Dadaism

The Dada exhibition that opened on October 5 2005 in the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris was organized by the French National Museum of Modern Art together with the Washington National Gallery of Art and MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York). The exhibit will travel from Paris to Washington (February19-May 14, 2006) and then to New York (June 16-September 11,2006). Initially each of these institutions, both the Washington and Paris museums, started preparing a retrospective of the Dada movement independently. When the museums learned of their overlapping interests they decided to join forces and invite a third party - the newly renovated MoMA with its rich collection of Dada art.

The Spring 2010 exhibition “Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention” at the Jewish Museum in New York was a highlight of the city’s artistic season, revealing in particular the artist’s Jewish identity. Man Ray, later titled a “prophet of the avant-garde” in America, was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 in Pennsylvania, the eldest child in a Jewish family of Russian origin. Emmanuel was nicknamed “Manny”, and from 1912 onwards, when the Radnitzky family took the surname Ray, he began to use “Man Ray” to label himself as an artist; while never completely rejecting them, he nevertheless came to free himself from his familial roots. As Man Ray he concentrated on building up an artistic identity which found its realization in creative photography, the visual arts, film-making, poetry, literature and philosophy.

The Spring 2010 exhibition “Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention” at the Jewish Museum in New York was a highlight of the city’s artistic season, revealing in particular the artist’s Jewish identity. Man Ray, later titled a “prophet of the avant-garde” in America, was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 in Pennsylvania, the eldest child in a Jewish family of Russian origin. Emmanuel was nicknamed “Manny”, and from 1912 onwards, when the Radnitzky family took the surname Ray, he began to use “Man Ray” to label himself as an artist; while never completely rejecting them, he nevertheless came to free himself from his familial roots. As Man Ray he concentrated on building up an artistic identity which found its realization in creative photography, the visual arts, film-making, poetry, literature and philosophy.

"For Arp, art is Arp" - this proclamation made by Marcel Duchamp in 1949 arouses a curiosity to get to know Arp's understanding of art, presented at the exhibition in the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck*. There are many reasons to consider the painter, sculptor, and poet Hans (Jean) Arp (1886-1966) to be among the most influential artists of the 20th century. In Zurich in 1916, together with his artist colleagues Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Tristan Tzara he founded Dada, a protest movement against war and human despotism. With mostly provocative, sometimes playfully-ironic artistic means of expression, the Dadaists tried to surmount existing social and aesthetic norms, and in doing so, revolutionized the art scene in only a short time. "Happenings" and "performances", significant forms of expression even in today's art, are directly rooted in Dadaism, and "concrete poetry" is wholly in the tradition of the poet Arp as well.