Authors: Dorothea Dietrich. Brigid Doherty. Sabine Kriebel. Janine Mileaf. Michael Taylor. Matthew Witkovsky. Hans Jean Arp. Tristan Tzara. Marcel Duchamp. Kurt Schwitters. Francis Picabia. Max Ernst.
Paperback, 536 pages
Publisher: National Gallery of Art, Washington/D.A.P.
Publication Date: 2008-03-01


Reviews :

    Now available in paperback, this lavishly illustrated and astonishingly comprehensive volume stands as the definitive study of the influential but deliberately elusive international Dada movement of the early twentieth century. Organized according to the primary city centers where this shifting, quintessentially avant garde movement emerged, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris features the work of 40 key artists, both infamous and lesser-known, including Louis Aragon, Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, Andre Breton, Otto Dix, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hoch, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara and Kurt Schwitters, to name just a few, in media spanning painting, sculpture, photography, collage, photomontage, prints and graphic work. Dynamically designed with an uncommon intelligence suited to the complexity of the movement itself, it contains hundreds of reproductions of works which, until the major traveling exhibition of 2005 and 2006 for which this book was originally produced, had for the most part never been seen in one place together. Documentary images, topical essays and an invaluable illustrated chronology of the movement make this volume uniquely essential, along with witty chronicles of events in each city center; a selected bibliography; and biographies of each artist accompanied by Dada-era photographs....

Authors: Hans Richter.
Paperback, 246 pages
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Publication Date: 1997-04


Reviews :

    "Where and how Dada began is almost as difficult to determine as Homer's birthplace," writes Hans Richter, who was associated with the movement from its early days. Here, through selections from key manifestos and other documents of the time, he records Dada's history, from its beginnings in wartime Zurich to its collapse in the Paris of the 1920s. Dada led on from Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism, and in turn prepared the way for Surrealism. It was enlivened by bizarre and extravagant personalities, notably Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, whose contributions are fully discussed. The spirit of Dada reappeared in the 1960s in movements such as Pop Art, which are surveyed in the final section....

Authors: Dietmar Elger.
Paperback, 95 pages
Publisher: Taschen
Publication Date: 2004-07-01


Reviews :

    Detailed introduction to Dadaism with 30 photographs plus timeline of most important political, cultural, scientific and sporting events. Body of book contains 35 of most important works of epoch with interpretationand artist biography....

Authors:
Paperback, 464 pages
Publisher: Belknap Press
Publication Date: 2007-03-29


Reviews :

   

The Dada Painters and Poets offers the authentic answer to the question "What is Dada?" This incomparable collection of essays, manifestos, and illustrations was prepared by Robert Motherwell with the collaboration of some of the major Dada figures: Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, and Max Ernst among others. Here in their own words and art, the principals of the movement create a composite picture of Dada--its convictions, antics, and spirit.

First published in 1951, this treasure trove remains, as Jack Flam states in his foreword to the second edition, "the most comprehensive and important anthology of Dada writings in any language, and a fascinating and very readable book." It contains every major text on the Dada movement, including retrospective studies, personal memoirs, and prime examples. The illustrations range from photos of participants, in characteristic Dadaist attitudes, to facsimiles of their productions.

...

Authors:
Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Publication Date: 2006-10-15


Reviews :

    ...

Authors: Tristan Tzara.
Paperback, 118 pages
Publisher: Calder Publications
Publication Date: 1981-10

Authors: George Baker.
Hardcover, 472 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2007-10-31


Reviews :

    The artist Francis Picabia—notorious dandy, bon vivant, painter, poet, filmmaker, and polemicist—has emerged as the Dadaist with postmodern appeal, and one of the most enigmatic forces behind the enigma that was Dada. In this first book in English to focus on Picabia's work in Paris during the Dada years, art historian and critic George Baker reimagines Dada through Picabia's eyes.

