The New York pre-school - Dada art, various artists, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

Art in America, June, 1997 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

Marcel Duchamp arrived in New York on June 15, 1915, nine months after the German advance on Paris had been stopped at the Marne at a total cost of one million lives, two months after chlorine gas introduced by Germany at Second Ypres in Flanders had asphyxiated 60,000 British soldiers, and one month after 1,200 civilians had perished aboard the Lusitania, victims of a German submarine attack. We really can't say for sure whether Duchamp's primary motive for flight was to escape the mounting horror of the war or to counteract the ostracism to which he had been subjected by an uncomprehending Paris art world, but it is not difficult to explain his choice of New York as a sanctuary. He had already achieved a measure of American success with the exhibition and prompt sale of four paintings at the 1913 Armory Show. It was Walter Pach, one of that show's organizers, who greeted Duchamp at the pier and arranged for him to five temporarily in the home of the fledgling collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg.

The territory already had been reconnoitered by Duchamp's Paris cohort Francis Picabia, who had visited the city for both the Armory Show and his own first exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery. In May 1915, during a New York stopover en route to a base in Havana, Picabia deserted from the French army and set about fashioning a metropolitan network of dealers and artists. Together Duchamp and Picabia became pivotal figures in the circle of emigres and Americans who enjoyed the generous patronage and boundless hospitality of the Arensbergs. They are also one very important reason why the body of art works and publications which emerged from the "Arensberg Circle" has come to be called "New York Dada."

The Arensbergs themselves were emigres of a sort, having moved from Boston to the West Side of Manhattan in 1914. The couple was seeking a more freewheeling and cosmopolitan environment following an epiphany, experienced by Walter at least, at the Armory Show. The move coincided with the launch of their collection, and over the years they acquired African tribal art, significant examples of European modernist art (from Rousseau and Cezanne through Picasso, Matisse and Brancusi) and works by those who would number among the first progressive figures of 20th-century American art (Joseph Stella, Morton Schamberg, Man Ray). The Arensbergs collected artists as well, and their nightly salon became an important meeting-place for the city's emerging avant-garde,

Duchamp was the perfect go-between -- mercurial, witty, debonair and, well, French. He introduced his American friends Man Ray and Beatrice Wood and his compatriots Jean Crotti, Juliette Roche, Henri-Pierre Roche and Albert Gleizes into the Arensberg Circle. The artist who had feared that poverty would lead to humiliation and compromise (Duchamp wrote before leaving for New York "I am afraid to end up in need to sell canvases, in other words, to be a society painter") instead found himself the beneficiary of indulgent patrons.[1] In October 1916 he moved into a studio one floor above the Arensbergs' duplex. They paid his rent in exchange for piecemeal acquisition of the Large Glass, which Duchamp left for them, signed and "incompleted," when he finally resettled in Paris in 1923. Most of the other expatriates had returned home after the 1918 Armistice, although Picabia had departed for Switzerland in October 1917. The Arensbergs decamped to California in the early '20s, their fiscal and marital stability undermined by unchecked spending, ceaseless entertaining and mutual infidelities.

The years 1913 and 1923 thus loosely bracket a period in which a vital mix of international talent and American patronage fashioned itself into a comfortable avant-garde. Its members flouted artistic and social conventions, explored the possibilities of machine imagery, questioned the fixity of gender identities, experimented with photography and assemblage, organized exhibitions, issued journals, quarreled and had affairs with one another -- seemingly affected by war and revolution abroad only to the degree that it had brought them together safely on American shores. The Old World was self-immolating with a fury unleashed by militarism and industrial greed. Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball and a nucleus of other artists in Zurich founded Dada in 1916 in a spirit of anarchy and disgust. By contrast, in New York later that same year, the more reasonably named and formally organized Society of Independent Artists was founded by Duchamp and a host of Americans from the Arensberg Circle with the financial support of 12 prosperous sponsors. In April 1917, as the United States entered the war against Germany, Duchamp was fighting, unsuccessfully as it would turn out, to have his readymade Fountain accepted for the Independents' exhibition.

Fountain, an upended urinal facetiously signed "R. Mutt," subsequently became one of the benchmark works of Dada. The first news of the Zurich movement and its name probably reached New York by the end of 1916 through letters exchanged by Tzara and Marius de Zayas. Notices began to appear in the New York press in 1918, the same year Picabia started informing Tzara about activities in America. In 1921 Duchamp and Man Ray published a single issue of New York Dada with a coy nonauthorization from Tzara to use the name because "Dada belongs to everybody."[2] A disenchanted May Ray, however, who left New York for Paris later that year, thereafter denied that Newyork Dada had ever existed.[3]