Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [113]
Wright’s life was as precedent-shattering as his buildings. The “master,” as he called himself, enjoyed outraging the public. His seventy-year career was punctuated by one tabloid headline after another: bankruptcies, scandalous divorces, and three marriages. In 1909 he deserted his wife and six children for an affair in Europe with a client’s wife. During a bitter courtroom battle, Wright named himself when asked to identify the world’s best architect. He later explained, “I was under oath, wasn’t I?”
Wright, Guggenheim Museum, 1959, NY. The most radical of his buildings, the Guggenheim substitutes curves for right ongles, making the whole a giant abstract sculpture.
DADA AND SURREALISM: ART BETWEEN THE WARS
DADA: A WORLD GONE GAGA. Founded in neutral Zurich in 1916 by a group of refugees from World War I, the Dada movement got its name from a nonsense word. Throughout its brief lifespan of seven years, Dada often seemed nonsensical, but it had a no-nonsense aim. It protested the madness of war. In this first global conflict, billed as “the war to end all wars,” tens of thousands died in trenches daily to gain a few scorched yards before being driven back by counterattacks. Ten million people were slaughtered or maimed. It’s no wonder Dadaist artists felt they could no longer trust reason and the establishment. Their alternative was to overthrow all authority and cultivate absurdity.
Dada was an international attitude that spread from Zurich to France, Germany, and the United States. Its main strategy was to denounce and shock. A typical Dada evening included several poets declaiming nonsense verse simultaneously in different languages with others yapping like dogs. Orators hurled insults at the audience, while absurdly costumed dancers flapped about the stage and a young girl in communion dress recited obscene poetry.
Dadaists had a more serious purpose than merely to shock. They hoped to awaken the imagination. “We spoke of Dada as a crusade that would win back the promised land of the Creative,” said Alsatian painter Jean Arp, a founder of Dada.
Arp, “Mountain, Table, Anchors, Navel,” 1925, MoMA, NY. Arp shared the Dada faith in accident, creating “free” forms by chance.
Duchamp, “Fountain,” 1917 Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
DUCHAMP: THE “DADA” OF SURREALISM
French artistMarcel Duchamp (pronounced doo SHAHN 1887-1968) was one of the most influential figures in modern art. A prime mover of both Dada and Surrealism, he also inspired diverse movements from Pop to Conceptualism. Duchamp became a legend without actually producing much art. Although his “Nude Descending a Staircase (see p. 150) was notorious, Duchamp abandoned painting at the height of his celebrity. ”I was interested in ideas — not merely in visual products,” he said. “I wanted to put painting once again of the service of the mind. ”
For Duchamp, conceiving a work of art was more important than the finished work. In 1913 he invented a new form of art called “readymades” by mounting a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool. His most controversial readymade was a porcelain urinal he signed R. Mutt. Duchamp defended the unconventional objet d’art, saying, “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hand made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it.... [he] created a new thought for that object.” Duchamp’s readymades opened the flood-gates for art that was purely imaginary rather than merely “retinal” (interpreting the visual world). He changed the concept of what constitutes art.
ARP: GAME OF CHANCE. In his work, Arp (1887-1966) exploited the irrational. He discovered the principle of random collage by accident, when he tore up a drawing and threw the pieces on the floor. Admiring the