Daughters of New York Dada at Francis Naumann

New York Dada, with its fluid genders and genres, has been poorly served by the rigid taxonomies of art history. It was not only Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray and Morton Schamberg who crossed paths on these shores during the First World War, as textbooks would have it. Rrose was not the only woman in town. Indeed, Katherine Dreier defined the terms of American Dada as much as Duchamp. Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven pioneered performance art in New York during the war years. Yet the Baroness's jarring ephemeral acts, her tomato-can bra and birdcage coiffure, have been marginalized, and Dreier is remembered as a supporter of Duchamp's ambitions rather than as a visionary in her own right.

"Daughters of New York Dada," organized by Francis Naumann, offered a compelling counterproposal to this year's Dada museum blockbuster. The small parlor like gallery was hung salon-style with six concentrations of artworks and ephemera illuminating the contributions of six women. Dreier's Cubist/Futurist paintings reveal her modernism in practice; especially notable is the wry Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1918), which turns the tables on the painter of Nude Descending a Staircase. Baroness Elsa is incarnated by a mannequin wearing one of her eye-popping costumes, remade for the show.

Many works are unapologetically erotic, created as liberating gestures that coincided with the rise of suffragettes and "the new woman." Clara Tice's sensuous nudes were censored by the city vice squad in 1915; a woman painting female eroticism in such lush, decadent terms was a provocation. Interracial couples consort tenderly on Florine Stettheimer's handpainted china plates. Borrowing an eminent Victorian medium, Stettheimer mocked colonialist mores, painting forbidden affairs with the Rococo pathos of Watteau. When Beatrice Wood's ceramic relief of a Rubenesque bather--with a tiny heart-shaped bar of soap placed in what Wood called "the tactical position"--was shown at the 1917 Independents Exhibition, titillated men inserted their calling cards in its frame. In homage to the quaint prurience of that first reception, visitors to Francis Naumann have done the same.

Emerging from a very different society are the poet Mina Loy's fragile, brutal dioramas--glass-encased boxes influenced by Joseph Cornell. Recumbent Bowery bums made from twisted rags, their faces painted with abbreviated, expressionist features, are scattered across an Army-green surface in Loy's Communal Cot (ca. 1950). She made such assemblages in the 1950s while living on the Bowery herself, and the Beats are as much in evidence as Dada.

American Dada was a catholic affair, and "Daughters of New York Dada" defines it expansively. And why not? Dada was never meant to be doctrinaire.

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