Dada & Surrealist Objects at Blain/Di Donna

One of the season's best exhibits, Dada & Surrealist Objects, is currently tucked away on the mezzanine of the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue.  This show at Blain/Di Donna is a "must see" for anyone with the slightest interest in the development of twentieth century art.  It contains works by almost all the major figures of the surrealist movement as well as a few lesser known artists.

The most important artist on display is Marcel Duchamp.  Though it was the presence of Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 at the 1913 Armory Show that first brought him to fame, it is his readymades and not his paintings that are his most significant legacy.  It was these "found" objects that opened the door not only to appropriation art but to the entire range of conceptual and pop art as well.  The most important of the readymades was Fountain (1917).  So successful was this work in challenging the then prevailing notions of what was and was not art that it was quietly destroyed by board members of the of the Society of Independent Artists to whose show it had been submitted.  Works by Duchamp on display at this show include A bruit secret. With hidden noise, Chess Score, Parmi nos articles de quincaillerie, La Bagarre d'Austerlitz as well as the artist's facsimile notes to the Bride Stripped Bare.  Also shown are several readymades created by Duchamp's close friend, the photographer Man Ray, including Indestructible Object, Object of my Affection and Les Grandes Vacances, the last a tribute to Duchamp's own bottlerack.

Joseph Cornell, Méret Oppenheim, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dali, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Jean (Hans) Arp, Kurt Schwitters and Yves Tanguy are among the other important surrealists represented at the show.  There are also two works by André Breton. Breton, though, was primarily a literary figure and his forays into the visual arts are derivative and not particularly successful.  The real surprise are the works of George Hugnet, including two assemblages in boxes from 1936-1937 that are very reminiscent of the boxed collages Cornell had begun making only a few years earlier.

Photography was represented at this show by an excellent rayograph by Man Ray, Champs delicieux (1922), as well as a vintage print of the photographer's Table Top Still Life (1935). Hans Bellmer's La Poupée dans la forêt (1935) and Claude Cahun's Je donnerais ma vie (1936) were also included.  There were also photographs of surrealist exhibitions and installations taken in 1938 by Raoul Ubac which provide important documentation of the movement's history.  Notable by their absence, though, are any works by the important surrealist photographer Pierre Molinier.

The exhibit continues through December 13, 2013.