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Zurich
Berlin
Hannover
Cologne
New York
Paris
Dickerman
zurich
berlin
hannover
cologne
new york
paris
DADA:
Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of
Art, Washington. All rights reserved. This book may not be
reproduced in whole or in part (beyond that copying permitted
by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers from the public press), without written
permission from the publishers.
Produced by the Publishing Office,
National Gallery of Art, Washington
www.nga.gov
Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Centre Pompidou, Musée
national d’art moderne, Paris, 5 October 2005–9 January 2006;
at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, 19 February–14 May
2006; and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 18 June–11
September 2006.
ISBN 0–89468–313–6
(softcover: alk. paper)—
1. Dadaism—Exhibitions
2. Arts, Modern—20th Century
I. Dickerman, Leah
II. National Gallery of Art (U.S.)
IV. Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)
V. Title
The hardcover edition is published by the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, and D.A.P./Distributed Arts Publishers, Inc., 155
Avenue of the Americas, Second Floor, New York, N.Y.
10013–1507. Tel. 212.627.1999, Fax 212.627.9484
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dickerman, Leah, 1964–
Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris
Leah Dickerman; with essays by Brigid Doherty… [et al.] .
p. cm.
Includes bibliographic references and index.
ISBN 1–933045–20–5
(hardcover: alk. paper)—
NX456.5.D3D53 2005
709’.04’062074—dc22
2005017984
The exhibition in Washington is made possible through the generous support of the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation and the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation.
Additional support for the exhibition in Washington has been provided by the Annenberg Foundation and Thomas G. Klarner.
The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
IX XI XIV XV 1 16 84 154 214
Foreword
Acknow
ledgments
Note to the R
eader
Lenders to the Exhibition
Introdu
ctionLeah D
ickerman
Zurich
Leah Dickerm
an
Berlin
Brigid D
oherty
Hannover
Dorothea D
ietrich
Cologne
Sabine T. K
riebel
Table of Contents
274 346 410 416 460 490 504 516
New
YorkM
ichael R. Taylor
Paris
Janine Mileaf
Matthew
S. W
itkovsky
Dad
a Films
Em
manuelle D
e L’Ecotais
Mark Levitch
Chronology
Matthew
S. W
itkovsky
Artists’ B
iographiesA
manda L. H
ockensmith
Sabine T. K
riebel with
Isabel Kauenhoven
Selected B
ibliographyA
urélie Verdier
Index
Credits
National Gallery of Art, Washington
19 February–14 May 2006
Centre Pompidou
Musée national d’art moderne, Paris
5 October 2005–9 January 2006
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
18 June–11 September 2006
DA DA:ZURICH BERLIN HANNOVER COLOGNE NEW YORK PARIS
Brigid Doherty
Dorothea Dietrich
Sabine T. Kriebel
Michael R. Taylor
Janine Mileaf
Matthew S. Witkovsky
Leah DickermanWith essays by: Edited by:
zurich
zurichHans RichterChristian SchadArthur Segal
Walter SernerSophie TaeuberTristan Tzara
Emmy HenningsRichard HuelsenbeckMarcel Janco
Francis PicabiaAdya van ReesOtto van Rees
Hans ArpHugo BallViking Eggeling
dada: the beginningLeah Dickerman
Dada was launched in Zurich. Its manifestation in that
city was distinguished by its origins within the cabaret,
the primacy given to defining a theory of abstraction
expressed across media, and interest in various forms
of primitivism. Yet, in the activities of a small group of
artists living there during World War I, a certain idea
of Dada developed with enough coherence to travel
and be adopted elsewhere. Zurich was a crucible for
Dada’s revolution. Many of the fundamental ideas and
strategies that later characterized Dada as a movement
grew out of events and activities that took place within
this city of refuge.
Because of Switzerland’s famed policy of
political neutrality, Zurich served as a safe haven for
those escaping the escalating conflagration of World
War I. Iconoclasts of all kinds were attracted to the city:
pacifists, draft dodgers, spies, and profiteers, as well
as political and intellectual refugees of many stripes,
including the Russian Bolshevik exiles Vladimir Lenin
and Grigori Zinoviev and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.
§
Hugo Ball, co-founder
of the Cabaret Voltaire,
February 5, 1916
Hugo Ball and other dada
artists at the Dada Fair, 1917.
Tristan Tzara, Richard
Huelsenbeck, Francis Picabia
Germaine Everling, 1921.
