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

Duchamp also appeared in two portraits by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, one a collage, the other a three-dimensional object portrait -- a droll assemblage of feathers and fabric effervescing from a stemmed cocktail glass -- represented in the show by a 1920 platinum print by Charles Sheeler. Add to these the 1918 Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp by Dreier and Man Ray's several photos of Duchamp cross-dressing as Rrose, and you got a pretty good idea of the erotic-hypnotic magnetism generated by the vulpine Duchamp.

Having met the players, the viewer arrived at New York Dada's playhouse, the Arensbergs' apartment. In a deftly handled recreation, the main room was suggested by enlarging documentary photographs taken in 1919 by Sheeler and then superimposing actual works from the Arensberg collection (by Matisse, Cezanne, Braque, Picasso, Picabia, Duchamp and Walter Arensberg's cousin John R. Covert) on their photographed positions. Here the "guest" could inspect photo albums and diaries, and read biographies of those who had been associated with the wealthy couple. The organizers were on shaky ground, however, when they decided to include Stuart Davis. He admired machine art, the Cubist collage esthetic, and even the transgressive spirit of Picabia and Man Ray, but there was no evidence presented that he ever so much as downed a manhattan at the Arensbergs' apartment, much less considered himself a Dada artist.

The best the organizers could do with Florine Stettheimer was to note that her apartment was only nine blocks away, and that she, too, entertained Duchamp and Picabia. This desire to include Stettheimer, a fondly regarded figure in the wake of the 1995 Whitney show "Manhattan Fantastica" [see A.i.A., Jan. '96], would cause even more trouble later in the exhibition. Her 1918 painting New York/Liberty celebrates the armistice with a freely "adjusted" panorama of the Manhattan skyline. A gilded Miss Liberty, built up of putty, presides over a secure harbor within a red, white and blue frame surmounted by an eagle. The exhibition label pronounced this to be "one of Dada's few patriotic paintings," but it is nothing of the sort. However many friends Stettheimer shared with the Arensbergs, however close their apartments on the West Side, her canny mix of faux American primitivism and illustrator's whimsy stands outside any useful definition of Dada.

The exhibition reinforced the centrality of Duchamp and Man Ray by presenting a second group of readymades, again most of them replicas, and related works by the pair. At this point, however, one could sense a fundamental difference of spirit between the infinite jest of Duchamp's enterprise and Man Ray's absorption with the poetic possibilities of ordinary objects. Ever the resourceful strategist, Duchamp could discredit authorship by constructing the Bicycle Wheel, and then feed the craving for "Duchamps" by making more ready-mades, replicating lost ones, and authorizing others to do the same. His 1919 glass ampule entitled 50 cc of Paris Air (represented in the show by a 1949 replica) was originally conceived as a gift for Walter Arensberg. It might well be a visual paraphrase of P. T. Barnum's adage that there's a sucker born every minute.