This statement echoes that of Tzara’s 1918 manifesto in Dada 3: If I continue to do something, it is because it amuses me, or rather because I have a need for activity which I use up and satisfy wherever I can. Basically, the true Dadas have always been separate from Dada.32

Hartley cites (in translation) Picabia’s “Manifeste Cannibale Dada” (“Cannibal Dada Manifesto”) published in Dadaphone: “Dada smells of nothing, nothing, nothing. / It is like your hopes: nothing. / like your paradise: nothing / like your idols: nothing.”33 He also quotes extensively from Paul Dermée’s statement, “Qu’est-ce que Dada” (“What is Dada”), printed on the cover of Z. However, whereas Dermée describes Dada as “a fundamentally religious attitude,” Hartley calls it an a-religious attitude.34 Whether or not this is in fact what Hartley said, intentionally or not, the version of Dada he conveys is rooted in readings of Paris Dada journals.35 The press’s responses to this event, which ranged from enthusiastic to dismissive, depended on Dada reviews, too: primarily Dadaphone, 391, and 291.36

New York Dada: American Glossy, Dada Magazine It is not surprising that Duchamp and Man Ray, members of the Société Anonyme, would make a journal, which remained the primary means of expression and membership in the Dada network. Both had experience making magazines. Their compilation of contributions to Tzara’s planned anthology, Dadaglobe, likely encouraged them to produce this single-issue publication, New York’s bid to participate in Dada.37 They produced it in sync with the eighth exhibition and “Dada evening,” and at the same time it was a way to communicate beyond their borders, share their works and their impressions

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of Dada with affiliates in the United States and abroad. Tzara’s authorization, however farcical, did legitimize them within artistic circles to a certain extent and situated them in the international context of Dadaglobe. Coming from a founding member of Dada, it served, in a sense, as a celebrity endorsement, as Hopkins has observed.38 “Dada” rarely appears in New York Dada. Tzara’s text comes closest to defining the word, though it is by no means helpful: “Dada is … a mixture of man, naphthaline [sic], sponge, animal made of ebonite and beefsteak.”39 Besides the title, the only other reference to Dada is “DADATAXI, Limited,” the signatory of a short enigmatic announcement and “dadaphoto/ Trademark Reg.” under a photo by Man Ray, described below. The ad for Schwitters does not mention Dada. Tzara’s authorization frames the New York group as Dada. His parameters are rather catholic. He lists many members, if not all of them: leading figures like Duchamp, Walter Arensberg, Stella, Elsa Freytag-Loringhoven, Hartley, Man Ray, and Stieglitz, as well as Belgian poet Adon Lacroix and French writer Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia. In the magazine itself Duchamp, Man Ray, FreytagLoringhoven, and Stieglitz are the only identified contributors. Hartley and Stella appear as characters in the humorous parody of a “coming out” ball, and Schwitters, as we have seen, shows up in an ad for his show, but only the careful reader would notice that Tzara lists him as a contributor to “Dadaglobe” and therefore, presumably, a Dadaist. Despite its editors’ involvement in the Société Anonyme and the importance of this organization to New York Dada, Dreier’s name never comes up in Tzara’s essay or anywhere else in the magazine. Except for the Schwitters show ad, New York Dada does not begin to relay Dreier’s many efforts. It also leaves out contributions from individuals the Société Anonyme identified as Dadaists— Picabia, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Schwitters, and Klee. Images in New York Dada are almost all photographs (except for Goldberg’s cartoon), a medium rarely if ever shown at the Société Anonyme.40 Additionally, the commodity status of the magazine runs counter to the Société Anonyme’s aim to show art in a noncommercial setting.41 New York Dada is best understood as one manifestation of Dada in New York rather than a comprehensive exposition of the activities and artworks of Duchamp, Loringhoven, and the others in their circles. It does not attempt to anthologize. Much of its statement of New York Dada’s identity is in the format itself, driven by two factors: membership in the Dada network required a magazine, and in the United States the women’s American glossy was the commodity of the time. The number of such magazines climbed sharply in

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the early twentieth century, coinciding with the rise of advertising. Particularly successful were weeklies such as Vanity Fair and Ladies Home Journal, which, notably, included works by some of the leading artists and writers of the time. Content targeted female, middle-class readers, with articles on housekeeping, fashion, shopping, and relations with men.42 At the intersection of European Dada and the US consumer culture, New York Dada functioned as both a Dada journal and as mass circulation magazine. Dada had engaged commercial culture from the beginning, and the magazines are a major site for the Dadaists’ linking themselves to commercial magazines.43 Besides such publications as Berlin’s Jedermann sein eigner Fussball, earlier Dada reviews anticipate the New York Dadaists’ turn to mainstream print media. They borrow texts and font types, for example, from mass media sources. Tzara’s poem, “Bulletin,” in Dada 3 (1918) includes phrases recalling placards in store windows, such as “for your benefit” and “the standard tie,” and the first issue of Berlin’s Der Dada bears the headline “Invest in Dada!”44 Collages and Dada endorsements excerpt and mimic slogans, captions, and photographs taken from magazines and newspapers. They were also picking up on the commercial features of The Blind Man. Most of the images in these two issues called to mind mass culture periodicals. Al Frueh, who drew the first one’s cover sketch, besides having had an exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery (1912),45 was a well-known American caricaturist for New York World and Vanity Fair (Figure  4.1).46 Clara Tice’s caricature of French musician Edgar Varèse recalls the recent scandal surrounding her earlier nudes, which Vanity Fair (September 1915) reproduced after they were confiscated for indecency.47 Stella, whose painting, here entitled, Coney Island, in the second issue, contributed illustrations for popular magazines.48 Finally, the framing of “Fountain’s” rejection as “The Richard Mutt Case” evokes American pulp magazines that often told colorful detective stories. The title of The Blind Man, too, parallels that of pulp magazines, which followed a main character. The first issue, moreover, includes a letter from Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield and a questionnaire like those published in popular periodicals of the time, asking readers questions like which works in the Independents show they thought were the funniest and most absurd, and how many visitors they think saw the show.49 However, ultimately most of these publications do not interfere with the reader’s impression of it as an art journal; they are otherwise filled with content expected in an artists’ magazine: manifestoes, poems, and essays about art. The overall small size, layout, and content of these titles are also comparable to that

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Figure 4.1  The Blind Man 1, ed. Henri Pierre Roché, Beatrice Wood, and Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1917, front cover. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (85-S586).

of other artists’ reviews. More than merely imitating aspects of commercial periodicals, New York Dada goes a step further: it assumes the “material markers” as Mark Morrisson calls them, of the genre. Such markers are those features that readers take in immediately and that determine their expectations. A magazine is “something more than the sum of its parts,” Morrisson points out, and attributes like page size and types of advertising and stories contribute to what he calls a reader’s “horizon of expectations for a magazine.”50 New York Dada’s price, dimensions, texts, and images parody those found in women’s magazines.51 Its editors, however parodically, appropriated the genre as a whole

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and thereby framed their review as a commodity that could be purchased, exchanged, and circulated. In the Dada context, they also brought this commodity into the artistic realm. The images and texts in New York Dada invite readers to compare it to society publications. For instance, “Pug Debs Make Society Bow” spoofs debutante ball announcements, a staple of society print culture. It describes a “coming out” party for Marsden Hartley and Joseph Stella: “Marsden Hartley will be attired in a neat but not gaudy set of tight-fitting gloves and will have a V-back in front and on both sides.”52 A Rube Goldberg cartoon showing Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts with one of his signature bizarre inventions also firmly situates New York Dada within a mass culture context.53 Like American women’s magazines, New York Dada references marketing targets female readers. The famous cover montage, Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (1921), is the most blatant example of this and therefore merits some unpacking (Figures 4.2 and 4.3).54 The photo shows the assisted readymade, a perfume bottle with a label presenting Duchamp in drag as Rrose Sélavy. The woman represented, whether understood as Rrose or “Belle Haleine” (“Beautiful Helen,” literally “beautiful breath”), conflates three items typically seen in periodicals for women—pieces on certain personalities, celebrity endorsements of products, and perfume advertisements. Visual resonances between the perfume bottle and articles and advertisements in the November 1920 issue of Vanity Fair strongly suggest that it inspired the piece (Figures  4.4 and 4.5).55 Printed on cheap newsprint, this composition emphasizes the commodity nature of magazines as well as their centrality to marketers’ ever-more aggressive targeting of women in the early twentieth century. Amelia Jones observes that the woman shown adds value to the fictional perfume but also to the publication itself: “Here a man masquerades as a woman, adopting the cultural signifiers of femininity as artifice, in order to ‘sell’ a commodity—the perfume—which itself is then produced as surface to sell another commodity—the magazine.”56 Like many magazines at this time, New York Dada spotlights a female celebrity, but here as an advertisement. The repetition of “New York Dada” resembles the back pages of a magazine, where the ends of articles form a sea of copy, and printed upside down, it parodies the unreadability of such pages. It also pokes fun at publishers’ practice in the early 1920s of printing advertisements as early as the first and second pages.57 Dada is commodified in New York Dada. In Tzara’s “Authorization,” it becomes a beautifying lotion, and he assigns the reader a female identity:

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Figure 4.2  New York Dada, ed. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, New York, 1921, front cover, letterpress and relief halftone, 14 ¾ × 10 1∕18 in. (37.5 × 25.8 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art © Man Ray Trust / ARS / ADAGP.

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Figure 4.3  Man Ray, “Belle Haleine,” (photo of Marcel Duchamp), 1921, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles © Man Ray Trust ARS-ADAGP.

“Therefore, Madam, be on your guard and understand that a really Dada product is a different thing from a glossy label. Dada abolishes ‘nuances.’ … Dada is an anti-‘nuance’ cream.”58 This passage places the male-dominated Dada movement within a feminized, consumerist context. Although on the one hand approaching women as consumers, it also lampoons ads and editorial content that cautioned women to beware the manipulations of advertisers while at the same time pitching the merits of a given product.59 Tzara’s promotion of

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Figure 4.4  Vanity Fair, ed. Frank Crowninshield, New York, November 1920, p. 67. University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

Dadaglobe as a beauty commodity further exposes this insidious tactic. Tzara’s warning to “Be on your guard, Madam” captures New York Dada’s address to female audiences, even as the journal functions as the editors’ bid to enter the male-dominated Dada network.60 Indeed, the two objectives likely went hand in hand, as women have historically been linked to mass culture and men with high culture.61

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Figure 4.5  Vanity Fair, ed. Frank Crowninshield, New York, November 1920, p. 121. University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

Reproduced just above Tzara’s text, a photomontage by Man Ray presents a literal picturing of the conflation of women with consumption.62 A photograph of a paper mannequin comprising a woman’s face and arms overlays one of a nude, seemingly amputated body of a woman, her body morphed into a window

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display prop (Figure 4.6).63 Man Ray’s censorship of his photomontage for the magazine serves as a parodic nod toward conservative policies and ends up emphasizing her nudity all the more. The title of the original, uncensored photo was “Portmanteau,” or “Coat Stand,” but here it is “dadaphoto, Trademark Reg.,” identifying it as an anonymous, branded photograph while also putting in a plug

Figure 4.6  New York Dada, ed. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, New York, 1921, p. 2, 14 ¾ × 10 1∕18 in. (37.5 × 25.8 cm). Spencer Collection, New York Public Library.

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for Dada. Such modifications, along with the imperative, “keep smiling,” printed next to the photo, expose picture magazines’ perpetuation of advertising’s exploitation of the female body and harassing demands on women.64 Perhaps the most intriguing and enigmatic manifestation of the Dadaists’ parody of commercial magazines is the back page, which presents photographs

Figure 4.7  New York Dada, ed. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, New York, 1921, p. 4, 14 ¾ × 10 3∕20 in. (37.5 × 25.8 cm). New York Public Library, Spencer Collection.

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of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven with the poem “Yours with Devotion: Trumpets and Drums,” printed upside down (Figure 4.7).65 It recalls pages showing a poem alongside a photograph of the author, shown from the shoulders up at an oblique angle, looking away from the camera, as if lost in

Figure 4.8  Vanity Fair, ed. Frank Crowninshield, New York, November 1920, p. 49. University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

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thought. The November 1920 issue of Vanity Fair includes such a feature on Edna St. Vincent-Millay (Figure 4.8). Yet that is where the similarities end. In the top picture, the Baroness’s jewelry and flamboyant hat accentuate her apparent nudity, and she stares down the camera, frowning defiantly. The bottom photo exposes one of her breasts, so that the image approaches the pornographic, although her closely cropped hair and stoic pose strip it of any kind of conventionally defined feminine allure and link her with the New Woman of the day.66 A page showing Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph, “Portrait of Dorothy True” (1919), can be interpreted differently depending on how one classifies the publication, exemplifying its simultaneous posing as a commercial magazine and as a Dada magazine. The photo is a double exposure of True’s face and a woman’s leg, her foot wedged into a high-heeled shoe and planted on photographic paper. The entire composition is printed in blue ink (the magazine is a single sheet of large paper printed in blue, folded to produce four  pages) (Figure 4.9). It accompanies the headlines, “Watch Your Step” and “Cut Out the Dadynamic Stuff!”67 Reproduced here, this page strongly resembles advertisements like those for stockings and shoes in Vanity Fair and related publications from the 1910s, similarly framed, showing the woman from the knee down (Figure 4.10). The unsigned passage below the photograph, possibly by Ettie Stettheimer, reads like an excerpt from romantic fiction, another ubiquitous feature in popular magazines.68 It begins, “I understood that I was hurting his feelings. I understood …. That she was hurting his feelings; the sea air did us no good.” The final line of the passage is a plea, possibly to advertisers: “Why do you not offer us something after having made our mouths water [sic].”69 Paired with the photograph, the phrasing emphasizes the physical, erotic overtones of marketing, while the printing of the cost of the magazine (25 cents) underscores its commercial status.70 This page also, significantly, references earlier art periodicals from New York that Duchamp and Man Ray must have seen. The phrase “Watch Your Step!” shows up in three other Dada publications over eight years, speaking to their interconnected nature. It echoes the May 1915 issue of 291 (New York, 1915– 1916), which contains a short, unsigned paragraph entitled “Watch Their Steps,” which reads, Apollinaire that profound observer of the superficial brought to artistic significance the squeaking of the “new shoes of the poet.” Unhappily we have no poet in New York who could sing of the forms of the shoes that women

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Figure 4.9  New York Dada, ed. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, New York, 1921, p. 1, 1919, 14 ¾ × 10 3∕20 in. (37.5 × 25.8 cm). Spencer Collection, New York Public Library. are wearing now … Women’s shoes reveal a new mentality at work. They break away from convention … Another profound observer of the superficial said that perhaps the spirit of modern art, having failed to reach the heads of the Americans is trying to get into their feet.71

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Figure 4.10  Vanity Fair, ed. Frank Crowninshield, New York, November 1920, p. 23. University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

Considered in this context, the New York Dada page becomes a visual manifestation of this witty commentary relating women’s shoes to modern art, simultaneously celebrating women’s fashion and decrying Americans’ reluctance to accept modernism. Also in May 1915, an issue of the short-lived Rogue (New York, 1915–1916, ed. Louise and Allen Norton) includes Robert

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Figure 4.11  Rogue, ed. Louise and Allen Norton, New York, 1915, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

Locher’s drawing, “Watch Your Step!” It depicts a domestic scene framed so that all the viewer can make out are two figures in a sparsely furnished room (Figure 4.11). On the left, a woman’s leg resembles the one in Stieglitz’s photograph. The meaning of the warning is unclear, but the juxtaposition and implied tension between the sexes are in keeping with New York Dada. Finally, the sixth issue of Kurt Schwitters’s Merz (Hanover, 1923) bears the subtitle,

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“Imitatoren watch step!” (“Imitators, watch (your) step!”). Such references put New York Dada into dialogue with local predecessors.72 Most of the contributions to New York Dada are anonymous, something Man Ray attributed to the editors’ “contempt for credits and merits,” but this tendency also parrots the same tendency in mass culture magazines.73 The only signed submissions are Goldberg’s comic and Tzara’s “Authorization.” Otherwise credit is attributed to a company (“DADATAXI, Limited”) or entirely missing. The editors’ names are not listed, and Duchamp even concealed any involvement with the publication on his part, writing to Picabia and Germaine Everling that it would be edited by Man Ray and his friend, Bessie Breuer, a claim that echoes his attribution of “Fountain” to a woman in Philadelphia.74 Like other readymades, this printed source allows for such veiling.

A Readymade for Sale Readymades call attention to their specific contexts. “Fountain,” for instance, exposes museums and magazines as places with the capacity to define objects as artworks. The urinal Duchamp purchased at a plumbing store had a decidedly different identity and function than it did in the Independents’ show or currently (in copied form) on pedestals at art museums, where it has remained for decades. Since its scandalous inaugural exhibition, it has been deemed a work of art. Today, copies of New York Dada are extremely rare and highly valued as artifacts of Dada in America. They lie immobilized in archives or arranged on museum walls or vitrines, akin to the fate of other readymades. But in 1921 the magazine’s mobility temporarily granted it two major frameworks simultaneously. Initially its editors put it up for sale to the public and mailed it to artists overseas.75 Some who discovered New York Dada at a New York bookstore may have initially seen it as a women’s journal. They may have interpreted the cover as an actual perfume ad or as some kind of alternative publication, possibly for a homosexual audience, as cross-dressing was common in the gay community of the time. Those in the know would have perceived it as a Dada magazine. Copies also circulated through the mail to Dada affiliates who no doubt appreciated it as a humorous representation of Dada in America’s consumerist setting. In writing about the cover of New York Dada, David Hopkins points out that it can be understood as “a ruse by which Duchamp, seeing the need to ‘sell’ himself within the avant-garde market-place but conscious of the need to preserve his status as a masculine ‘high art’ producer, ironically adopted the role of woman.”

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He posits that it could be an example of “a shoring-up of the male position … in line with the essentially ‘men only’ or clubbish ethos that functioned as one of the structural determinants behind the formation of the Dada avant-garde in America.”76 The merging of the commercial and the artistic throughout New York Dada can be understood as exemplifying this tact, as it compelled its mostly male, European Dada counterparts across the Atlantic to slip on an American, female identity. It can also, however, be interpreted as exposing Dada’s commitment to advertising in a manner that even Dadaists might have found unsettling. Addressing readers as women, however farcically, New York Dada pushed the limits of Dada and its members’ professed open-mindedness. It also established that Dada had indeed become a known entity, even as Duchamp, Man Ray, and Tzara ridiculed the notion of membership on its pages. Finally, it enabled these New York residents to carry on the name “Dada,” while also accommodating yet another interpretation of the movement. At about the same time, more magazines from cities like Bucharest and Zagreb forced these same Dadaists to expand Dada’s parameters even further.

Notes 1

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3 4

Man Ray writes, “Duchamp was in correspondence with the young group of poets and painters in Paris: the Dadaists, who asked for contributions to their publications. Why not get out a New York edition of a Dada magazine?” Man Ray, Self Portrait (Boston: Little Brown, 1963), 100. Hopkins makes the related David Hopkins’s claim that New York Dada “can be seen as an exemplary case of the annexation of a language of advertising and commercial culture to the concerns of the avant-garde.” David Hopkins, “Selling Dada: New York Dada and Its Dialogue with the European Avant-Garde,” “Selling Dada: New York Dada and Its Dialogue with the European Avant-Garde,” in Regarding the Popular: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture, ed. Sascha Bru et al. (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2011), 282. According to Man Ray, he was responsible for everything but the cover, though he does say that they both translated Tzara’s text, mentioned below, and Duchamp likely at least advised him on its concept and content. Man Ray, Self Portrait, 100–1. Hal Foster, “Close Up: A Rrose in Berlin,” Artforum 49, no. 8 (April 2011): 169. Man Ray, quoted in Marjorie Rex, “‘Dada’ Will Get You If You Don’t Watch Out: It is on the Way Here,” New York Evening Journal, January 29, 1921, quoted in Jennifer Mundy, ed., Man Ray: Writings on Art (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2015).

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Dada Magazines A letter from Duchamp to Picabia dated January 20, 1921, indicates that he and Man Ray helped them sell copies of 391 and Dada. Marcel Duchamp to Francis Picabia and Germaine Everling, January 20, 1921, trans. Affectionately, Marcel, 95–6. The Société Anonyme’s report lists the Dreier sisters and Caroline Goodwin O’Day (later a member of the US Congress) as the founders. Duchamp served as the first president, Dreier the treasurer, and Man Ray the secretary. Société Anonyme Inc. (Museum of Modern Art) Report, 1920–1921 (New York: 1920–1921), 29; Robert L. Herbert, Eleanor S. Apter, Elise K. Kenney et al., eds., The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University: A Catalog Raisonné (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 1. Société Anonyme Inc., 7. Zurich Dadaists’ business cards identify Dada as a “Société Anonyme” as does the program for a Dada festival in Paris on March 27, 1920. By 1921, members of the New York group would have known of these printed materials. Other art journals included 291, Camera Work, SIC, Der Sturm, Valori Plastici, The Dial, Chapbook, Ma, Cannibale 2, Cannibale, Z, and TNT (edited by Man Ray and Adolf Wolff in 1919 in New York). In her letter to Buffet-Picabia from May 10, 1920, Dreier asks for the names of European journals and books, as well as copies, and asks to subscribe to them. Katherine Dreier to Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, May 10, 1920. Katherine S. Dreier Papers / Société Anonyme Archive. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. See Ruth L. Bohan, The Société Anonyme’s Brooklyn Exhibition: Katherine Dreier and Modernism in America (Ann Arbor: MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), 30. Their most famous exhibition was the “International Exhibition of Modern Art Assembled by Société Anonyme” (November 19, 1926–January 10, 1927). For more on this show, see Bohan, The Société Anonyme’s Brooklyn Exhibition, 36, 216. Katherine Dreier to Max Ernst, May 25, 1920, Katherine S. Dreier Papers / Société Anonyme Archive. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Ernst agreed enthusiastically to show at the Société Anonyme. Max Ernst to Katherine Dreier, June 16, 1920, Katherine S. Dreier Papers / Société Anonyme Archive. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. More than six months later, on May 25, 1920, she wrote to Ernst, in German, informing him that she had not yet received the publications he had promised her. Katherine Dreier to Max Ernst, May 25, 1920, Katherine S. Dreier Papers / Société Anonyme Archive. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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15 Ernst to Dreier, June 16, 1920, Katherine S. Dreier Papers / Société Anonyme Archive. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 16 Katherine Dreier to George Grosz, August 16, 1920, Katherine S. Dreier Papers / Société Anonyme Archive. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 17 Katherine Dreier to John Heartfield and George Grosz, July 18, 1920, George Grosz Archiv, Akademie der Kunste, Berlin. 18 The catalog came out two weeks after the opening of the exhibition, suggesting that Dreier saw the exhibition and then submitted a list of works that she wanted sent to New York. 19 By mid-August it seems she had limited the exhibition to the works of Grosz and the Cologne and Paris Dadaists. She also tells him that it is unlikely she will be able to show a certain piece by Grosz, due to Dr. Burchard’s apparent hesitation. Katherine Dreier to George Grosz, August 16, 1920, Katherine S. Dreier Papers / Société Anonyme Archive. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. She was also probably prevented from showing Cologne Dada works that had been shown in Berlin by the German government, which was concerned with how they would represent Germany. Brigid Doherty, “Introduction,” October 105, 95. 20 Wieland Herzefelde, “George Grosz, John Heartfield, Erwin Piscator, Dada und die Folgen oder die Macht der Freundschaft,” Sinn und Form, ed. Deutsche Akademie der Künste zu Berlin 23, no. 6 (Berlin, November 1921), 1244, trans. Bergius. Dada Triumphs!, 271. 21 Grosz to Dreier, December 8, 1922, Katherine S. Dreier Papers / Société Anonyme Archive. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 22 Dreier likely knew about the Italian Dadaists through Tzara’s Bulletin Dada, which featured a poem by Julius Evola. In 1921 the Société Anonyme library included Evola’s Arte Astratta and the first two issues of Bleu, which feature contributions by Evola and Fiozzi. She grouped them with the Paris Dadaists probably because she knew about the Italians through the Dadaists in Paris and because in 1921 Evola’s works were exhibited with French artists Albert Gleizes, Jacques Villon, and Sonia Delaunay in a Der Sturm exhibition in January 1921 and in Tzara’s Salon Dada show in June. Letters from Tzara from July 1920 indicate that he was aware of Dreier’s efforts and that he wanted her to show Paris Dada works in October 1920. In response, Dreier proposed that she host a Paris Dada exhibition the following year. Tristan Tzara to Francis Picabia, July 11, 1920, trans. Dada in Paris, 418–19 and Katherine Dreier to Tristan Tzara, August 16, 1920, Katherine S. Dreier Papers / Société Anonyme Archive. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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23 Société Anonyme Report, 1920–1921, 15. 24 Ibid., 2. 25 Henry McBride, “News and Views of Art, Including the Clearing House for Works of the Cubists,” New York Sun and Herald, May 16, 1920. Quoted in David Joselit, “The Artist Readymade: Marcel Duchamp and the Société Anonyme,” in The Société Anonyme, Modernism for America, ed. Jennifer R. Gross and Ruth L. Bohan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 39. 26 A photograph of the galleries of the Société Anonyme in New York from 1921, the frontispiece of the Société’s Report in the summer of 1921, shows very small rooms; only sixteen to twenty works were shown in each room typically. The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University, 1. One of the pieces shown at this first exhibition, Jacques Villon’s “Figure,” is reproduced in the Société Anonyme’s 1921 Report showing the lace framing the piece. 27 The surviving correspondence between Dreier and Schwitters does not begin until 1925. However, Schwitters was represented at the Der Sturm gallery, where Dreier would have seen his work on her visit to Berlin in the early autumn of 1919. In addition to several shows in Hanover, Schwitters had shown at the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin twice in 1919, and a one-man exhibition of his works took place there in 1920 before the exhibition in New York. Georg Brühl, Herwarth Walden und Der Sturm (Cologne: DuMont, 1983), 271–3. 28 Handbill for the fifth exhibition at the Société Anonyme, November 1–December 15, 1920, Katherine S. Dreier Papers / Société Anonyme Archive. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 29 Exactly which works by Schwitters the show included is not known. The other artists were Heinrich Campendonk, Johannes Molzahn, Marthe (or Tour) Donas, Fritz Stuckenberg, and Paul Klee. 30 Handbill for Société Anonyme exhibition, March 15 to April 12, 1921, Katherine S. Dreier Papers / Société Anonyme Archive. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Société Anonyme labeled Klee a Dadaist in their report, but he was apparently not highlighted as such in the exhibition. Société Anonyme Report, 1920–1921, 13, 15. 31 Marsden Hartley, “The Importance of Being Dada,” in Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters Vaudeville and Poets, ed. Marsden Hartley (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), 247–8. 32 Dada 3, 1, trans. Manheim, The Dada Painters and Poets, 76. 33 Hartley, “The Importance of Being Dada,” 250. Picabia, “Manifeste Cannibale Dada,” Dadaphone, 2. 34 Dermée, “Qu’est-ce que Dada,” Z, 1; Hartley, “The Importance of Being Dada,” 252. 35 In the text version of his talk the excerpts from magazines are in quotation marks, though whether he noted that they were quotes or not when he delivered the speech is unknown.

