NEW YORK.- Dada, on view at The Museum of Modern Art through September 11, 2006, is the first major museum exhibition in the United States to focus exclusively on Dada, one of the most influential avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. Responding to the disasters of World War I and to an emerging modern media and machine culture, Dada artists led a creative revolution that both boldly embraced and caustically criticized modernity itself. Pursuing innovative strategies of art making that included abstraction, chance procedures, collage, photomontage, readymades, performances, and media pranks, the Dadaists created an abiding legacy for the century to come. The exhibition features over 400 works in a dynamic multimedia display that includes films, paintings, photographs, printed matter, sound recordings, and objects. Among the nearly 50 artists represented are Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters, Sophie Taeuber, and Tristan Tzara.

This exhibition surveys the many forms of Dada artistic production as developed in Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, New York, Paris, and Zurich, the six principal cities where Dada took hold between 1916 and 1924. It presents an expansive view of Dada, including Zurich’s experiments in radical abstraction, New York’s irreverent readymades and machine portraits, Berlin’s scathing political montages, Cologne’s hallucinatory imagery, Paris’s relentless critiques of painterly traditions, and Kurt Schwitters’s carefully composed recyclings of society’s detritus in Hannover.

Dada had its U.S. premiere at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from February 19 to May 14, 2006. A variation of the exhibition was shown in Paris at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, from October 5, 2005, to January 9, 2006. MoMA is the final venue for this exhibition. Dada is organized by Leah Dickerman, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington; and Laurent Le Bon, Curator, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris, in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art, New York. It is coordinated at MoMA by Anne Umland, Curator, and Adrian Sudhalter, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.

Says Ms. Umland, “The Dada movement’s outrageous provocations have prompted many to define it as ‘anti-art’—a term the Dadaists themselves used. This exhibition argues, however, that Dada’s shock tactics were meant less as a wholesale disavowal of art than a complete and radical rethinking of its definitions and rules. Dada held at its core a profound ethical stance against contemporary social and political conditions. Its oppositional strategies—the exploitation of nontraditional artistic materials, mining of mass media, destruction of language, exploration of the unconscious, and cutting and pasting of photomontage—irrevocably altered perceptions of what qualifies as art, in ways that continue to be powerfully resonant today.”

Installation - The Dada exhibition at MoMA is structured around a series of six porous, interconnected spaces, respectively devoted to the six principal cities where Dada was developed and defined. There are two different entrances to the Dada exhibition at MoMA; visitors who enter on the left begin in New York, and those who enter on the right begin in Zurich. These options reflect the Dada movement’s dual points of origin in two geographically disparate, but similarly neutral, cities at the beginning of World War I. Within the exhibition space—designed by Jerome Neuner, Director, Exhibition Design and Production, The Museum of Modern Art—emphatic diagonals, overlapping planes, and expansive vistas emphasize the themes of movement, travel, and dispersal that pervade Dada, a defiantly international movement and the first to self-consciously position itself as an expansive network spanning countries and continents. The exhibition’s structure is deliberately nonlinear; it is intended to exploit the constant, productive tension between containment within cities and dissemination between cities, as Dada artists, ideas, words, images, and strategies circulated.