In relation to Berlin, Munich, Bucharest, and Paris,
where the founding dadaists had spent their pre-war
years, Zurich was by all accounts a conservative city.
Its very tranquility, abundance, and disengagement
from the conflict created at times a feeling of unreal
isolation from the larger European world. At one point in
his memoirs, Richard Huelsenbeck, a founding member
of the Zurich Dada group, writing with cosmopolitan
disdain, labeled the entire country “one big sanatorium.”1
But Huelsenbeck also clearly conveyed the overarching
sense of freedom and relief that accompanied his arrival
in Zurich: “In the liberal atmosphere of Zurich, where the
newspapers could print what they pleased, where there
were no ration stamps and no ‘ersatz’ food, we could
scream out everything we were bursting with.”2 This
sense of refuge was shadowed by a keen awareness
of proximity to threat, felt both geographically and
physically. Hans Arp wrote defiantly: “Despite the
remote booming of artillery, we sang, painted, pasted
and wrote poetry with all our might,”3 while Hugo Ball
drew a more precarious picture, describing Switzerland
as a “birdcage, surrounded by roaring lions.”4
The origins of the Dada movement are
inextricably tied to the short life of the Cabaret Voltaire,
an iconoclastic nightclub that served as the first public
gathering place for Dada artists and writers. The
learned Ball, the Cabaret’s founder with his companion
Emmy Hennings, served as Dada’s earliest intellectual
leader. Ball was a studious figure whose writings
reveal an incredible breadth of cultural erudition. His
diaries serve not only as the most important record for
our understanding of events in Zurich, but also as an
intellectual genealogy, making links between his thinking
and other contemporaries. In Munich before the war,
Ball wrote for Die Aktion, Der Sturm, and other radical
journals and began serious involvement with the avant-
garde theater, working as literary adviser to several
progressive theatrical groups. Along with the playwright
and poet Hans Leybold, Ball cofounded an experimental
journal of his own called Revolution, which launched
1 Richard H
uelsenbeck, Mem
oirs of Dada D
rumm
er (196
9), ed.
Hans J. K
leinschmidt, trans. Joachim
Neugroschel (B
erkeley, 1991), 2
5.
2 Huelsenbeck, D
ada Drum
mer, 14.
3 Jean [Hans] A
rp, Arp on A
rp: Poem
s, Essays, M
emories, ed.
Marcel Jean, trans. Joachim
Neugroschel (N
ew York, 19
72), 2
32.
4 Hugo B
all, Flight Out of Tim
e: A D
ada Diary by H
ugo Ball (19
27), ed. John
Elderfield, trans. A
nn Raim
es (Berkeley, 19
96), 3
4. Entry for 10
October 1915.
£ ¤
18 | 19
§
£
¤
proto-dadaist assaults on bourgeois mores. The pub-
lication of one of Ball’s poems, “Der Henker” (The
Hangman), led to the confiscation of the journals; but
at the ensuing trial, the judge declared the poem to be
incomprehensible and therefore harmless. Ball’s Munich
activities brought him into expressionist circles around
the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider), and Vasily Kandinsky,
the group’s leading figure, was to remain a central
and lasting influence on Ball. The two developed plans
to reopen the Munich Artists’ Theater in an effort to
promote a “new form of theatrical expression,” ambi-
tions that were jettisoned with the outbreak of war.
A meeting in a Munich café established a second
important relationship for the founding of Dada: Ball
befriended Huelsenbeck and began a formative
collaboration with the younger man
Hennings, a figure of quite a different type,
sat at the class margins in a way that distinguished
her from her future (and male) Dada colleagues. She
was an experienced professional entertainer, who had
been associatwed with theatrical companies, vaudeville,
cabarets and nightclubs, and avant-garde ventures
from about 1905.5 Contemporary criticism and memoirs
present a consensus about her extraordinary stage
presence. Capturing both her charisma and dissipation,
the Züricher Post ran a piece on the Cabaret Voltaire
declaring: “The star of the cabaret, however, is Mrs.
