First International Dada Fair, Berlin, 1920
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Contents
- Introduction
- Photographs
- Catalogue
- Artworks
- Documents
- References
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1. Introduction
The Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (First International Dada Fair) was held at the Gallerie Otto Burchard, Berlin, between 30 June and 25 August 1920. It was a landmark exhibition, both for practitioners of Dada and for Modernist art in general, in that it brought together some of the most prominent European artists associated with this innovative movement encompassing performance, literature and art. The exhibition itself was recorded through a brief, single sheet catalogue of works, a small collection of photographs, various newspaper and magazine reports and reviews, plus later reminiscences by participants and visitors to the show. Much of the available English-language content is brought together in the current blog. A detailed list of references to the show, its content, reception and significance is also included.
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2. Photographs
The most well known image from the exhibition (illustrated below) is a posed shot looking at one of the corners of the main exhibition space, with various artists and attendees gathered in the middle, either standing or seated. Around and above them are numerous works of art, including paintings, posters and sculpture.
1) People in the exhibition space, Galerie Otto Burchard, Berlin, 30 June-25 August 1920. Photograph: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.
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This photograph displays the eclectic nature of the hanging, with posters, paintings, collage and sculpture mixed together in a somewhat frenetic display. A variant of this photograph featured on the cover of the Milan magazine La Domenica Illustrata. Therein it is not a simple photographic reproduction, but instead a coloured artwork with additional elements and individuals portrayed. Both photograph and coloured illustration include the tall, standing figure of George Grosz on the right, though the position of various artworks on the walls is altered.
2) People in the exhibition space [magazine cover], La Domenica Illustrata, Milan, 28 July 1920. Coloured drawing by George Grosz.
An additional photograph, perhaps taken at the opening of the exhibition, is a crowd scene from a different section of the gallery, though it includes a number of the people seen in the first photograph.
3) Crowd of people in the exhibition space. L-R: Hannah Höch, Otto Schmalhausen, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield (hidden, holding his son Tom), Dr. Otto Burchard, Margarete Herzfelde, George Grosz (pictured on wall), Wieland Herzfelde, Rudolf Schlichter, Mies van der Rohe, unknown (hidden behind hand) and Johannes Baader.
It would appear that photograph #3 was taken from a similar position to #1, though looking in a different direction in order to record as much of the show as possible in the two images. Another photograph of this section of the exhibition exists, though without the crowd and looking slightly towards the left. It reveals the central part of photograph #3 and extents to the left towards a large poster featuring a man shouting.
4) Main room, with works by Raul Hausmann, John Heartfield, George Grosz and Dada puppets on a wooden plinth. A desk featuring Dada publications can be seen on the right.
This section of the exhibition featured in the 1988 Berlin reconstruction show. Therein many, though not all, of the original works and installation elements were reproduced, including the ceiling-mounted Prussian Angel.
5) Replication of part of the main exhibition room of the First International Dada Fair, Berlin, 1988.
6) Facsimile of John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter's Prussian Archangel, Berlin exhibition, 1988.
A fourth original photograph survives, featuring the artists Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch. It extends the view seen in photograph #3 along the wall to the right and includes, lower left, Hoch famous collage Cut with a Kitchen Knife. Behind her left shoulder and to the right is Hausmann's Tatlin en Casa [Tatlin at Home].
7) Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch at the opening of the First International Dada Fair. They were two Berlin Dadaists, who during their brief love affair, began experimentations with collage. Photographer: Robert Sennecke. Collection: Hannah-Höch-Archiv, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin.
A fifth photograph exists featuring George Grosz and John Heartfield standing next to their mannequin-based sculpture entitled simply Mannequin 27. This artwork can be seen on the far right of photograph #1a. In the image Grosz and Heartfield are holding a poster stating Die Kunst ist tot - Es lebe die neue Maschinenkunst Tatlines / Art is Dead - Long live Tatlin’s New Machine Art.
8) George Grosz and John Heartfield in front of Mannequin 27.
This poster can also be seen in photograph #6, mounted on the wall behind Hannah Hoch. The exhibition featured a variety of similar text-only posters, all of which made statements which were emphatic or nonsensical, and presented Dada views and opinions. A sixth image from the exhibition shows artist Otto Dix interacting with an artwork featuring a movable figure.
9) Otto Dix and moveable artwork.
The seventh and last known original photograph from the exhibition is of a large work by the artist known as the Great Dada - Johannes Baader - and entitled German's Greatness and Decadence. It was apparently located in a separate room next to the main exhibition space and comprised a tower-like structure composed of artefacts, publications, posters and sculpture elements. Baader referred to it as a Plaster-dio-dada-drama.