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36 One example is Henry Tyrell, “The Cheerless Art of Idiocracy,” The World Magazine (June 12, 1921), which mentions “Dada-phone” as well as Cannibale, 391, and 291. For more on the New York press’s responses to Dada, see Naumann, New York Dada, 198–9, and Kuenzli, New York Dada, 143–5. 37 Adrian Sudhalter, “R(r)ose Recontextualized: French/American Identity and the Photographic Portraits for Dadaglobe and New York Dada,” in aka Marcel Duchamp: Meditations on the Identities of an Artist, ed. Anne Collins Goodyear, James W. McManus (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2014), 27–8. David Hopkins calls it the editors’ “desperate attempt to produce an American version of the movement, to tie in with the mushrooming international trend.” Hopkins, “Selling Dada,” 284. 38 Hopkins, “Selling Dada,” 285. 39 Tzara, “Authorization,” New York Dada, 2. 40 Man Ray’s works were probably paintings or sculptures. The only work by him illustrated in the report is his sculpture, “Lampshade,” now at the Yale University Art Gallery. Société Anonyme Report, 1920–1921, 16. 41 Telegram from Duchamp to Dreier, January 16, 1948, quoted in The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University, 1. 42 By 1900, Ladies Home Journal reached the highest circulation of any magazine, with 860,000 subscribers. It was the first magazine to reach a million paid subscribers in 1903 and by 1920 was the most valuable magazine property in the country. David E. Sumner, The Magazine Century: American Magazines since 1900 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010), 25, 27. For more on the rise of these magazines and their importance as sites for advertising, see Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 12, 14, 198–9. 43 For a discussion of this engagement, see Hopkins, “Selling Dada,” 291, and the writings of Sherwin Simmons, in particular “Dada and Kitsch: Cultivation of the Trivial,” in Virgin Microbe. David Hopkins writes, “It is evident that the Dada magazines played heavily on their relationship to mass circulation magazines.” Hopkins, “Selling Dada,” 282. 44 Tzara, “Bulletin,” Dada 3, 13, “Legen Sie Ihr Geld in dada an!” Der Dada 1, 6. 45 Ades, “The Blind Man: Notes and Commentary,” Three New York Dadas and the Blind Man, 147. 46 For a detailed discussion of Frueh and his career, see Wendy Wick Reaves, “Al Frueh: The Quintessential Summary,” in Celebrity Caricature in America (New Haven and London: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in association with Yale University Press, 1998), 103–27. 47 Naumann, New York Dada, 117–18. 48 Barbara Haskell, Joseph Stella (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.), 225.

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49 For more on questionnaires, see Lori Cole, Surveying the Avant-Garde: Questions on Modernism, Art, and the Americas in Transatlantic Magazines (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2018), 28. Mark S. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 39. 50 Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 39. 51 The magazine cost 25 cents, an amount between that of other commercial magazines of the time Vanity Fair (35 cents) and women’s weeklies such as Ladies Home Journal (20 cents). New York Dada’s tall, rectangular shape mimics that of these two magazines, as well. It measures 15½ × 10 inches. Vanity Fair is 13 × 9 inches and Ladies Home Journal was about the same. 52 Anonymous text, New York Dada, 3. 53 Naumann, “New York Dada: Better Late Than Never,” 147. 54 The name is a pun based on a tendency among women’s beauty products manufacturers to use French, which often was flawed. “Belle Haleine,” literally, means “Beautiful Breath,” and “Eau de Voilette,” a play on the common “eau de violette,” or violet water, translates to mean “Veil Water.” Nancy Ring, New York Dada and the Crisis of Masculinity: Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp in the United States, 1913–1921 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services, 1993), 231–6. 55 Ring, New York Dada and the Crisis of Masculinity, 237–8. Nancy Ring interprets “RS” to mean that Rrose Sélavy was the fictional manufacturer. Ring argues that “Belle Haleine” can be translated as Beautiful Helen and that she is a media personality endorsing a commercial product. Ring, 235–9. Amelia Jones understands Rrose Sélavy, not Belle Haleine, to be the celebrity figure on the perfume bottle. Jones, “‘Women’ in Dada,” in Women in Dada, 154. 56 Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 173. 57 Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings, 30. Dawn Ades suggests a certain desperate urgency. Dawn Ades, “Duchamp’s Masquerades,” in The Portrait in Photography, ed. Graham Clarke (London: Reaktion, 1992), 108. 58 Tristan Tzara, “Authorization,” New York Dada, 2. This passage is almost identical to parts of Tzara’s essay, “Art and the Hunt” (L’art et la chasse), which was published in the Salon Dada catalog in Paris two months later. However, the catalog text does not include the sentence characterizing Dada as an anti-nuance cream. Duchamp asked Tzara for this authorization in a letter to Picabia and Everling. Marcel Duchamp to Francis Picabia and Germaine Everling, January 20, 1921, trans. Affectionately, Marcel, 95–6. Hopkins points out the links between the origins of Dada’s name, tied to a company selling women’s beauty products, to Tzara’s text, as well as to Duchamp’s cover image for New York Dada. Hopkins, “Selling Dada,” 287.

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59 Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, “Preface,” Women in Dada, xi. 60 Man Ray writes, “Duchamp was in correspondence with the young group of poets and painters in Paris: the Dadaists, who asked for contributions to their publications. Why not get out a New York edition of a Dada magazine?” Man Ray, Self Portrait, 100. 61 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 47, and Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp, 162, both quoted in Hopkins in the context of New York Dada. Hopkins, “Selling Dada,” 287–8. 62 “Female bodies became the purveyors of commercial value in increasingly ubiquitous print advertisements.” Jones, “‘Women’ in Dada,” Women in Dada, 146. 63 In his analysis of this piece, Michael Taylor characterizes it as a “caricature of the female body as a sexually available automaton” that “eroticizes Duchamp’s readymade gesture … to reveal the sex underneath selling in American advertising.” Michael Taylor, “New York,” Dada, ed. Dickerman, 296. 64 Michael Taylor notes that American toothpaste companies used the slogan “keep smiling” at the time. See Michael Taylor, “New York,” Dada, ed. Dickerman, 293. 65 The authorship of the poem is debated in Dada discourse. Man Ray claimed that Hartley penned it. Arturo Schwarz, Man Ray: The Rigour of Imagination, London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 49. The April 1921 review of the magazine, too, attributes the poem to Hartley, possibly based on an interview with Man Ray, and comments that it is “wonderful and needlessly anonymous.” “New York Dada Review Appears in New York,” The New York Herald, April 24, 1921, sec. III, 11. However, the poem’s style, its focus on circus performers, whom the Baroness admired, and its appearance alongside her photograph and name strongly suggest that she wrote it. James M. Harding, Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 192, n 71. 66 Amelia Jones, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 7. 67 In the magazine, Man Ray trimmed off the area around the leg. As Tara Clayton points out, “In the context of New York Dada, the photograph is further sexualized by the way it has been re-cropped: the area highlighted by the top arrow in and of itself becomes a suggestive symbol, directing the viewer’s attention straight up the woman’s skirt.” Tara Clayton, “Man Ray, Reproduction, and Semiotic Slippage: Shaping the Transatlantic Avant-Garde,” Master’s thesis, New York University, 2016, 16. Dorothy True was a friend of Georgia O’Keeffe. Naumann, New York Dada, 241, fn 39. 68 The New York Herald claims that in addition to “Yours with Devotion,” New York Dada features a poem by “Miss Stettheimer.” Ettie Stettheimer is the most likely possibility of the three Stettheimer sisters. It is also possible that the review is

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Dada Magazines referring to the poem on the back page of the magazine. “New York Dada Review Appears in New York,” The New York Herald, 24 April 1921, sec. III, 11. Katherine S. Dreier Papers / Société Anonyme Archive. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Francis Naumann claims that this unsigned article was written by art critic Henry McBride. Naumann, “New York Dada: Better Late Than Never,” 147. Anonymous text, New York Dada, 1. For more on women’s magazines from this period, see Mary Ellen Zuckerman, A History of Popular Women’s Magazines in the United States, 1792–1995 (Westport, CT, London: Greenwood Press, 1998). “Watch Their Steps,” 291, 3 (New York: 1915): back cover. If one translates Wiland Herzefelde’s words “Achtung, Stufe!” in the First International Dada Fair catalog as “Watch your step!” (as Hanne Bergius does), this publication is yet another instance of this phrase in a Dada publication. Bergius, Berlin Dada, 60. Man Ray, Self Portrait, 101; Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings, 17. Marcel Duchamp to Francis Picabia and Germaine Everling, January 20, 1921, trans. Affectionately, Marcel, 95–6. In her article, “Introducing Da Da,” which appeared in The Morning Telegraph on May 1, 1921, Agnes Smith tells her readers where to find New York Dada: “As for the American attitude towards Da Da, you may learn all about it in Da Da, the magazine, for sale at the Washington Square book store.” Agnes Smith, “Introducing Da Da,” The Morning Telegraph (May 1, 1921), quoted in Naumann, New York Dada, 204. Most likely the bookstore to which she refers is the Washington Square Bookstore. It was probably also sold at Sunwise Turn: The Modern Bookshop at 2 East 31st Street, which was owned by Mary MowbrayClarke and Madge Jenison. Beatrice Wood claimed that copies of New York Dada, as well as Rogue, The Soil, The Blind Man, and Rongwrong, were for sale at the Sunwise Turn Bookshop. Madge Jenison, “Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling” (New York, 1923), quoted in Ars Libri, “Twentieth Century AvantGarde, Rare Books and Documents,” catalog 137 (Boston: Ars Libri Ltd, 2006), 22. Hopkins, “Selling Dada: New York Dada and Its Dialogue with the European AvantGarde,” 288.

5

Contingency and Continuity: Dada Magazines and the Expanding Network, 1922–1926 In 1922, across the Atlantic, Dada enthusiasts in Zagreb, Leiden, Berlin, Hanover, and Bucharest, who had depended on journals to learn about Dada, also began making their own: Dada Tank, Dada Jazz, Mécano, G, Merz, and 75 HP. These reviews enabled their editors—Theo Van Doesburg, Hans Richter, Dragan Aleksić, Kurt Schwitters, Victor Brauner, and Ilarie Voronca—to expand and further diversify the network begun in 1916.1 Although the chronological structure of this book dictates discussing them at the end, they were by no means tangential to Dada. Dada lived on in these publications, not only in their images and texts but also because they sustained Dada’s integrating function. Timothy Benson points out that the exchange of journals at this time “created a mobile space for the movement to continue after it had essentially expired as a manifestation in exhibitions, soirees, performances, and other such events.”2 Earlier Dada journals encouraged liberal interpretations of Dada and enabled it to take on new meanings. In the internationalizing context of the early 1920s, as the movement’s fame threatened such changeability, the magazines continued to serve the function they had from the start—combining various artistic currents, enabling Dada to maintain its contingency and thus its currency during a period of crisis for the movement and for the avant-garde overall. These publications feature poems and drawings deemed “Dada,” but they also engendered connections with other local and international artistic styles and approaches. They champion Dada both as a movement, however loosely defined, and as a strategy for juxtaposing various artistic currents, now, notably, including Dada. Surrealism is most commonly linked to Dada, as many Dadaists allied themselves with Breton’s program (Man Ray, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, among others).3 However, many Dada supporters also established ties with international Constructivism, and this alliance proved advantageous to Dada’s longevity.4 This chapter begins by describing Dada’s identity as a widely

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recognized movement in the early 1920s. After establishing the context of the international avant-garde after the war, it explores how select magazines from this period integrated Dada and Constructivism. The magazines in this chapter fall into three categories. In Zagreb, Dada Tank and Dada Jazz brought Dada ideas to Croatia, sharing contributions from Dadaists in other countries while expressing editor Dragan Aleksić’s own take on Dada. Mécano and G imitated the earliest Dada journals by combining movements—this time Constructivism and Dada—in an international context, in an effort to forge something new. Finally, Merz and 75 HP adopted Dada’s earlier use of a review to display a wide range of styles in the name of a nonsense word, but instead of “Dada” they pushed “Merz” and “Pictopoezie,” allowing Dada to live on, if not in name, in strategy.5 All of these reviews literally translated Dada, as well, into their own languages, with texts in French, German, Croatian, Romanian, and Dutch.

From Dada to Dadaism The early 1920s marked a contested period for Dada. Starting in 1916, prompted by the magazines, its affiliates had championed Dada as an apparatus for juxtaposing heterogeneous materials and various art movements, chiefly Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism. They had insisted that Dada was unlike other collectives with aesthetic tendencies specific to it alone, and the journals had spurred and enabled this perception. As Chapter 1 outlines, in the earliest Dada reviews, the function of Dada was parallel to that of photography, as described by Malraux in Museum without Walls. Like photography, which enables the placing of any object of any period, style, or medium alongside another, the journal can encompass any reproducible visual work of art or text.6 The first Dada magazines show paintings, drawings, and prints by Expressionists, Futurists, Cubists, and, increasingly, self-proclaimed Dadaists, who mixed aspects of these artistic styles. But at this time, readers did not associate such submissions with yet another movement because Dada had not yet become an established style. Indeed, the journals obstructed such attempts. As long as audiences did not distinguish Dada as a distinct entity, Tzara, Huelsenbeck, and their comrades maintained a certain transcendence above the other movements, whose efforts cohered on a printed page. Dada—specifically editors and their publications—did the gathering, juxtaposing, and leveling. By the early 1920s, however, this function had become unsustainable. “Dada” had become “Dadaism.” Individuals who had seen the magazines and

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exhibitions attended the performances or even just read about Dada in the news perceived of it as a group, regardless of how vague their understanding of it. In France, in large part because of Paris Dada journals like Tzara’s Bulletin Dada and Dadaphone (both from March 1920), Picabia’s Cannibale (April and May, 1920), and Céline Arnauld’s Projecteur (May 1920), Dada had become what Marius Hentea calls “the most infamous art movement” in the country.7 As Michel Sanouillet points out, in the early 1920s in Paris, “the words ‘Dada, Dadaism, Dadaist’ were literally on everyone’s lips.”8 Dadaists had from the start drummed up such publicity.9 Articles in the mainstream press linked Dada with styles of dance, music, and typography, with often anti-Semitic and nationalist critiques describing Dadaists as anything from innocuous oddballs to Bolsheviks, madmen, and foreigners.10 Most tied Dada to nihilism.11 In Berlin, the press characterized Dada as a swindle of sorts, with members using scandal to get attention.12 Informed audiences linked the group with chaotic graphic design, sound poetry, collage, and montage, as well as the embracing of chance and absurdity and the resistance to nationalism and war. Regardless of their attitude toward or perception of the group, critics and casual observers alike came to identify particular artists as Dadaists, and they called their works “Dada.” Accustomed to a long history of isms, and driven by the common drive to categorize things in order to comprehend them, people began to shoe-horn the unorthodox movement into a cast set by a long-standing system of galleries, critics, and museums set up to showcase and evaluate any given group’s artistic strategies, manifestoes, exhibitions, and magazines. Despite the Dadaists’ parody of this system and attempts to undermine it, by the early 1920s, audiences were starting to approach it as an “ism.”13 Dada’s practices of aggregation had become an identifiable characteristic in itself. Now Dada magazines also encompassed what many were classifying as Dada pieces by Dada artists. Dada was no longer just a brand; it had accrued attributes. Once this happened, it became more difficult for Dada to serve as an undefined movement; it was one artistic tendency among many. This state of affairs threatened Dada’s status as transcendent, limitless, and therefore “unlimitable.” Picabia accused it of capitulating and becoming yet another school, Hugo Ball’s fear from the start. In 1921, Picabia lamented, “Then everything changed around me, I had the impression that like Cubism, Dada would have disciples who ‘understood’ and I had only one idea, to flee as far as possible.”14 Now Dada was packaged, a turn that threatened Dada’s demise, as therefore it could be shelved in the history of art and surpassed, like the long line of groups before and since.

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Eluding the “Ism” Trap: Magazines and the Dada and Constructivism after the War In the face of this undesired development, the magazines from such cities as Bucharest and Zagreb enabled Dada to retain its apparatus-like function and status as a meta-movement of sorts while also offering a means for Dadaists to form new bonds and reposition themselves.15 The journals carried on the practice of mixing “schools,” perforating the ever-thickening walls being built around Dada and connecting it to other movements in these cities, chiefly Constructivism. Rather than classification, calcification, and obsolescence, they made it possible for Dada to persist as a morphing, diasporic, and contingent collective, always allying itself with others. As Jonathan Eburne points out, in the early 1920s Dada “did not so much ‘die’ as pursue a set of alternative trajectories and affiliations.” He ties this scheme to Dada’s origins: “Well before 1922, the very consistency of Dada as an avant-garde collective had already presumed corrosion and contingency.” 16 At a time when Dada’s fame had become a liability of sorts, the magazines carried on doing what they had always done: they encouraged and empowered the Dadaists to reframe, reinvent, and perpetuate Dada in an increasingly internationalizing world. Taking advantage of how the journal format invites the integration of disparate artistic currents, a new set of editors took up the Dada project. Dada journals’ combining function was particularly important in the early 1920s, a time of competing and opposing artistic ideas and agendas, when the avant-garde became increasingly multiple and connected. The year 1922 marked “a threshold,” as Christine Poggi has argued.17 Artists from various countries and movements, driven by internationalist ambitions, were trying to determine a path forward. Magazines played a central role in the internationalizing tendencies of the time, as Polish artist Henryk Berlewi observed at the time: “A great network of periodicals has spread around the world, arguing for and propagating new ideas and new forms.”18 Periodicals, by providing a site where conflicts could be resolved and similarities revealed, offered a means to increase the international, multifaceted nature of the avant-garde.19 Detlef Mertins and Michael W. Jennings assert that the journals of the 1920s were the primary means of what they call the “new avant-garde internationalism” of the time.20 The explosion of magazines after the war coincided with various international gatherings throughout Europe. In Paris, French poet André Breton planned

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the Congrès international pour la détermination des directives et la défense de l’Esprit Moderne (“International Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit”), in order to gather representatives of various artistic currents to determine a new direction for modern art. His words from 1922 convey his perception of Dada as yet another point on a trajectory and his desire to move to the next step: “To consider Cubism, Futurism, and Dada in succession is to follow the flight of an idea that has now reached a certain height, and is only awaiting a new impetus to continue describing the arc assigned to it.”21 The Paris Congress never took place, due to bitter disagreements, chiefly between Breton and Tzara, who contested Breton’s attempts to turn Dada’s variability into something more prescriptive. The Dadaists also divided over the mock trial of the conservative Maurice Barrès in May 1921.22 And here again magazines were critical. In what Hentea has called a “print war,” their debate played out in Paris newspapers and periodicals.23 In the April 1922 issue of Littérature, for example, Breton went so far as to implore readers: “Lâchez Dada” (“Leave Dada Behind”).24 Bulletin Dada and Dadaphone, mentioned in Chapter 3, reflect Tzara’s ongoing preoccupation with resisting a codified Dada while emphasizing its nihilism, with statements like “The true Dadas are against Dada” and “Dada is the chameleon of rapid and attentive change / Dada is against the future, Dada died, Dada is idiotic/ Long live Dada, Dada is not a blaring literary school.”25 This debate also played out in other newspapers and periodicals, even some targeting a broader readership, such as Vanity Fair in 1922.26 Beyond Paris, 1922 witnessed two important meetings: the Kongress der Union Internationaler fortschrittlichen Künstler (“Congress of International Progressive Artists”) in Düsseldorf in May and Der Internationale Kongress der Konstruktivisten und Dadaisten (“International Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists”) in Weimar in September. Representatives of the Bauhaus, De Stijl, Constructivist, Dada (Hausmann, Höch, Janco, and Richter, e.g.), and Futurist movements, among others, set out to find commonality, though differences among them interfered.27 Van Doesburg, Richter, Lissitzky, and others protested the event and formed the International Faction of Constructivists. Four months later, Van Doesburg, Schwitters, and Lissitzky organized the Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists and the International Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists. At the Dutch artist’s encouragement, Tzara, along with Arp, attended. Despite various inevitable clashes, an alliance between Dada and what has come to be known as International Constructivism persisted, primarily in the magazines.