Such reimagining involves a new account of the readymade—Marcel Duchamp's anti-art invention, which opened fine art to mass culture and the commodity. But in Picabia's hands, Baker argues, the Dada readymade aimed to reinvent art rather than destroy it. Picabia's readymade opened art not just to the commodity, but to the larger world from which the commodity stems: the fluid sea of capital and money that transforms all objects and experiences in its wake. The book thus tells the story of a set of newly transformed artistic practices, claiming them for art history—and naming them—for the first time: Dada Drawing, Dada Painting, Dada Photography, Dada Abstraction, Dada Cinema, Dada Montage. Along the way, Baker describes a series of nearly forgotten objects and events, from the almost lunatic range of the Paris Dada "manifestations" to Picabia's polemical writings; from a lost work by Picabia in the form of a hole (called, suggestively, The Young Girl ) to his "painting" Cacodylic Eye, covered in autographs by luminaries ranging from Ezra Pound to Fatty Arbuckle.

Baker ends with readymades in prose: a vast interweaving of citations and quotations that converge to create a heated conversation among Picabia, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. Art history has never looked like this before. But then again, Dada has never looked like art history....

Authors: Elsa Bethanis. Peter Bethanis.
Paperback, 128 pages
Publisher: For Beginners
Publication Date: 2007-08-21


Reviews :

    What kind of artists put a moustache on the Mona Lisa? Enter a urinal in an art competition? Declare their own independent republic? Hijack a ship? Dadas!
And what happens to such a movement? With Dada, many of the artists declared their own "Pope" and continued their journey (with no destination) into Surrealism, creating burning giraffes, "amoebic" dogs, and lobster telephones–some of the most imaginative and intense works of art of the 20th century. In Dada and Surrealism For Beginners, you'll get a colorful overview of these two movements, and develop a sense of the turbulent, wild, and unapologetically mad mood and tone of the Dada and Surrealist movements. Whether you're an artist, would-be artist, or someone seeking the marvelous, you'll find the courage and originality of the movements inspiring, and you'll gain an understanding of their long-term (and current) influences on contemporary art and culture – everything from performance art to pop art to the abandoned train ticket you find in the street....

Authors: M. E. Warlick.
Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Publication Date: 2001-03


Reviews :

   

Surrealist artist Max Ernst defined collage as the "alchemy of the visual image." Students of his work have often dismissed this comment as simply a metaphor for the transformative power of using found images in a new context. Taking a wholly different perspective on Ernst and alchemy, however, M. E. Warlick persuasively demonstrates that the artist had a profound and abiding interest in alchemical philosophy and often used alchemical symbolism in works created throughout his career.

A revival of interest in alchemy swept the artistic, psychoanalytic, historical, and scientific circles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Warlick sets Ernst's work squarely within this movement. Looking at both his art (many of the works she discusses are reproduced in the book) and his writings, she reveals how thoroughly alchemical philosophy and symbolism pervade his early Dadaist experiments, his foundational work in surrealism, and his many collages and paintings of women and landscapes, whose images exemplify the alchemical fusing of opposites. This pioneering research adds an essential key to understanding the multilayered complexity of Ernst's works, as it affirms his standing as one of Germany's most significant artists of the twentieth century.

...

Authors: Marc Dachy.
Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: "Harry N. Abrams, Inc."
Publication Date: 2006-04-01


Reviews :

    Well-written, loaded with information, and with a rich assortment of illustrations, each Discoveries(r) volume is a look at one facet of art, archaeology, music, history, philosophy, popular culture, science, or nature. These innovatively designed, affordably priced, compact paperbacks bring ideas to life and amplify our understanding of civilization in a new way.

Dada was one of the most important and influential movements in 20th-century art. Beginning in the anti-establishment climate around World War I, it encompassed painting, sculpture, photography, poetry and language, graphic design, film, performing arts, and criticism in Europe and America.

Dada had an immense effect on art throughout the 20th century. Its emphasis on machines reflected similar mechanistic currents in art through the war years; its appropriation of advertising imagery was revived in Pop Art in later decades; and its anti-aesthetic, anti-object, and anti-art principles persisted in important spurs of artistic theory and practice through the end of the century.

The movement's history is outlined in this concise, readable text-the only short introduction devoted exclusively to Dada, supplemented with essential documents and a useful bibliography. ...