10) Johannes Baader, Plaster-dio-dada-drama / German's Greatness and Decadence, 1920.
No other images of the exhibition survive, though we do have the original catalogue to assist in identifying works shown. This was printed as a single sheet, folded in four, and in red and black ink. A few illustrations were included amongst the typically Dada graphic design elements.
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3. Catalogue images
The following are images from the official catalogue for the exhibition.
11a-d. Exhibition catalogue.
The catalogue features a listing of works on show, two reproduction of artworks, graphic embellishments and some descriptive text, apart from information about the show itself.
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4. Artworks
From the exhibition catalogue and contemporary photographs we know what works were shown. A number survive, whilst others were destroyed by the Nazi's or otherwise lost due to time, neglect and the war. Important works are reproduced below.
12. Otto Dix, The War Cripples, 1919. Presumed lost and likely destroyed by the Nazi regime. This was the largest non-sculptural on show.
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5. Documents
A number of contemporary reviews of the exhibition which have been translated into English are reproduced below.
* Introduction to the exhibition, by Wieland Herzfelde, First International Dada Festival - Catalogue (Long 1995):
Erste InternationaleDada-Mess
Introduction [excerpt]
WIELAND HERZFELDE
Berlin, 1920
Painting once had the distinct goal of making it possible for people to see things, landscapes, animals, buildings, etc., which they could not see with their own eyes. Today these tasks have been taken over by photography and film, which perform them incomparably more perfectly than the painters of all times. But painting did not die off with the loss of this goal; it searched for new ones. Since then all efforts in art can be summarized as follows: they share a tendency to emancipate themselves from reality no matter how different they are. Dadaism is the reaction to all those attempts to deny the factual, attempts which were the driving force of the Impressionists, Expressionists, Cubists, and also the Futurists (in that they did not want to capitulate to film); but the Dadaist does not try to compete again with the photographer's apparatus, or even to imbue it with soul by preferring (like the Impressionists) the worse lens: the human eye-or (like the Expressionists) by turning the apparatus around and constantly portraying only the world within their own breast. The Dadaists say: if at an earlier time, love and effort were expended on the painting of a body, a flower, a hat, a shadow, etc., we only have to take the scissors and cut out all these things we need from among the paintings, photographic reproductions; if it concerns something smaller we don't even need a depiction at all, but can take the objects themselves, for example pocket-knives, ashtrays, books, etc., all things which have been quite beautifully painted in the museums of old art, but painted just the same. Now the famous question: Yes, but the content, the spiritual? Over the centuries, the uneven distribution of life-and developmental possibilities has produced outrageous conditions in the field of art just as in all other fields. On the one side are a clique of so-called able and talented people who, partly through decades of training, partly by protection, tenacity, in part too through inherited gifts, have monopolized all judgments about art. On the other side are the mass of people whose modest and naïve desires to portray, communicate, and come to terms with themselves and their surroundings have been suppressed by that clique of trendsetters. Today the young person who does not want to give up all claim to education and to the broadening of his native talents has to submit to the thoroughly authoritarian system of artistic education and the artistic public judgment. In contrast, Dadaists are saying that production of pictures is not important, and that at least one should not assume a position of authority when one does make pictures. In this way, the pleasure the masses may take in the creative activity would not be ruined by the professional arrogance of a haughty guild. For this reason the contents and also the media of Dadaistic pictures and products can be extraordinarily varied. By itself any product is Dadaistic which is created without influence from and regard for public authority and criteria of judgment. And it remains Dadaistic as long as the image works against illusion, out of the need to subversively assist the contemporary world, which obviously is in a state of disintegration and metamorphosis. The past is important and relevant only insofar as its cult must be opposed .... Today no man, even one who speaks with the language of art-a genius-could create works whose conditions belong to past centuries and millennia. The Dadaists consider it an accomplishment to be vanguard opponents of dilettantism, because an artistic dilettante is nothing other than the victim of a prejudiced, arrogant, aristocratic point of view. The only programme the Dadaists recognize is the duty to make current events, current in both time and place, the contents of their pictures. This is the reason they do not consider the "Thousand-and-one-nights" or "Pictures from Indochina" as sources for their work, but rather the illustrated magazine and the lead stories in the press.
* Raoul Hausmann, A Dadasoph's Opinion of What Art Criticism Will Say about the Dada Exhibition, First International Dada Festival - Catalogue (Lippard 1971):
Max Miebermann is illustrating the Bible!