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This alliance may at first seem surprising to some. There is a tendency to treat Dada and Constructivism as opposites: the irrational versus the rational, chance versus order, the negative versus the positive, the destructive versus the constructive. Yet they also had a lot in common. The periodicals discussed here highlight the two groups’ common interests, namely abstraction, the machine, collage, photomontage, assemblage, atypical art materials, a proclivity toward photography and graphic design, and questioning of artistic autonomy.28 Both Constructivism and Dada were geographically dispersed, as well, and depended on the journals as primary sites of interaction and creativity. They also shared an indeterminate sense of membership, which allowed for a great deal of autonomy, though Constructivism did not advocate for this to the extent that Dada did. Stephen Bann distinguishes between an “inclusive” and an “exclusive” definition of constructivism. He writes, “While some defined it quite narrowly, others used it to refer to an anti-individualistic stance.”29 This broader interpretation was advanced by Van Doesburg, Richter, and Lissitzky, who therefore were open to Dada, as their magazines show.

Dada Tank and Dada Jazz: Promoting Dada, Linking the Local and the International In 1922, Croatian poet Dragan Aleksić, based in Zagreb, produced two Dada journals, DadaTank and Dada Jazz, which he used to bring Dada to local audiences while attempting to ingratiate himself among Dadaists in Paris, Berlin, Cologne, and Hanover.30 Aleksić’s introduction to Dada was in Prague, where he likely attended two Dada soirées put on by Huelsenbeck, Hausmann, Schwitters, and Baader in March 1920. He based his perception of Dada, which means “yes yes” in Croatian, on these performances and on earlier Dada journals. At first Aleksić promoted Dada in the Constructivist-leaning periodical, Zenit (“Zenith”) (1921–1926, Zagreb, Belgrade), which sought to fuse modernist trends—chiefly Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, and Constructivism—from many countries and in many languages toward a distinctly Balkan art movement. Although its editors, Ljubomir Micić and Branko Ve Poljanski, did not fully support Dada, in the third issue they allowed Aleksić, then in Prague, to promote “Yugo-Dada” through a series of texts, like a “Dada poem” and two “Dada Songs.”31 Aleksić’s formulation of Dada is rather broad: he contrasts art—“darkness, boredom”— with Dada, “the cry for youth.” He writes, “Dada is primitivism and yearning/ aspiration. The future. … Everything is DADA.”32 This final sentence echoes Tzara’s declaration, “Dada is tout,” in Bulletin Dada.

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By 1922, disagreements between Aleksić and the editors of Zenit regarding Dada became increasingly divisive. Zenit featured contributions from Aleksić through issue 13 in April 1922, but the next issue announces the Zenit group’s excommunication of Aleksić. Poljanski’s scorn was so severe he published his own spoof of Dada journals, Dada Jok, mentioned in the introduction. In June, just after Zenit expelled him, Aleksić started Dada Tank with the support of a group of Croatian artists and writers. After a summer of Dada events—poetry readings, plays, and exhibitions—in September 1922, Aleksić produced Dada Jazz, which declares itself to be both an anthology (on the cover) and a Dada review, recalling the dual identity of Cabaret Voltaire six years earlier (Figures 5.1 and 5.2). Editing Dada reviews was defining for him.33 On the bright poster for an event in Osijek, which Aleksić sent to Tzara, he connects himself and the event with Dada Tank; its cover announces him as editor in both Croatian (“urednik”) and French (“directeur)” (Figure 5.3).34 As Sonja Uzelac puts it, “The axis of his activity … remained the magazine. That is how he presented himself.”35 Dada Tank aimed primarily to bring Dada to Yugoslav readers. Its cost appears only in Croatian currency (5 denari), and texts are primarily in Croatian. Eager to expose his compatriots to Dada writings and images from abroad, Aleksić aggressively pursued submissions from Dadaists, hyping Zagreb’s commitment to Dada. His enthusiastic letter to Tzara from May 14, 1922 is representative of his initial contact with his Dada predecessors. Writing in German, he declares that he is part of “a new Dada in Yugoslavia!” He explains that the journal’s mailing address, Peŧrinska 6/II, is the center for “Dada-club, Dada-art, and Dada-Tank” and announces Dada Tank, an international “review for Dada.” After reporting on his exposure to Dada in Prague and his contributions to Zenit, he asks for Dada reviews and books. Emphasizing the international scope of the journal, he declares, “We appeal therefore to the solidarity of the entire Dada world and eagerly await your works.”36 Dada Tank bears the fruits of Aleksić’s efforts: Croatian translations of Tzara’s poem, “Zanzibar,” Schwitters’s then-unpublished “Pesma nr. 48” (“Poem no. 48”) (c. 1920), and an excerpt from Huelsenbeck’s introduction of Dada Almanach (Berlin, 1920), which manifests rather than explains Dada: “Dada is the dancing spirit atop of the world’s morals. Dada is the great parallel to the relativist philosophies of our times; Dada is not an axiom.”37 The cover proudly proclaims, “The first dada stars work for this premium dada review,” and continues with a call to artists in Zagreb to endorse and embrace it as their own: “Very honorable Yugoslav artists. Promote it! It’s the people’s voice.”38 The cover also bears the imperative, “Poštujte Dadasofe” (“Honor the Dadasoph”), a reference to Hausmann.

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Figure 5.1  Dada Tank, ed. Dragan Aleksic, Zagreb, 1922, front cover (photo of reprint in Ranko Horetzky, Darko Simicic, Graham McMaster, Ljubomir Micic, Zenit, Svetokret, Dada jok, Dada tank, Dada jazz, 1921–1926 [Zagreb: Horetzky, 2008]).

The magazine integrates these contributions with texts by Aleksić and his Yugoslav colleagues—Nac Singer, Fer Mill, Vido Lastov, Mihailo Petrov, and Jim Rad. A passage by Aleksić contrasts Dada with the past, using doomsday language: “Come together all. The day of reckoning is close at hand. The old values of ‘art’ will fall. All the crematories do not bring as many calories to the

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Figure 5.2  Dada Jazz, ed. Dragan Aleksić, Zagreb, 1922, front cover (photo of reprint in Ranko Horetzky, Darko Simicic, Graham McMaster, Ljubomir Micic, Zenit, Svetokret, Dada jok, Dada tank, Dada jazz, 1921–1926 [Zagreb: Horetzky, 2008]).

bodies of rotten mummies as dada does.”39 An essay by Lastov probably further confounded readers: “Dada has a worldly (worldman) character: Dada is as much at home on the boullvard [sic] Sebastopol as on the Calle Arsenal, Unten [sic] den Linden and Zrinjevac.”40 Most texts are in Croatian, but two poems by Petrov and Aleksić appear in German, likely for the sake of Dadaists from Berlin

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Figure 5.3   “Jugoslavenski, da da, DA DA, DA, DA …: U Osijeku, Royal-kino dne 20. viii. matinée, 1922,” Poster for Dada event, Zagreb, 1922. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2001.PR.1) (see Plate 8).

and Hanover. Aleksić’s poem mimics the nonsensical tone and disregard for grammar and syntax that initially attracted him to Dada. It begins, “Stock market decline Triest. / Polyp children applause triangular swords / Saws itself suns deep wound tragic / Ajax …”41 Like earlier texts in Dada reviews, Aleksić’s presents English words referring to capitalism and the entertainment industry into his poems. He also creates new words by imitating the compound word structure of the German language.42 Juxtaposing works by Dadaists and by Aleksić and his cohorts, Dada Tank thus frames Zagreb artists as ingrained in Dada, much more than they actually were—in a manner akin to Die Schammade. Dada Jazz, too, makes the distant close for Zagreb readers. It contains an essay on Alexander Archipenko and Aleksić’s Dada manifesto, both in Croatian. Aleksić printed three texts by Tzara here, this time in French: “Comment je suis devenu charmant, sympathique et délicieux,” but here, “Pourquoi je suis devenu charmant, sympathique et délicieux” (“How/Why I became charming, attractive, and delightful”) (1920), Sillogisme colonial (“Colonial syllogism”), and Manifeste de Monsieur Aa l’antiphilosophe (“Manifesto of Monsieur Aa the Anti-philosopher”) (1920). This last piece, notably, negates Picabia’s charge that Dada had become a school.43 Other than these three, texts from abroad appear in Croatian, again conveying Aleksić’s desire to bring Dada to readers in Zagreb.44 Visually, the graphic design of both Dada Tank and Dada Jazz reflects Dada and Constructivist currents. Repetition and printing with seemingly random capitalization and font sizes recall Dada publications. The cover of Dada Tank bombards the reader with Yugo-Dada. “Dada-yougo” appears seven times along the left-hand side, and words read in five directions in more than four type fonts and styles. Some words are randomly capitalized. On the top

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left-hand side of the cover, “Dada” repeats four times in many sizes; the final one is upside down. The passage that starts “Come together all” is printed in a smaller size along the top.45 Dada Jazz’s lively cover prints the title three times, each with different capitalization, and the title, “Dada anthology,” is perpendicular to them.46 Inside, a page promotes the journal as a “Dadaistic review” in English, French, Italian, and Croatian; thick black lines border the words; and the words “Dadaistic review” are at a diagonal. At the same time, the typography, layout, bold geometrical graphics, and right angles of Dada Tank resemble the emerging Constructivist aesthetic apparent in issues of Zenit, beginning with number six, as well as the first issue of Veshch. Gegenstand. Objet: Revue international de l’art modern (“Object: International Review of Modern Art”) (edited by El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg Berlin, 1922–1923) and other Constructivist reviews, such as Ma (edited by Lajos Kassák, Vienna, 1916–1925).47 As in these publications, in Dada Tank, texts in sans serif fonts read horizontally, separated by horizontal and vertical lines, with authors’ names in capital letters just below and to the right of each passage. Page layouts emphasize balance, if sometimes asymmetry, as well as order and regularity— quite unlike the idiosyncratic layouts of earlier Dada journals, which had tried to destabilize accepted graphic design techniques that gave the semblance of transparency. Similarly, the two abstract linocuts in Dada Tank by Russian artist Mihailo S. Petrov (Dada Jazz includes no images), despite a somewhat jumbled composition, are decidedly more restrained than the collages and line drawings in recent Dada magazines from Paris and Berlin. Just one month after Dada Jazz, in October 1922, Aleksić declared an end to Dada in Zagreb until 1999, though he maintained an archive of Dada activity and continued to go by the name “Dada” until his death in 1958.48 With these two single-issue reviews, Aleksić established a new Dada center with himself at its center, promoted the movement, and integrated it with local and international artistic leanings toward Constructivism. In so doing, he helped Dada to keep changing and expanding.

Mécano and G: Reconciling Opposites and Showcasing Similarities Whereas Aleksić’s Dada Tank and Dada Jazz primarily set out to promote Dada, despite visual evidence of the increasing influence of Constructivism, Van Doesburg’s Mécano (Leiden and the Hague, 1922–1923) and Richter’s G

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(Berlin, 1923–1926) set out to merge Dada with Constructivism, though each of them conceived of the relationship between the two differently.49 Van Doesburg is best known as a leading member of the Dutch movement, De Stijl, along with Piet Mondrian, as well as editor of De Stijl (Delft, Leiden, and Meudon, 1917– 1931), which promoted Neo-Plasticism.50 In the early 1920s, De Stijl presented a significant amount of Dada content, such as contributions from Schwitters, Hausmann, Tzara, and Ribemont-Dessaignes. Van Doesburg famously even adopted a Dada pseudonym and alter ego, I. K. Bonset, so that he could express his support for Dada more freely.51 He became a linchpin for the connections between Dadaists and Constructivists, evidenced in his involvement in the Congress of the Constructivists and Dadaists and in Mécano. Dada journals from France, Germany, and Italy introduced Van Doesburg to Dada. In 1921, he wrote to Tzara, “Now I put a table in my workshop with all the reviews of the avant-garde and Dada for the friends of the modern spirit.”52 He began receiving Dada publications from Zurich and Berlin primarily—Dada, 391, Cannibale, and Paul Dermée’s Z—as early as February 1919.53 In late 1920 and into 1921, he visited artists linked with the journals in and near Paris, Berlin, and Weimar, among them Tzara, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Schwitters, and Arp.54 Van Doesburg’s zeal for Dada and for internationalism drove him to produce Mécano. In his first letter to Tzara, he tells him about it, identifying the editor as I. K. Bonset, whom he describes as a Dutch colleague and a “pure Dadaist” (“dadaïste pur-sang”).55 His letter to Dutch poet Antony Kok from June 1921, after a trip to Paris, recalls the transnational ambitions of the earliest Dadaists: As far as that Dadaist pamphlet is concerned: I spoke about it in Paris with the most prominent Dadaists! They thought it was a superb idea, particularly if it were to appear in Weimar, as it could give rise to an international exchange of ideas, right across the heads of the members of the Entente!56

Between January 1922 and January 1923, Van Doesburg produced four issues of Mécano, assigning each one a color: yellow, blue, red, and white.57 The January 1923 issue of De Stijl advertised it as an “Internationall tijdschrift voor geestelijke Hygiène, mechanische Esthetiek en Neo-Dadaïsme” (“International Magazine for Mental Hygiene, Mechanical Aesthetics and Neo-Dadaism”). Texts in French, German, and Dutch, as well as prices in different currencies, also attest to its global aspirations.58 Mécano features writings and images by artists representing a broad scope of movements: Van Doesburg, Ezra Pound, Boccioni, Marinetti, Mondrian, Picabia, Jean Crotti, Éluard, Tzara, Man Ray, Ribbemont-Dessaignes, Malcolm Cowley, Arp, Hausmann, and Schwitters.59 But its pages are dominated by Dada

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and Constructivism, which Mécano’s texts define as opposites even as its images call out their visual resonances. Mécano’s framing of Dada is complex. On the one hand, it portrays Dada as nihilistic, a goal Van Doesburg lays out in a letter when considering making a new periodical: “It is perhaps best to stop producing De Stijl and to start a Dadaist paper: against everyone and everything.”60 Van Doesburg’s “Karakteristiek van het Dadaisme” (“Characteristics of Dadaism”), published in Mécano 4–5, describes Dada as beyond morality and politics, antibourgeois, and irreverent toward art of the past, with a dash of humor: “Dada is the only successful remedy to heal you of your art and logic diarrhea. Dada is the cork on the flask of your stupidity.”61 Van Doesburg was attracted to Dada as what Jane Beckett calls “a destructive and liberating force that could assist in the abolition of the old world.”62 As Hubert van den Berg points out, although usually Constructivism is not associated with destruction it had what he calls “a very specific destructive dimension, demanding a tabula rasa as precondition for new Constructivist art.”63 Backing up his own writings, Van Doesburg excerpts, for the cover of Mécano 4/5 (January 1924), an important interview with Tzara, originally published in Le journal du people the year before, where he contradicts attempts to compare Dada to other movements and underlines its nihilistic nature: I find that it is wrong to say that Dadaism, Cubism and Futurism were based on common ground. The two last tendencies especially were based on a principle of technical or intellectual improvement, while Dadaism was never based on any theory and was only a protest.64

At the same time, Mécano also portrays Dada as a strategy for encompassing contraries and achieving balance. In what is almost a direct quote from Tzara’s “1918 Dada Manifesto,” another passage in “Characteristics of Dadaism” reads, “Dada: at once order and disorder, yes and no, ego and non-ego.”65 This theme carries on throughout Mécano, with phrases like “Dada is the placing of opposites next to each other” and Bound neither to time nor space, the Dadaist loves the positive-negative, the yes-no, the full-empty, the yesterday-tomorrow, and, in the bold flight of his creative imagination, he places opposites directly next to one another.66

In “Towards a Constructivist poetry,” printed in the final issue of Mécano, Van Doesburg, as Bonset, asserts, “The new poet forms only by means of overcoming, cancellation, destruction ….”67 Multipaged, collaborative, and mechanically reproduced, the magazine enabled Van Doesburg to bring together what he deemed to be two unlike entities.

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Mécano’s images and graphic design call out similarities between Dada and Constructivism. The second issue of Mécano pairs the spiraling forms of Russian artist Serge Charchoune’s Picabia-like drawing, “Cigarette Dada,” and an assemblage by Hungarian Constructivist László Moholy Nagy, here called, “Nickel Sculpture” (“Nickel-Plastik”) (Figure 5.4). Mécano also highlights the groups’ shared preoccupation with the machine, apparent in its name, which

Figure 5.4  Mécano 2, ed. Theo Van Doesburg, Leiden, 1922, inside pages, unfolded. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (86-S98).

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comes from a kind of DIY toy, “Meccano,” and other contributions. The first issue reproduces a photo of a cogwheel, and in the second, rather than reproducing one of Ernst’s biomorphic frottages, Van Doesburg chose one of his more mechanical pieces, “Photo-mechanische compositie” (“Photo-mechanical composition”). In Mécano 4, Picabia’s “Les dents viennent aux yeux comme des larmes” (“Teeth come to the eyes like tears”), a typically enigmatic line drawing of what looks like a rudimentary contraption, and Man Ray’s “Dancer/

Figure 5.5  Mécano 1, ed. Theo Van Doesburg, Leiden, 1922, inside pages, unfolded. Kunsthaus Zurich Library.

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Danger” (1920), labeled “Man Ray New York Dada,” in the first issue, also stress the Dadaists’ machinist aesthetic, one that conflates machine and flesh (Figure 5.5).68 In his text, “Will to Style,” in the February–March 1922 issue of De Stijl, Van Doesburg characterized Man Ray’s montage as an example of how Dadaists “play with the machine.”69 Mécano also exposes Dada’s and Constructivism’s common experimentation with collages and assemblages. Hausmann’s “Elasticum,” here labeled, “Construction,” in the second issue, is made up of machine parts one might find in a Constructivist composition, such as a tire, with two male heads, letters, and words: “Pipicabia” and, in Dada fashion, “Merde.” Hausmann’s “Mechanischer Kopf: Der Geist underer Zeit” (“Mechanical Head: The Spirit of Our Time”) (c. 1921), labeled simply “plastique,” made up of a wooden head adorned with various items, including a wallet and a ruler, similarly, calls out the Dadaists’ preoccupation with merging the human and the mechanical. Hausmann’s famous photomontage, “Tatlin lebt zu Hause” (“Tatlin Lives at Home”) (1920), a non-portrait of the famous Russian Constructivist with mechanical parts for a brain, reads as an homage to Tatlin, whom Constructivists and Dadaists alike revered as a leading figure in “machine art.”70 Other pieces embody trends from both movements. Moholy-Nagy’s collage, “Relief S” (1921), in the second issue, is made up of prefabricated objects like a measuring device and a cogwheel. However, its spare design and inclusion of the letter “s,” a black square, and the number one make it decidedly Constructivist. Van Doesburg’s collage, “La matière dénaturalisée. Déstruction 2” (“Distorted Material: Destruction 2”) (c. 1923), reproduced in the fourth and final issue of Mécano, merges elements of Dada and Constructivist collages. Photographs and clippings from French and German newspapers recall Dada collages, while a fragment from the floor plan by De Stijl architect J. J. P. Oud and cutouts of solid blocks of color are closer to Constructivist works. The graphic design of Mécano is a distinctive mix of Dada and Constructivism. As in Dada journals, here images are interspersed with texts printed at right angles from each other and diagonally, creating dynamic page designs. Yet rather than the idiosyncratic, almost painterly compositions of earlier Dada publications, here the sans serif font type, thick black lines dividing spreads into discrete areas, and asymmetrical balance align this periodical with De Stijl and Veshch. Mécano also emphasizes clarity: larger font sizes, underlining, and boldface type, for instance, are reserved for words that readers expected to be highlighted, such as titles.71

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A respected editor with extensive international contacts among Dadaists and Constructivists, Van Doesburg brought representatives of each movement together, first at the Weimar Conference and then in Mécano. The journal inspired him to draw out similarities he perceived between the two, effecting a reinterpretation of Dada. Rather than continuing to use De Stijl to express his Dada ideas, Van Doesburg produced a Dada journal so he could participate fully in the Dada network begun in Zurich in 1916. Mécano exemplifies magazines’ ongoing role in disseminating and reexamining Dada while also bringing together movements. Van Doesburg understood the juxtaposition of different entities as a Dada strategy, something he accomplished by placing Constructivist-inspired submissions alongside ones now deemed “Dada.” The aims of the new and unrestricted (Dada) and the aims of the enduring (Constructivism) go together, and condition each other. To embrace and integrate these two tendencies was the purpose of the magazine G.72

Though widely classified as a Constructivist publication, in its early issues, Richter’s G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung (“Materials for Elemental Construction/Form-Design”) (Berlin, 1923–1926), like Mécano, brought Dada and Constructivism together and helped perpetuate Dada (Figure 5.6).73 Its pages manifest continuities between the two collectives. Richter shunned associations between his magazine and Constructivism as a movement, advancing, instead, the notion of elementare Gestaltung, meaning elemental form or construction.74 Richter had been affiliated with Dada since 1918, and after the war, he became increasingly involved in Constructivism. He attended the Dusseldorf Congress, where he announced his forthcoming journal, and the Weimar Conference, where he established ties with a wide range of artists who became regular contributors to G. The First International Russian Art Exhibition in 1922 and Lissitzky’s Veshch also had a profound effect on him. Richter produced five issues of G with the help of various other editors with strong Constructivist leanings: Bauhaus photographer Lissitzky, Werner Gräff, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and architect and designer Friedrich Kiesler. The notion of elementare Gestaltung, from the subtitle, placed an emphasis on objectivity. Richter’s involvement with Constructivism did not signal a full break from his Dada identity, however. The notion of elementare Gestaltung was not an “ism” for Richter, and when asked if juxtaposing two tendencies within a single publication was fence straddling, he answered, “[N]ot at all,” adding, “our problem was one of a destructive/constructive nature.”75 By 1923,

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Figure 5.6  G 1, ed. Hans Richter, Berlin, 1923, front cover. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S1338).

as Dada had changed from an emerging trend to a debated but established movement, and Constructivism was gaining traction, G set out to connect Dada and Constructivism by showcasing a wide range of artists associated with both groups to an international audience.76

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Richter maintained that abstraction and structure, two defining characteristics of Constructivism, had always been present in Dada. In “Dada and the Film,” he argues, “The nucleus of the artistic endeavor of Dada as it appeared in Zurich 1916/19 was abstract art,” adding, “Abstract art, that was dada.”77 His “Heads” appeared in Dada 3 and Dada 4/5, and his paintings, prints, and drawings, and later films became increasingly abstract. By 1919, he had begun collaborating with Viking Eggeling to produce scroll paintings and films made up of rectangles and squares. His Dada creations are much closer to the geometrical abstraction of many Constructivist compositions than they are to Picabia’s bizarre machine drawings or Hausmann’s busy, politically charged collages that had also been shown in Dada magazines. Indeed, this distinct interpretation of Dada promoted by Richter and Eggeling at times tested other Dadaists’ rhetoric of inclusivity. According to Richter, Tzara tried to exclude two of Eggeling’s abstract lithographs from Dada 4/5. Comparing them to Renaissance paintings, the Romanian poet objected that they were too classical for a Dada publication, and Richter had to convince him otherwise.78 In his introduction to G, Richter underscores the Dadaists’ and Constructivists’ shared emphasis on structure: The fact is that the tendencies of Constructivism, or more generally speaking of structure, appeared in Dada itself … the tendencies for an order, a structure, appeared nonetheless as a counterpart to the law of chance which Dada had discovered. In this way the Constructivist involvement in Dada and vice versa may be understood.79

According to his estimation, Constructivism was tied to structure, which he believed to be present in Dada, if often in tension with chance. G also manifests Richter’s championing of Dada’s ability to encompass disparate entities. His words recall Van Doesburg’s: “The realization that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole—this was the central message of Dada.”80 He describes Dada as “an attempt to restore the lost balance between reason and unreason in modernity,” adding, “It was in the interplay of opposites … that the essence of Dada consisted.”81 G’s juxtaposition of Dada and Constructivism is evident in its artworks and texts. Constructivist-inspired images dominate: Richter’s film strips, a photo of Lissitzky’s Proun room and writings about it, and photographs of factory buildings. Yet we also find here Hausmann’s opinions of German fashion, an essay by Tzara, and a humorous story by Arp about making a drinking cup according to the rules of Gestaltung. All are in German, often followed by short

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summaries of featured artists in French, English, and Russian. A text by Grosz emphasizes Dada’s absurdist, nihilistic nature: Today I and all other founders of German Dadaism know that our only error was to have taken the so-called art at all seriously. Dadaism was our awaking from this self fraud. We saw the lunatic results of the reigning social order and broke out in laughter.82

Adding to the periodical’s Dada flavor, the first issue shows a mug shot of Arp, a photograph of Schwitters reading a sound poem from Merz and two of Hausmann modeling the latest fashions in Germany. Unlike Mécano, G shows Dada works that depart from the Constructivists’ machine aesthetic, but it frames them as Constructivist. The third issue of G, for example, displays several of Arp’s organically shaped designs, moving away from the machine aesthetic of some Dada artworks. However, reproduced horizontally across the top of the page, they take on a serial quality that corresponds with Richter’s filmstrips (Figure 5.7). Grosz’s incisive drawings, which contrast the indulgences of the rich with the hardships of the poor in postwar Germany, also stand out, as they are figural and hand-drawn, unlike the Constructivists’ machine-inspired, abstract forms. But here a description accompanying the drawings asserts, in German, French, and Russian, “George Groß [sic] hates exploiters but likes producers,” thus situating him in a Constructivist context. The graphic design of G reflects Constructivism’s proclivity toward simplicity and clarity.83 The first two issues, with their dense printing of texts, separated by thick black lines, and two or three illustrations on each page, strongly resemble Veshch. Entire pages are printed in only one font type, all texts are sans serif and most are arranged horizontally or at right angles with one another. G both demonstrates Moholy-Nagy’s words on typography in a 1923 manifesto in which he asserts, “Typography must be clear communication in its most vivid form. Clarity must be especially stressed, for clarity is the essence of modern printing.”84 Moholy-Nagy’s words mark a noted departure from the Dadaists’ suspicion of such ideas and their assault on graphic design that pretends to be transparent. With the third issue, there is much less text, and an uptick in the number of photographs, although each page usually shows only one illustration. Its overall design probably explains why it has been grouped with Constructivist magazines almost right from the start. Closer analysis, however, reveals that in its initial iterations this publication was not simply a Constructivist periodical, but rather a means by which Richter, a self-proclaimed Dadaist, could intermingle Dada and Constructivism and thus prolong Dada.

