Dreier and Duchamp. Duchamp and Dreier. As dynamic artist duos go, the pairing of Katherine S. Dreier and Marcel Duchamp does not have the familiar ring of Picasso and Braque, or Johns and Rauschenberg. But it should, and The Societe Anonyme: Modernism for America at the Phillips Collection here may begin to make it so.
The show presents about 150 objects, all from the amazing 1,000-work art collection that Dreier assembled with Duchamp's help and gave to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1941. It was organized by Yale and had its premiere at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in a larger version. Rife with unfamiliar names, this exhibition is both a Who's Who and a Who's That? of modernism that can change the way you see it and history in general.
Duchamp (1887-1968), of course, you know well: the aristocratic lapsed painter, dedicated chess player, intermittent cross-dresser, sometime art adviser, and sardonic, unsentimental pioneer who, as Donald Judd put it, invented fire — that is, he found the first found object.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Dreier (1877-1952) was a painter, collector, and patron with a small private fortune, a passion for Modern art, and a fashion sense that rivaled Eleanor Roosevelt in dowdiness. Her parents were well-off German immigrants in Brooklyn, New York, who reared their children to be movers and shakers. Dreier's two older sisters were leaders in the women's labor movement. Dreier, active in women's suffrage, made art the object of her similarly formidable brains, energy, and organizational skills.
In 1919, with Duchamp as her muse, Dreier more or less invented the concept of the modern-art museum, which she envisioned as an institution of international scope dedicated to making the art of the moment comprehensible to the public, through exhibitions, publications, lectures, concerts, and a library. She would later, somewhat painfully, watch Alfred Barr bring the idea to fruition in the 1930s with the Museum of Modern Art, helped by a more diplomatic personality and substantially more financial support. (Dreier was no Rockefeller.)
Dreier and Duchamp both exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show but did not meet until 1916. Their friendship deepened the next year, after Duchamp's urinal was rejected by the Society of Independent Artists, which Dreier had helped found. No one knows the extent of their intimacy.
Before 1920, Dreier divided her time between America and Europe, studying, making and collecting art; exhibiting; and establishing a network of artists and dealers. Determined to make the US more receptive to the new, she joined with Duchamp and the American artist Man Ray to form an organization she initially called the Modern Ark, until Man Ray suggested the Societe Anonyme.
On April 30, 1920, Societe Anonyme opened an exhibition and a library in two small rented rooms on East 47th Street in New York. Dreier appended to the name of this fledgling organization The Museum of Modern Art: 1920.
The Phillips show opens with a re-creation of the society's first show, which combined serious art and Dada insouciance. In a mixing of masculine and feminine that was typically Duchampian, the floor was covered with rather institutional-looking gray rubber, and the paintings were framed in paper lace doilies. It looks great. Included are nearly all the works that were in the original: by Brancusi, Gris, Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Morton Schamberg, and Joseph Stella.
While Dreier dreamed of raising money for a permanent building, it was not to be. The East 47th Street quarters stayed open for only a year. After that, the Societe was peripatetic, although Dreier excelled at this nomadic state, functioning as a museum-without-walls. She organized traveling exhibitions; staged shows in New York galleries, social clubs, and workers' centers; and periodically rented exhibition space.
Under these shifting auspices, she gave first American solos to Kandinsky, Leger, Klee, Louis Eilshemius, Alexander Archipenko, Jacques Villon, and Heinrich Campendonk. All are represented here, usually by clusters of work, as are Kurt Schwitters, Jean Arp, and the little-known John Covert, maker of muscular painted reliefs.
Other artists are represented by single, often startling, works. Laszlo Peri's Room (Space Construction) of 1920-21 adds to the history of modernist shaped paintings. Dreier also organized the first large exhibition of avant-garde Russian painting and sculpture in this country, at the Brooklyn Museum in 1923.
At the same museum, in 1926, she and Duchamp presented An International Exhibition of Modern Art Assembled by the Societe Anonyme, with more than 300 works by 106 artists from 23 countries. It was the largest display of Modern art in America since the 1913 Armory Show, and the largest gallery at the Phillips is devoted to its work.
In 1936, Duchamp spent three months at Dreier's country home in Redding, Connecticut, repairing damage to his masterwork The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, better known as the “Large Glass.” During his stay, as they faced up to the dominance of the Museum of Modern Art, he persuaded her to make her collection a record of her prescient exhibition history. Dreier considered making the Redding house a museum, and contacted Yale about its purchasing the house, with her collection included as a gift.
She was shortly persuaded to give her collection to Yale's art gallery. She continued to add works to the gift for the rest of her life and left Yale an additional bequest at her death, along with sizable ones to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (which got the “Large Glass”), the Phillips Collection, and the Museum of Modern Art.
This exhibition is just a tip of the iceberg that is Yale's rich archive. What you see here is the wonderful, unruly mess that Modernism deserves. Dreier had her favorite artists, but she embraced all art movements and countries equally. Picasso and Matisse, the French giants of modernism and MoMA, are represented by just one work each.
Unsurprisingly, many of the least-known names here belong to women. There is the confident 1917 Synthetic Cubist collage by Marthe Donas; the lyrically Futurist ink drawings of Erika Giovanna Klien; the typewriter drawings of Stefi Kiesler (wife of Frederick); and Dreier's own vigorous abstractions, which give Constructivist abstraction a looser, more Surrealist panache.
One of the biggest surprises is Lotte Reiniger's brilliant 1926 film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which may be the earliest surviving animated film. Its black cut-out paper, highlighted by saturated monochrome backgrounds, serve equally well for lavish clothing, gripping battle scenes, emotional expression, and exotic architecture. (The effect is halfway between Balinese puppets and Kara Walker.) Dreier never owned the film, but arranged for its showing at the New School in 1926.
In 1918, Dreier asked Duchamp to make a painting to go above the bookshelves in her New York apartment: the famous, rarely traveled Tu m'. Hung high on a wall here, the long, scroll-like canvas, which Duchamp claimed was his last oil painting, is dotted with the shadows of ready-mades and a flying color spectrum. The meaning of the intriguing title was never specified, but the letters begin the French phrase “Tu m'aime” — “You love me.”
Whatever the nature of Dreier and Duchamp's long-lasting symbiosis, it has a living monument in the collection of the Societe Anonyme.
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