ART HISTORY LECTURE SERIES: CATHY CRAFT

Join us for this lecture by distinguished alumna Cathy Craft.

"The Dada Strain: Marcel Duchamp, Robert Motherwell and the Origins of Neo-Dada"

Craft's talk will explore the complexities of Duchamp’s and Motherwell’s engagements with Dada and their effects on the phenomenon that came to be known as Neo-Dada. Duchamp is today thoroughly identified with Dada, but it was only in New York in the 1940s that he decisively began to characterize himself and his work in this way. He appears to have done so at first in order to distance himself from Surrealism, but Duchamp’s embrace of Dada was cemented by the emergence of the Abstract Expressionists, whose devotion to painting represented everything he had rejected in art. In contrast, Motherwell’s work on the Dada anthology—which spanned six years during which he disseminated ideas about Dada throughout New York’s small art world—coincided with the development and emergence of Abstract Expressionism and Motherwell’s own growth into artistic maturity. Subtly but unmistakably, The Dada Painters and Poets became so intertwined with Motherwell’s artistic concerns and his understanding of what he and his peers were attempting to create that he was to declare in the book’s Preface that “there is a real Dada strain in the minds of the New York School of abstract painters that has emerged in the last decade...”