This major museum exhibition, which premiered at the National Gallery of Art, is the first in the United States to focus exclusively on Dada, one of the 20th century’s most influential avant-garde art movements. Responding to the disasters of World War I and to an emerging modern media and machine culture, Dada artists led a creative revolution that profoundly shaped the course of subsequent art. Dada was a defiantly international movement, the first to self-consciously position itself as an expansive network crossing countries and continents. Born in neutral Zurich and New York, two cities that served as independent points of origin for the movement, Dada rapidly spread to Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, Paris, and beyond. This exhibition surveys the many forms of Dada artistic production as developed in the movement’s six primary city centers and features over 400 works in a dynamic multimedia installation that includes collages, films, paintings, photographs, printed matter, sound recordings, and sculpture. Among the nearly 50 artists represented are Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters, and Sophie Taeuber, along with a number of less familiar individuals associated with the movement. A publication accompanies the exhibition.
Coordinated by Anne Umland, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture. The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