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Figure 5.7  G 3, ed. Hans Richter, Berlin, 1923, p. 48. Getty Research Institute (87-S1338) © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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Merz and 75 HP: Dada after “Dada” In the first issue of Merz (1923–1932, intermittently, Hanover), Schwitters declares, “[W]e who are so decidedly not Dadaists, are best suited to carry on the Dadaist movement.”85 His comment captures his fraught relationship with Dada and the fact that his magazine permitted him to express his affinity to Dada without officially adopting the name of the group that rejected him. Significantly for our purposes, it suggests a perceptive grasp of the place of Dada in the early 1920s. “Dada” was becoming a thing of the past, but Schwitters was helping it to live on, in a different guise, by carrying on its members’ appropriation of the magazine to make connections among disparate movements under another nonsensical, undefined name, this time, “Merz.”86 The first issue grew out of the Dada tour in 1922 and 1923 that he put on with Theo and Nelly Van Doesburg, Schwitters, and Vilmos Huszár in Germany and Holland. As the cover advertises, it is devoted to Dada in Holland.87 In both the texts and images in the first four regular issues of Merz (the focus of this analysis), he, like Van Doesburg, connects Dada and Constructivism.88 Merz 4 is the most Dada in character, with aphorisms by known Dada enthusiasts such as Soupault, Picabia, Eluard, and Serner, as well as poems by Ribemont-Dessaignes, Tzara, and Hausmann. It repeats important texts printed in Mécano: the quote from Tzara, mentioned above, that contrasts Dada and other movements, and parts of Van Doesburg’s essay, “Dadaisme,” published in Mécano, which emphasizes Dada’s capacity for juxtaposing disparate styles and approaches. Constructivist contributions include Lissitzky’s “Topography of Typography” in Merz 4 and Mondrian’s essay on Neo-Plasticism in Merz 6. Essays by Schwitters in Merz exploring the relationship between Dada and Merz reveal his simultaneous preoccupation with Dada, his eagerness to distinguish himself and Merz from it, and his affinity toward Constructivism. In “Dadaismus in Holland” (“Dadaism in Holland”) in Merz 1, he grants Dada two identities. On the one hand it is one of many competing factions, along with “Anarchists,” “Socialists,” Impressionists, and Expressionists. On the other hand, it is a reflection of a condition: “Our time is called dada. We live in the dada period … Nothing is so characteristic of our time as dada.” He goes on, “DADA is the CONFESSION OF BELIEF in the LACK OF STYLE. Dada is the style of our time, which has no style.”89 As van den Berg explains, for Schwitters, “the Dadaist was not Dada himself, but rather helped to make the Dadaist ‘stylelessness’ of contemporary culture visible to his audience.”90 Yet this condition is only temporary, according to his formulation. Dada recognizes

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the era’s absence of style (“Stillosigkeit”), Schwitters contends, and once people are aware of this absence, they will turn against Dada and “fight only for style (Stijl).”91 Here Schwitters allies himself with Van Doesburg, casting Dada as necessary for the creation of something new, in his case, Merz. Schwitters writes, “We want style. We mirror Dada, because we want style. For that reason we are responsible for the Dadaist movement. Out of love for style we deploy all our force for the Dadaist movement.”92 Beginning with Merz 5 he did pursue a more defined Constructivist aesthetic. The first four issues, however, seem to play out the first stage of the process he outlines, when there is no direct connection to a particular style, calling to mind Dada’s meta role, bringing together various movements under one term.93 Before reading any of these texts, however, individuals leafing through Merz  would have discovered an eclectic mix of primarily Dada and Constructivist images. We find in the first issue of Merz two spare linear drawings by Höch and Picabia. Picabia’s untitled drawing is much like those reproduced in earlier Dada publications, with its crossing thin curved lines that flirt with figuration, labeled with words—“doctor,” “narcissus,” “women,” “convalescent”—whose combined meaning is ultimately enigmatic.94 Höch’s untitled drawing (1922)—simple, ordered, and architectonic—on the other hand, is more aligned with Constructivist works (Figure I.3). Curved lines and hatchings intersect a large oval shape, and two knob-like shapes emerge from the top and left-hand sides, balanced on a horizontal base-like buildings on a landscape. Contributions from De Stijl and Constructivist members in Merz include Neo-Plastic paintings by Van Doesburg and Mondrian, a photograph of an interior space designed by Van Doesburg and Oud, another of Lissitzky’s “Proun (City)” (“Proun (Stadt)),” as well as a drawing of Tatlin’s famous structure, “Denkal der dritten international” (“Monument to the Third International”). Merz also presents images that are not collages but share Schwitters’s interest in mixing dissimilar materials: a photogram by Vilmos Huszar and Lissitzky, a stamp drawing by Bauhaus architect Günter Hirschel-Prostch, and a photo by Moholy-Nagy, for instance. A design on the cover of the first issue of Merz by Hausmann and Baader—showing a windmill made of a square base and St. Andrew’s cross with “DA” on each arm—recalls Constructivism, even as it declares a Dada affiliation.95 Schwitters’s contributions demonstrate the Dada and Constructivist strains in his own oeuvre. In his “Merz drawing” (“Merzzeichnung”), in the first issue, various found materials overlap with each other but are printed flatly. Like

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Dada collages, it includes newspaper and magazine clippings of fragments of words in Czech and Dutch (“aver,” “brieken,” “geldig,” “Prah”) and the number “21.” But his careful placement of these pieces to form a balanced, abstract, geometrical composition recalls Constructivist works. The materials themselves—an architectural drawing and a patterned semicircle—link the collage to Constructivist models, as well. In “Das Kreisen (Merzbild)” (“The Circle (Merz Picture)”) in Merz 2, six rings float around a canvas divided by the prongs of the compass (Figure 5.8). The geometric forms and compass manifest Constructivists’ emphasis on the artist as engineer. At the same time, one of the circles could be a cutout of the photo of an eyeball that the Berlin Dadaists arranged on either side of the title on the cover of Dada 3 and throughout the journal. Merz 6 presents a “Merz Picture” (“Das Merzbild”) (Figure 5.9) that demonstrates the shared attraction to collage and assemblage among Dadaists and Constructivists. It is made up of scraps of mesh, paper, wood, and metal stacked on top of one another, with a small ladder-like object dividing it diagonally. The photo of this collage (now lost) spans two pages, and the string of the binding bisects the piece, adding another collage layer.96 Merz’s graphic design, too, juxtaposes Dada and Constructivist models. Certain characteristics bring to mind earlier Dada journals: images and texts in many font types mingle, with page numbers printed in varying font sizes and types. In addition, its inclusion of the pointing hand derived from ads but now synonymous with Dada, as well as random graphics such as a drawing of a cow (in the first issue), recall Dada publications. Yet other graphic elements such as straight lines, arrows, and squares frame images and divide pages into clearly demarcated registers, creating a geometric, balanced design closer to those found in Veshch than it is to earlier Dada journals. The Merz logo, a white square made with arrows, also reflects the Constructivist leanings of the review. The typography in Merz varies, but according to conventions aimed at clarity: titles and other emphasized words appear in larger fonts, usually in boldface type, and font sizes and types remain consistent throughout each essay and poem. The prevalence of sans serif font types also gives the journal a decidedly Constructivist look. The hand of the printer is not as evident as in earlier Dada publications, which look haphazard in comparison to the pages of Merz. Merz thus reveals Schwitters’s close collaboration with Lissitzky, whose essay, “Topography of Typography,” emphasizes economy of form and material and geometrical layout. Whereas the Dadaists set out to manipulate readers’ expectations, Lissitzky argues that how a text is printed should correspond with its meaning: “The designing of the book-space through the material of

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Figure 5.8  Merz 2, ed. Kurt Schwitters, Hanover, 1923, p. 23, 11 7∕16 × 8 2∕3 in. (29 × 22 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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Figure 5.9  Merz 6, ed. Kurt Schwitters, Hanover, 1923, pp. 8–9, 11 7∕16 × 17 7∕16 in. (29 × 44 cm) (spread). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

the type, according to the laws of typographical mechanics, must correspond to the strains and stresses of the content.”97 Lissitzky’s essay describes many of the rules that Schwitters was beginning to incorporate into the design of his journal, which he and Schwitters would employ more emphatically in subsequent issues. But here the integration of Dada graphic design elements complicates a clear classification of the magazine as Constructivist only. In Merz 2, Schwitters asserts that he is “the artist of the work des autres.” He explains, “I am the artist who turned the song of others, however bad, into a work of art.”98 We see this drive in his collages and i-poems (made of excerpted text fragments), certainly, but also in his magazine. It allowed him to incorporate Dada, along with other artistic currents, chiefly Constructivism, while also wielding the Dada strategy of joining these currents under a nonsense word, in this case, “Merz,” without fully explaining what it means. Merz also enabled him to uphold his own independence while participating in the transnational network of periodicals that continued to be the lifeblood of the avant-garde. In a letter from March 1923, just after he published the first issue of Merz, he asked Tzara, “Do you know addresses for exchange with other periodicals?”99 As his

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close friend Käte Steinitz explained, “Schwitters’ Merz journal came into being, in part, because of his tremendous need for an arena of exchange.”100 A year later, in Bucharest, the single-issue 75 HP (Bucharest, 1924), like Merz, carried on Dada’s combining function, this time under the banner of “Pictopoezie” (Figure 5.10).101 Its editors, poet and theoretician Ilarie Voronca

Figure 5.10  75 HP, ed. Ilarie Voronca, Victor Brauner, Bucharest, 1924, front cover. Kunsthaus Zurich Library (see Plate 9).

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and painter and illustrator Victor Brauner, and poet, editor, and critic Stéphane Roll felt a special bond to the Dada movement because Tzara and Janco were Romanian, even though Tzara did not contribute much to Romanian journals. Yet unlike the other publications discussed in this chapter so far, 75 HP did not promote Dada directly or include pieces by recognized Dadaists. Like the earliest Dadaists’ adoption of the word “Dada,” it promoted “Pictopoezie” in a manner parallel to Merz’s advocacy of “Merz.” It did not define it, saying that it was a word and nothing more: “Pictopoezie is not painting, Pictopoezie is not poetry, Pictopoezie is Pictopoezie.”102 The editors come closest to characterizing it when they describe its function vis-à-vis other movements: Pictopoezie revives all the revelatory currents of new art. Pictopoezie realized finally the true synthesis of futurism, dadaism, constructivism. The most distant attitudes will find themselves universally fruitful again in the Pictopoetic movement … Pictopoezie triumphs over all, records all, realizes the impossible.103

Voronca and Brauner espoused the Dadaists’ magazine strategy, but now, since Dada was established, and even historicized, it was one of many. “Pictopoezie” was the new word and 75 HP was an effective vehicle for synthesizing and transcending these elements and for resisting categorization. Indeed, 75 HP pledged that “[whenever] what we do becomes a formula, we shall relinquish it.”104 Like Dada Tank and Dada Jazz, 75 HP empowered its editors to negotiate their local and international agendas. Emerging amid the contentious environment of competing avant-garde factions in Bucharest, 75 HP dialogues with readers in Bucharest and accommodates cultural concerns and international factions.105 Its editors were familiar with many avant-garde periodicals of the time, as the back cover proves: we find here a list with such journals as Merz, Noi, Mécano, and G, as well as De Stijl, Zenit, Il Futurismo, and Le Futurisme.106 By producing a magazine, they entered into dialogue with these other editors. Essays and poems in 75 HP are almost exclusively in Romanian and French, suggesting that the editors wanted to reach both their immediate audiences and foreign, primarily French-reading ones.107 Requirements for contributing to the journal and descriptions of the objectives of the group are in French. With Dadaist hyperbole, Voronca and Brauner declare, “Our group counts among its collaborators the best writers and artists of the modernist movement in the world.”108 As in Tzara’s 1918 Dada manifesto, their requirements poke fun at traditional notions of membership in an artistic group (see Chapter 2):

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To contribute to 75 HP it is necessary: to know how to dance well, urinate on everything, to respect his/her parents, to have suffered an air crash, not to make literature, to have a certificate of good conduct, to drink sulfuric acid, to know boxing, to decapitate oneself twice a week.109

Texts in Romanian demonstrate Dada to Bucharest readers. Voronca’s “Aviograma (in loc de manifest” (“Aviogram [In Place of a Manifesto]”) calls for total liberty of expression and invention and, like a Dada poem, offers nonsensical juxtapositions such as “The logical grammar of sentimentalism like the flapping of clothes on the line summons the empire of luminous placards.”110 The two pictorial examples of Pictopoezie paintings in 75 HP, both by the editors, look like collages comprising clippings of words and red and yellow paper. “Pictopozia no. 5721” is a dynamic convergence of words referring to the modern metropolis, specifically cameras, cigarettes, and cable cars: words like “Kodak,” “Maxilar,” and “Cablecardique” (Figure 5.11). “Pictopoezia no. 384” also mixes words written in various fonts arranged in many directions, interspersed over patches of yellow, red, and black. Here we see such texts as “H2O,” “Extern,” and “Hear are the straps” (“Voilà des Bretelles”). Red words describing Pictopoezie flank the piece: “syntheticism,” “simultaneism,” “rhythm,” “harmony,” “sonority,” “parallelism,” “abstract,” “vocabulary,” and “mechanism.”111 Both Pictopoezie pieces borrow from the diverse collage techniques of the Futurists, Dadaists, and Constructivists: they are dynamic, reference commercial sources, and contain abstract geometrical shapes. Janco (written in the Romanian “Iancu”) submitted an untitled woodcut that resembles his earlier contributions to Dada journals in Zurich, while the geometric shapes evoke Constructivist works. An untitled linoleum print by Brauner, which depicts a human figure divided into four zones of black and  white, strongly resembles Picasso’s painting Harlequin (1915), and an untitled linoleum print shows his proclivity toward abstraction. Its  simultaneity calls to mind Constructivist pieces, as well as Prampolini’s black-and-white woodcuts, which Brauner most likely had seen reproduced in Noi. As in self-identified Constructivist publications, here thick lines divide pages into clearly demarcated sections, almost all texts are in sans serif font types, some words are in all capital letters, and titles appear in boldface. The striking combination of red, yellow, black, and white on the front and back covers also calls to mind Constructivist collages and print media. At the same time, however, 75 HP’s design is much busier and more disorienting than the

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Figure 5.11  75 HP, ed. Ilarie Voronca, Victor Brauner, Bucharest, 1924, p. 9. Kunsthaus Zurich Library (see Plate 10).

spare compositions of Constructivist models, as its pages are filled with texts and images printed in several directions, forcing readers to turn it 360 degrees. 75 HP is the least directly Dada of all the titles discussed in this book, but it manifests the ongoing impact of Dada magazines well into the 1920s. Voronca and Brauner used it to participate in an international dialogue among journal

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editors and to juxtapose various artistic currents under a new, invented name, thus forging a new artistic identity for themselves.

Circulating Contingency, Continuing Dada Magazines’ Legacy Although the circulation and reception of magazines are notoriously evasive, we know that all of these reviews found their way to other countries, reaching bookstore browsers as well as leading figures of the avant-garde, gaining for their collaborators membership in the vibrant network of reviews circulating throughout Europe. Aleksić attracted the attention of Richter in Berlin, who commented that Dada Tank “had a powerful impact despite the brevity of its life” and “carried the unmistakable stamp of Dada.”112 Mécano sold at the famous bookstore, Librairie Six, in Paris, as well as on Van Doesburg’s Dada tour throughout Germany and Holland, and Tzara sent Van Doesburg a list of addresses, granting him access to a host of influential readers.113 Although Van Doesburg’s Dada tour did not attract much attention, in a letter from January 19, 1923, Van Doesburg tells Tzara that at an event in Haarlem, he sold “all the numbers of Mécano II Blue!” (“tout le numéros de Mécano II Bleu!”).114 G had a few dozen subscribers by the time the third issue came out. The print run was around 2,000 copies by some estimates, and Gräff later claimed that the editors sent up to 1,000 copies to artists, critics, art libraries, collectors, and manufacturers.115 Merz circulated in cities throughout Europe, such as Berlin, Paris, Rome, Milan, as well as New York, and it lists the prices in many currencies.116 Schwitters gathered contact information from correspondents and colleagues, and Tzara sent him addresses of many editors, including Aleksić, Evola, Man Ray, and members of the Societé Anonyme. Beginning in November 1924, 75 HP could be acquired in Paris at the recently established Bureau de recherches surréalistes (“Bureau of Surrealist Research”). In February of 1925, Manomètre, the avant-garde review from Lyon, announced 75 HP, and a little while later, Die Driehoek, published by a Constructivist group in Antwerp, Belgium, mentioned the Romanian journal in an article on the Romanian avant-garde. Upon receiving his copy of 75 HP Schwitters wrote from Hanover, promising future contributions and to send Merz.117 In all of these ways, these titles spread new interpretations of Dada, as it began to morph and merge with Constructivism.

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In the early 1920s, almost ten years since the Cabaret Voltaire group first convened, with the avant-garde in a state of flux, Dada represented one of many competing factions, but its journals offered a way out of being categorized and left behind. Dada reviews were transnational, multilingual, and encompassed many movements, and they endorsed a fluid understanding of their own identity, a contingency that proved useful at this time. Carrying on what Cabaret Voltaire and Dada had started in Zurich, these publications helped Dada enthusiasts form new bonds and reposition themselves. This openness, along with periodicals’ networking capacity, sustained Dada’s relevance even as late as the 1970s, and as far away as San Francisco, as the next chapter explores.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6

The journal Mavo (1924– 1925), edited by Murayama Tomoyoshi in Tokyo, also responded to Dada journals, but was not a Dada magazine, and analysis of this journal is beyond the scope of this book. See Gennifer Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002) and Toshiharu Omuka, “Tada = Dada (Devotedly Dada) for the Stage: The Japanese Dada Movement 1920–1925,” in The Eastern Dada Orbit: Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Central Europe and Japan, ed. Stephen C. Foster, Gerald Janecek, and Toshiharu Omuka (New York: G.K. Hall; London: Prentice Hall International, 1998), 223–303; Gennifer Weisenfeld. “Mavo’s Conscious Constructivism: Art, Individualism, and Daily Life in Interwar Japan,” Art Journal 55, no. 3 (1996): 64–73. Timothy Benson, “Dada Geographies,” Virgin Microbe, Hopkins and White, 22. In his introductory essay, Jean-Michel Rabaté observes, for instance, “Dadaism was slowly petering out and giving a difficult birth to surrealism.” Jean-Michel Rabaté, 1922: Litterature, Culture, Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2. Dawn Ades, “Dada-Constructivism,” in Dada-Constructivism: The Janus Face of the Twenties (London: Annely Juda Fine Art, 1984), 35. For analysis of the differences between Russian and international constructivism, see The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephen Bann, The Documents of 20th-Century Art (New York: The Viking Press, 1974), xxxv–xxxvi. Benson refers to Merz and other such efforts, including those in New York, that “involved the same artists and are considered crucial to understanding Dada when defined stylistically or ideologically” as “cognates.” Benson, “Dada Geographies,” Virgin Microbe, 21. The Dadaists and their magazines do not, however, seek to function as what Crimp calls an “organizing device,” as Crimp calls it, which “reduces the now even vaster

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heterogeneity to a single perfect similitude.” Douglas Crimp, “On the Museum’s Ruins,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 50. 7 Marius Hentea, “Federating the Modern Spirit: The 1922 Congress of Paris,” PMLA 130, no. 1 (January 2015), 39. For more on Cannibale, see Ruth Hemus, “Dada’s Paris Season,” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, part I, 188–91. Projecteur features texts by Dermée, Picabia, Tzara, Breton, Aragon, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and the back page announces the “Festival Dada,” held at the Salle Gaveau on the rue la Boëtie on May 26, 1920. 8 Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 287. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 289–92; Doherty, “Berlin,” Dada, 100. For an account of how the press covered Dada, see Watts, Dada and the Press. 11 One French article reads, “In Paris, nothing is synonymous with ‘Dada’ The Dadas or Dadaists think they have to fill an important mission here, protesting against all the accepted principles of art, science, music, and religion. It’s a word of artistic anarchy” (“à Paris, rien est synonyme de ‘Dada’. Les Dadas ou Dadaïstes croient avoir à remplir ici-bas importante mission en protestant contre tous les principes admis en art, science, musique et religion. C’est un mot d’anarchie artistique.”) L’Ecouteur, L’avenir, June 17, 1921, quoted in Dada and the Press, 276. 12 Bergius, Dada Triumphs, 135. 13 Marius Hentea writes, “There was something ‘cosmic’ about Dada that transcended any set of axioms.” Hentea, “Federating the Modern Spirit,” 47. 14 Francis Picabia, quoted in “Francis Picabia et Dada,” L’Esprit nouveau, no. 9 (Paris, May 1921): 1059–60, trans. Camfield, Francis Picabia, 163. As Sanouillet points out, his comments target then-Dada enthusiasts Breton, Aragon, Soupault, and their circle, but for many in Paris these individuals represented what Dada had become. Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 196. 15 See Jed Rasula, Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 245–7. Benson refers to Bucharest, among other cities, as a site that “functioned more as part of a social network and cultural infrastructure … that support Dada than as part of Dada’s self-indexing.” Benson, “Dada Geographies,” Virgin Microbe, 21. 16 Jonathan P. Eburne, “Dada, Futurism, and Raymond Roussel,” 1922, ed. Rabaté, 131. 17 Chris Poggi, “Circa 1922: Art, Technology, and the Activated Beholder,” in 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics, 104. 18 Henryk Berlewi, “Miedzynarodowa Wystawa w Düsseldorfie” [“International Exhibition in Düsseldorf ”], Nasz Kurior (August 2, 1922), trans. Timothy O. Benson, “Exchange and Transformation: The Internationalization of the AvantGarde(s) in Central Europe,” in Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and

