New York Dada

Marcel Duchamp edited this oversized leaflet, which features writing about the Dada movement by its founder, Tristian Tzara. The vibrant, halftone-printed cover depicts a perfume bottle with an image of Duchamp’s feminine alter ego Rrose Selavy affixed to the front. Entitled Belle Haleine, the perfume bottle is an example of an “assisted readymade,” a mass-produced object slightly altered by an artist, and elevated to the status of art through the artist’s designation.

Although Dada’s activity was waning in Europe by 1921, World War I and the subsequent turmoil brought several artists associated with the movement to North America. Tzara’s text bestows a powerful “authorization” upon the growing artist population in New York, effectively blessing Dada’s global expansion.

The publication also includes a reproduction of a Man Ray photograph depicting a nude woman, a comic by Rube Goldberg, and an advertisement for an exhibition of Kurt Schwitters’s work, among other Dadaist typography and hybrid literature. The large-scale glossy format parodies the style of visual advertising growing more common in New York magazines in the 1920s.