The Hobbyhorse Rides Again

As openings go, it was a far cry from 1938's International Exhibition of Surrealism, when 2,000 outraged Parisians staged a near riot. Or from Cologne's Dada exposition of 1920, when the entrance hall was a public lavatory, the visitors were supplied with an ax to chop up the art, and a young girl in a white Communion dress stood on a platform reciting obscene verse.

Indeed, the mild catcalls and bilious banner-waving provided last week by several hundred Greenwich Village vigilantes in front of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art seemed a slur on the once dread name of Dada. They were protesting a survey of Dada and surrealism, replete with crispy fried canapes, Galanos evening gowns, and a "bourgeois" black-tie dinner.

"Down with art, up with revolution!" yipped one Yippie in a Mao jacket. "We're carrying on the spirit of Dada by being here, instead of in the museum," insisted a Princeton University art instructor. Quoth the durable Salvador Dali, 63, who was on hand for the occasion: "Unfortunately many of the young people today have no information. Dada was a protest against the bourgeoisie, yes, but by the aristocracy, not by the man in the street." After the Barricades. He did have a point. The anarchistic, anti-artistic spirit of Dada arose almost simultaneously in New York and Europe from the spiritual debris of World War I. It was baptized by two artistic types in Zurich who flipped open a dictionary at the word dada, French baby talk for "hobbyhorse." Incorporated into the more structural surrealist movement in 1924, it immortalized a species of hoopla and hubris that has become characteristic of modern American society. Dada's pranks and surrealist spectacles were revived in the 1960s as Happenings, which in turn have been commercialized by department stores, and ultimately popularized by flower children as love-ins.

Yet, amazingly, the esthetic aspects of Dada and surrealism have never been presented to the public since the twin movements came of age. In retrospect, the hobbyhorse has been accepted by most art historians as a thoroughbred, but no U.S. museum has devoted a major display to it since 1936.

Dada and surrealism, now half a century old, were not merely episodes or aberrations in the history of art, but part of its mainstream development, perhaps more profound and influential than any other style of the century. Now that the fusillades have died away on the barricades, the Museum of Modern Art's carefully winnowed exhibit of 340 paintings, sculptures, collages and assemblages is intended to show just what has survived that is genuinely entitled to be preserved in museums.

"Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage"* demonstrates abundantly that the philosophies produced a witty, erotic, and still magically evocative body of work (see following color pages).

To demonstrate the validity of the movements, the show's organizer, Curator William S. Rubin, 40, eschewed the gaudy sensationalism favored in the heyday of Dada. Instead, he has let the precise craftsmanship and fertile inventiveness of his chosen artists speak for themselves. The exhibit is sedately mounted in a series of small, serene galleries, with Marcel Duchamp's proto-pop Fresh Widow (a miniature French window with a head cold) respectfully enshrined in a Plexiglas case. Dali's minuscule (as small as 7 in. by 5 1/2 in.) Krafft-Ebing fantasies glow like 15th century Van Eycks beneath Metropolitan Museum-style picture lamps.

The sole concession to flamboyance is a reconstruction of Dali's ivy-twined Rainy Taxi, from the 1938 exposition, faithfully copied right down to the snails that crawl on the faces of the sopping, green-lit mannequins inside. Otherwise, dulcet decorum is preserved because, as former Sarah Lawrence Professor Rubin puts it: "While the Dadaists use the term antiart to deny modern art, in retrospect their work takes its place in that tradition, enriching more than denying it."

Nonsense & Nostalgia. Though the Dadaists were determined to break with what they considered the "spiritually bankrupt" styles of cubism and futurism, they borrowed many cubist techniques. While they claimed to tweak the nose of logic, and build their art by happenstance, it was in fact highly rational and ironically detached.

Collage, for example, was originally developed by the cubists; yet when the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters began to build his many-splendored "Merz pictures" from old newspaper scraps, driftwood, buttons and other attic rubbish, his works took on a pathos and intimacy that more formal cubist compositions lacked. Schwitters himself always insisted that Merz was a nonsense syllable, derived from a phrase from an advertisement for the "Kommerz und Privatbank." But merzen is also an obsolete German verb connoting rejection. Both as nonsense and as nostalgia, Schwitters' handsome, 5-ft. by 4-ft. Merz Picture with Rainbow clearly foreshadows Robert Rauschenberg's "combines" of the 1950s.

Freudian Art. Considerably less well known than pop art's debt to Dada is the seminal influence exercised by the surrealists on U.S. abstract expressionism. The relationship has been obscured until now, partly by the abstract expressionists themselves, who kept their early surrealistic canvases out of sight. The confusion was compounded by the fact that the original surrealist manifesto of 1924 envisioned two different techniques for applying Freud's then radical theories to art.

All surrealists agreed that the time had come to substitute the logic of the unconscious for the deliberate illogic of Dada, but only half of the movement, including Dali, Rene Magritte and Yves Tanguy, used conventional Renaissance oil techniques and perspective to portray the fantasy world of dreams and hallucination. Helped by Dali's genius for self-publicity, it was this half of the movement that became synonymous with surrealism in the U.S.

Prophetic Approaches. In the long run, the other technique of "automatist" surrealism proved more revolutionary and durable. As practiced by Joan Miro, Andre Masson, Max Ernst and Roberto Matta, automatism relied on the unconscious to direct the pen, pencil, brush or tube of glue. "Rather than setting out to paint something," said Miro, "I begin, and as I paint, the picture begins to assert itself." Landscape with Rooster, one of a dozen outsize, uninhibited Miros on display, illustrates the antic, fanciful contours that result.

Masson's approach was even more prophetic. Because he found the constant reloading of a brush impeded his "psychic impulses," he took to ladling glue onto a canvas, wiggling his fingers over it in patterns, then pouring sand into the glue to capture them. In addition, he squeezed color directly onto his canvases from a special tube, thereby antedating the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock by 20 years.

Automatist surrealism migrated to the U.S. during World War II. It deeply impressed a generation of younger American artists who were shortly to become celebrated innovators themselves, such as Pollock, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb.

Nonetheless, as examples of early work by these abstract expressionists and the pop artists on display at the Modern suggest, more was assimilated from the surrealists and Dadaists than mere assemblage and drip. Common to all of the work in the exhibit is a poetry and passion, gaiety and humanism totally foreign to the dry logic of cubism and to the pure, impersonal geometric abstractions that developed directly out of it in Europe. The camera may well have deprived painting of its reason for being by surpassing it in the portrayal of objective reality. Dada and surrealism, however, made up for that loss by showing that another, still more engrossing vision lay within the fantastic recesses of man's mind.

* Due to be shown at the Los Angeles County Museum this summer and the Art Institute of Chicago next fall.

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