Art: The Good Old Dada Days

In Europe’s art centers in the gay and bitter years just after World War I. there was nothing quite like the determinedly disorderly young men who called themselves dadaists.* Whatever anyone else admired, they despised; whatever anyone else believed in, they mocked. They were deliberately incomprehensible, studiedly outrageous, and they pledged themselves to respect nothing, not even themselves.

Dadaist dancers performed motionless dances; poets recited poems such as Grim glim gnim bimbim grim glim gnim bimbim . . .

bum bimbim bam bimbim . . .

o be o be o be o be.

At a 1920 art show in the cellar of a Paris bookshop, all the lights were turned out so that no one could see the pictures.

Dadaists, wearing white gloves to protect them from contamination with the bourgeoisie, stood at the door shouting insults at visitors. Poet Louis Aragon (later a top ornament of Communist letters) mewed like a cat; another declaimed over and over, “It’s raining on a skull,” and Poet André Breton sat on a stool and ate matches. When the police arrived, the dadaists considered their success complete.

Last week in a Left Bank gallery, no insults were shouted, no poets mewed and Poet André Breton crunched not a single match as people wandered through a show of recent paintings by Breton’s old friend and fellow dadaist, Artist-Photographer Man Ray. At the opening Painter Ray, now a wiry 64, moved among the staid visitors clad in a brown tweed jacket, blue shirt and a yellow shoestring tie—a costume as unremarkable in Paris’ painter circles as a Truman shirt in Hollywood.

The new paintings of Old Dadaist Ray seemed as subdued as the aging rebels on hand, ranging from rather tame surrealist compositions to well-painted abstractions akin to industrial designs.

Flatiron Revolution. Man Ray was one of the zaniest dadaists of them all.

Born in Philadelphia, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, he went to Manhattan to study art under George Bellows and Robert Henri, changed what he calls his “foreign” name—from what he will not say—to avoid the jeers of his fellow students. In Manhattan Ray met up with a painting visitor from Paris: Marcel (Nude Descending a Staircase) Duchamp.

Ray and Duchamp began their own artistic revolution. Ray fashioned “objects” constructed of flatirons and tacks, paintings featuring such “readymades” as doorknobs or reflectors. Duchamp nailed clothes hangers to the floor and made little machines that whirled aimlessly.

When their magazine, New York Dada, folded after one issue, they gave up Manhattan in disgust and moved to Paris.

There Ray met Picasso and Braque. “I realized I wouldn’t stand much of a chance as a painter against that kind of competition,” says Ray, “so I turned to photography.” Exquisite Corpses. Ray invented “rayograms”—pictures made by placing objects directly upon photographic paper.

And his arty, moody photographic portraits were an immediate success. He took pictures of Gertrude Stein, Le Corbusier, Arnold Schoenberg, Brancusi, Braque and.

of course, famed Model Kiki in the nude.

Ray spent his evenings at the Café Certá talking with Breton, Arp. De Chirico and Léger and making composite drawings that they called “exquisite corpses.” This was actually an old parlor game. One artist would draw a head, fold the paper and pass it on to the next man, who would draw the body without seeing what had already been done. “We used to fabricate all sorts of monsters.” says Ray.

Ray stayed in Paris, painting and photographing, and became a leading exponent of dada’s successor, surrealism. When the Germans came in 1940, he took off for Hollywood, where he painted, photographed and lectured. In 1951 he went back to Paris and the Latin Quarter. There he now works, but never more than two hours at a stretch. “I like to work at white heat for short periods,” he explains. Painting is his main love, but photography brings in more money. Like a true dadaist, Ray scorns credit for the unquestionable skill of his photographs: “Many photographers consider themselves as artists. In my opinion, 99% credit should go to Mr.

Zeiss and Mr. Eastman and 1% to the man who happens to stand behind the camera.” Or, as a dadaist once abjured, “Stop looking! Stop talking!”

* So named when a knife was plunged into a French dictionary, stabbed the word dada, meaning, appropriately, “hobbyhorse.”