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20 21

22

23 24

25

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27 28 29 30

Dada Magazines Transformation, 1910–1930, ed. Timothy Benson (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2002), 64. Timothy Benson has argued that pluralization and the potential loss of any semblance of unity threatened to undermine the avant-garde. Benson, “Exchange and Transformation,” in Central European Avant-Gardes, 64. Mertins and Jennings, “Introduction,” in G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, ed. Mertins and Jennings, 3. André Breton, “Characteristics of the Modern Evolution and What It Consists Of (November 1922),” in The Lost Steps, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 113, quoted in Jonathan P. Eburne, “Dada, Futurism, and Raymond Roussel,” in 1922, ed. Rabaté, 129–30. Hentea, “Federating the Modern Spirit,” 47. For a discussion of the infighting among Dada members in Paris in 1921 and 1922, see Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 209–16; 233–54 and Marius Hentea, Tata Dada, 178–81. For a discussion of Congress in Paris, see Hentea, “Federating the Modern Spirit” and Jonathan P. Eburne, “Dada, Futurism, and Raymond Roussel,” in 1922, ed. Rabaté 128. Hentea, “Federating the Modern Spirit,” 38. Breton, “Leave Everything,” The Lost Steps, quoted in Eburne, “Dada, Futurism, and Raymond Roussel,” 1922, ed. Rabaté, 131. Other periodicals involved in Dadaists’ debates included the French culture magazine, Comoedia, Breton’s Littérature, Picabia’s Pilhaou-Thibaou (July 1921, Paris), a single issue publication that he described as an “annexe” to 391, which includes texts criticizing the Barrès trial and signaling Dada’s demise, Picabia’s La Pomme du Pins (February 1922), answered by Tzara’s Le Coeur à Barbe (April 1922). For more on Le Coeur à Barbe, see Hemus, “Dada’s Paris Season,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, part I, 198–201. “Les vrais dadas sont contre Dada.” Bulletin Dada, 2. “Dada est le caméléon des changement rapide et interessé / Dada est contre le futur, Dada est mort / Dada est idiot / Vive Dada, Dada n’est pas une école littéraire hurle.” Tristan Tzara, untitled poem, Dadaphone, 4. For more on the Paris issues of Dada, see Hemus, “Dada’s Paris Season,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, part I, 194–8. Tristan Tzara, “News of the Seven Arts in Europe,” Vanity Fair (November 1922): 88. The other articles were “Some Memoirs of Dadaism” (July 1922): 70, 92, 94, and “What We Are Doing in Europe” (September 1922): 68, 100. For more on the event, see Rasula, Destruction Was My Beatrice, 242. Stephen Bann, “Introduction,” The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Bann, xxxvi. Ibid., xxv; John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 125. Dada Tank was printed in two slightly different versions (the second without material that was deemed obscene by state censors), by Stampirija Gaj on the

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32 33 34

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36 37 38 39

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second floor of 6 Peŧrinska in Zagreb. It is eight pages long and measures 9½ × 12½ inches (24 × 32 cm). Dada Jazz is eighteen pages long. For more on Zenit, see Laurel Seely Voloder and Tyrus Miller, “Avant-Garde Periodicals in the Yugoslavian Crucible,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines III, part II, 1100–14. In the second issue of Zenit (March 1921), Micić published his article, “Dada Dadaizam,” in which he quotes French texts from Dada journals and speaks critically of Dada. Micić, “Dada-Dadaizam” Zenit 2, 17, trans. Dragan Kujundžić and Jasna Jovanov, “Yougo-Dada,” in The Eastern Dada Orbit, ed. Janecek and Omuka, 44. I examined original copies of these issues of Zenit in the Special Collections of the Getty Research Institute. Aleksić, “Dadaizam” Zenit 3 (April 1921), trans. Jovanov and Kujundžić, “YougoDada,” in The Eastern Dada Orbit, ed. Janecek and Omuka, 45. Dragan Aleksić to Tristan Tzara, August 20, 1922, Dossiers Tristan Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire, Jacques Doucet, TZRC 44. It also includes a playful element: a postage stamp, which was affixed tilted and upside down, which one would imagine would be added after the poster was printed—in fact it was printed as part of the poster—and how it was printed seems to invite a double take, as the stamp overlaps the second “d” of “Dada” but is overprinted by the second “a.” The copy of the poster now in the Special Collections at the Getty Research Institute, most likely the only surviving copy, was once in Tzara’s collection. It bears the penciled item number for the 1968 Tzara sale in Berlin as well as the penciled notation “Tzara 52” on the verso. Sonja Briski Uzelac. “Visual Arts in the Avant-Gardes between the Two Wars,” in Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-AvantGardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991, ed. Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 135. Aleksić to Tzara, May 14, 1922, Dossiers Tristan Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire, Jacques Doucet, TZRC 43. Richard Huelsenbeck, “Introduction,” The Dada Almanac, 9–10. “Prvi dada-staovi rade u ovoj prima dada-reviji. Urlo zaslužni jugosl. Umetnici. Propagujte to je glas naroda.” Dada Tank, cover, trans. Andrea Walsh. “Svi na okup blizu je dan razračuna pasti če stare vrednote ‘umetnosti’ Sveukupni krematorijl ne donašaju toliko kalorija u teto istrullh mumija kao dada.” Dada Tank, cover, trans. Andrea Walsh. “Dada ima svetski (worldman) karakter: Dada je produckt inernacijonainih hotel foyera, dada je na boullvard sevastopolu tako kod kuće kao I na Calle arenal, Untern den linden I na Zrinjevcu. Vido Lastov, trans. Jovanov and Kujundžić, “Yougo-Dada,” in The Eastern Dada Orbit, ed. Janecek and Omuka, 51. “Börse dekliniert triest / Polypkinder aplaus [sic] dreieckiger schwert / Sägt sich sonne tiefwund tragic / Ajax /”

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42 Kujundžić and Jovanov, “Yougo-Dada,” in The Eastern Dada Orbit, ed. Janecek and Omuka, 50. 43 “Manifesto of Monsieur Aa” and “Colonial syllogism” had been published in Littérature in 1920 and 1921, and Tzara may have sent Aleksić copies of these publications or manuscripts of the poems. “Manifesto of Monsieur Aa” was published in no. 13, May 1920, and “Colonial syllogism” was published in no. 18, March 1921. “Comment je suis devenu charmant, sympathique et délicieux” was published in La Vie des lettres, no. 4, 1921. Tzara, Oeuvres Complètes I, 704. 44 After the war, in 1918, the region unified under the name the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. 45 “Svi na okup … ” Dada Tank, cover, trans. Andrea Walsh. 46 The cover of Dada Jazz promotes it as a Dada “anthology,” and it includes excerpts from Huelsenbeck’s Dada Almanach, but like Dada Tank, it functioned like a journal, that is, a portable publication meant to circulate locally and internationally and to promote the efforts of its editors. 47 For more on Veshch. Gegenstand. Objet see Stephen Bury, “‘Not to Adorn Life But to Organize It,’” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, part II, 855–60. For more on Ma see Éva Forgács and Tyrus Miller, “The Avant-Garde in Budapest and in Exile in Vienna,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, part II, 1128–41. 48 Jovanov and Kujundžić, “Yougo-Dada,” in The Eastern Dada Orbit, ed. Janecek and Omuka, 58. Unfortunately, his collection of letters and Dada ephemera does not survive. Uzelac, “Visual Arts in the Avant-Gardes between the Two Wars,” in Impossible Histories, ed. Djurić and Šuvaković, 132. 49 Sascha Bru writes, “Whereas the first and final issues stated that the magazine’s administration was based in Leiden … the two other issues referred readers to The Hague.” Sascha Bru, “‘The Will to Style’: The Dutch Contribution to the AvantGarde,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, part I, 306. 50 For more on De Stijl, see Hubert F. van den Berg, The Import of Nothing: How Dada Came, Saw, and Vanished in the Low Countries (1915–1929), vol. VII, Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, ed. Stephen C. Foster (New York: G.K. Hall and Co., 2002), 111–49, and Bru, “The Will to Style,” 296–306. 51 For more on this pseudonym, see Craig Eliason, “‘All the Serious Men Are Sick’: van Doesburg, Mondrian and Dada,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 34, no. 1 (2009/2010), 50–2. As van den Berg argues, Dada was not very popular in Holland after the war. Hubert van den Berg, “Some Reflections on the Margins of Dada,” in Virgin Microbe, ed. Hopkins and White, 77–9. 52 Van Doesburg to Tzara, n.d. (most likely toward the end of 1921), Dossiers Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, TZRC 4090.

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53 van den Berg, The Import of Nothing, 113, and Jane Beckett, “Dada, Van Doesburg and De Stijl,” Journal of European Studies 9, no. 3 (1979): 9. 54 Beckett, “Dada, Van Doesburg and De Stijl,” 14, 5, 11. Eliason, “All the Serious Men Are Sick,” 50–1. 55 Theo Van Doesburg to Tristan Tzara, June 6, 1920, Dossiers Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, TZRC 4084. Mécano identifies Van Doesburg as its visual arts technician (“mécanicien littéraire”) and Bonset as the literary editor (“gérant littéraire”). Bru, “The Will to Style,” 306. 56 Theo Van Doesburg to Antony Kok, June 24, 1921, trans. Els Hoek, Theo van Doesburg (Utrecht: Centraal Museum, 2000), 308. His emphasis. 57 A letter from the summer of 1923 indicates that he planned another issue of Mécano, but it never appeared. Van Doesburg blames lack of funds, rising costs, and a slow editor for delays in publishing the magazine. Van Doesburg to Tzara, n.d., Dossiers Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, TZRC 4090. The first three numbers are one folded sheet measuring about 12½ × 19½ in. (32 × 50 cm) and the final issue is four folded sheets. An average of 200 copies per issue was printed. Bru, “The Will to Style,” 306, 309. 58 An annual subscription cost 50 marks, 20 francs, and 22 lira. The first three numbers are one folded sheet measuring about 12½ × 19½ in. (32 × 50 cm) and the final issue is four folded sheets. Bru, “The Will to Style,” 306–7. 59 One example is a satirical “manifesto” in the first issue, which reflects on the 1922 International Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists. For more on Mécano and the Bauhaus, see Bru, “The Will to Style,” 308. Van Doesburg did not show Bauhaus works, however. In fact, he used the journal to critique the religious/romantic tendencies of the Bauhaus. Bru, “The Will to Style,” 308. 60 Theo Van Doesburg to Antony Kok, November 12, 1920, cited in Hoek, Theo van Doesburg, 308. 61 Theo Van Doesburg, “Karakteristiek van het Dadaisme,” Mécano 4/5. 62 Beckett, “Dada, Van Doesburg and De Stijl,” 5. 63 van den Berg, “Some Reflections on the Margins of Dada,” in Virgin Microbe, ed. Hopkins and White, 83. 64 Tristan Tzara, interview with Roger Vitrac, “Tristan Tzara va cultiver ses vices” (“Tristan Tzara Is Going to Cultivate His Vices”), Le journal du people (April 14, 1923): 135–7, trans. Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 236. Schwitters also cited it in Merz 4 in July 1923, with the appended title, “L’arriviste Tzara va cultivar ses vices.” Merz 4, 38, 40. 65 I. K. Bonset, “Karakteristiek van het Dadaisme.” Van Doesburg, trans. Claire White, Dadas on Art, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1971), 112. Tzara’s manifesto reads, “order = disorder, ego = non-ego, affirmation = negation” (“ordre = désordre, moi = non=moi, affirmation=negation”). Tristan Tzara, “Manifeste Dada 1918,” Dada 3.

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66 Quoted in Beckett, “Dada, Van Doesburg and De Stijl,” 22. 67 I. K. Bonset, “Tot een constructieve dichtkunst,” Mécano no 4–5 (1923): 7, quoted in van den Berg, “Some Reflections on the Margins of Dada,” in Virgin Microbe, ed. Hopkins and White, 83. 68 Judging from Tzara’s October 1921 letter to Van Doesburg, Tzara sent all of them. Tristan Tzara to Theo Van Doesburg, October 4, 1921, Dossiers Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, TZRC 4088, quoted in Hoek, Theo van Doesburg, 308. 69 Van Doesburg, “The Will to Style” (“Der Wille zum Stil”), trans. Joost Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 123. 70 Biro, The Dada Cyborg, 136, 139. 71 For more on Constructivist graphic design, see Drucker, The Visible Word, 223–47. 72 Hans Richter, Introduction, “G,” in “Great Little Magazines,” series, ed. Mike Weaver, Form no. 3 (December 15, 1966), 27. 73 For a discussion of the multiple meanings of Gestaltung, see Mertins and Jennings, “Introduction,” G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 5–6. The magazine measured approximately 41 × 29 cm (about 16 × 11.5 inches). The first two issues were four pages long, but subsequent issues were longer. Bury claims that it brought together Dada, Expressionism, Futurism, Constructivism, and De De Stijl. Bury, “Not to Adorn Life but to Organize It,” 867. 74 See Mertins and Jennings, “Introduction,” G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 12. 75 Hans Richter, quoted in Marion von Hofacker, “Introduction,” in G: Material zur Elementaren Gestaltung, ed. Hans Richter (Munich: Der Kern, 1986), np. 76 A list of other journals, printed in each issue, attests to its participation in an international network of journals, including Zenit, De Stijl, Mécano, Merz, and Noi. 77 Hans Richter, “Dada and the Film,” in Dada: Monograph of a Movement, ed. Willy Verkauf (London: Academy Editions; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), 39. His emphasis. 78 The two works by Eggeling in Dada 4–5 are “Basse générale de la peinture: orchestration de la ligne” (“General Bass of Painting: Orchestration of the Line”) and “Basse générale de la peinture: extension” (“General Bass of Painting: Extension”). 79 Hans Richter, Introduction, “G,” “Great Little Magazines,” series, ed. Mike Weaver, no. 3, Form no. 3 (December 15, 1966), 27. 80 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (1965), trans. David Britt (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 64. 81 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, 59. 82 “Heute weiß ich I und mit mir alle anderen Begründer des deutschen Dadaismus, daß unser einziger Fehler war, die sogenannte Kunst überhaupt ernst genommen zu haben. Der Dadaism war unser Erwachen aus diesem Selbstbetrug. Wir sahen die irrsinnigen Endprodukte der herrschenden Gesellschaftsordnung und brachen in Gelächter aus.”

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83 As Mertins and Jennings write that Lissitzky’s design “ensured that a constructivist visual sensibility inflected every linguistic utterance on the journal’s pages.” Mertins and Jennings, “Introduction,” G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 12. For more on the graphic design of G, see Maria Gogh, “Contains Graphic Material: El Lissitzky and the Topography of G,” G: An AvantGarde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 21–51. 84 László Moholy-Nagy, in Staatliches Bauhaus, Weimar, 1919–23, trans. Bauhaus 1919–28, ed. Hebert Bayer, Walter Gropius and Ise Gropius, The Museum of Modern Art, 1938, quoted in Lewis Blackwell, Twentieth-Century Type (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 64. 85 Schwitters, “Dadaismus in Holland,” Merz 1 (January 1923), 7, trans. Dorothea Dietrich, “Hanover: ‘True Art’ and ‘True Dada,’” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Europe 1880–1940, 967. He was speaking for himself, Theo and Petro Van Doesburg, and Vilmos Huszár. Merz was published by Merzverlag, Hanover. For a discussion of Schwitters and his travels to and relationships with Dadaists in other European cities, see Michael White, “Dada Migrations: Definition, Dispersal, and the Case of Schwitters,” 54–69. 86 For more on the postwar publishing context out of which Merz emerged, including the magazines Das Hohe Ufer, Der Zweemann, which published some Dada content as well as contributions from Schwitters, and, the most Dada of them all, the singleissue magazine, Der Marstall, which included many Dada texts, see Dorothea Dietrich, “Hanover: ‘True Art’ and ‘True Dada,’” in Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. II, part II, 947. 87 In his call for contributions in the first issue of Merz, Schwitters declares, “I dedicate Merz I to Dadaism in Holland.” Dietrich, Oxford, 966. 88 The first four regular issues are Merz 1, 2, 4, and 6. The third and fifth are folios of lithographs by Schwitters and Arp. After Merz 6, the journal adopted a decidedly more Constructivist identity. 89 van den Berg, “Some Reflections on the Margins of Dada,” in Virgin Microbe, ed. Hopkins and White, 76. 90 Ibid., 75. 91 Kurt Schwitters, “Dadaism in Holland,” Merz 1, 5, 7–8, trans. Michael Kane, Dada Reader, 291–3. 92 Schwitters, “Dadaismus in Holland,” Merz 1 (1923), 5, quoted in van den Berg, “Some Reflections on the Margins of Dada,” in Virgin Microbe, ed. Hopkins and White, 76. 93 Dietrich writes that Schwitters brought together “a variety of activities within one overarching term,” “Merz.” Dietrich, 967. 94 “médecin,” “narcis” [sic], “femmes,” “paysages,” “convalescent” 95 van den Berg, The Import of Nothing, 152.

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96 It is notable that Schwitters did not include collages by Hausmann and Höch, given his close ties to them. Before Merz 6 came out, Schwitters rejected a collage by Höch, saying it was “too Dadaist for Merz,” possibly referring to its political content. It is possible he simply did not want to share the stage with other collagists, but it may have also wanted to highlight his own collages by ignoring other similar efforts. Kurt Schwitters to Hannah Höch, September 12, 1923, Hannah Höch: eine Lebenscollage. Vol. II, 1921–1945, ed. Eberhard Roters, Heinz Ohff, Ralf Burmeister, Eckhard Fürlus (Berlin: Ostfildern-Ruit: Künstlerarchiv der Berlinischen Galerie: Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Photographie und Architektur; G. Hatje, 1995), 126–7. 97 El Lissitzky, “Topography and Typography,” in Merz 4, 1923, trans., ed. Henry Hongmin Kim, Graphic Design Discourse: Evolving Theories, Ideologies, and Processes of Visual Communication (New York: Princeton Architectural Press), 120. 98 Kurt Schwitters, Merz 2, 17–18, trans. Elderfield, 188. 99 “Weisst du Adressen pour exchange avec autres periodiques?” Schwitters to Tzara, March 16, 1923, quoted in Schrott, Dada 15/25, 326. Kurt Schwitters to Tristan Tzara, March 16, 1923, quoted in Dada 15/25, 326. His emphasis. 100 Käte T. Steinitz, Kurt Schwitters: A Portrait from Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 18, quoted in Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, 128. 101 75 HP measures 27.5 × 23.3 cm (about 11 × 9 inches) 102 “Pictopoezia nu e pictura. Pictopoezia nu e poezie. Pictopoezia e Pictopoezie.” 103 “La pictopoésie revivifie tous les courents révélateurs d’art nouveau LA PICTOPOESIE réalise enfin la vraie synthése [sic] des futurismes dadaismes constructivismes. Les attitudes plus éloignées se retrouvent universellement fécondées dans le mouvement pictopoétique … Pictopoèsie triomphe sur tout enregistre tout realize l’impossible.” 104 75 HP, October 1924, np, quoted in S. A. Mansbach, “The ‘Foreignness’ of Classical Modern Art in Romania,” The Art Bulletin, 80, no. 3 (September 1998), 542. 105 For more on Bucharest and the art scene there, see Tom Sanqvist, Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 340, 357. Also Irina Livezeanu, “Romania: ‘Windows toward the West’: New Forms and the ‘Poetry of True Life,’” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III, part II, 1157–83. 106 Closer to home, Contimporanul (1922–1932), co-edited by Janco, Ion Venia, and M. H. Maxy, which set out to support the “Stil Nou” (new style), served as a model for them as well. Ioana Vlasiu, “Bucharest,” Central European Avant-Gardes, 252. See also Sanqvist, 345 ff. 107 Voronca and Brauner were very active members of the French avant-garde later.

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108 “Notre Groupement compte parmi ses collaborateurs les meilleurs écrivains et artistes du mouvement moderniste de tout le monde.” 109 “Pour collaborer a [sic] 75 HP il faut: savoir bien danser, uriner sur tout, respecter ses parents, avoir un certificat de bonne conduite, boire de l’acide sulfurique, connaître la boxe se décapiter deux fois par semaine.” 110 “Gramatica logical sentmentalismul ca agătătoare de rufe pe frânghi chiamă inpărătia afişelor luminoase,” trans. Michael H. Impey, “Before and After Tzara: Romanian Contributions to Dada,” The Eastern Dada Orbit, ed. Janecek and Omuka, 134. 111 “sinteza,” “simultanism,” “ritm,” “armonie,” “sonor,” and “paralelism,” “abstract,” “vocabular,” “interstitial,” and “mecanism.” 112 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 199. 113 Dossiers Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, TZRC 4113. “Envoyez moi SVP la liste d’adresses pour Mécano!”) Theo Van Doesburg to Tristan Tzara, October 20, 1922, Dossiers Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, TZRC 4104. 114 The final issue of Mécano reported on Van Doesburg’s Dada tour with Nelly Van Doesburg, Schwitters, and Huszár as if it had garnered much attention, though in fact this was not the case. Bru, “The Will to Style,” 309. Theo Van Doesburg to Tristan Tzara, January 19, 1923, Dossiers Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, TZRC 4103. For an analysis of the tour, see van den Berg, “Some Reflections on the Margins of Dada,” in Virgin Microbe, ed. Hopkins and White, 72–4. 115 Bury, “Not to Adorn Life but to Organize It,” 866. Werner Gräff, “Concerning the So-Called G Group,” Art Journal 23 (Summer 1964), 282. 116 Schwitters to Tzara, June 20, 1923, quoted in Schrott, ed., Dada 15/25, 330. 117 Kurt Schwitters to Ilarie Voronca and Victor Brauner, quoted in Marina VanciPerahim, “75 HP, La Revue Pictopoétique,” preface to 75 HP (reprint) (Paris: J.-M. Place, 1993), 7.