Emmy Hennings. Star of many nights of cabarets and
poems. Years ago she stood by the rustling yellow
curtain of a Berlin cabaret, hands on hips, as exub-
erant as a flowering shrub; today too she presents the
same bold front and performs the same songs with a
body that has since then been only slightly ravaged
by grief.”6 Like many other female entertainers of her
day, Hennings slipped in an amphibian way between
advanced intellectual circles and a seedy, underworld
“ we want to provoke, perturb, bewilder, tease, tickle to death, confuse...”§ Weimar participants,
autumn 1922
§
existence. She worked as a model, nightclub hostess,
and lady of the night, was arrested several times for
prostitution and theft, and suspected of homicide.7
Ball and Hennings had met in Munich in 1913 and
soon became a couple. When World War I broke out,
Ball exhibited considerable patriotic fervor, volunteering
for military service three times, only to be rejected each
time on medical grounds. But his initial enthusiasm was
transformed into keen opposition when he made an
unauthorized visit to the Belgian front and was horrified,
precipitating a personal crisis that nearly ended in
suicide. Soon afterward, Ball moved to Berlin, where
Hennings and Huelsenbeck joined him, establishing the
beginnings of a Dada coterie. Along with Huelsenbeck,
he organized a series of antiwar evenings featuring
aggressive performances that later served as a prec-
edent for events at the Cabaret Voltaire. At one in
February 1915 called “Gedächtnisfeier für gefallene
Dichter” (The Memorial for Fallen Poets), Ball read an
ironic poetic obituary of his close friend Leybold—who
had committed suicide after being injured at the front
in the fall of 1914—in a deliberately unsentimental,
biting manner that in its recited chants négres—poems
intended to capture the rhythm and tonality of African
tribal songs—to the beat of a drum. The pair ended the
evening by handing out a manifesto, which declared,
“We want to provoke, perturb, bewilder, tease, tickle
to death, confuse….”9
5 See H
ubert Van den B
erg, “The S
tar of the Cabaret V
oltaire,” in Dada Z
urich: A
Clow
n’s Gam
e from N
othing, ed. Brigitte P
ichon and Karl R
iha in the series
Crisis and the A
rts: The History of D
ada, vol. 2, gen. ed. S
tephen C. F
oster (New
York, 199
6), 6
9–
88
.
6 Ball, Flight O
ut of Time, 6
3. E
ntry for 7 M
ay 1916.
7 Van den B
erg, “The S
tar of the Cabaret V
oltaire,” in Dada Z
urich, 77.
8 Hans L
eybold, Gegen Z
uständliches: Glossen, G
edichte, Briefe, ed. E
ckhard Faul
(Hannover, 19
89
), 112; and H
ugo Ball (18
86
–198
6): Leben und W
erk [exh. cat.,
Wasgauhalle P
irmasens] (Z
urich, 198
6), 18
.
9 Malcolm
Green, “Introduction,” B
lago Bung, B
lago Bung, B
osso Fataka: First
Texts of Germ
an Dada by H
ugo Ball, R
ichard Huelsenbeck, W
alter Serner
(London, 19
95
), 15.
provoke, perturb, bewilder, tease, tickle to death, confuse...”
20 | 21
The Cabaret Voltaire closed in early July 1916.
Huelsenbeck reported that Jan Ephraim “told us we
must either offer better entertainment and draw a
larger crowd or shut down the cabaret.”10 But it is
also clear that Ball was becoming exhausted by his
efforts and no longer wished to continue.11
In the few months of the Cabaret’s existence,
there was increasing discussion, with Tristan Tzara
at the helm, of expanding the group’s reach beyond
Zurich. “There are plans for a Voltaire Society, and an
international exhibition,” Ball wrote in early April. “The
proceeds of the soirées will go toward an anthology
to be published soon.”12 Ball and Huelsenbeck resisted
the idea of “organization,” but it seems that Tzara soon
prevailed, and the publication was soon in the works
with Ball actively involved in its preparation.
Adorned with a luxurious red cover with an
abstract woodcut by Arp, the only issue of Cabaret
Voltaire, published on 31 May 1916, was already distant
from the seedy, nocturnal experience of the cabaret, 13
and, despite the group’s iconoclasm, its purpose was
a self-historicizing one: “[Cabaret Voltaire] was,” Tzara
insisted, “not a journal but a documentary publication on
the cabaret we founded here.” 14 The publication offered
its readers a miscellany of the group’s activities, “which
at that time seemed to us to constitute ‘Dada’”15: an
introduction by Ball, a catalogue of one of the Cabaret
Voltaire exhibitions, a chapter of Ball’s “fantastic novel,”
the simultaneous poem and other contributions by the
same range of modernists whose work had appeared
at the Cabaret (Guillaume Apollinaire, Picasso, Kan-
dinsky, Filippo Marinetti, Blaise Cendrars) and by the
dadaists themselves. As Tzara intended, the printed
anthology also granted a new portability to the contents
and the ideas they represented, allowing them to reach
a broader audience.
