Duchamp's "Fountain," the urinal with a fabricated signature, earned this distinction from 500 critics, curators, artists and art dealers surveyed in late 2004 by the firm that sponsors England's Turner Prize. Its prominence only seems to grow, even if the original no longer exists. (Duchamp had a replica made in 1964.)
It's the gesture that matters, the idea that anything could become the stuff of art. And his dada era gestures - he called them "readymades" - are philosophical challenges to the status of art delivered with a wily smile. His Mona Lisa with moustache and goatee ("L.H.O.O.Q.") is nearly as famous as his urinal.
The sprawling exhibition - jointly organized by Leah Dickerman at the National Gallery of Art and Laurent le Bon of the Centre Pompidou in Paris - features these Duchamps, along with 400-plus other works in a plethora of media. It is the first major museum exhibition in the United States to focus on dada exclusively, even if it is crucial to any understanding of modern and contemporary art. Perhaps that's because presenting a portrait of dada is a challenge, as this exhibition makes clear.
Less a movement than a loose alliance of artists, it had several centers and took on different personalities in each. In New York, where Duchamp conceived of his "Fountain," the art fixed on the machine and on concepts. In Berlin, ravaged by World War I, there was a political thrust to the work. Dadaists in Zurich invented a form of performance art and tended toward abstraction. The other major centers were Cologne, Hannover and Paris, and each gets its clearly defined space in the exhibition.
The profusion of inventive works is remarkable, though the design of the show could have done more to showcase individual works. It's as if the supervising curators at MOMA wanted to infuse the installation with some of the anarchic quality that characterized dada itself, when more order would have been helpful to viewers trying to sort through this period of remarkable creativity.
Duchamp blurred the difference between industrial item and art object. Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber, working in Zurich, did too, in a thoroughly different way. They collapsed the distinction between handiwork and high art by taking the notion of abstraction into the realm of needlepoint tapestries that took their cue from painting.
The grid, that staple of modern art and design, first made an appearance in some of their elegant collaborative collages ("duo-collages") - even before Piet Mondrian used the grid. And long before John Cage introduced chance operations in his musical compositions, Arp was making collages with subtitles like "Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance."
Dada's standard place in the history books is as the progenitor of "anti-art," a term its artists used. And in the name of dada, a lot of self-indulgent work has been created, found object or junk art in particular. Duchamp appeared to suggest as much when, in 1946, he said, "I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their beauty."
But this exhibition reveals, in myriad ways, how a major strain of thisanti-art wasn't anti-visual. Even Arp's collages with random rectangles are seductive. Kurt Schwitters, working in Hannover, took collage to an epic level, calling his work "Merz" from a word fragment he lifted from an ad. He is arguably the father of assemblage, the first artist to recognize that society's junk could the stuff of beautiful compositions. His "Merz Picture 32 A. The Cherry Picture" (1921) makes this case, with its many textures and shapes forming a complex arrangement anchored around a simple little illustration of cherries.
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