First of all, it should be emphasized that this Dada exhibition is a very common bluff, a mean speculation on the curiosity of the public - it is not worth a visit. While Germany is trembling and shaking in a governmental crisis of unforeseeable duration, while the meeting in Spaa pushes our future fate further and further into uncertainty - these boys come along making wretched trivialities out of rags, trash, and garbage. Such a decadent group, showing no ability at all and lacking in serious intent, has seldom appeared so boldly in public, as these dadas dare to. They don't surprise one anymore; everything goes down in cramps of originality mania, which, devoid of all creativity, lets off steam with foolish nonsense. 'Mechanical art work' may pass in Russia as a type of art - here it is talentless and artless mimicry, the utmost in snobbism and insolence towards serious criticism. Even the single middling talent among this bunch, the draughtsman Grosz, is disappointing; it is precisely his case that demonstrates how weakness of character and inability to resist the pressure of fashion and the search for the 'newest' can lead a talent into a swamp of boredom, aberration, and dull bar-room jokes. Oh Grunewald, Durer, and you other great Germans, what would you say about it? The works shown at this exhibition are without exception on such a low level that one wonders how an art gallery could dare show these concoctions for such a high admission price. The perhaps misled owner of this gallery should be warned - but the dadas should receive merciful silence.
* Newspaper review.
"Kunst-Bolschewismus"
P.F.
Neue Preussischer Zeitung-Berlin, 3 July 1920
The "Monster Dada Exhibition" at the Galerie Otto Burchard is the proverbial writing on the wall, a chronometer of the incredible confusion of all moral and intellectual notions. For these brothers in Dada, under the leadership of Chief Dada Baader, there is, as far as one can see, neither logic nor principles. If one argues with them and insists that the conclusion exactly contradicts the premise, they are as delighted as savages, and say that is exactly what they intended. One must then, simply accept, as unprovable, everything that they have glued together into a potpourri cuttings from only the most radical publications, and regard it as the babblings of the weak-minded. Everywhere, large posters boastfully proclaim that "Dada triumphs"; but, in spite of the fact that a professional athlete in a vest is standing guard in the exhibition, a normal average European would not be able to understand anything of the "art objects" on display here. addition, the whole thing is enormously lacking in wit, and is intellectually so impoverished that one is not even moved to smile. Great art of the past is merely negated, impudently and brazenly, with terms of abuse, or is hidden beneath inanely affixed scraps of photographs; and one of these Dada knaves has even dared to transform the death mask of Beethoven in an unutterably stupid and idiotic manner. The only thing that these trainee marksmen do bring off is a loathsome hatred for our military leaders in the World War, whom they defile in a drunken manner as cheap as it is repulsive. The most complete dissolution in the event is brought about by the idiocy of the Chief Dada, who styles himself "President of the Earth and the World, Head of the International Court, True Secret Chairman of the Inter- Telluric Supra-Dadaistic Universe of Peoples," etc., etc., even though he is qualitatively perhaps the least harmful element in so far as he is currently becoming acquainted with the madhouse. His childish, laboriously concocted Teacher Hagendorfs Reading Desk [Lehrer Hagendorfs Lesepult] takes up a great deal of space without making even the slightest sense except that of nonsense. But enough of this trash. In spite of all the ballyhoo from these bohemian youths, all we find here is total impotence and decrepit, victimless confidence trickery. In one especially inspired moment, one of these babbling Dada-sophists wrote his own critique of this Dada exhibition. I cannot resist citing it here, word for word, and I have to add that I fully agree with it: "Let it be said at the outset that even this Dada event is an absolute bluff, and is not worth seeing. While Germany quakes in an unprecedented governmental crisis of unforeseeable duration, while the meeting in Spaa pushes our future fate further and further into uncertainty these fellows make trivial fun out of rags, kitsch, and photographs. Such a decadent society, in which each and every soul is disintegrating, has rarely been represented in public so brazenly as the Dadaists have represented it here. Nothing at all of what is here can astonish us any more, everything is drowning in spasms of the lust for originality, which-given that it is lacking in any creativity-expends itself in inane antics. The 'mechanical work of art' may be feasible in Russia, but here it is untalented and artless imitation, the most extreme form of cynicism and effrontery toward earnest criticism. Even the single reasonable talent to be found in this mob, the draftsman Grosz, proves a disappointment, for it is precisely in his work that it becomes clear where weakness of character and the inability to resist the search for the 'latest thing' can lead a gifted artist-right to the heart of the swamp of boredom, error, and trite, drunken hoaxing. The work shown at this exhibition is, throughout, of such a low level that one has to marvel at an art gallery that has the nerve to charge such a high entry fee. The owner, who was perhaps misled (whom the Dada numbskulls have, in passing, named 'General Dada'), should be warned: 'On the Dadaists, silence should be maintained forever.' '0 hohojoho - domohodoho!"' (R. Hilsenbeck). One sees what awaits us and our thousand year-old German art if Bolshevism should penetrate here. (The danger is very great!) In any case, what has become of the art censor?