Yet the media potential for a new audience
that so captivated Tzara seems to have rankled Ball and
may well account for his opposition to the idea of a Dada
movement. Writing in a later diary entry about the group’s
effort to organize an international Dada event, Ball wrote:
“In the end we cannot simply keep on producing without
knowing whom we are addressing. The artist’s audience
is not limited to his nation anymore…. Can we write,
compose, and make music for an imaginary audience?”16
Ball laments the loss of the intimacy—the shift from a
direct relationship between a performer and audience
physically present before him, and its replacement by
one that would have an international scale, but would be
inherently more mediated and abstract. Perhaps for Ball
there was some sense, as well, that making Dada public,
presenting it as a movement, would transform him into
a propagandist —bringing him uncomfortably close to the
wartime media abuses he deplored.
Ironically, it was most likely Ball who provided
that crucial emblem of movement identity: the word Dada
itself.17 Against the background of heated discussion
about plans for a Voltaire Society, Ball noted in his entry
for 18 April 1916: “Tzara keeps on worrying about the
periodical. My proposal to call it Dada is accepted.”18
The first word appeared in print in Tzara’s La premiére
Aventure céléste de Mr Antipyrine (The First Celestial
Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine) and in the Cabaret
Dada, The Movement
§ First International Dada Messe
Inauguration, Berlin, 1920
ZURICH
10 Huelsenbeck, “The D
ada Drum
mer” in D
ada Drum
mer, 1
7.
11 See B
all’s entry for 15 M
arch 19
16: “The cabaret needs a rest. W
ith all the tension the
daily performances are not just exhausting, they are crippling.” B
all, Flight Out of Tim
e, 57.
12 Ball, Flight O
ut of Time, 6
0. Entry for 2 A
pril 19
16.
13 Debbie Lew
er, “From the C
abaret Voltaire to the Kaufleutensaal,”
in Pichon/R
iha, eds. Dada Zurich, 4
8.
14 Tzara to Raim
ondi, 17 M
arch 19
17, D
ada, l’arte della negazione (Rom
e 19
94), 1
10
–1
11.
15 Huelsenbeck, “E
n avant Dada,” in M
otherwell, The D
ada Painters and P
oets, 27.
16 Ball, Flight O
ut of Time, 9
8. E
ntry for 10
February 19
17.
17 John Elderfield provides a com
prehensive discussion of claims to the invention of the w
ord
Dada. S
ee his afterward, “‘D
ada:’ The Mystery of the W
ord,” Ball, Flight O
ut of Time, 2
38
–2
51.
18 Ball, Flight O
ut of Time, 6
3. E
ntry for 18
April 1
91
6.
19 Huelsenbeck, “E
n Avant D
ada,” in Motherw
ell, The Dada P
ainters and Poets, 2
6.
20 Huelsenbeck, “D
ada Lives,” in Motherw
ell, The Dada P
ainters and Poets, 2
79–
28
1.
21 Ball, Flight O
ut of Time, 6
3. E
ntry for 18 A
pril 19
16.
ZURICH
Voltaire in an advertisement for the forthcoming journal.
Huelsenbeck later recounted that it was chosen from
a German-French dictionary while he was visiting Ball19
and that the two delighted in the primal quality of its
infantile sound and its appropriateness as an emblem
for “beginning at zero.”20 Though it resonated with the
fragmentary and abstract phonemes of the sound poetry
performed at the cabaret, the group clearly embraced
its multiple meanings and evocative connotations across
languages. Stressing both this semantic mobility and
richness, Ball added to his first mention of the word:
“Dada is ‘yes, yes’ in Rumanian, ‘rocking horse’ and
‘hobbyhorse’ in French. For Germans it is a sign of foolish
naiveté, joy in procreation, and preoccupation with the
baby carriage.”21 Suggesting basic drives and childlike
behavior, the word was at the same time self-consciously
absurd, even self-mocking, and a subversive anthem
of resistance to more fully instrumentalized speech
and disciplined rationality. Resistance to fixed meaning
remained a key feature; and later dadaist productions
generated countless new definitions.
§
22 | 23
and suggesting a kind of “dada hubris.”30 “Just a
word,” declaimed Ball, “and the word a movement.”
