New York Minutes

A day late (and several dollars poorer, thanks to the book stores, restaurants, and museums of Gotham) I've finally returned, and I can say, unequivocally, that if you missed the Dada show and Against The Grain: Contemporary Art from the Edward Broida Collection at MoMA, you must return to NY now.

Architect (and evidently MoMA Trustee) Edward Broida was the collector of which one can only dream...or so I would have believed. His collection began with a bang when he acquired two (not one, two) Philip Guston paintings on his first visit to McKee Gallery in 1978. From there, he went on to amass a collection whose highlights, represented in this overwhelming show, are numerous and dazzling...but not because everyone in it is so friggin' famous, but because everyone it is so friggin' good and everything makes everything else look better. Take Jake Berthot. A fine abstract painter, whose large painting, The Room, hangs across the room from John Walker's Green Alba-Kingston. That Mr. Broida invested deeply in the artists he collected is all the more admirable when you walk along the wall gasping in quiet delight at the Vija Celmins drawings or Ken Price's sculptures, some recent enough to have been shown only last year. One wants to take everyone who has aspirations to "collecting" art by the hand and lead them through this show, which is a master class in how to select tough, thoughtful art.

But the Dada show...I had dreaded this. Were we doomed to another episode in MoMA's ongoing effort to enhance the standing of the Modern project by presenting its pioneering moments as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy…but no. The first thing you see when you arrive on the museum's sixth floor is a monitor showing footage of atrocities and aftermaths of World War I, arguably the defining moment of global Modernism. It is gruesome, and riveting. One watches clouds of mustard gas waft toward helpless soldiers outfitted with pathetic, primitive protective gear that looks more ritual than reliable. We see a man whose face had been blown off trying on prosthetic eyeglasses...complete with an artificial nose to make him look last ghastly. And then one is ready to see some art.

I could go on and on about the works, but what was really compelling was the installation. Loosely grouped into sections centered around the various cities in which Dada flourished (Berlin, Cologne, Paris, New York, etc.), the show was at once regional - it allowed the viewer to see how politically radical and profoundly local Dada was in the work of artists like Heartfield and Grosz - and global - encouraging sudden, almost imperceptible boarder crossings (when did I wind up in Paris?).

Sadly, and by virtue of architecture’s need to direct traffic flow more than any thing else, the show ended with NY Dada and the work of Marcel Duchamp, whose arguably revolutionary works seemed more concerned with petty squabbles with art than grand statements of disgust with culture at large.

Indeed, the show’s greatest contribution was the opportunity – however brief – to regard Dada as something more than just a precursor to Surrealism. When one goes back and reads the documents of the Surrealists, one finds in them the same sort of anger that propelled the Dada artists, but Surrealism was handily overtaken by fashion and commerce where Dada resisted these forces.