* Newspaper review.
"Grosse Monstre-Dada-Schau"
ERNST COHN-WIENER
Neue Berliner Zeitung - Berlin, 6 July 1920
If I had had to arrange this exhibition, I would have sought out, in place of the idyllically located Galerie Burchard beneath the chestnut trees on Schoneberger Ufer, a fairground that was as noisy as possible. I would have set up the most brightly colored stalls among carousels, helter-skelters, boxing rings, little bands, and hurdy-gurdy players. I would have had the Herzfelde brothers posed with kettle-drum and triangle on the right, and George Grosz with a great big trombone on the left. And I would have cried: "Keep on coming, step right up, very little respected public, please enter! Here you will see no boxing-wrestling-racing-reviewing-brawling. Here you will see true art. A Museum of Anatomy where you can see yourselves dissected, and not only an arm or a leg, but your head and your heart. And not only your own, but that of all of you at once, without any magic, quite naturally painted." That was our militarism. All you can see, of course, is a stuffed uniform, but it is precisely this figure that was your superior, completely true to life down to the heels of his boots! - What is that you say? What are they for? To trample you underfoot, of course! "Here you can see the teacher of your so-called youth, the man with the hereditary ideals. And next to him, the true, great art: the Mona Lisa, etc. - Yes, in the picture there are a good many vile thing s- but what are you shouting about? The pictures seem real enough to you, and then what are they to you, anyway, Hecuba? And, if someone now painted a Mona Lisa, as bold as she was in those days, then you would - "This here is a cross-section of yourselves, with all the sentimentalities, instances of untruthfulness, enthusiasms, and prejudices that you love, because that's what you hear and because the others do it, too. Just as you let yourselves be trampled because that's what you hear and because the others do it, too. Here you can see your passion for nature, your science, your so-called love, as it really is, without the usual masks of picture postcard sentimentality. "Here you can see the German Republic, culture, religion, and ... "What's that you say?- That this is not an art exhibition? Well, we are after all at the fair, and this is a cabinet of curiosities with a distorting mirror in which you can see yourselves without the infamous pack of lies by means of which you tell yourselves in order to be able to believe that you are respectable individuals. Here you can see yourselves without the illusion of beauty, without any of your money, without your knowledge simply naked, naked, naked!" As I said, that is how I would have cried up the stalls if l were a Dadaist. But I'm not. Someone has to sweep out our houses, but I love the man who builds them.
* Magazine review.
"Dada"
ADOLF BEHNE
Die Freiheit - Berlin, 9 July 1920
The Dadaists Hausmann, Dix, Albrecht, Gross, Hannah Hoch, and some others have opened an exhibition at the Salon Burchard, at 13 Lutzowufer, for which they charge an entry fee of three marks and 30 pfennigs, probably in the expectation that only the purse-holders of the West End will pay a visit. So, although it may well be asserted, on a poster within the exhibition, that Dada is on the side of the revolutionary proletariat, the Burchard exhibitors in fact end up enacting the intellectual dictatorship of the proletariat as a form of overture for an audience of well-to-do philistines. Very much a case of "art," then. Dada wants to liberate us from all bourgeois lies. It wants to undermine the windy rhetoric, the conventions, and the hypocrisy of the bourgeois mentality; and it has succeeded brilliantly in some sure-footed hunting out of the bourgeois in disguise. The best of this work has been achieved in the essays of Raoul Hausmann, published in the Einziger, in the Erbe, and recently in issue no. 8 of Dada (Malik-Verlag, Berlin). "Know yourself'- is the wisdom of Dadaism. Forget about the past, forget about the future; know yourself ... today! Wrap yourself up in today, whether you are happy to do so or not. Every flight from the present is a weakness, every passing of judgment an instance of narrowmindedness. Only he who knows himself in the present moment has the right to open his mouth. As the intellect eagerly insinuates itself between things as they are and our perceptions of them be it in the form of a judgment, an assumption, a wish, a belief, an intellectual tradition, or an idea the Dadaists are against intellect. They uphold the pure primitivism of unmediated experience. It is out of this Dadaist stance, which has an ethical value, that the art of Dada arises. Making art does not, strictly speaking, form part of the Dada program. But where does it leave Dada when its young people barricade themselves against its command to "know yourself' taking refuge in self-assurances, in Ten Commandments advertised on posters: in short, when they make idiots of themselves instead of knowing themselves? Dada is itself mired in Expressionism. It has to recognize that-and then laugh! But such recognition, which is bitter enough, is not yet the final form of