New Perspectives on Dada & Cubism

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

As art movements go, Dada burned brightly and briefly, its spirit too nihilistic to be sustained by mere paint and poems. Jean Arp and Marcel Duchamp moved on to influential careers, but the Berlin-born Hans Richter (1888-1976), a founder of Dada’s Zurich chapter and author of the history “Dada: Art and Anti-Art,” is less remembered. Maya Stendhal’s handsome survey of more than 100 of his drawings, prints, paintings, assemblages, and reliefs could use a few more explanatory labels and elaboration of his work in film, but it amply demonstrates the artist’s protean gifts.

Richter’s earliest Dadaist works on view include a series of raw, expressionist portraits executed between 1916 and 1918 in ink, colored pencil, and linocut. He soon turned to geometric abstraction, and from then on his radicalism found its voice – remarkably enough – in lyrical, playful composition.

In 1919, he produced the first of his “scroll paintings,” long, thin compositions paced by rhythmically evolving shapes. (Unsurprisingly, these sequential images coincide with his first abstract experiments in film.) He revisited this format over the years with such works as the 7-foot-tall oil painting “Fugue 8” (1958) and the 11-foot-wide serigraph “Fugue 23” (1976). All are notable for their linear sense of time; unlike most traditional paintings – even abstractions – there’s little doubt about the progressions of movements.

His more compact designs employed a bewildering variety of materials.The de Stijl-like canvas “Towards a Perfect Painting” (1946) opposes jazzy thrusts of red, blue, and black on a white background. With delightful irreverence, bits of corrugated cardboard animate two collages from 1970. Several reliefs incorporate polished metal cutouts, and even, in the case of “Three Little Themes” (1964), copper strips applied artfully to termite-eaten planks.

Despite these works’ revolutionary roots, a poetic orderliness prevails.Two wood reliefs from 1974, both titled “Dada Head (After Drawing 1918),” reflect the persistent balance of logic and lyricism. Their playfully abstracted features are engaging but not startling, as if guided by wit and application rather than by, say, Arp’s drive for pure, plastic discovery and climactic tensions.

Richter aficionados will be pleased to see films playing on two screens. His later films, produced after he settled in the United States, include “8×8” (1957), in which Duchamp, megaphone in hand, dourly supervises a giant chess game with live playing pieces. The earlier black-and-white short films are less dryly cerebral. In “Rhythm 21” (1921), rectangles expand and shift across the screen in pregnant intervals. Though conceptually simple, its effect is hypnotic.

“Ghosts Before Breakfast” (1927) constructs a provocative pseudo-narrative out of self-propelled bowler hats, self-filling coffee cups, and vanishing beards – their juxtapositions made even stranger by dramatic lighting and camera angles. In it, one senses an acute intelligence at work, freewheeling in its outlook but insisting on its own, discreet rhythms.

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Abstract-Expressionism has been hailed as the first authentically American modern art movement. The impli cation is that prior modernist trends were merely derivative.

“Toward a New American Cubism,” currently on view at Berry-Hill Galleries, shows that derivativeness of style is not necessarily poverty of invention. This fascinating selection of 40 paintings from museums and private collections showcases the work produced in the 1920s and ’30s by nine American modernists.

Several canvases by Stuart Davis reflect his own brand of stylish, controlled exuberance; “Salt Shaker” (1931) borrows Picasso’s 1920s “linear Cubism,” but its textures and colors achieve their own jaunty vigor. Arshile Gorky’s work suggests a romantic wanderer, moving from the vibrant, flattened “Abstract Still Life” (c. 1934-37) – a looser, more limpid version of Braque – to a more rigidly geometric study for a mural (c. 1935-36). John Graham’s canvases startle for their obtuse, earthy flamboyance: In “The Yellow Bird” (c. 1930), the contours of the central biomorphic shape accelerate and slow in maddening fashion, as if the artist could hardly contain himself.

Elsewhere, an untitled de Kooning abstraction (c. 1934) fascinates with the strapping crispness of its forms; it suggests an original spirit in search of a subject. Several paintings by sculptor David Smith rather tamely follow Cubist precepts, while Jan Matulka’s canvases seem sweetly decorative hanging next to the burly rhetoric of Hans Hofmann.

Visitors may lament the omission of important modernists like Max Weber, Arthur Dove, and Marsden Hartley. Nevertheless, the exhibition is a compelling account of an era’s insights and struggles – not the telegraphed struggles of Abstract Expressionism but the internal ones of painters attempting to make sense of their own world with their palettes.

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Lyrical, suggestively textured abstract landscapes are a road well traveled by Joan Mitchell, Pat Steir, and many others. Eva Lundsager brings an intelligent rigor to a genre that can sometimes slip into agreeable escapism.

Her canvases, which vary from about 3 feet to 7 feet in width, are sometimes impishly titled – “Maddenlump,” “Plunderstorm” – but they’re knowingly composed.The evocative ingredients are all there: textures ranging from swirling strokes to clotted marks, pointillist dots, and neat rows of drips that could be rainfall, stalactites, or even ships’ masts. Colors tend toward vibrant midnight blues, bold oranges, and warm grays, enlivened by shocks of brilliant scarlet.

She effectively paces these ingredients, giving heft to their allusions. In “Hermit Style” (2006), a flood of transparent orange settles deeply into space behind a sweep of knotted grays. A rocky beach at sunset? Perhaps: Ms. Lundsager walks a skillful line between daydreams and painterly constructs, and never lets us forget that it’s all paint.

Richter until September 16 (545 W. 20th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-366-1549). Works are not for sale. “Cubism” until July 7 (11 E. 70th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-744-2300). Works are not for sale. Lundsager until July 7 (730 Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets, 212-445-0444.) Prices: $6,000-$20,000.


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