Dada 1916-1923
INV-249220th Centuryposteradvertisement
Date
New York: Sidney Janis Gallery, 1953
Medium
Letterpress poster and exhibition catalog in black and red ink on lightweight paper; folded version
Dimensions
97 × 63 cm (38 1/4 × 24 13/16 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Mary Reynolds Collection Fund, Ryerson & Burnham Libraries
At the opening of the 1953 exhibition Dada 1916–1923, Marcel Duchamp squashed posters advertising the show into balls and placed a wicker basket of crumpled catalogues beside the door. (The example in the Art Institute’s collection did not suffer that fate.) Duchamp’s goal for the show and its printed materials was simple: to subvert the seriousness of exhibitions and their ephemera and instead embrace the playfulness and absurdity of Dada, an art movement formed in reaction to the First World War which aimed to upset and replace traditional values in art. The catalog and poster’s compounding typefaces disrupt and intersect each other to further disturb the conventional appearance of exhibition publications.
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