self-knowledge. The art of the Dadaists can only be a direct expression of the age. It cannot really differ in character from the present day. Mr. Scheinrat recently penned the delightful proposition: "Art is able to transpose man into a more beautiful world." This reflects a bourgeois understanding of art. Dada shows us the world as it is in 1920. Dada would like to tell us: 1920 is not as horrible as all that. Man is a machine, culture consists of rags, education is darkness, intellect is a form of brutality, the norm is stupidity, and the military is in charge. Only a fool would nowadays paint The Elysian Fields [Gefilde der Seligen]. All "beautiful" colors and forms are nowadays fraudulent. The state of the intellect in 1920 is shown by the Dadaists in images that have been glued together out of advertising logos, photographs, driver's licenses, iron crosses, razor blades, scraps of braid, uniform insignia, and newspaper clippings. They swap the heads on photographs, cut them off and recombine them, and have evolved a technique that produces an uncanny tension and that undeniably enriches our conventional approach to making paintings. Here there are to be found a great many important ideas-and not least for the cinema, whose future I see as above all very Dadaistic. A number of truly marvelous pasted works by Hanna Hoch, Raoul Hausmann, and George Grosz make this exhibition well worth a visit. But there is in fact far too much good work in it. With the walls hung entirely with these Dada pictures, there no longer appears to be any real difference between this movement and any other formula for art, be it Impressionist or Expressionist. Only that which is unique is truly Dada. When the Dadaists had finished installing their exhibition, they should have thrown out half of what they had hung. Annoying the philistine bourgeois, annoying the philistine artist-that alone is rather too little for Dada. It really would have been better to show Kurt Schwitters and Golyscheffhere rather than many "true" Dadaists. An outstanding abattoir picture by Otto Dix and A good picture by Paul [Johannes Sokrates] Albrecht, Death of the Musketeer Helm hake on the Field of Honor [Der Tod des Fuseliers Helmhake Auf dem Felde der Ehre ], are very badly hung. But Then these are not examples of orthodox Dadaism. Dadaism is a force to be reckoned with. It sees things for what they are-and, by this means, puts an end to them. Correctly understood, it does away with every form of opposition. Dadaism, which alternately gives sermons and snaps at them, is still only in its modest beginnings. Terror is unworthy of true Dada. The German Revolution is at a stage where scolding has a counter-revolutionary effect. This display has turned out to be something of a German Dada Exhibition. We must hope that the next one will be an International Dada Exhibition. The most promising item in the present show is a poster with the slogan "Dada is not bluffing."
* Newspaper review.
"Dada" [excerpt]
PAUL WESTHEIM
Frankfurter Zeitung - Frankfurt, 17 July 1920
Otto Burchard has opened a new art gallery in Berlin, which boldly began its series of exhibitions with works by Rudolf Schlichter. ... Now, however, Burchard is hosting a Dadaist show. It is probably only by accident that Dada has strayed into a commercial art gallery. We do not need to understand it fully here, but Dada is not a new direction in art, nor is it metaphysics. Dada is not even about shocking the bourgeoisie, which the whole world is already doing nowadays anyway - nor can it be described as clowning around or humbug, even though Dada's proponents do not let anyone prevent them from pulling a gag or having some fun. Dada is a .. . reaction - a reaction to the spirit of our times, which have devolved into a culture of slogans, deceit, exploitation, and suppression, a reaction to the years 1914, 1915, 1920, 1921 up until an as of yet unknown end. Those who have a craving for big words might even say that Dada is a world view. Dada is against everything: against lying, against deceit, against slogans, against spectacle-wearing seriousness ... innocuousness; Dada is simply against! Against God and the world (in the most real, literal sense). Dada is against the organized disorder of the world and especially against every possible type of order? Dada is against morality and against immorality, it is against politics and is eminently political, it is against capitalism and against socialism, against government and against misgovernment. Perhaps Dada is the great sentimentality of childish idealists, who are staring aghast at the shattered remains of our chaotic reality, who-as great unbelievers-live in the firm belief that salvation can only be achieved through the complete disintegration of our world, comprised as it is of slogans and deceit. Dada is (of course) also against art, but this does not preclude the presence of a great artist among the ranks of these unsolicited firemen of world conflagration-namely George Grosz, who is sometimes an astonishing painter and graphic artist, a graphic artist in the style of Daumier, but at other times, consumed by skepticism, is against himself, against art and, to put it simply, is Dada.
