Museums: The Hobbyhorse Rides Again

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To demonstrate the validity of the movements, the show's organizer, Curator William S. Rubin, 40, eschewed the gaudy sensationalism favored in the heyday of Dada. Instead, he has let the precise craftsmanship and fertile inventiveness of his chosen artists speak for themselves. The exhibit is sedately mounted in a series of small, serene galleries, with Marcel Duchamp's proto-pop Fresh Widow (a miniature French window with a head cold) respectfully enshrined in a Plexiglas case. Dali's minuscule (as small as 7 in. by 5½ in.) Krafft-Ebing fantasies glow like 15th century Van Eycks beneath Metropolitan Museum-style picture lamps.

The sole concession to flamboyance is a reconstruction of Dali's ivy-twined Rainy Taxi, from the 1938 exposition, faithfully copied right down to the snails that crawl on the faces of the sopping, green-lit mannequins inside. Otherwise, dulcet decorum is preserved because, as former Sarah Lawrence Professor Rubin puts it: "While the Dadaists use the term antiart to deny modern art, in retrospect their work takes its place in that tradition, enriching more than denying it."

Nonsense & Nostalgia. Though the Dadaists were determined to break with what they considered the "spiritually bankrupt" styles of cubism and futurism, they borrowed many cubist techniques. While they claimed to tweak the nose of logic, and build their art by happenstance, it was in fact highly rational and ironically detached.

Collage, for example, was originally developed by the cubists; yet when the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters began to build his many-splendored "Merz pictures" from old newspaper scraps, driftwood, buttons and other attic rubbish, his works took on a pathos and intimacy that more formal cubist compositions lacked. Schwitters himself always insisted that Merz was a nonsense syllable, derived from a phrase from an advertisement for the "Kommerz und Privatbank." But merzen is also an obsolete German verb connoting rejection. Both as nonsense and as nostalgia, Schwitters' handsome, 5-ft. by 4-ft. Merz Picture with Rainbow clearly foreshadows Robert Rauschenberg's "combines" of the 1950s.

Freudian Art. Considerably less well known than pop art's debt to Dada is the seminal influence exercised by the surrealists on U.S. abstract expressionism. The relationship has been obscured until now, partly by the abstract expressionists themselves, who kept their early surrealistic canvases out of sight. The confusion was compounded by the fact that the original surrealist manifesto of 1924 envisioned two different techniques for applying Freud's then radical theories to art.

All surrealists agreed that the time had come to substitute the logic of the unconscious for the deliberate illogic of Dada, but only half of the movement, including Dali, René Magritte and Yves Tanguy, used conventional Renaissance oil techniques and perspective to portray the fantasy world of dreams and hallucination. Helped by Dali's genius for self-publicity, it was this half of the movement that became synonymous with surrealism in the U.S.