Dadaist collection may fetch $3.5M

Press, 14 October 1985, Page 32

Dadaist collection may fetch $3.5M

By

ANTHONY WILLIAMS,

Reuters (through NZPA)

Zurich When a Swiss-owned collection of Dadaist art works goes on sale in December, the London auctioneers, Sotheby’s, are hoping to fetch about. SUSI3O,OOO ($227,500) for a replica of an upturned bicycle wheel on a stool.

A “Mona Lisa” reproduction daubed with moustache and goatee, a hanging shovel and a urinal on its side are also among the 261 lots that a Sotheby’s expert says may be worth a total of SUS2 million ($3.5 million).

The works are all linked to artists in the Dada group, an iconoclastic and disrespectful movement which sprang out of the chaos of World War I.

It was in Zurich in 1916 that a Rumanian writer, Tristan Tzara, officially launched the group with a manifesto speech in a city guild hall. The movement spread to New York, Berlin, Hanover, Paris and Cologne. Angry with the bourgeois concepts of art which its members maintained reflected values leading to the violence of war, they rejected tradition and deliberately set out to shock. Marcel Duchamp’s “Mona Lisa,” a 1964 reworking of his original 1919 work, is not only an attack ' on the classics but also a sideswipe

at public morality. Its subtitle “LHOOQ” when read in French roughly translates as “She’s a hot piece of tail.” One version of the origin of the name Dada is that a paper knife inserted into a French-German dictionary pointed at Dada, a hobby horse in French or an unstructured baby sound in German.

The chance element of the name was one of the aspects of Surrealism which followed Dadaism and to which many Dadaists turned when the movement fizzled out in 1924.

Perhaps the most famous works to come under the Sotheby hammer in London on December 4 are the socalled “ready-mades” of Duchamp and an American photographer, Man Ray. Both displayed ordinary manufactured goods in unconventional positions and gave them a witty title. The point was to stress that any object is art if the artist says it is. One of the purest examples of a ready-made. is Duchamp’s upturned urinal, submitted under a pseudonym to a New York art society of which he was a founder member. It was rejected.

There are also items like the bicycle wheel called “assisted ready-mades” because the artist went to the lengths of screwing the wheel on to the stool.

The ready-mades are not originals but replicas of works created during the Dada period and commissioned many years later by the Dada historian and collector, Arturo Schwarz, who had series of them signed by the then aging artists. A Sotheby expert, Ralph Dosch, defended his company’s valuations by saying a New York gallery had sold a wheel in the. same series to a museum for SUSI7O,OOO ($297,500). Sotheby’s catalogue estimates the wheel now on auction is worth £75,000 ($187,500) to £120,000 ($300,000). A Swiss art historian, Hans Bolliger, co-author of the book, “Dada in Zurich,” regards photographs by Man Ray as some of the most significant works in the collection.

He said Ray’s portraits of figures such as Tzara and the French writers, Paul Eluard and Jean Cocteau, were “some of the most wonderful works he created.”

Both Dosch and Bolliger said a montage by the German Johannes Baader was the most “Dada” in the collection.

He includes in his work a postcard asking a friend to get the Chinese Government to allow the Cosmic World Convention of Dadaist spirits to be held in the year C of Heaven in Peking. It underlined the basic

precepts of Dadaism, a movement reflecting the absurdity of both art and life. Dosch also regarded as significant a series of 12 “Rayographs." Ray called these his personal handwriting and they involved laying three-di-mensional objects on lightsensitive paper which he exposed to light and developed. The works in the collection do not just present an anarchistic view of art, but, as Dosch says, they have an intellectual quality reflected in verbal and visual puns. Duchamp produced a coat rack screwed to the floor in the hope that people might trip over it (trebucher in French) and called it “Trebuchet,” a chess term. With a trebuchet a player offers a pawn in the hope the opponent wiH “trip over it.” When Sotheby’s displayed the coat rack in Zurich their insurers did not let them screw it down, just in case anyone did. All the works, which were on display in the Zurich Kunsthaus gallery for a ( week this month, were » originally owned by the art ‘ historian, Schwarz, but Dosch says the Milan-based collector sold them to two Swiss people in the ’ 19705.

Sotheby’s is not saying who the two owners are, strictly adhering to their wish for anonymity.