* Newspaper review.
"Dada"
PETER PANTER [KURT TUCHOLSKY]
Berliner Tageblatt - Berlin, 20July 1920
At 13 Lutzowufer there is now a Dada exhibition. Because we have nothing else to worry about. If one discounts the element of bluff in this association, one is not left with terribly much. I know precisely what these people want: the world is confusing, meaningless, pretentious, and intellectually puffed up. This is what they want to deride, reveal, deny, and destroy. And on that point there is nothing to discuss. (Just like artistic Bolshevism in general, despair about the justification of the value of art is a concern that one cannot simply dismiss. Disbelief takes hold.) But I do not like their way of going about it. Anyone who hates fervently must have once loved very deeply. Anyone who wishes to deny the world in such a fashion must have once affirmed it very strongly. Must have once embraced that which he now condemns to the flames. But what impression does this make? Minor literary talents endeavor, in a rather spasmodic fashion, to terrify the bourgeoisie and to insult that which is sacred to other people. That is the word for it: a spasm. From nine in the morning until seven in the evening, without a break, they are corrosively humorous and disposed to satire. It is Dadaism in return for an entry fee of three marks and thirty pfennigs. "The real thing obtainable only here. Beware of imitations." The exhibition itself resembles a very cute dime store. (Having said that, I believe that hundreds of generations of artists could have done this more wittily, more convincingly, and more daringly at their studio parties.) A fat, stuffed sailor hangs from the ceiling, looking blissfully down upon the clutter of old hatboxes, cardboard boxes, rusty nails, very unsuitably positioned sets of false teeth and paintings. It is rather quiet in there, and no one reacts as if outraged anymore. Dada-oh well ... But there is someone who really does stir things up, and for whom it is worth going to see the exhibition: this is George Grosz, a real man, a fellow full of sarcasm. If drawings could kill, the Prussian military would certainly be dead by now. (And, by the way, drawings can kill.) His portfolio God with Us [Gott mit uns] deserves a place on every good bourgeois family table - its grimacing caricatures of majors and sergeants are apparitions drawn from reality. He, alone, truly rages, kicks up a racket, scoffs and sneers, and gives us something that we rarely see: revolution. The others merely leave scratches. He kills. The others simply make little jokes. This man is serious. Is it really so unbelievably courageous to write, say, about some picture by Ciorgione and then to reject it with the addition of two fat white brushstrokes? That is mere stage thunder. But you absolutely must not miss the boxing match between Grosz and the century of the soldier.
* Newspaper review.
"Dada-Ausstellung am Lutzowufer 13,Kunstsalon Burchard"
G.G.L. [GERTRUD ALEXANDER]
Die Rote Fahne - Berlin, 25 July 1920
"Dada is great and John Heartfield is his prophet." "Dada is not bluffing." "Dada triumphs." It is on posters with slogans such as these that Dada sings its own praises. And it certainly needs such praise so as to assure us that Dada is indeed not "bluffing." The first impression one has of the Dada exhibition is, in fact, that of a great bluff "Hoax," the term employed by the restrained, good natured critic of the Vossische Zeitung, is putting it too mildly. For this business is too dull, too little suited to laughter, too serious, and too pretentious to be a mere "hoax." The bourgeoisie, it is true, can do no better than laugh at it. But the pale Dada youth who, with a patronizingly sympathetic expression, seeks to introduce Dada to lesser mortals, without of course being himself in a position to explain all the oddities that hang or stand in the exhibition, would have rejected, in disappointment, the opinion of Max Osborn, who is right to treat the whole thing as a bit of fun. At first sight, this exhibition has the air of a film company's promotional hurly-burly or the advertising for a sale of military effects or of some such stuff In gluing together a mosaic of objects of bourgeois origin such as newspaper clippings, tram tickets, postcards, parts of toys; in signing and framing the result as a "picture"; in hanging this picture alongside bizarrely tasteless, new, barbaric "paintings"; in setting up next to these paintings or hanging from the ceiling, stuffed soldiers' uniforms as a type of "sculpture"; and with the further addition of colorful Dada dolls and marionettes - in short, in dispersing all this tomfoolery around the walls and the rooms, Dada believes it is "shattering bourgeois society" and "cornering bourgeois art." Such "sculptures" could be justified only in an anti-military panopticon, where no one would have any complaint to raise against them. But presenting a collection of perversities as a contribution to culture, and even to art, is no longer a "hoax," but sheer effrontery. Is it not effrontery when we find obscene words scrawled over reproductions of Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Botticelli's Flora, and when these are hung alongside reproductions of