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

One of the more appealing oddities in the Independents section was Beatrice Wood's drawing on cardboard Un peut [sicl d'eau dans du savon (A Little Water in Some Soap), a scandalous little piece which -- unlike Fountain -- did make it into the group's 1917 show. The 1977 replica re-created the composition of a nude female torso, emerging from hip-high water and sporting only a piece of green shell-shaped soap on her pudenda. According to the explanatory paragraph, Duchamp had suggested to Wood that the conventional fig leaf be replaced by soap, and had further cautioned her that the soap had to be "right." It might be added that the shell shape is a likely allusion to the watery birth of Venus. With the dissolving of the soap would come the loss of all modesty, pudeur in French. Indeed, one can't help but wonder if Wood wasn't attempting a French pun with "un peu d'eau," much as Duchamp would do later by penning "L.H.O.O.Q." beneath a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. The attempt seems all the more awkward since Wood, who was praised for her speaking command of French, has misspelled the word peu.

By the conclusion of the exhibition it was clear that an abundance of wonderful objects and a great deal of dedicated research had added up to a less than convincing presentation. One suspected a curatorial willingness to inflate the Dada category rather than come to terms with the complexities of an emerging American avant-garde that did not entirely deserve the label. The dogged determination to make sense of the subject only resulted in a dumbing-down of the information about historical context. For example, one didactic wall text in the Arensberg apartment re-creation made the following assertion: "The preference of the Arensberg Circle for cerebral pursuits such as chess, for intellectual concerns over surface aesthetics, and for humor and irreverence gave New York Dada a unique character, vastly different from the nihilism and anti-art stance of the European Dadaists." It is sheer folly to suggest that "European" Dada was not characterized by intellectual concerns and irreverence, though, indeed, chess may not have been on those artists' minds.

What distinguished European from American Dada was that the former was bearing witness to the violent collapse of an entire political and cultural order, while the latter was in possession of the security and the means with which to imagine a new order -- or a happy state of disorder -- an ocean away. Picabia's randy mechanical gizmos might well procreate freely; for Otto Dix in Berlin, however, mechanical forms could comprise only the ghoulish prostheses worn by hideously maimed veterans. A strong injection of continental wit and sophistication, courtesy of Duchamp and Picabia, entered American modernism, just as two decades later a far more traumatized wave of European abstract painters and Surrealists catalyzed the local talent and helped form the New York School.

Perhaps it would be best to call the mischief-makers of 1913-23 the "New York Pre-School": frolicsome, permissive and greatly pleased to have been free from the adult turmoil of Europe. How shall we picture them? What would serve as the equivalent of the 1951 Life magazine photo of "The Irascibles," which fixed the testy and defiant look of the Ab-Ex generation? My choice would have to be Wood's delicious little 1917 watercolor Lit de Marcel (Marcel's Bed). Worn out by a night of romping at The Blindman's Ball, five bohemian sleepyheads have tumbled into Duchamp's narrow bed to restore their energy and wake up to be good Dadaists again in the morning.