PARIS, FRANCE.-The Centre Pompidou, Mus閑 national d’art moderne proposes a re-reading of Dada, one of the major international movements of the first half of the 20th century. Dada, the irreverent “anti-art” movement will enjoy an unprecedented scope in these exhibition with more than 1,000 works by 50 artists from prestigious public and private collections will be on view. The Centre Pompidou will exhibit nearly all of its Dada collection, one of richest in the world. The Museum of Modern Art in New York will also lend some 100 works, to the Dada exhibition. After its unique European debut, Dada will be shown in a modified version at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. (19 February to 14 May 2006), and then in New York at MoMA (18 June to 11 September 2006). The exhibition has been organized with the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition is sponsored in Paris by PPR and Yves Saint Laurent.

Born during the First World War, the Dada movement expressed a raging contempt for existing values. In its wake, the industrial object was considered as a work of art; performances, sound poetry and the practice of collage, among others, were soon determining elements in the history of art in the 20th century.

The 1910s and the early 1920s saw the advent of the illustrated press, radio, assembly line work and cinema as commercial phenomena. Dada seized the new media and the “culture of the machine,” and succinctly subjected them to biting criticism. The participants in Dada expressed, through references to modernity, a voracious interrogation of modernity itself. The Dada exhibition presents a dynamic panorama of paintings, sculptures, photographs, collages, photomontages and graphic documents, as well as sound recordings and films. This rich ensemble of works puts the entire Dada period on parade – from 1916, the date of the foundation of the impertinent Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, to 1924, when the majority of Dadaist groups had left the scene.

The exhibition features many figures of Modernism who took part in the multiple expressions of Dada. Here are specific idioms of the movement that issued from Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, Paris and New York, as well as in the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Japan.

The artists presented include icons of Modernism, including Hans (Jean) Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hannah H鯿h, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Louis Aragon, Johannes Baader, Hugo Ball, Andr� Breton, Jean Crotti, Paul Eluard, I.K. Bonset, Marcel Janco, Cl閙ent Pansaers, Tristan Tzara, and Hans Richter.

At the crossroads of multiple influences, the Dada exhibition shows the creative explosion of the first half of the 20th century – one that gives as much significance to words as to images. Thus, a very significant number of books, reviews, photographs and manuscripts are brought together thanks to the exceptional support of the Biblioth鑡ue Litt閞aire Jacques Doucet and the Biblioth鑡ue Paul Destribats.

The exhibition’s design reserves a noteworthy place for seminal Dada films, among them Viking Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony, 1921; Paul Strand/Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta, 1921; Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21, 1921, Rhythmus 23, 1923-1925 Filmstudie, 1926, and the Vormittagsspuk, 1927-1928; Ren� Clair’s Entr’acte, 1924; and Marcel Duchamp’s An閙ic Cinema, 1925.