Museums: The Hobbyhorse Rides Again

As openings go, it was a far cry from 1938's International Exhibition of Surrealism, when 2,000 outraged Parisians staged a near riot. Or from Cologne's Dada exposition of 1920, when the entrance hall was a public lavatory, the visitors were supplied with an ax to chop up the art, and a young girl in a white Communion dress stood on a platform reciting obscene verse.

Indeed, the mild catcalls and bilious banner-waving provided last week by several hundred Greenwich Village vigilantes in front of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art seemed a slur on the once dread name of Dada. They were protesting a survey of Dada and surrealism, replete with crispy fried canapés, Galanos evening gowns, and a "bourgeois" black-tie dinner.

"Down with art, up with revolution!" yipped one Yippie in a Mao jacket. "We're carrying on the spirit of Dada by being here, instead of in the museum," insisted a Princeton University art instructor. Quoth the durable Salvador Dali, 63, who was on hand for the occasion: "Unfortunately many of the young people today have no information. Dada was a protest against the bourgeoisie, yes, but by the aristocracy, not by the man in the street." After the Barricades. He did have a point. The anarchistic, anti-artistic spirit of Dada arose almost simultaneously in New York and Europe from the spiritual debris of World War I. It was baptized by two artistic types in Zurich who flipped open a dictionary at the word dada, French baby talk for "hobbyhorse." Incorporated into the more structural surrealist movement in 1924, it immortalized a species of hoopla and hubris that has become characteristic of modern American society. Dada's pranks and surrealist spectacles were revived in the 1960s as Happenings, which in turn have been commercialized by department stores, and ultimately popularized by flower children as love-ins.

Yet, amazingly, the esthetic aspects of Dada and surrealism have never been presented to the public since the twin movements came of age. In retrospect, the hobbyhorse has been accepted by most art historians as a thoroughbred, but no U.S. museum has devoted a major display to it since 1936.

Dada and surrealism, now half a century old, were not merely episodes or aberrations in the history of art, but part of its mainstream development, perhaps more profound and influential than any other style of the century. Now that the fusillades have died away on the barricades, the Museum of Modern Art's carefully winnowed exhibit of 340 paintings, sculptures, collages and assemblages is intended to show just what has survived that is genuinely entitled to be preserved in museums.

"Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage"* demonstrates abundantly that the philosophies produced a witty, erotic, and still magically evocative body of work (see following color pages).