works by Dadaists, as examples of "bourgeois art that should be trampled back into the Middle Ages and beyond?" Do these gentlemen really imagine that they can get at the bourgeoisie by this means? That they have somehow caught out the bourgeoisie? The bourgeoisie just laugh at it all. The Vossische Zeitung calls it a "hoax," the Post terms it "higher nonsense," and yet both still thereby acknowledge Dada as a force in art: for they can still smell in it the flesh of their flesh-bourgeois decadence. (When one finds, as in the case of the review in the Post, comparisons with Rabelais, Fischart, and Morgenstern, it is clear that there has truly been a great effort to accommodate this exhibition!) One could dismiss Dada as mere megalomania and categorize it as pathological, if these things were not so risibly small, minute, and impoverished by comparison with the proletariat's mighty struggle for liberation, the only place where there is serious commitment to the destruction of bourgeois society. And the proletariat will wage and win this battle without the assistance of a campaign against art and culture undertaken by a bourgeois literary clique. The proletariat has no patience for perversities of this sort, for which the sensation-greedy bourgeoisie of the West End are still willing to pay three marks and 30 pfennigs; and it cannot get far enough away from all this bourgeois business, where the bourgeoisie can be exposed as often as they like. We just ask that these gentlemen, who glue their cut-out photographs on to the figures in old fashioned drawings so as to make accomplished caricatures, do not call themselves communists. We find it hard to comprehend how A. Behne critic of the Freiheit, can take a charitable view of such revolutionary nonsense, treating figures in a panopticon and the magic of the cinema as examples of art, proposing the "enlightenment" of the workers, and speaking of "values." "All 'beautiful' colors and forms are nowadays fraudulent." "Only a fool would nowadays paint The Elysian Fields [Gefilde der Seligen]."Yes, indeed! For the bankrupt bourgeoisie there are only lies and chaos, just as modern bourgeois art is itself largely kitsch. (One need only look at the big Berlin art exhibitions.) But what does the proletariat care about all this? Does it perhaps not have the right and the hope to improve its own situation-and perhaps even in the foreseeable future? It does not need to trouble the bankrupt bourgeois. And, without suffering any damage to its proletarian soul, its class-consciousness, and its readiness for battle, it can just as well seek beauty in the old, better days of the bourgeoisie, which brought forth individuals no less revolutionary than the worker revolutionary of today. This self-aware fighter does not need to destroy works of art, as Dada does, in order to free himself from being "bourgeois." For "bourgeois" is precisely what he is not. But a person who can do nothing but glue stupid pieces of kitsch together, as practitioners of Dada do, should keep his hands off art. But to seek and to see in Dada an achievement that "enriches our conventional approach to making paintings," or "a great many important ideas," as A. Behne does, is already the manifestation of a certain intellectual wretchedness, a perversity, and a lust for sensation.
* Newspaper report.
"Staatsaktion gegen Dadaisten" [excerpt]
Anonymous
Vorwarts - Berlin, 21 April 1921
. .. On Wednesday, the writer Johannes Baader (known as "Oberdada"), the art-dealer Dr. Buchard, the painter George Grosz, the writer Wieland Herzfelde, and the painter Rudolf Schlichter appeared before the II Regional Court's Criminal Division, for insult to the federal army. The Dadaists' exhibition - 'The First International Dada Fair"- was the basis for the prosecution charges. This exhibition was predominantly characterized by persiflage and humor, with militarism being one, among many, of its targets . .. . There was also a portfolio of the highly talented artist George Grosz, entitled God with Us [Gott mit uns]. ... In nine sheets of the highest artistic value, the portfolio presented a grim satire on the excesses of militarism. These drawings are a caricature creation of utmost weight and should be put on the same level with the great historical caricatures .... ... Of course the prosecutor was only able to see these caricatures as an insult to the German armed forces. Captain Marthal, who visited the exhibition, was insulted and initiated the trial. ... The court sentenced the defendant Grosz, who was deemed an uncontrollable artist, to a fine of 300 marks, Herzfelde to a fine of 6oo marks and the rest of the defendants were acquitted. The court also ordered the confiscation and destruction of the plates and molds, which were to be handed over to the Minister of Defense, until the authorization for publication was granted. .. . Every single piece of paper in that portfolio holds more art than in the whole of the Siegessaule because of which a special court shed such bitter tears. All art-interested circles should protest against the fact that because of a few monocle-wearing men and their excessive sensibility, a work of art will be destroyed that our contemporaries have the right to see and know.