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Epilogue: Magazines to Zines: Echoes of Dada in 1970s America

The words “dada triumphs,” a reproduction of Man Ray’s photomontage, “Dadaphoto,” and Francis Picabia’s “Funny Guy” handbill—such contributions would not be surprising in a Dada magazine. But in fact they appear in a 1973 issue of the NYCS Weekly Breeder, one of many zines published in San Francisco in the 1970s (Figure E.1). The Bay Area Dadaists—Bill “Picasso” Gaglione, Anna Banana, Tim Mancusi, Charles Chickadel, Monte Cazazza, Irene Dogmatic, and Monte Cazazza, among others—gathered in the Bay Area (many coming from New York) in the late 1960s and early 1970s.1 Besides putting on performances and staging various pranks, they produced zines—underground, amateur, smallcirculation serials—they dubbed “Dadazines”: NYCS Weekly Breeder (1972– 1973), Dogarithms (1973), West Bay Dadaist (later Quoz?) (1974–1975), Vile (1974–1977), Punks (1975), and Insult (1979), among others (Figure E.2).2 The Bay Area Dadaists’ interpretations of Dada were neither studious nor thorough, but they responded to Dada journals in their content and in their combining function, exposing cultural, political, social, and artistic similarities between the early and late twentieth century. These quirky publications speak to Dada’s ongoing relevance. Among the many ways that Dada has informed the work of later artists, the magazines fostered print media- and network-based movements that broke from conventional, object-based notions of art and collectivity.3 The Bay Area Dadaists affiliated with the Fluxus movement that originated in the 1950s and 1960s and with Mail Art, or postal art, the worldwide collective linked to Ray Johnson and the New York Correspondence School, which depends on the postal service to circulate pieces.4 Both groups adopted Dadaists’ strategies, including their engagement with periodicals. Dada was primarily defined for the Bay Area Dadaists by Fluxus and Mail Art, but enthusiasm for Dada among members of these groups was not universal.5 Dick Higgins declared, “I knew several of the old Dadaists, had been raised on their work, and there was

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Figure E.1  The NYCS Weekly Breeder, ed. Tim Mancusi, San Francisco, 1973, The Bay Area Dadaists, instant print. Museum of Modern Art © Bill Gaglione dadaland.

no doubt in my mind that what we happenings and Fluxus people were doing had rather little to do with Dada.”6 Performance artist and Fluxus affiliate Allan Kaprow later explained, “No one said, ‘Oh isn’t it wonderful that you’re a NeoDadaist.’ It was a criticism, not a joyous utterance.”7 Despite such distancing,

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Figure E.2  The West Bay Dadaist, vol. 1, no. 2, ed. Arthur Cravan (Charles Chickadel), San Francisco, June 1973, Trinity Press/Foundling Publications, front cover, instant print, Qwik Print. John Held, Jr. Collection of Mail Art Periodicals, The Museum of Modern Art Library.

they drew on Dada’s resistance to the art market, manipulation of language, transnational reach, subversive, sardonic sense of humor, collage techniques, self-publishing, dependence on the postal system, and emphasis on creating a transnational network. Others embraced the Dada connection. Johnson went by “Sugar Dada” and “Dada Daddy.”8 In his declaration, “Mail Art and the New

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Dada,” Mail Artist Klaus Groh declares, “Mail art is Dada art!” and then lists their similarities, saying that both are “explosive,” “easy to do,” and “for everyone.”9 Fluxus affiliates, too, linked their activities with those of the Dadaists.10 Ben Vautier credited Dada with the emergence of almost every postwar art trend, asserting, “Because of Dada everything, anything, everywhere, anywhere, is art/ Before Dada, art was in form, after Dada, art is in attitude.”11 The Bay Area Dadaists were more like this latter group, though their serials’ explicit references to Dada journals are notable. Their “Dadazines” unabashedly allied themselves with Dada and directly referenced Dada magazines. They quoted these publications, imitated their understanding of the ethos of Dada, and adopted Dada strategies, chiefly the integration of past and present. This tendency is particularly extraordinary in 1970s San Francisco, where various artists were interested in Dada but resented labels, often assigned by critics who compared them unfavorably to earlier artists. Although figures such as William T. Wiley, Clay Spohn, and Bruce Conner called upon Dada predecessors in their work, they shunned the association. Spohn contended that while Dada wanted to destroy the power of art he wanted to build it up.12 Conner, who studied under Max Ernst’s son, Jimmy Ernst, played down his familiarity with Dada, saying that all he knew about it came from Robert Motherwell’s book, Dada Painters and Poets (1951, 1967).13 The Bay Area Dadaists, by contrast, embraced and invited association with Dada, even as they mocked their choice. A handwritten passage in Chickadel’s The West Bay Dadaist, for example, reads, “Boy are we ever being Dada here. It was redundant by 1920. What is this? Method teaching in art history? (Picabia) … ”14 They assumed Dada nicknames: Gaglione was “Dadaland” (or “Daddaland”), Banana became “Ms. Canadadda,” Mancusi was “Dada Processing,” and Chickadel took on the name of the proto Dada pugilist poet, Arthur Cravan. Some of their performances, too, are Dada-inspired. Examples include Dada sound poetry readings, a production of Tzara’s play, Gas Heart, strutting in the San Francisco Columbus Day parade wearing huge letters spelling “Dada,” and “Dada Shave,” held at La Mamelle Center in 1978. For this event they shaved “Dada” onto their chests (captured in a photo Banana used on the cover of Vile), a nod to Duchamp’s shaving of a star onto his head (“Tonsure”) in 1921.15 The Bay Area Dadaists also built on the print culture of their adoptive city—including the Beats’ literary journal Beatitude (1959–1975), the hippie newspaper, Oracle of the City of San Francisco (1966–1968), and Berman’s magazine, Semina (1955–1964). They looked to Fluxus and Mail Art periodicals,

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which, like the Dadaists before them, recognized periodical production as a major form of creative expression. File magazine (1972–1989) had the largest circulation (between 3,000 and 5,000) and was the longest running and best known.16 Initiated principally by A. A. Bronson in Canada, it was a parody of Life magazine with a glossy cover disguising low budget, tabloid-like inside pages. Serial publishing was fundamental to Fluxus. Issues of its longest-running publication, the newspaper V TRE (later cc V TRE, 1963–1979), edited by George Brecht and George Maciunas, present pseudo-scientific illustrations, cutouts from mass media journals and advertisements, arbitrary headlines, event scores, Fluxus works, and advertisements for (actual and imagined) Fluxus events and publications. Fluxus serials—along with other examples of underground DIY publishing and the printed materials of groups such as Black Mask/Up against the Wall Motherfucker and the Situationist-inspired Point Blank!, edited by David Jacobs in Berkeley in the early 1970s—encouraged and informed the Bay Area Dadaists’ zine production. Dadazines vary in size, length, and content, reflecting the eclecticism of their editors and contributors. Most are between twenty and forty pages, but they can be anywhere from two to over a hundred. Some, such as Punks (1975), measuring only 2¾ × 2¼ inches, are miniscule, whereas others, like Banana’s Vile, at 14 × 10¾ inches, are much larger. In addition to using instant printing and photocopying, for a brief period the Bay Area Dadaists employed an offset printer in Chickadel’s garage, under the name Trinity Press.17 Limited to print runs of about fifty to three hundred, the Dadazines came out erratically; some in only single issues. Like the Dadaists, these 1970s artists used periodicals as a way to assume the role of critics and to publish their own work. They recognized that they could use them as a means of exchange, a deviation from the mainstream and press, and as an oppositional medium providing a space for critical and artistic dialogue and collaboration. Additionally, they embraced the continued currency of print media as a spontaneous means of responding to political, artistic, and cultural concerns. Prompted by the increasingly pervasive and predatory nature of mass media in the late twentieth century, the zinesters found self-publishing to be an effective means of critiquing its channels of production and distribution. Their decision to hijack the zine and circulate it in an underground and small, if international, sphere manifests their sense of a rising need to resort to ever-more dissident measures to evade a media and commercial culture that was devouring and assimilating even the most fundamental interrogations of the status quo. The zines also offered

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an alternative approach to museum practice at a time when artists were interrogating conventional exhibition spaces within an ever-expanding and commercialized artistic community. Dadazines demonstrate a perception of Dada that is at once ambiguous and specific. Mancusi’s description of the NYCS Weekly Breeder bears this out. He claimed that the publication gave him “an opportunity to merge my interests in Dada and Mail Art with my skills in graphic arts,” adding, “I could draw like an underground cartoonist, do interesting designs with type and lettering, make Max Ernst-type collages, all the while poking fun at politics and religion.”18 Encouraged by Dada magazines’ refusal to nail down a system of belief, Dadazines describe Dada as an attitude, something that coincides with others’ perception of the movement. Bay Area Dadaists’ knowledge of Dada’s history was not thorough, yet their zines indicate that they recognized parallels between their time and that of the Dadaists and appreciated the earlier group’s efforts to confront disillusionment with satire and nonsense. A 1973 issue of the NYCS Weekly Breeder calls Dada “a savage anarchism, a deliberate program devised to undermine the moral and social assumptions of existing middle-class society.”19 But more common is the kind of characterization found in Vile, a parody of Bronson’s parodic File. She identifies her magazine’s “true nature” as being “subtle put-down of the mass culture with nasty, Dada, ‘up-yours’ type messages.”20 Even more vague was Mancusi’s claim that he and others were drawn to Dada “not just as a period of art but as a way of living.”21 The San Francisco group’s imprecise understanding of Dada did not prevent them from stealing physical, visual, and textual material from Dada publications. A passage over photographs of contemporary artist Vito Acconci in an issue of The West Bay Dadaist reads, “Ladies and Gentlemen: I don’t have to tell you that for the general public and for you, the refined public, a Dadaist is the equivalent of a leper,” a quotation from Tzara’s 1922 “Lecture on Dada.”22 A banner on the bottom right-hand corner of the cover identifies it as a “Special Neo-Merz Issue,” although nothing in the body of the zine refers to Merz or Schwitters in any way. A page (that Mancusi identified as one of his favorites) of a 1973 issue of the NYCS Weekly Breeder is particularly notable (Figure E.1). It includes many excerpts from Dada art journals and related ephemera, some of them copied from reproductions in Motherwell’s Dada Painters and Poets. Here we find Man Ray’s photomontage, “Dadaphoto,” as it appeared in New York Dada. The piece’s lambasting of censorship is repeated elsewhere on the page by photographs of nude women strategically covered by black stars. Dominating the top half is a cutout of playboy Dadaist Francis

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Picabia’s “Funny Guy” handbill (1921) with Mancusi’s name replacing Picabia’s, so that it is printed seven times amid the illogical French text. A photograph of the back of a head obscures the original text and visually rhymes with the back of Dagwood Bumstead’s head in the “Blondie” comic just to the left. Inserted nonsensically into this collage of a page are the words “dada siegt!” (“Dada triumphs”), from Der Dada 2’s cover, as well as the cryptic composition from the Cologne Dadaists’ 1920 catalog exhibition.23 Mixing cutouts from reproductions of Dada art journals with ones from today’s classifieds, Banana, Gaglione, and their affiliates dialogued with the past while engaging present-day absurdities. By juxtaposing 1970s magazine and newspaper clippings with Dada journals published in the 1910s, they stressed the historical specificity of their own media critique in a way that evokes the Dadaists’ practice in their journals. Their adoption of collage to mingle these materials, of course, is yet another way they were indebted to Dada, something Mancusi and Gaglione highlighted in the 1981 anthology issue of NYCS Weekly Breeder: “Collage, [sic] itself owes its existence to the early Dadaists, who in the 1920’s [sic]broke through the formal design and composition standards of their day.”24 This technique enabled their distinctively unschooled response to Dada. Unlike the many 1970s exhibitions and books on Dada, such as Marcel Duchamp at the Museum of Modern Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1973 and Dada and Surrealism Reviewed in London in 1978, the Dadazines de-historicized Dada, generating disjointed, decontextualized peeps of the past, not a careful, retrospective account.25 Dada’s own eluding of logic and exact parameters gave these later artists license to take such liberties. Even when they did not draw directly from Dada sources, the Bay Area Dadaists imitated their sense of humor and interactive nature. Dadazines resist defining Dada, often drolly degrading it, much like Tzara, Huelsenbeck, and the other earlier Dadaists had. In a 1972 issue of the Dadazine, Weekly Reader Da-jest, a Dada manifesto by “R. Man” (Mancusi—a play on R. Mutt) is altered so that the line “Is Dada beginning to speak to you” is replaced with “Dada utterly useless and only $2.98.”26 The cover of the ninth issue of Banana’s The Sometimes Monthly Banana Rag (1973–1979) shows a drawing of Jesus, probably taken from a religious flyer, next to the words “Jesus Christ was the first Dada” and “Dada is idiotic.”27 Additionally, Dadazine 3 includes blunt, Dada-sounding appeals to readers, such as “You’ve come to the page worth tearing out” and “This newspaper isn’t written for everyone.” Such passages force recipients to try to relate the bizarre and varied materials, a task made even more difficult by the low quality of the photocopying.

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In making zine pages, Dadazine editors foregrounded their appropriations by highlighting the glitches in their Dada-inspired processes, generating more visual noise (see Chapter 2). They photocopied images of journals reproduced in published sources, cut them out, pasted new words on them, enlarged and shrunk them, pasted them into place, and copied them again for distribution. These multiple layers of duplication resulted in fuzzy resolution and cut off words, and the mediated nature of the zines interferes with easy comprehension and shifts attention away from content. They flatten Dada, as it were, reducing it to just another source. The zine medium allowed and encouraged this approach. Serials allowed the Bay Area Dadaists to link themselves with the former movement and with their own immediate context.28 They peppered their zines with Dada content, but rather than trying to revise, reinvent, or return to Dada, their zines appropriate, excerpt, and fragment the magazines, mixing various contemporary and historical cultural, religious, and political materials. These amateur, small-circulation publications were part of a larger surge of art magazines in the late twentieth century, but their primary inspiration was Dada magazines, speaking to the ongoing relevance of serials and Dada. Today, zines continue to circulate, particularly among teens and young adults, despite the advent of digital publishing, a testament to the continued power of printed periodicals in an era of ever-growing and ever-more-sophisticated digital connectedness.

Notes 1

Gaglione, Chickadel, and Steve Caravello worked at Baron’s art supply store in San Francisco in 1968. Mancusi, Gaglione’s cousin, arrived a year later, followed by Banana from Victoria, British Columbia, in 1973. 2 The NYCS Weekly Breeder was edited by Tim Mancusi and Steve Caravello, Irene Dogmatic edited Dogarithms and Insult, Charles Chickadel edited West Bay Dadaist (later Quoz?), Anna Banana edited Vile, Punks was coedited by the “Bay Area Daddaists” [sic]. For a definition of a zine, see Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (Bloomington, IN: Microcosm Publishing, 2008), 6–21. 3 See Allen, Artists’ Magazines. 4 For more on Fluxus serials see Owen Smith, “Developing a Fluxable Forum: Early Performance and Publishing,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1998), 12–21; Owen F. Smith, “The Middle Years: The Development of Fluxus Multiples and Publications from 1965 to 1969,” in Fluxus:

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The History of an Attitude, ed. Owen F. Smith (San Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press, 1998), 165–202. For a detailed discussion of many correspondence art zines, see Michael Crane, “Exhibitions and Publications,” in Correspondence Art: Source Book for the Network of International Postal Art Activity, ed. Michael Crane and Mary Stofflet (San Francisco: Contemporary Arts Press, 1984), 301–48; “Mail Art Magazines,” Appendix 5, in Eternal Network: A Mail Art Network, ed. Chuck Welch (Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 1995), 270–80. 5 Gaglione, Banana, and the others maintained close ties with Fluxus, particularly through friendships with Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, as well as California affiliates Ken Friedman and Jeff Berner. John Held Jr., Bay Area Dada (San Francisco, New York: Snowman Publications, 1998), np. 6 Dick Higgins, quoted in Craig Saper, Networked Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 164, n. 3. 7 Allan Kaprow, interview with Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958–62 (New York: The American Federation of Arts in association with Universe Publishing, 1994), 132. 8 Michael Crane, “The Origins of Correspondence Art,” Correspondence Art, 83. 9 Klaus Groh, “Mail Art and the New Dada,” Correspondence Art, 75. 10 In September 1962, Maciunas discussed the renewed interest in Dada among Fluxus artists in his lecture, “Neo-Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry, Art.” He described the movement as “what one might call neo-Dada in the United States, or what in any case we would like to view as such renewed Dadaism.” Hapgood, NeoDada, 27–8. 11 Ben Vautier, quoted in Saper, Networked Art, 164, n. 3. 12 Clay Spohn, interview with Paul Cummings, for the Archives of American Art, January–February 1976. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-historyinterview-clay-spohn-11671. 13 Kevin Hatch, Looking for Bruce Conner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 73. Daniel Spoerri explained the art critics’ position: “Dada was originally a strong movement, and we were just a remake, reheated coffee. That’s what they said. NeoDada was more or less an insult.” Daniel Spoerri, interview with Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada, 132. 14 The West Bay Dadaist 2: 8, December 1974, np. 15 Held, The Bay Area Dadaists, np. 16 For more on File, see Allen, “The Magazine as Mirror: File, 1972–1989,” in Artists’ Magazines, 147–74. 17 Bill Gaglione, telephone interview with author, September 2012. Instant print shops housed customer-friendly small offset presses. In offset printing, ink is transferred from an inked plate to a cylinder covered with a rubber blanket that transfers the ink to the paper. By contrast, photocopying (also known as xerography or electrophotography) is a dry copying technique in which images are produced

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18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26 27 28

Dada Magazines using an electrically charged photoconductor-coated cylindrical drum. See Handbook on Printing Technology (Offset, Gravure, Flexo, Screen), 2nd edition, ed. NIIR Board (Delhi: Asia Pacific Business Press Inc, 2011), 2, and “The Big Boom in Instant Printing,” in Book Production Industry, vol. 44 (June 1968): 67–9. Tim Mancusi, quoted in John Held, Jr., “The Pink Dot Caper,” San Francisco Bay Guardian (August 12–18, 1998): 34. The New York Correspondence School Weekly Breeder 3:6, Fall 1973, np. Anna Banana, About Vile, Vancouver, 1983, quoted in Held, The Bay Area Dadaists, np. Tim Mancusi, quoted in “Mail Interview Project by Ruud Janssen—Part 2,” June 17, 1996, 73. Available at https://www.academia.edu/6769512/Mail-Interview_Project_ by_Ruud_Janssen_-_Part_2. West Bay Dadaist 1:2, June 1973, np. The “Funny Guy” handbill and New York Dada were reproduced in Motherwell’s book. The others most likely derived from related scholarly publications. The New York Correspondence School Weekly Breeder 3, 1981, np. The 1970s witnessed several notable books and exhibitions about the movement, including Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, 1978; Tashjian, Skyscraper Primitives (1975); Lippard, Dadas on Art (1971). Exhibitions included Marcel Duchamp at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1973 and Dada Artfacts at the University of Iowa Museum of Art in 1978. Other sources include Dada: réimpression intégrale …, ed. Sanouillet and Baudouin (1976–1983), The Art Press, ed. Fawcett and Phillpot, from 1976, Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (New York: The Museum of Modern Art and The Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973), and Camfield, Francis Picabia from 1979. Weekly Reader Da-jest 1:1, November/December 1972, np. The Sometimes Monthly Banana Rag 9, June 1973, cover. Mail Art zine editors also took to the stage, putting on Dada- and Futurist-inspired performances. For a listing of their performances, see Suzanne Foley, Space, Time, Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area (San Francisco: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 173, 175, 179, 183.

Bibliography Archival sources Archives of American Art. Dorothea A. Dreier Papers. Joaqin Torres-Garcia Papers, 1921–1974, Washington, DC Beinecke Library, Yale University Connecticut. Katherine Dreier Papers, New Haven Berlinische Galerie, Berlin Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre de documentation et de recherche du Musée national d’art moderne, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris. Dossiers Francis Picabia. Dossiers Tristan Tzara George Grosz Archives, Akademie der Künste, Berlin Getty Research Institute. Jean Brown Papers. Yves Poupard-Lieusseau Papers, Los Angeles International Dada Archive, Iowa City Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich Musée Départemental, Rochechouart. Archives Raoul Hausmann, France New York Public Library. The Elaine Lustig Cohen Dada Collection, New York Philadelphia Museum of Art. Alexina and Marcel Duchamp Papers. The Arensberg Archives, Philadelphia Spencer Collection, New York Public Library, New York

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Index “0–10, The Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures,” Petrograd 92 291 magazine 37, 44, 54 n.81, 63, 144, 150 n.8 391 magazine 4, 10, 19 n.20, 57–8, 63, 82 n.3, 97, 104–5, 129, 168 75 HP magazine 7, 13, 157–8, 178–87, 196 n.101 Acconci, Vito 204 Ackerman, Phyllis 132 actor-network theory (ANT) 20 n.24, 20 n.28, 89 n.71 Ades, Dawn 55 n.82 Dada and Surrealism Reviewed 10, 19 n.22, 56 n.97, 208 n.25 “Dada-Constructivism” 188 n.4 The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology 10, 22 n.39 “The Blind Man: Notes and Commentary” 153 n.45 Three New York Dadas and the Blind Man 118 n.16 Die Aktion magazine 37 Albert-Birot, Pierre 60, 64 “Crayon Bleu” 78 “le triangle” 67 “Pour Dada” 52 n.52 Aleksić, Dragan 157–8, 162–7, 187 “Dadaizam” 191 n.32 Altshuler, Bruce 91, 117 nn.4–6 Salon to Biennial, Exhibitions That Made Art History 19 n.17 anarcho-communism 87 n.44 Anthologie Dada. See Dada magazine, Dada 4–5 anthology 26–7, 34–5, 40, 50 n.33, 73–5, 82 n.1, 124 n.66, 132, 163, 192 n.46 anti-Dadaism 1, 104 Apollinaire, Guillaume 62 “Arbre” 26, 48 n.9 “Le cas de Richard Mutt” 45, 56 n.94 Tzara and 41–2, 53 n.63

Aragon, Louis 96, 106 “Rivelazioni sensazionali” 111 Arbeitsgemeinschaft bildender Künstler 96 Archipenko, Alexander 166 Ardis, Ann 10, 22 n.41 Arensberg, Louise 44 Arensberg, Walter 44, 133 Arnauld, Céline 7, 159 Arp, Hans 1, 38, 47 n.4, 48 n.7, 57, 60, 67, 94, 96, 113, 161, 168, 175–6 “Aus die Wolkenpumpe” 85 n.19 “Der Arp is da!” 97 untitled artworks 27, 38, 42, 47 n.6, 67, 75, 78, 83 n.7, 85 n.19, 85 n.21, 176, 195 n.88 Arte Astratta magazine 129, 151 n.22 Aspen magazine 23 n.50 Avalanche magazine 23 n.50 avant-garde 3, 17 n.6, 25–6, 36, 40–1, 43–5, 60, 85 n.26, 91–2, 111, 116, 148–9, 157–8, 160, 168, 182, 187 magazines in 1910s 62–3 Avner, Janna, “How the Dirty New Media Movement Informed the First Virtual Art Galleries” 86 n.39, 87 n.41 Baader, Johannes 57, 60, 64, 79–80, 87 n.44, 92, 97, 120 n.26, 162 “Collage Dada (Raoul Hausmann)” 81 images by 64, 97 texts by 60, 64, 79 “Tretet Dada bei” 71 Baargeld, Johannes (Alfred E. Gruenwald) 91–2, 95–6, 104, 106–7, 121 n.46, 129 “Antropofiler Bandwurm” 97 “Fluidoskeptrik” 99 “Le Dirigeable Dada” 111 Balla, Giacomo 53 n.64

Index Ball, Hugo 1, 18 n.14, 25–8, 30, 33–7, 47 n.4, 48 n.7, 48 n.9, 48 n.12, 49 n.21, 109, 117 n.8, 159 “Als ich das Cabaret Voltaire gründete … ” 50 n.27 and Brodnitz 52 n.56 Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary by Hugo Ball 17 n.11, 48 n.7 and Hoffmann 50 nn.28–9 international collaboration of periodicals 47 n.4 and Tzara 51 n.38, 51 n.43 Banana, Anna 199, 202–3, 207 n.5 About Vile 208 n.20 The Sometimes Monthly Banana Rag 205 Banash, David, “From Advertising to the Avant-Garde: Rethinking the Invention of Collage” 89 n.73 Bann, Stephen 162 The Tradition of Constructivism 188 n.4, 190 n.28 Barrès, Maurice 161, 190 n.24 Bartok, Béla 96 Beals, Kurt Dada Networks Project 9 “Redefining Dada: The Avant-Garde Movement as Network” 20 n.32 Beatitude magazine 202 Beckett, Jane 169 “Dada, Van Doesburg and De Stijl” 193 n.54 Benjamin, Walter 34, 77 on anthology 50 n.33 The Arcades Project 50 n.33 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 89 n.67 Benson, Timothy O. 3, 8–9, 86 n.37, 157, 188 n.5 “Dada Geographies” 17 n.10, 17 n.12, 188 n.2, 189 n.15 “Exchange and Transformation” 190 n.19 Bergius, Hanne 66 Berlin Dada 120 n.33, 156 n.72 Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada 82 n.4 Dada Triumphs! Dada Berlin, 1917–1923: Artistry of