A first public event, a first manifesto, but also an ending,
for despite its obscurity, the manifesto was intended
and received, Ball wrote, as a “thinly disguised break
with friends.”32 Ball soon distanced himself from the
group leaving Zurich for the Ticino in the first of several
leave-takings and bringing to a close the period of his
greatest intellectual influence.33
With Ball’s absence and the closing of the
cabaret, Tzara emerged as the new leader, converting
Ball’s persona as cabaret master of ceremonies into
a role as a savvy media spokesman with grand ambi-
tions. Tzara was “the romantic internationalist,” wrote
Huelsenbeck in his 1920 history of Dada.”34 As a result,
it was largely through the filter of Tzara’s efforts and
writing that ideas about Dada were communicated to
an audience outside of Zurich. While Ball had not art-
iculated a specific theory or program for Dada, Tzara’s
writings marked a certain shift, distilling concepts that
had emerged at the Cabaret into discernible principles
capable of being communicated. Departing from the
more mystical aspects of Ball’s thought with its relig-
ious and alchemical imagery, Tzara, as discussed in
the introduction to this volume, offered a declaration of
resistance to various forms of social government. In his
widely distributed “Manifeste Dada 1918,” he wrote, “To
impose your ABC is a natural thing, hence deplorable.”35
Though it may not have been Ball’s intention, the word
Dada offered tremendous media potential. Tzara seems
to have recognized its publicity early on; Huelsenbeck
recalled that Tzara “had been one of the first to grasp
the suggestive power of the word Dada,”22 and he
developed it as a kind of brand identity—a newly vis-
ible phenomenon in both the sphere of culture and
consumer economics.23 (Indeed, Ball hinted that the
word Dada already resonated as a brand name, offer-
ing in a manifesto the slogan: “Dada is the world’s best
lily milk soap.”24) In Zurich Tzara placed “Mouvement
Dada” as a banner headline across a series of posters
announcing evening events, transformed the Galerie
Corray into Galerie Dada, and published three poetry
books under the series title “Collection Dada”25—as
well as launching the journal for which the name had
originally been chosen. And he gave Dada (and Arp’s
abode) the façade of a corporate structure, using
envelopes printed with the return address:
As part of this effort to forge a broader
identity, the group staged the “first public Dada
evening,”27 as Ball wrote, underscoring the word
public, on 14 July 1916 at Zurich’s Waag Hall, an old
guildhouse on one of the city’s main squares. Hennings
read poems, Arp offered a discussion of paper collages;
Ball, Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janco, and Tzara performed
costumed and masked dances. The event also marked
a movement away from the margins of culture, seen
in the shift within the topography of the city from the
seedy Niederdorf, where no respectable citizen would
go, to a central area where the bourgeoisie was part
of the potential audience.28 Yet if it was a step toward
a more mainstream identity, it also made the dadaist
assault on bourgeois pieties all the more direct.
Along with the other offerings of the even-
ing, the core members read manifestos, appropriating
a traditional form of public and political communica-
tion aimed at establishing principles.29 But Ball’s text
turned on the group itself, mocking its ambitions
Very easy to understand…. To make of it an artistic
tendency must mean that one is anticipating
complications. Dada psychology, dada Germany cum
indigestion and fog paroxysm, dada literature, dada
bourgeoisie, and yourselves, honored poets, who are
always writing with words but never writing the word
itself, who are always writing around the actual point.
Dada world war without end, dada revolution without
beginning, dada, you friends and also-poets, esteemed
sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada
Huelsenbeck, dada m’dada, dada m’dada dada mhm,
dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza.31
§ Dada portrait of Germaine
Everling, Francis Picabia, 1920
£ Alarm Clock I, Dada 4–5 cover,
Francis Picabia, 1919
¤ Untitled Mask, Marcel
Janco, 1919
¥ Collage with Squares Arranged
According to the Laws of
Chance, Jean Arp, 1916–1917
Administration/Mouvement Dada/Zurich Zeltweg 83.26
22 Huelsenbeck, “E
n Avant D
ada,” in Motherw
ell, The Dada P
ainters and Poets, 2
6.
23 The idea of branding emerged in the nineteenth century as the industrialization of
goods moved to centralized factories; in an effort to fam
iliarize a wider custom
er base
beyond the reach of word of m
outh with their products, m
anufacturers adopted brand
names and logos to reassure custom
ers of the reputation and quality of their goods.
24 Ball, “D
ada Manifesto” (1916), reprinted in B
all, Flight Out of Tim
e, 221.
