Revolution of the Daughters

In a summer season of slapdash gallery exhibitions in which a thin conceit attempts to unite work by basically unrelated artists, Francis M. Naumann’s “Daughters of New York Dada” is a delightful exception. This properly curated affair is elegant, insightful, and lots of fun.Dada was less a unified movement than a catchall term for several loosely connected avant-garde practices that arose amid the tension of World War I and its immediate aftermath in art centers on both sides of the Atlantic. Unlike the sprawling retrospective currently at the Museum of Modern Art, “Daughters of New York Dada” limits its focus — to New York, and, more specifically, female artists. None of these women achieved the canonical centrality of New York-based men like Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp, the latter of whom serves as a sort of spiritual dada, or at least frère ainé, to this exhibition. But the six artists shown here produced amazingly diverse work and together give an impression of Dada’s overall range.Florine Stettheimer, the most likely of the six to figure in an art-history survey, was both painter and salonière, hosting regular avant-garde gatherings at the West 76th Street townhouse she shared with her sisters Carrie and Ettie. Her best-known paintings depict the figures of her social world as elusive, almost spectral presences. The same elegant, haunted style is seen in “Delphiniums and Columbine” (1923), an exquisite rendering of a slender vase with a colorful bouquet whose every bud is a sensuous impasto kiss.Katherine S. Dreier made her mark as a collector and organizer — together with Duchamp and Man Ray, she founded the Société Anonyme, Inc., the first museum of modern art in America (the collection, donated to Yale, is currently on a national tour) — but she was also an accomplished artist. Her “Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp” (1918) captures the whimsy, warmth, and dynamism of its enigmatic subject in a totally nonobjective work.Both Dreier and Stettheimer, each of whom had a dual identity, were caught between newer and more traditional gender roles in the early 20th-century art world. Dada coincided with women’s suffrage in many countries, and it is the first art movement that saw large numbers of women acting as significant protagonists. While this exhibition avoids becoming bogged down by sexual politics, the issues of gender and equality are plain for all to see, giving “Daughters of New York Dada”the sort of intellectual and historical weightiness normally reserved for museum exhibitions.In the work of Beatrice Wood, there is a fine line between the serious unseriousness of Dada and a sort of feminized dilettantism. The artist is represented by several witty, flirtatious drawings depicting social gatherings or black-suited men frolicking with naked women. But this tension is most pronounced in “Un peu d’eau dans du savon” (“A Little Water in Some Soap”), dated 1917/77, a ceramic of a naked female midsection, thighs to neck, with a heart-shaped bar of soap covering what Wood delicately called “the tactical position.”When this work was shown at the 1917 Independents Exhibition, male visitors, upon learning that it was made by a woman, placed their calling cards around the frame.Francis Naumann has playfully re-created this effect with business cards. This ambiguous gesture is both teasing tribute and a decorous equivalent to the dollar bills slipped beneath a stripper’s G-string.Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is a familiar type: the Greenwich Village bohemian with a colorful backstory and even more colorful wardrobe. The Little Review, a vanguard poetry magazine to which she contributed, described her as “the first American dada … the only one living anywhere who dresses dada, loves dada, lives dada”; like Duchamp, her life was her greatest work. Unlike him, however, her persona comes down to us overdetermined by a single, caricature-like photograph, which shows the baroness striking an absurdly grandiose pose and dressed in an outlandish, self-designed two-piece costume. The photograph and costume (recreated by designer Pascale Ouattara) — its eccentric accessories include ribbons dangling from the knees with bells on their tips and a lion’s head pendant between the breasts — are both on view here.This clownish costume captures the mood of New York Dada, which, being far from the battlefields of World War I, was decidedly lighter, more playful, and less political than the European variety. But several artists in this show lived long beyond the halcyon days of Duchampian insouciance, and the nature of their art underwent considerable change.This is most evident in the work of Mina Loy, who is represented here by two collage sculptures from the 1950s, when she led a marginal existence in the Bowery, preferring the company of the downtrodden to the artists with whom she had previously kept company.Made of materials found on the street, “Communal Cot” (c. 1950) and “Christ of a Clothesline” (c. 1955–59) are the darkest, most affecting works in the show. The first presents a series of figures, their bodies crumpled rags, sleeping in the contorted positions one associates with passed-out bums. The second shows a ghoulish older man with a black eye and unwashed strands of thorny hair. His body hangs from a rooftop clothesline; his arms, clothespinned at the shoulder, dangle like socks. Behind him stretches a bleak cityscape of collapsing buildings, shuttered windows, and rusty smokestacks.Unrelenting in its vision of despair, this work adds a jolting final note to an otherwise joyous show, which, in true Dada fashion, manages to charm and provoke all at once.***The German modernist Marianne Brandt, who served as acting director of the Bauhaus Metal Workshop following the departure of László Moholy-Nagy in 1928, is best-known for her abstract metalwork.But in the 1960s, an aging Brandt went public with a very different body of work from her Bauhaus days, approximately 30 photomontages made between 1924 and 1930. These energetic though largely inscrutable collages are displayed together for the first time in the International Center of Photography’s “Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt.”This exhibition makes Brandt’s concern with gender issues a central focus. From work to work, wall texts explain her conflicted responses, ranging from celebrations of newfound freedoms (Germany granted women’s suffrage in 1918), to despair over female powerlessness to stop male aggression, to ambivalence about the exalted position of women in the performing arts.These opinions are easy to see, but whatever else Brandt intended with these works — and surely she did intend more; after all, she privately guarded them for 40 years — remains elusive. Though composed of images drawn from the popular press, these curiously enigmatic photomontages seemingly resist deeper interpretations.In a sense, this hardly matters. Brandt’s most memorable pieces are dense assemblages of clipped photographs such as “Parisian Impressions” and “This Is How We Live 1926” (both 1926),which look like yearbook collages from a bygone era. To the contemporary viewer, they read as historical documents, capturing the promise and hypocrisy of the short-lived Weimar Republic. Here are smiling men in top hats and coquettish dancers in peacock dresses, burgeoning cities with crowded beer halls and rising towers, goggle-clad motorcyclists and eyelash-fluttering starlets — but also, more ominously, images of labor unrest, claustrophobic urban spaces, violent parliamentary debates, and marching armies. Together, they provide incontrovertible evidence, when seen through the lens of history, of the looming political crisis that soon engulfed the world.“Daughters of Dada” until July 28 (22 E. 80th Street, 212-472-6800). “Tempo Tempo!” until August 27 (114 Sixth Avenue at 43rd Street, 212-857-0000).

Revolution of the Daughters

Revolution of the Daughters

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