225

Polarities:Montages, Metamechanics, Manifestations, vol. V 82 n.4, 119 n.25, 120 n.39 Berlewi, Henryk 160 “Miedzynarodowa Wystawa w Düsseldorfie” 189 n.18 Berlin (Germany) 46, 82 n.4, 87 n.44, 92, 96–7, 100, 159 Dada events in 57 Dadaists 46, 61, 77, 87 n.46, 96, 99, 104, 109, 117 n.1, 117 n.8, 119 n.25, 130, 165, 180 exhibition catalog 101, 104, 109, 129–30 growth of 57 Berner, Jeff 207 n.5 Blast magazine 62, 85 n.27 Der Blaue Reiter Almanach 92 Bleu magazine 7, 106, 109–12, 122 n.54, 129, 151 n.22 Bleu 1 111 Bleu 2 112 Bleu 3 110 The Blind Man magazine 4, 13, 22 n.43, 44–5, 55 n.86, 95, 118 n.16, 127, 129, 134–5, 156 n.75 Der blutige Ernst magazine 109 Boccioni, Umberto 168 Bochner, Jay 52 n.59 Bonset, I. K. See Van Doesburg, Theo Braddock, Jeremy 35 Collecting as Modernist Practice 50 n.36 Bragaglia, Anton 53 n.64, 120 n.35 Brauhaus Winter 99 Brauner, Victor 157, 184–6, 196 n.107, 197 n.117 Brecht, George 203 Breton, André 106, 116, 157, 160–1 “Characteristics of the Modern Evolution and What It Consists Of (November 1922)” 190 n.21 “Leave Everything” 190 n.24 Breuer, Bessie 148 La Brigata magazine 42–3, 54 n.76 Bru, Sascha 192 n.49 “The Will to Style” 193 n.58, 197 n.114 Bucharest, Romania 3, 7, 13, 149, 157, 160, 183–5, 189 n.15, 196 n.105 Buchholz, Tanja, “Galerie Dada” 118 n.14

226 Buffet-Picabia, Gabrielle 57, 83 n.7, 129, 133 and Dreier 150 n.9 Bulletin Dada magazine. See Dada magazine, Dada 6 Bulletin D magazine 95, 119 n.18, 121 n.46, 129 Bulson, Eric 12 Little Magazine, World Form 20 n.29 Burchard, Otto 99, 130 Bureau de recherches surréalistes 187 Cabanne, Pierre 55 n.87, 118 n.15 Cabaret Voltaire magazine 25–30, 32–6, 38, 40–6, 48 n.8, 48 n.11, 55 n.82, 65, 94, 163, 188 Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich 1, 25–7, 30, 42, 47 n.2, 94, 188 calligrammes 62, 67, 85 n.28 Camera Work magazine 150 n.8 Camfield, William A. 22 n.43 Francis Picabia 189 n.14 Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism 122 n.46 Cannibale magazine 111, 122 n.48, 130, 159, 168, 189 n.7 Cannibale 2 150 n.8 Cantarelli, Gino 38, 42–3, 92–3, 96, 110 “Costellazione” 32–3 and Tzara 54 n.73 Caravello, Steve 206 nn.1–2 Carrà, Carlo 53 n.64 Cates, Jon 64 Catholicism 102 Cazazza, Monte 199 Chapbook magazine 92, 150 n.8 Chaplin, Charlie 67 Charchoune, Serge, “Cigarette Dada” 170 Chickadel, Charles. See Cravan, Arthur Ciacelli, Arturo 113 Clayton, Tara, “Man Ray, Reproduction, and Semiotic Slippage: Shaping the Transatlantic Avant-Garde” 155 n.67 Club Dada magazine 63 Coady, Robert 44 Cohen, Arthur 70 collage 2, 11, 27, 38, 63, 77–8, 80, 89 nn.73–4, 101, 102, 109, 131, 134, 172, 180, 182, 185, 204

Index Cologne, Germany 95–6, 99, 121–2 n.46, 129–30 Dada Early Spring show 96, 99, 104, 131 Dadaists 95, 106, 130, 205 exhibition catalog 101, 104, 119 n.25 commercial magazines 46, 67, 71, 128, 134–5, 142, 144, 149, 149 n.2, 154 n.51, 203 commodity 71, 133, 136, 139 Comoedia magazine 190 n.24 Conner, Bruce 202 Constructivism 7, 157–87, 188 n.4 Constructivist(s) 7, 161, 166–9, 172–3, 175–6, 178–80, 185–6, 195 n.83 Contimporanul magazine 196 n.106 Cowley, Malcolm 168 Crane, Michael, “The Origins of Correspondence Art” 207 n.8 Cravan, Arthur 199, 202–3, 206 n.1 Crehan, Hubert 56 n.90 Crimp, Douglas, “On the Museum’s Ruins” 188–9 n.6 Crispolti, Enrico, “Dada a Roma: Contributo alla partecipazione italiana al Dadaismo” 53 n.64 Croatia 158, 163, 166 Crotti, Jean 168 Crowninshield, Frank 134 Cubism 3, 26–7, 38, 113, 128, 158–9, 161, 169 Cubist(s) 7, 27, 38, 40, 94, 158 Cummings, Paul 207 n.12 Dada (art movement) 1, 4, 26, 38, 43, 45, 56 n.91, 60, 62, 92, 97, 106, 113, 132–3, 138, 157–9, 161–3, 168, 170, 172, 174–6, 178–9, 184, 186, 199, 201, 204 aphorisms 64, 178 and avant-garde groups 3, 7, 17 n.6 Dadaists 1, 3–4, 8–12, 20 n.29, 25, 27, 34, 38, 40, 45, 53 n.64, 57, 59–60, 63–5, 71, 75, 77, 80–1, 87 nn.45–6, 93, 98–99, 103, 104, 106, 116, 123 n.63, 129, 131–2, 157–60, 168, 172–3, 175–6, 178, 180, 184, 188 n.6, 189 n.11, 199, 202–3, 205 diversity 3, 7–8, 38, 65

Index promoting/promotion of 8, 13, 26, 36–40, 43, 45, 57, 60–1, 109, 113, 138–9, 162–7, 175, 192 n.46 scholarship 9–13 transnationalism (see transnationalism) Dada Augrandair: Der Sängerkrieg Intirol. See Dada magazine, Dada 8 Dada-Austellung: Modernste Malerei, Negerplastik, alte Kunst 94 Dadaco magazine 124 n.66 Dadaglobe 75, 89 n.72, 124 n.66, 132–3, 139 Dadaism 92, 111, 113, 132, 158–9, 188 n.3 “Dadaïsme Vénitien” 92 Dada Jazz magazine 13, 157–8, 162–7, 184, 191 n.30, 192 n.46 Dada-Jok magazine 1–2, 16 n.1, 163 Dada magazine 1, 4, 8–11, 13, 25–6, 31, 36–8, 40–6, 62, 73, 94, 129, 168, 188 Dada 1 25, 36–8, 42–3, 51 n.48, 52 n.52, 54 n.76, 65, 94 Dada 2 25, 32–3, 37–8, 42, 51 n.48, 65, 79 Dada 3 42, 57, 59–61, 64–7, 69–71, 73, 75, 77, 83 n.7, 84 n.18, 85 n.21, 86 n.32, 87 n.46, 109, 132, 134, 152 n.32, 175, 180 Dada 4–5 – Anthologie Dada 52 n.52, 57, 60–1, 66, 73–7, 83 n.7, 85 n.21, 95, 175 Dada 6 – Bulletin Dada 92, 113–14, 118 n.11, 123 nn.62–3, 151 n.22, 159, 161–2 Dada 7 – Dadaphone 109, 132, 159, 161 Dada 8 – Dada Augrandair: Der Sängerkrieg Intirol 113, 115 deluxe edition of 83 n.7, 85 n.21 regular edition of 83 n.7 Der Dada magazine 13, 57, 60, 62–3, 71, 82 n.4, 89 n.75, 129, 134 Der Dada 1 11, 60–1, 66–7, 69, 79, 81, 83–4 n.7, 89 n.76, 111, 121 n.41 Der Dada 2 61, 64, 67, 71–2, 78, 80, 83 n.7, 97, 205 Der Dada 3 67–9, 97, 101, 104, 106–9, 122 n.47 Dada Tank magazine 1, 7, 157–8, 162–7, 184, 187, 190 n.30, 192 n.46

227

Dada-Vorfrühling exhibition 14, 91, 99, 104, 129, 131 Dadazines 199–206 Dadazine 3 205 d’Arezzo, Maria 38, 118 n.11 Das Hohe Ufer magazine 195 n.86 Das neue Leben exhibition 94 DdO4H2 magazine 4, 19 n.19 de Chirico, Giorgio 53 n.64 The Evil Genius of a King 38 Delaunay, Robert, “La Fenêtre sur la Ville II” 38 Delaunay, Sonia 151 n.22 Demos, T. J. 4, 19 n.21 “Circulations in and around Zurich Dada” 18 n.15 The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp 18 n.14 “Zurich Dada: The Aesthetics of Exile” 18 n.14 De Nieuwe Amsterdammer magazine 30 de Pisis, Filippo Emporio 43 and Tzara 54 n.77 Dermée, Paul 60, 123–4 n.63, 132 “à Kisling” 71 and Tzara 82 n.1 De Stijl magazine 111, 161, 168–9, 172–3, 179, 184, 192 n.50 de Zayas, Marius 42–5, 86 n.35 and Guillaume 54 n.79 and Tzara 55 n.82, 55 n.86 The Dial magazine 150 n.8 Dickerman, Leah 8, 19 n.21 Dada 47 n.2 “Dada Gambits” 20 n.29 Dietrich, Dorothea, “Hanover: ‘True Art’ and ‘True Dada’” 195 n.93 Digital Museum of Digital Art (DiMoDa) 64 Dirty New Media (DNM) 1, 59, 64, 86 n.38 Dix, Otto, “Bewegliches Figurenbild” 98 Dogarithms magazine 199 Dogmatic, Irene 199 Doherty, Brigid 151 n.19 “Berlin” 189 n.10 Doyobi, Team 86 n.37 Dreier, Dorothea A. 129, 133 Dreier, Katherine 7, 128–32, 151 n.22, 152 n.27

228

Index

and Buffet-Picabia 150 n.9 and Duchamp 153 n.41 and Ernst 150 nn.12–14, 151 n.15 and Grosz 151 n.16, 151 n.21 Die Driehoek magazine 187 Drucker, Johanna 12, 71 The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 22 n.44 du Bief, André 1, 17 n.3 Duchamp, Marcel 1, 44–5, 56 n.89, 116, 124 n.64, 127–33, 144, 148–9, 149 n.2, 202 “Boîte-en-valise” 127 and Cabanne 55 n.87, 118 n.15 and Crehan 56 n.90 and Dreier 153 n.41 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme 116 “Fountain” 4, 22 n.43, 44–5, 94–5, 127, 148 and Picabia 150 n.5, 154 n.58, 156 n.74 and Sweeney 45, 55 n.88 Dunan, Renée 111 “Assassiniamo l’intelligenza e l’estetica se vogliamo comprendere la bellezza” 123 n.56 “Dada?” 123 n.55 Eburne, Jonathan 160 “Dada, Futurism, and Raymond Roussel” 189 n.16, 190 nn.21–2 eclecticism 26–7, 37, 63–5, 203 Edme, René 1, 17 n.3 Eggeling, Viking 168, 175 Eilshemius, Louis, “Supplication” 94 Elaine Lustig Cohen Dada Collection 48 n.10, 85 n.21 electrophotography. See photocopying technique Éluard, Paul 19 n.19, 106, 168, 178 Die Erde magazine 77 Ernst, Jimmy 202 Ernst, Max 91–2, 95–6, 99, 104, 106–7, 117 n.8, 121 n.41, 129, 171, 202, 204 “Aquis submerses” 95 and Dreier 150 nn.12–14, 151 n.15 “Parafulmine giurabacco dei dada arp tzara ERNST baargeld picabia ecc” 111

Erste Ausstellung der Redaktion Der Blaue Reiter, Munich 92 Erste Internationale Dada-Messe, Berlin 14, 91, 98, 102, 117 n.1, 130, 156 n.72 Europe 1, 4, 26, 36–7, 41, 43–4, 46, 96, 116, 128–9, 134, 149, 160, 187 Everling, Germaine 148, 154 n.58, 156 n.74 Evola, Julius 91–2, 96, 99, 106, 111, 118 n.12, 119 n.20, 120 n.35, 130, 151 n.22, 187 and Tzara 109, 118 n.12, 119 n.22, 122 n.50, 123 n.58, 123 n.60 exhibition(s) 1, 4, 9, 13, 21 n.36, 22 n.43, 44, 46, 81–2, 91, 94, 97, 99, 116, 118 n.14, 119 n.21, 124 n.68, 128–32, 129, 150 n.11, 152 nn.27–8, 159, 205. See also specific exhibitions 1916–1918 94–5 1920–1921 95–100 catalogs 101–4, 119 n.25, 121 n.40, 151 n.18 Dadaists’ 43, 82, 91 spaces 59, 91, 94, 116, 204 Expressionism 3, 17 nn.6–7, 26–7, 38, 158, 162 Expressionist(s) 7, 27, 40, 92, 94, 158, 178 femininity 136, 144. See also gender female bodies/female identity 142, 149, 155 nn.62–3 File magazine 203 Fiozzi, Aldo 43, 92, 96, 109, 111, 130, 151 n.22 First International Russian Art Exhibition 173 First World War 1, 25, 57 Flint, F. S., “The Younger French Poets: The Dada Movement” 117 n.10 Fluxus movement 1, 199–200, 202–3, 206 n.4, 207 n.5 Foster, Hal 128, 149 n.3 Foster, Stephen, Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada 20 n.35, 23 n.46 France 10, 41, 129, 159, 168 Freeman, Judi, The Dada and Surrealist Word-Image 22 n.44

Index Die freie Straße magazine 86 n.30, 120 n.26 Die Freie Zeitung magazine 51 n.39 Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von 133, 143 Friedman, Ken 207 n.5 Frueh, Al 134, 153 n.46 Füllner, Karin, Richard Huelsenbeck: Texte und Aktionen eines Dadaisten 56 n.95 Futurism 3, 17 n.6, 26, 37–8, 51 n.47, 111, 113, 128, 158, 161–2 Futurist(s) 7, 40, 53 n.64, 92, 94, 158, 161 Le Futurisme magazine 184 Gaglione, Bill “Picasso” 199, 205, 206 n.1, 207 n.5, 207 n.17 Galerie Beaux-Arts, Paris 116 Galerie Corray, Zurich 35–6, 43, 51 n.48, 52 n.52, 83 n.5, 94, 118 n.14 Galerie Dada. See Galerie Corray, Zurich Galerie Montaigne, Paris 100 gender 4, 10, 18 n.16, 136, 138–9. See also femininity Geneva Grand Dada Ball, Paris 96 Germany 10, 41, 81, 129, 151 n.19, 168, 176, 178, 187 Gesamtkunstwerk. See Galerie Corray, Zurich Getty Research Institute 48 n.8, 54 n.74, 88 n.65, 191 n.34 Giacometti, Augusto 76 Gleizes, Albert 151 n.22 “La Peinture Moderne” 63 glitch art 1, 59, 86 n.38 G magazine 157–8, 167–77, 173, 175–6, 184, 187, 195 n.83 G 1 174 G 3 177 Goldberg, Rube 133, 136, 148 Goltz, Hanz 95 Golyscheff, Jefim 77 Gräff, Werner 173, 187 “La grande complainte de mon obsurité” 54 n.72 graphic design 1–2, 12, 28, 57, 59, 62–7, 69–73, 75–6, 83 n.5, 85 n.26, 101, 106, 111, 113, 159, 166, 169, 172, 180, 182, 194 n.71 Grecia magazine 111

229

Groh, Klaus, “Mail Art and the New Dada” 207 n.9 Grosz, George 57, 59, 62, 64, 76, 80, 91–2, 97, 101, 108–9, 130, 151 n.19, 176 “‘Daum’ marries her pedantic automaton ‘George’ …” 107 and Dreier 151 n.16, 151 n.21 Phantastische Gebete 46 untitled artworks 69, 101, 108 Guilbeaux, Henri, “L’art de demain” 51 n.43 Guillaume, Paul 41, 43 and de Zayas 54 n.79 and Tzara 52 nn.60–1 Gurk, Paul 78 halftone block printing technology 36, 64, 87 n.46 Hammer, Steve 86 n.38 Hardekopf, Ferdinand 76 “Regie” 84 n.18 Harding, James M., Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde 155 n.65 Hartley, Marsden 131–3, 136, 155 n.65 “The Importance of Being Dada” 152 n.31 Haskell, Barbara, Joseph Stella 153 n.48 Hatch, Kevin, Looking for Bruce Conner 207 n.13 Hausmann, Raoul 11, 46, 56 n.95, 57, 63, 69, 76–80, 83 n.7, 85 n.22, 87 n.44, 91–2, 97, 99, 104, 107, 162–3, 168, 175–6, 178 “Collage Dada (Raoul Hausmann)” 81 “Dada in Europa” 67, 109 “Elasticum” 172 “Erste international Dada-Messe: Katalog” 120 n.37 “Mechanischer Kopf: Der Geist underer Zeit” 172 “Tatlin lebt zu Hause” 172 “Tretet Dada bei” 71 untitled artworks 11, 63, 69, 76–9 “Was die Kunstkritik nach Ansicht des Dadasophen zur Dadaausstellung sagen wird” 101 Haviland, Paul B. 43 Heartfield, John 46, 59, 62–3, 81, 91–2, 98, 102, 104, 107, 130

230

Index

“Leben und Treiben in Universal City um 12:05 Uhr” 102 “The Pneuma Travels around the World” 80 Preussischer Erzengel 98, 117 n.1 untitled artworks 62–3, 69, 102 Hemus, Ruth “Dada’s Paris Season” 83 n.6 Dada’s Women 18 n.16 Hennings, Emmy 1, 18 n.14, 25, 27, 35, 117 n.8 “Puppen” 30 Hentea, Marius 159, 189 n.13 “Federating the Modern Spirit: The 1922 Congress of Paris” 189 n.7, 190 n.22 print war 161 Herzefelde, Wieland 46, 63, 69, 86 n.29, 102, 121 n.43, 130, 151 n.20, 156 n.72 Heuberger, Julius 26, 28, 37, 83 n.7 Higgins, Dick 199, 207 nn.5–6 Hirschel-Prostch, Günter 179 Höch, Hannah 1, 5–6, 11, 76, 79, 92, 179, 196 n.96 untitled artworks 5–6, 11, 76, 79, 179 Hoerle, Angelika Fick 7, 92 “Reiterin” 95 Hoerle, Heinrich 92, 95 “Porträt einer Liliputanerin” 95 Hoffmann, August 50 nn.28–9 Hollaender, Friedrich 62 Holland 178, 187, 192 n.51 Hopkins, David 3, 17 n.7, 133, 149 n.2, 156 n.76 on The Blind Man (second issue) 45 A Companion to Dada and Surrealism 19 n.22 Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction 19 n.22 Dada’s Boys: Masculinity after Duchamp 18 n.16 Huelsenbeck, Richard 1, 18 n.14, 25, 27, 31, 34–5, 38, 41, 47 nn.3–4, 59, 61, 77, 87 n.44, 92, 106, 158, 162, 205 “Die Arbeiten von Hans Arp” 84 n.18 “Collective Dada Manifesto” 80–1 Dada Almanac 124 n.66, 163, 192 n.46 Dadaistsches Manifest 82 n.4 “Dada Lives” 49 n.23

En Avant Dada: A History of the Dada Movement 23 n.47 “Erklärung” 25–6 “L’Amiral cherche une maison à louer” 27, 36 “Der Neue Mensch” 46 and Tzara 46, 56 nn.95–6, 61–2 Huidobro, Vincente 61 Huszár, Vilmos 178–9, 197 n.114 Huyssen, Andreas, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism 155 n.61 Il Futurismo magazine 184 Impressionism 113, 178 Independent Society of Artists 44 Insult magazine 199 Der Internationale Kongress der Konstruktivisten und Dadaisten, Weimar 161 International Constructivism 157, 161, 188 n.4 Internationale Kunstausstellung, Dresden 116 “International Exhibition of Modern Art Assembled by Société Anonyme” exhibition 150 n.11 International Faction of Constructivists 161 Italy 38, 41–2, 92, 96, 109, 113, 168 Jacob, Max, Saint Matorel 48 n.9 Jacobs, David 203 Janco, Marcel 25, 27, 42–3, 47 n.6, 60, 65, 67, 76, 85 n.21 “Chant Nègre” 27 “Construction 3” 38 “L’Amiral cherche une maison à louer” 27, 36 untitled artworks 38, 42, 47 n.6, 185 Jedermann sein eigner Fussball magazine 134 Jenison, Madge, “Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling” 156 n.75 Jennings, Michael W. 160, 190 n.20, 195 n.83 Johnson, Ray 199, 201 Jolles, Adam, “Artists into Curators: Dada and Surrealist Exhibition Practices” 19 n.17, 117 n.2, 124 n.68, 125 n.72

Index Jones, Amelia 136 Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada 155 n.66 Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp 154 n.56 “‘Women’ in Dada” 155 n.62 Joselit, David 152 n.25 Le journal du people magazine 169, 193 n.64 journals. See magazines Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry 48 n.9 Kandinsky, Wasilly 26, 38, 76, 92, 131 Kane, Carolyn L. “Exhaustion Aesthetics” 86 n.37, 87 n.42 “Glitch Art: Failure from the AvantGarde to Kanye West” 86 n.37 Kaprow, Allan 200, 207 n.7 Kiesler, Friedrich 173 Kittler, Friedrich, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 87 n.48 “Klebebilder” (glued pictures) 77 Klee, Paul 133, 152 nn.29–30 Klonk, Charlotte, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 117 n.3 Knowles, Alison 207 n.5 Kok, Antony 168, 193 n.56, 193 n.60 Kölner Kunstgewerbemuseum 96 Kölner Kunstverein 95 Kongress der Union Internationaler fortschrittlichen Künstler, Düsseldorf 161 Kriebel, Sabine T., Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield 89 n.73 Kuenzli, Rudolf, “Survey” 17 n.5, 17 n.9 “Künstlerkneipe ‘Voltaire’” art pub 30 Lacerba magazine 37, 51 n.47 parole in libertà 62–3, 94 Lacroix, Adon 133 Ladies Home Journal magazine 134, 153 n.42, 154 n.51 Lastov, Vido 164–5 Latham, Sean, “The Rise of Periodical Studies” 22 n.45 Latour, Bruno 8, 89 n.71

