Exhibition on Dadaism in New York City

By Clare Hurley:

No nonsense about Dada

18 September 2006

Dada, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, June 18—September 11, 2006.

MoMA is the exhibition’s final of three venues.

Centre Pompidou in Paris (October 5, 2005—January 9, 2006) and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (February 19—May 14, 2006) were the first two.

Some ninety years after the outbreak of World War I, militarism and imperialist conflicts are again the order of the day.

In these circumstances, an exhibition devoted to the art movement that called itself “Dada” in 1916 seems timely.

Reacting to the slaughter that many of them had seen as soldiers in the trenches across Europe, Dada artists expressed healthy disgust not just at the carnage of imperialism, but with bourgeois society as a whole.

Several of its adherents subsequently took their revolt a step farther and sided with the revolutionary struggle of the working class.

Others, who did not take the path of political commitment, made significant contributions to the development of various trends in contemporary art in the period between the world wars.