25 These included Tzara’s own La prem
iére Aventure céléste de M
r Antipyrine
(The First C
elestial Adventure of M
r. Antipyrine), and H
uelsenbeck’s Phantastische
Gebete (Fantastic P
rayers) and Schalaben schalabai schalam
ezonai, the first with
woodcuts by Janco, and the latter draw
ings by Arp.
26 A copy of this envelope exists in the collection of the M
useum of M
odern Art, N
ew York.
27 Ball, Flight O
ut of Time, 7
3. Entry for 6
August 1916
.
28 Lewer, “From
the Cabaret Voltaire to the K
aufleutensaal,” in Dada Z
urich, 52.
29 Since the seventeenth century m
anifestos have been used as a genre for political
opposition, as most fam
ously seen in Karl M
arx’s Com
munist M
anifesto.
30 B
all, Flight Out of Tim
e, 83. E
ntry for 6 October 1916.
31 Ball, “D
ada Manifest,” in B
all, Flight Out of Tim
e, 22
0.
32 Ball, Flight O
ut of Time, 7
3. Entry for 6
August 1916.
33 Ball left for the first tim
e at the end of July for Tessin, then for the village
of Vira-M
agadino, and then Ascona. In N
ovember, he returned to Z
urich
for several months.
34 Huelsenbeck, “E
n Avant D
ada,” in Motherw
ell, The Dada P
ainters and Poets, 24
.
35 Tzara, “Dada M
anifesto, 1918,” in Motherw
ell, The Dada P
ainters and Poets, 76.
§ £ ¤ ¥
24 | 25
Definitive changes occurred within the group between
late 1917 and what might be seen as the demise of
Zurich Dada around the end of 1919. The ending of
the war allowed for the increased possibility of foreign
travel, facilitating greater contact with the world out-
side of Zurich and offering the first real opening for
an international expansion of Dada as a movement.
The arrival in Zurich of two key figures, French-Spanish
artist Francis Picabia and the German critic Walter
Serner, was influential in these late stage develop-
ments, introducing a new cynically subversive tone.
Having spent much of the war in New York
working closely with Marcel Duchamp and members
of the Stieglitz circle, Picabia left for Europe in 1918,
staying in Barcelona and Paris, all the while publishing
his journal 391, which had already become an inter-
national avant-garde forum. Both the journal and his
own itinerancy made Picabia an important conduit for
ideas. In 1918 he sought treatment for neurasthenia
(and perhaps for alcoholism) in Switzerland, first at
Gstaad, then in the spa town of Bex-les-Bains, where
Dada International
he received a letter from Tzara inviting participation in
Zurich Dada, copies of Dada 3, and books of poetry as
gifts.36 The exchange seems to have prompted Picabia
and his wife Gabrielle Buffet to visit Zurich for three
weeks at the beginning of 1918,37 and the encounter
between Picabia and the Zurich group was one of
mutual recognition and embrace. The group descend-
ed upon Picabia en masse in his Zurich hotel room. To
their delight, he smashed an alarm clock (the symbol
par excellence of Swiss efficiency and rationality)
and dipped its inner workings in ink, pressing them
on paper to make monoprints (Réveil matin I [Alarm
Clock]). Thus was European dadaism introduced to
the imagery of dysfunctional machines developed in
New York during the war, bringing together the Zurich
group’s critique of governing systems with New York’s
subversion of icons of industrial capitalism. One of
the clock images was feature on the cover of Dada
4–5, the last issue to be produced in Zurich. The in-
side pages offered another drawing by Picabia titled
“Mouvement Dada”—a diagrammatic rendering of the
avant-garde network linking Zurich, New York, and
Paris in which the movement of ideas was presented
as a circuit of machinic forces. Already experienced in
publishing a journal, Picabia collaborated with Tzara
in editing the issue, and it featured a truly international
roster of contributors including, along with Tzara and
Picabia themselves, Jean Cocteau, Pierre Reverdy,
Raoul Hausmann, Huelsenbeck, André Breton, Serner,
Viking Eggeling, and Hans Richter. While in Zurich,
Picabia also edited the eighth number of 391, which
featured the activities of the Zurich Dada group. «
36 See M
atthew S
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inars, 26
9–
29
3.
37 William
A. C
amfield, Francis P
icabia, 26 S
eptember 1918
, in Michel S
anouillet, D
ada á Paris, 2 vols. (P
aris, 199
3), 46
9.
§ Meeting at Weimar, 1922
§ 26 | 27
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