231

actor-network theory (ANT) 20 n.24, 20 n.28, 89 n.71 Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory 20 n.25 Leavens, Ileana B., From “291” to Zurich: The Birth of Dada. Studies in the Fine Arts: The Avant-Garde 55 n.82 Le Bon, Laurent, Dada 17 n.12 Leiden 157, 192 n.49 L’Esprit Nouveau magazine 124 n.63 letterpress printing technology 64, 67, 87 n.46 Lewer, Debbie 35, 47 n.6, 88 n.63 “The Avant-garde in Swiss Exile 1914–20” 18 n.14 A New Order: An Evening at the Cabaret Voltaire 47 n.2 Life magazine 203 line block reproduction 64, 87 n.46 linocut 77, 167 linotype printing technology 36, 64, 87 n.46 Lippard, Lucy R., Dadas on Art 208 n.25 Lissitzky, El 116, 161–2, 173, 175, 182, 195 n.83 “Demonstrationsräume” 124 n.69 “Proun (City)” 175, 179 “Topography of Typography” 178, 180, 196 n.97 L’Italia Futurista magazine 54 n.76 literature 9–13, 20 n.31 Littérature magazine 4, 111, 161, 190 n.24, 192 n.43 Locher, Robert 146–7 Lupton, Ellen, “Design and Production in the Mechanical Age” 88 n.52 Maciunas, George 203, 207 n.10 magazines 1–2, 4–5, 7, 10–11, 13, 15–16, 22 n.43, 33–4, 46, 59, 65, 82, 89 n.73, 93, 96–7, 106, 159–62, 180, 185, 199, 206. See also specific magazines avant-garde (in 1910s) 62–3 Bulson on 20 n.29 commercial (see commercial magazines) Dadaists and 20 n.28, 25, 40 extension of network 43

232

Index

in graphic design 12 images 77, 81 learning from 95–100 production, history of 51 n.45 women’s 135–6, 148, 154 n.51, 156 n.70 Mail art movement 1, 16, 17 n.4, 199, 201–2, 204, 208 n.28 Malevich, Kazimir, Black Square 92 Malik-Verlag publishing house 86 n.29, 87 n.44, 109 Malraux, André 40 Museum without Walls 52 n.55, 158 Ma magazine 150 n.8, 167 M’amenez’y magazine 4, 19 n.19 Mancusi, Tim 199, 204–5, 208 n.18, 208 n.21 Manifeste de Monsieur Aa l’antiphilosophe 166, 192 n.43 Manomètre magazine 187 Man Ray 4, 44–5, 127–33, 140–1, 144, 148–9, 149 n.4, 149 nn.1–2, 153 n.40, 155 n.65, 155 n.67, 168, 187 “Belle Haleine” 136, 138, 154 nn. 54–5 “Dadaphoto” 199 “Dancer/Danger” 171–2 “Portmanteau” 141 Self Portrait 156 n.73 Marcel Duchamp exhibition 208 n.25 Marc, Franz 92 Marcus, Greil, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century 28, 49 n.18 Marinetti, Filippo Tomasso 26, 86 n.34, 94, 168 Der Marstall magazine 195 n.86 Marxism 87 n.44 Mavo magazine 188 n.1 McBride, Henry, “News and Views of Art, Including the Clearing House for Works of the Cubists” 152 n.25 McEvilley, Thomas 116 Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space 124 n.67 Mécano magazine 1, 13, 157–8, 167–78, 184, 187, 193 n.57, 193 n.59, 197 n.114 Mécano 1 171 Mécano 2 170 Mécano 4–5 169, 171

media network 2, 5, 8. See also network Menkman, Rosa 64, 86 n.37 Mercure de France magazine 45 Meriano, Francesco 38, 42–3 on Dada 52 n.52 and Tzara 53 n.70 “Walk” 42 Mertins, Detlef 160, 190 n.20, 195 n.83 Merz magazine 5–6, 147, 157–8, 176, 178–87, 195 n.88, 195 nn.85–7 Merz 1 178 Merz 2 180–1 Merz 4 178 Merz 5 179 Merz 6 178, 180, 182, 196 n.96 Meyer, Agnes Ernst 43 “Woman” 86 n.35 Meyer, Raimund, Dada Global 10, 22 n.39, 119 n.21 Michaelides, Chris, “Futurist Periodicals in Rome” 83 n.5 Micić, Ljubomir 162 “Dada Dadaizam” 191 n.31 Miller, Tyrus, “Avant-garde Periodicals in the Yugoslavian Crucible” 16 n.2 Mill, Fer 164 Der Mistral magazine 47 n.4 modern art (movement) 40, 44, 109, 129, 145–6, 161 modern movement 43–4 modes of address 49 n.15 Moholy-Nagy, László 176, 179 “Nickel Sculpture” 170 “Relief S” 172 Staatliches Bauhaus, Weimar 195 n.84 Mondrian, Piet 168, 179 Monsieur Antipyrine magazine 46 The Morning Telegraph magazine 156 n.75 Morrisson, Mark 12, 135 The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 22 n.45 Moscardelli, Nicola 38, 42–3 Motherwell, Robert, Dada Painters and Poets 202, 204 “Mouvement” 54 n.72 “Mouvement Dada-Marcel Janco” 54 n.72 Museum of Modern Art, New York 9, 129, 205, 208 n.25

Index National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 9 nationalism 2–3, 25, 159 Naumann, Francis M. 156 n.68 “The New York Dada Movement: Better Late Than Never” 55 n.82 Neo-Plasticism 168, 178–9 The Netherlands. See Holland network 2–3, 5, 7–10, 13, 17 n.12, 20 n.29, 37, 40–6, 57, 63, 93, 106, 132–3, 139, 157, 160, 173, 182, 194 n.76, 199, 201 Neue Jugend magazine 46, 62, 81, 86 n.29 New York, The United States 3, 9, 14, 26, 41–6, 94, 116, 128–33, 144–5, 149, 187 New York Dada magazine 1, 127–8, 132–49, 154 n.51, 155 n.68, 204, 208 n.23 New York Herald magazine 155 n.68 New York World magazine 134 Niebisch, Arndt 40, 65 “Dada Media Subversion” 52 n.54 Media Parasites in the Early AvantGarde: On the Abuse of Technology and Communication 47 n.3, 87 n.47 Noi magazine 39, 42–3, 83 n.5, 184 Non: Critique individualiste, anti-dada magazine 1, 17 n.3 NYCS Weekly Breeder magazine 199–200, 204–5, 206 n.2 O’Day, Caroline Goodwin 129, 150 n.6 Oppenheimer, Max 27, 47 n.6 Oracle of the City of San Francisco newspaper 202 Oud, J. J. P. 172, 179 The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines 10, 12, 18 n.13 Packer, Randall, “Glitch Expectations: A Conversation with Jon Cates” 87 n.40 La Pagine magazine 43, 54 n.76 Paliyenko, Adriana M., “Apollinaire and Dada: Influence Matters,” 52 n.61 Paris 17 n.12, 19 n.22, 41, 46, 57, 83 n.6, 95–100, 109, 113, 159–60, 187, 189 n.11

233

Dada in 117 n.9, 130, 132, 159 Dadaists 106, 131, 151 n.22, 162 exhibition (catalog) 101, 102, 117 n.1, 130, 154 n.58 Paris Congress 161 Paris Dada exhibition 130, 151 n.22 periodicals. See magazines Petrov, Mihailo S. 164–5, 167 Philadelphia Museum of Art 205 photocopying technique 203, 205–6, 207 n.17 photograph(s)/photography 27, 40, 64, 71, 79, 81, 89 n.77, 106, 118 n.14, 140, 144, 147, 152 n.26, 155 n.67, 158, 162, 172, 175, 179, 204–5 photolithography 64, 87 n.46 photomontage 62, 89 n.73, 140–1, 172, 199, 204 Picabia, Francis 19 n.20, 19 n.23, 20 n.33, 45, 58, 61, 63, 67, 83 nn.6–7, 86 n.32, 92, 96, 113, 129–31, 133, 148, 159, 166, 168, 175, 178–9 “Abri” 64 “Les dents viennent aux yeux comme des larmes” 171 and Duchamp 150 n.5, 154 n.58, 156 n.74 “Francis Picabia et Dada” 189 n.14 “Funny Guy” 199, 205, 208 n.23 “Manifeste Cannibale Dada” 109, 132 Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère 64 “Tamis du vent” 97 and Tzara 82 n.3, 118 n.11, 119 n.23, 151 n.22 Picasso, Pablo 26, 48 n.9 “Girl’s Head with Small Bird” 101 Harlequin 185 Pictopoezie 158, 183–5 Pierre, Arnauld, “The ‘Confrontation of Modern Values’: A Moral History of Dada in Paris” 52 n.58 Pilhaou-Thibaou magazine 190 n.24 Pindell, Howardena, “Alternative Space: Artists’ Periodicals” 23 n.48, 84 n.9 Die Pleite magazine 109 “Pneuma” 89 n.77 Poggi, Christine 160 “Circa 1922: Art, Technology, and the Activated Beholder” 189 n.17

234 “Lacerba: Interventionist Art and Politics in Pre-World War I Italy” 51 n.47 Poljanski, Branko Ve 1, 16 n.1, 162–3 La Pomme du Pins magazine 190 n.24 postal art 199 postcard 93, 130 Pound, Ezra 168 Prampolini, Enrico 26, 38–9, 42, 53 n.64, 61, 64, 77, 118 n.12, 185 and Tzara 53 n.66, 53 n.68 Preiss, Gerhard 69, 101 Prezzolini, Giuseppe 43 printing process 63–5, 73, 81, 97, 136, 144, 166, 176, 203. See also specific printing technologies mistakes in printing of “Movimento Dada” 54 n.74 offset 207 n.17 Procellaria magazine 43 Projecteur magazine 111, 159, 189 n.7 Proverbe magazine 4, 19 n.19, 111, 122 n.48 Punks magazine 199, 203 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 188 n.3 Räderscheidt, Anton 119 n.18 radio 20 n.29, 63 Rad, Jim 164 Raimondi, Giuseppe 50 n.31, 61 readymades 2, 13, 44–5, 67, 94, 117, 127–8, 136, 148–9 Rebacci, Otello 92–3 Reverdy, Pierre 60–1, 109 Rhoades, Katharine Nash 86 n.35 Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges 106, 130–1, 133, 168, 178 “The Richard Mutt Case” 95, 134 Richter, Hans 60, 77, 84 n.18, 157, 161–2, 167–8, 173, 175–6, 187, 194 n.72 “Dada and the Film” 175 Dada: Art and Anti-Art 194 n.80 elementare Gestaltung 173, 175, 194 n.75 “Gegen Ohne Für Dada” 60, 85 n.19 Material zur elementaren Gestaltung 173 and Tzara 89 n.68 untitled artworks 77, 176

Index The Ridgefield Gazook magazine 44, 54 n.81 Rilla, Walter 77 Ring, Nancy, New York Dada and the Crisis of Masculinity: Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp in the United States, 1913–1921 154 nn.54–5 Roché, Henri-Pierre 44–5 Victor 95, 118 n.16 Rogue magazine 146–7, 156 n.75 Roll, Stéphane 184 Romania/Romanian 7, 158, 184–5, 187 Rome 42, 92, 95–6, 99, 111, 187 Rongwrong magazine 156 n.75 Rousseau, Henri 101 Sachlichkeit, Neue 17 n.7 Salazar-Caro, Alfredo 64, 87 n.41 “Salon Dada Exposition Internationale”, Paris 91, 99–100, 103, 106, 113, 119 n.23, 151 n.22 Salon des Indépendants 113, 119 n.23 Sanminiatelli, Bino 42 Sanouillet, Michel 10, 40, 159, 189 n.14 “Dada: A Critical History of the Literature in France and the United States” 21 n.35 “Dada: A Definition” 52 n.53 Dada in Paris 21 n.36, 21 n.38, 52 n.60, 86 n.32, 117 n.9, 119 n.23, 124 nn.63–4, 189 n.14, 190 n.22 Satrom, Jon, “Exhaustion Aesthetics” 86 n.37, 87 n.42 Savinio, Alberto 38, 43, 53 n.64, 61 “Seconde origine de la voie lactée” 84 n.18 Sbarbaro, Camillo 61 “Mörar” 84 n.18 Scanlon, Jennifer, Inarticulate Longings 154 n.57 Schad, Christian 47 n.4, 119 n.21 Die Schammade magazine 1, 97, 104, 106–7, 111, 119 n.17, 121 n.46, 129, 166 Schlichter, Rudolf, Prussian Archangel 98, 117 n.1 Scholes, Robert E. 12 Modernism in the Magazines 22 n.45

Index Schönberg, Arnold 96 Schwarz, Arturo, Man Ray: The Rigour of Imagination 155 n.65 Schwitters, Kurt 5–6, 128, 131, 133, 147, 152 n.27, 152 n.29, 157, 161–2, 168, 176, 178–9, 183, 195 n.87, 196 n.96, 197 n.114 “Dadaismus in Holland” 178, 195 n.85, 195 nn.91–2 “Merz drawing” 179 “Pesma nr. 48” 163 Segal, Arthur 47 n.6, 60, 76 Seita, Sophie 10 “The Blind Man Sees the Fountain: New York Dada Magazines in 1917: An Introduction” 21 n.38 Seiwart, Franz Wilhelm 119 n.18 Semina magazine 202 Serner, Walter 47 n.4, 178 “Der Letze Lockerung” 60 “Letzte Lockerung Manifesto” 85 n.19 Sheppard, Richard “Chronology” 53 n.64 Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism 17 n.6 SIC magazine 150 n.8 Sillogisme colonial 166, 192 n.43 Simultanism 128 Singer, Nac 164 Sinn und Form magazine 130 Sirius magazine 47 n.4 Skyscraper Primitives exhibition 208 n.25 Slodki, Marcel 27 Smith, Agnes, “Introducing Da Da” 156 n.75 Société Anonyme, Inc. 128–33, 150 nn.6–7, 152 n.26, 152 n.28, 152 n.30, 187 Society of Arts exhibition 95, 129 Society of Independent Artists 45, 94 The Soil magazine 14, 44 Les Soirées de Paris magazine 37, 41–2, 62 Soupault, Philippe 60, 106, 178 “Flamme” 84 n.18 “Portrait of a Fool” 98 Spaïni, Alberto 42, 53 n.64 Spiegelgasse 1, Zurich. See Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich Spies, Werner 121 n.46 Spohn, Clay 202, 207 n.12

235

Steinberg, Leo 81, 97 “psychic address” 81 “Reflections on the State of Criticism” 89 n.78 Steinitz, Käte 183 Stella, Joseph 131, 133, 136 “Battle of Lights, Mardi Gras, Coney Island” 94 “Coney Island” 134 Stettheimer, Ettie 144, 155 n.68 Stieglitz, Alfred 133–4, 147 “Portrait of Dorothy True” 144 Stokes, Charlotte, “Rage and Liberation: Cologne Dada” 119 n.32 Stravinsky, Igor 96 Stupid magazine 119 n.17 Der Sturm gallery 38, 53 n.64, 118 n.14, 131, 152 n.27 Der Sturm magazine 37, 53 n.63, 63, 111, 150 n.8 Sudhalter, Adrian 35, 89 n.72, 153 n.37 “How to Make a Dada Anthology” 50 n.35, 88 n.64 “War, Exile, and the Machine” 19 n.20, 19 n.23, 20 n.33 Sumner, David E., The Magazine Century: American Magazines since 1900 153 n.42 Suprematists 92 Surrealism 7, 19 n.22, 157 Sweeney, James Johnson 45, 55 n.88 Taeuber-Arp, Sophie 1, 25, 27 Tatlin, Vladimir 92 “Denkal der dritten international” 179 Taylor, Michael 155 nn.63–4 Tice, Clara 134 TNT magazine 150 n.8 Tomkins, Calvin 56 n.91 Tomoyoshi, Murayama 188 n.1 transnationalism 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 26–7, 33, 40–1, 104, 106, 168, 182 typewriter 31, 36, 63, 87 nn.46–7 typography and layout. See graphic design Tyrell, Henry, “The Cheerless Art of Idiocracy” 153 n.36 Tzara, Tristan 1, 4, 12, 18 n.14, 25–9, 31, 33–6, 38, 40–3, 53 n.69, 54 n.74, 59–60, 63, 67, 69, 86 n.32, 88 n.66,

236 92–3, 96, 104, 106, 109, 111, 132, 149, 158, 161–2, 168, 175, 178, 182, 205 and Aleksić 163, 191 n.33, 191 n.36, 192 n.43 “Ange” 111 and Apollinaire 41–2, 53 n.63 “Art and the Hunt” 154 n.58 “Authorization” 23 n.49, 128, 133, 136, 148, 154 n.58 and Ball 51 n.38, 51 n.43 “Bulletin” 67, 71, 106, 134, 153 n.44 and Cantarelli 54 n.73 Dadaglobe 20 n.34 “Dada ne signifie rien” 59–60 and de Pisis 43, 54 n.77 and Dermée 82 n.1 and de Zayas 42–5, 55 n.82, 55 n.86 and Dreier 130 and Evola 111, 118 n.12, 119 n.22, 122 n.50, 123 n.58, 123 n.60 “Froid Jaune” 42 Gas Heart 202 and Guillaume 52 nn.60–1 and Huelsenbeck 46, 56 nn.95–6, 61–2 “L’Amiral cherche une maison à louer” 27, 36 “Manifeste Dada 3” 84 n.10 “Manifeste Dada 1918” 59, 118 n.12, 132, 169, 184 and Meriano 53 n.70 “Movimento Dada” 43 “News of the Seven Arts in Europe” 190 n.26 “Pélamide” 43 and Picabia 82 n.3, 118 n.11, 119 n.23, 151 n.22 25 poèmes 67 and Prampolini 53 n.66, 53 n.68 La Première Aventure Céleste de M. Antipyrine 44, 55 n.82 “Proclamation sans Pretension” 60–1, 84 n.11 and Raimondi 50 n.31 “La revue Dada 2” 29, 36 “Les Revues d’avant-garde” 88 n.54 and Richter 89 n.68 Stationery: Mouvement Dada 5 “Texte sur Dada” 52 n.49 “Une nuit d’échecs gras” 104

Index and Van Doesburg 169, 187, 192 n.52, 193 n.55, 193 n.57, 194 n.68 and Vitrac 193 n.64 “Zanzibar” 163 “Zurich Chronicle 1915–1919” 49 n.24 The United States 10, 36, 41, 128–9, 133, 207 n.10 American art 44 Dada to New York 128–32 New York Dada (see New York Dada magazine) Uzelac, Sonja Briski 163 “Visual Arts in the Avant-Gardes between the Two Wars” 191 n.35, 192 n.48 Vallotton, Félix 82 n.3, 86 n.32 Valori Plastici magazine 150 n.8 van den Berg, Hubert 169, 178 The Import of Nothing 193 n.53 “Some Reflections on the Margins of Dada” 193 n.63, 195 n.89 van der Rohe, Ludwig Mies 173 Van Doesburg, Nelly 178–9, 197 n.114 Van Doesburg, Theo 109, 157, 161–2, 168–9, 172–3, 175, 178, 187, 197 n.114 “Karakteristiek van het Dadaisme” 169, 193 n.65 and Kok 193 n.56, 193 n.60 “La matière dénaturalisée. Déstruction 2” 172 “Photo-mechanische compositie” 171 “Tot een constructieve dichtkunst” 194 n.67 and Tzara 169, 187, 192 n.52, 193 n.55, 193 n.57, 194 n.68 “Der Wille zum Stil” 194 n.69 van Hoddis, Jakob (“Jacob”) 26, 61 “Der Idealist” 84 n.18 Vanity Fair magazine 127–8, 134, 136, 139–40, 143–4, 146, 154 n.51, 161, 190 n.26 Van Rees, Otto 27, 48 n.11 Varèse, Edgar 134 Der Ventilator magazine 95, 118 n.17, 121 n.46

Index Veshch. Gegenstand. Objet: Revue international de l’art modern 167, 172–3, 176, 192 n.47 View magazine 116 Vile magazine 199, 203–4 Villon, Jacques 151 n.22 “Figure” 152 n.26 Vincent-Millay, Edna St. 144 Vitrac, Roger 193 n.64 La Voce magazine 43 Vogue magazine 127 Voloder, Laurel Seely, “Avant-garde Periodicals in the Yugoslavian Crucible” 16 n.2 Voronca, Ilarie 157, 184, 186, 196 n.107 “Aviograma (in loc de manifest)” 185 and Schwitters 197 n.117 Vorticism 37 V TRE (cc V TRE) newspaper 203 Walden, Herwarth 37, 53 n.63, 118 n.14, 131 Weekly Reader Da-jest 205 Weikop, Christian 82 n.4, 87 n.44 “Berlin dada and the Carnivalesque” 82 n.4, 86 n.29, 89 n.75 “Transitions: From Expressionism to Dada” 86 nn.29–30, 87 n.44, 120 n.26 West Bay Dadaist (Quoz?) magazine 199, 201–2 White, Michael 3, 17 n.7 “Dada Migrations: Definition, Dispersal, and the Case of Schwitters” 18 n.14 Wiley, William T. 202 Winter, Gundolf, “Zurich Dada and the Visual Arts,” 49 n.17

237

Witkovsky, Matthew 64–5 “Pen Pals” 20 n.29, 83 n.6, 87 n.45, 87 n.50 Wood, Beatrice 44, 128, 156 n.75 woodcut technique 27, 38, 42–4, 63–6, 69, 77, 83 n.7, 185 wood engraving 47 n.6, 64, 85 n.21, 87 n.46 Wulfman, Clifford 12 Modernism in the Magazines 22 n.45 xerography. See photocopying technique Yugo-Dada 162, 166 Zagreb, Croatia 3, 7, 13, 149, 157–8, 160, 162–3, 166–7 Der Zeltweg magazine 94, 122 n.48 Zénit magazine 162–3, 167, 184, 191 nn.30–1 Zervigón, Andrés Mario, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage 89 n.73 zines 203–4, 206, 206 n.2 Z magazine 4, 19 n.19, 123 n.63, 132, 150 n.8, 168 Zurich, Dada in 34–5, 47 n.2, 57, 61, 67, 73, 83 n.6, 173, 185 Cabaret Voltaire 1, 25–7, 30, 42, 47 n.2, 94, 188 Dadaists in 46, 47 n.6 growth of 46 Der Zweemann magazine 195 n.86

238

239

240

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242

Plate 1  Cabaret Voltaire, ed. Hugo Ball, Zurich, 1916, Meierei Verlag, front cover, 10 5∕8 × 8 11∕16 in. (27 × 22 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

Plate 2  Cabaret Voltaire, ed. Hugo Ball, Zurich, 1916, Meierei Verlag, front cover, 10 5∕8 × 8 11∕16 in. (27 × 22 cm). Spencer Collection, New York Public Library.

Plate 3  Dada 3, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1918, Mouvement Dada, front cover, c. 1917, 13¼ × 911∕16 in. (33.7 × 24.6 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

Plate 4  Der Dada 3, ed. George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Raoul Hausmann, Berlin, 1920, Malik-Verlag, p. 16, 9 1∕16 × 6 1∕8 in. (23 × 15.6 cm). International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

Plate 5  Dada 4–5: Anthologie Dada, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1919, Mouvement Dada, limited issue front cover, letterpress and collage on newsprint, 10 13∕16 × 7 5∕16 in. (27.4 × 18.5 cm), Bibliotheque des Musees de Strasbourg, Photo by Mathieu Bertola. Licensed under Creative Commons © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Plate 6  Dada 4–5: Anthologie Dada, ed. Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1919, Mouvement Dada, limited issue front cover, letterpress and collage on newsprint, 10 13∕16 × 7 5∕16 in. (27.4 × 18.5 cm). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (85-S55) © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Plate 7  Bleu 3, ed. Gino Cantarelli, Mantua, 1921, front cover. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-S869).

Plate 8  “Jugoslavenski, da da, DA DA, DA, DA …: U Osijeku, Royal-kino dne 20. viii. matinée, 1922,” Poster for Dada event, Zagreb, 1922. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2001.PR.1).

Plate 9  75 HP, ed. Ilarie Voronca, Victor Brauner, Bucharest, 1924, front cover. Kunsthaus Zurich Library.

Plate 10  75 HP, ed. Ilarie Voronca, Victor Brauner, Bucharest, 1924, p. 9. Kunsthaus Zurich Library.