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6. References
Adkins, Helene, 'Erste Internationale Dada-Messe', in Stationen der Moderne : die bedeutenden Kunstaustellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland / hrsg. von Michael Bollé und Eva Züchner (Berlinische Galerie : Berlin 1988) 156-183.
Altshuler, Bruce, 'Dada ist politisch : the first international Dada fair, Berlin, June 30-August 25, 1920', Chapter 6 of Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition : New Art in the 20th Century (Harry N. Abrams : New York 1994).
----, Salon to Biennial - Exhibitions That Made Art History. Volume I: 18163-1959 (Phaidon Press : London 2008).
Bergius, Hanne, 'Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (1. Juli - 25. August 1920). Katalog der Ausstellung und ihre Rekonstruktion: Rundgang durch die Messe anhand der Fotografien und Identifizierung der Werke', in Hanne Bergius, Montage und Metamechanik. Dada Berlin - Artistik von Polaritäten (Gebr. Mann Verlag : Berlin 2000) 349-414.
-----, 'First International Dada Fair: Saturnalia of Art', in "Dada Triumphs!" Dada Berlin 1917-1923. Artistry of Polarities, Montages-Metmechanics-Manifestations. Crisis and the Arts. The History of Dada, volume 5 (G.K. Hall & Co. : Farmington Hills MI 2003) 231-281. Translated from the German. The German version is published in Hanne Bergius, Montage und Metamechanik. Dada Berlin - Artistik von Polaritäten (Gebr. Mann Verlag : Berlin 2000) 233-303.
Bernard, Sophie, 'Dada-Messe/Foire Internationale', in Laurent Le Bon (dir.), Dada (Editions du Centre Pompidou : Paris 2005) 322-325.
Dachy, Marc, 'Lambeaux de corps dans le brouhaha', in Dada et les Dadaïsmes (Gallimard : Paris 1994) 174-186.
Dada-Messe, [website]. Available URL: http://www.dada-companion.com/dada-messe/.
-----, [Catalogue], 1920. Available URL: http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/Dada_Messe/index.htm.
-----, [Catalogue] [Text]. Available URL: https://digital.kunsthaus.ch/viewer/fulltext/22378/5/.
-----, Kunsthandlung Dr. Otto Burchard. Erste internationale DADA-Messe. Faltblatt zur Rekonstruktion der Messe in der Berlinischen Galerie [Catalogue facsimile], Koln, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 1988.
Erste Internationale Dada Messe [blog], Machinekunst, 13 January 2011. Available UR: http://maschinenkunst.blogspot.com/2011/01/erste-internationale-dada-messe-1920.html.
Grey, Emily Rachel, Dada Exhibitions: A Survey and Analysis (University of Maryland.
Heartfield, John J., First International Dada Fair, Berlin Club Dada 1920 [blog], 25 October 2018. Available URL: https://www.johnheartfield.com/John-Heartfield-Exhibition/helmut-herzfeld-john-heartfield/chronology-heartfield-dada-politics/grosz-hausmann-piscator.
Herzfelde, Wieland, and Brigid Doherty. “Introduction to the First International Dada Fair.” October, vol. 105, 2003, pp. 93–104. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3397683.
Ilustrated History of Dada, MERZMail [website]. Available URL: http://www.merzmail.net/dada7.htm.
Lippard, Lucy B., Dadas on Art, N.J. Prentice, Englewood Cliffs, 1971.
Long, Rose Carol Washton (ed.), German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995.
Steinhauer, Jillian, Behold Nazi Postcards from the Infamous Degenerate Art Show, Hyperallergic [blog], 26 November 2014. Available URL: https://hyperallergic.com/165346/behold-the-nazi-postcards-from-the-infamous-degenerate-art-show/.
The International Dada Archive, University of Iowa. Available URL: http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/collection.html. Contains a collection of 36 Dada publications for download.
Wikipedia, Erste Internationale Dada-Mess, Wikipedia. Available URL: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erste_Internationale_Dada-Messe.
Züchner, Eva, 'Die Erste Internationale Dada-Messe in Berlin. Eine meta-mechanische Liebeserklärung an Tatlins "Maschinenherz"', in Berlin Moskau, 1900-1950 = Moskva Berlin, 1900-1950 / hrsg. von Irina Irina Antonowa und Jörg Merkert (München etc. : Prestel 1995) 118-124.
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| Dada in Australia | First International Dada Fair, Berlin 1920 |
Last updated: 22 May 2019
Michael Organ, Australia
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