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Across one step of the structure’s foundation appears the word lives, barely discernible amid other, illegible graffiti scrawls, but rendering the pedestal immediately recognizable—not as any specific site, but as part of the worldwide demonstrations demanding justice for ongoing police violence against Black bodies; this is a makeshift monument to brutality all too widespread. The vacant pedestal likewise conjures the ongoing discourse (to euphemize its frequent vitriol) about the removal of statues of white supremacists and slave owners. Tacla uses a finely honed combination of linework and color washes to create blurred and turbulent surfaces—a formal quality that underscores the ideological tenor of his imagery. The relentless roiling of his paintings imparts on even the most seemingly inert matter a sense of historical urgency.

If bodies are absent from Identidad Oculta 160, they comprise the sole subject of Injury Report 22 (2022). With eyes blindfolded, fists clenched, and mouths open—presumably in collective chant—a group of women marches in the open air in what can only be a political protest, conducted in a public space, presumably urban, given the faint outlines of buildings in the background. Despite the ominous deep-red sky, no injuries are visible. But the image’s sense of imminent violence erupts in Injury Report 17 (2022). Sprawled on the ground in a more compact and shallow space, one figure is either helped to his feet or pushed down. Other indistinct figures surround him, one of whom reaches out an arm in either aid or aggression. Verging on abstraction, the striated tumult of bodies is further blurred by dripping, crimson pigment, at once immanent to the scene and also a pictorial event pooling atop the painting’s surface. The canvas itself seems a bleeding casualty of the same demonstration. 

While those works are still generalized, images like October 25 #4, 2019 and October 25 #5, 2019 (both 2022) invoke through their titles recent episodes in the political life of the artist’s native Chile, with demonstrating crowds, still entirely anonymous, forming the images’ raw formal material. The latter divides its multitudes into six large monochrome sections surrounding a central rectangle of vivid red: an architectural sketch of a street lined by buildings, perhaps depicting a site of unrest. The former work melds bodies and cityscape: a monument at the painting’s core appears engulfed by flags and bodies that have wrested its historical importance to their own ends. The flags appear as illegible as the locale is nondescript. October 25 is the date of one of the largest mass demonstrations in Chile’s history, which unfolded in Santiago in 2019 in response to mounting living costs and social inequality, yet the scenes’ imprecision links them to wider, contemporary global protests (like the Black Lives Matter demonstrations to which his other images allude). The expressly muddled faces and bodies in Tacla’s paintings create the distance one expects from a memory or dream; their studied imprecision inflects their presence with the fugitive temporality of ruins. The artist does not appear to take sides per se. But the fact of these demonstrations, the commingling of bodies in space agitating for change, bespeaks a vital human need, one increasingly threatened. And the selection of events to which his titles refer, among them the Beirut explosion in 2020 (in a set of paintings not on view here), indicates a sociopolitical orientation.

Even more striking than the artist’s expressly civic images are those cityscapes evacuated of identifiable human presence but charged with its effects. The United States Capitol looms at an oblique angle in Injury Report 16 (2022), in plain allusion to the insurrection of January 6, 2021. Its nondescript buildings awash in a uniform ashy red, Identidad Occulta 163 (2022) suggests, with smoke or fire billowing from a burning central edifice, some unidentified country gripped by political unrest. In lieu of his usual wax and pigments the artist has added marble powder here, which lends the paint more substance and an eerily material gravity. That the conceptual space between the sites Tacla names—the beacon of Western democracy and “freedom,” the foreign shores where America has sponsored illegitimate coups, and the monuments closer to home where an acute lack of freedom is named—has shrunk so drastically underscores the ghastly predicament of populist politics. Such is the subtle achievement of Tacla’s painting: with this show he confirms his presence among those few contemporary figurative painters, from the late Juan Genovés to Julie Mehretu, still worthy of the title “history painter.”

SURREALISM PERSISTS IN THE POPULAR imagination as a predominantly visual phenomenon. Almost a century after its founding, the name remains virtually interchangeable with the work of its most prominent painterly exponents, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte chief among them. Nearly as familiar as their imagery is the movement’s fixation on Freudian psychology: used not as a therapeutic tool, but as a thread to plumb the untapped depths of the unconscious, its stifled drives and desires. Far less recognized today are Surrealism’s engagements with Marxist politics—as fraught, and ultimately abortive, as they were impassioned. The group’s most immediate origins were literary: the practice of “automatic writing” by Philippe Soupault and André Breton (the movement’s leader), aimed to liberate thought from the superintending effects of syntax and superego. Like other of the group’s collective experiments, these were means and not ends. Channeling the remnants of Parisian Dada into a more systematic enterprise, Breton, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, Pierre Naville, and other founding luminaries aimed at wholesale social insurgency—an upending of sexual repressions, bourgeois mores, nationalist myths, and religious dogma, along with the linguistic strictures that promoted and preserved them. As attested in the titles of two of their journals—La Révolution Surréaliste and Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution—insurrection was no ancillary metaphor to this enterprise, but its driving force and ultimate purpose. To that end, the Surrealists came—gradually, fitfully, and often uneasily—to reconcile the movement’s metaphysical ambitions with Marxist materialism.

The latter, after all, had already contributed to at least one successful revolution against the prevailing order, the 1917 Bolshevik commandeering of the Russian state. Identified in Surrealism’s founding manifesto as a quintessential principle (along with the “omnipotence of the dream”), the “disinterested play of thought” thus became intermittently subordinated to the ministrations of party creed. Briefly joining the French Communist Party (PCF) himself in 1927, Breton sought to accommodate Surrealism’s “total subversion” to the totalizing program of revolutionary Marxism in practice. The experiment proved illusory. Rancor and recriminations abounded on all sides. Yet the very failure of the attempt merits attention as a vital chapter in the history of twentieth-century cultural politics—a far more complex phenomenon than the sanitized commodity version of Surrealism that most often reaches us nowadays. Routinely eclipsed by its museological canonization are the group’s anti-fascist and anti-colonialist activism, Breton’s collaborations with Trotsky and Diego Rivera, extensive Surrealist involvement in the Spanish Civil War, and less quantifiable contributions to existentialist philosophy and Situationist theory alike.

Koga Harue, Umi (The Sea), 1929, oil on canvas, 51 1/4 by 64 inches.

In a sense, Surrealism’s decline was commensurate with its influence, even ubiquity. Not only did its ostensibly scandalous objects come to feature in museum collections worldwide, its visual strategies were swiftly absorbed into the bloodstream of late capitalist culture. The waning of the movement after WWII appeared, according to Anselm Jappe in his study Guy Debord (1992/99), “brutally patent: for one thing Surrealism was now welcome in the temples
of bourgeois art, just as it was in the world of advertising.” Even as its improvisational dimensions were siphoned into the supposedly apolitical ascendance of American Abstract Expressionism, Breton declared in 1952 a “final break with all the conformist elements of the time.” His pronouncements failed to sway a younger generation. In their journal, Potlatch, the Lettrist group—immediate forebears of the Situationist International—assailed “bourgeois inquisitors like André Breton or Joseph McCarthy.”

Situationism’s most incisive theorist, Guy Debord, described Surrealism in 1958 as “thoroughly boring and reactionary,” beholden to both “bourgeois impotence” and “artistic nostalgia.” Indeed, Breton never renounced his attachment to visual art as a means of psychic and social liberation, and helped stage exhibitions as late as 1960. Yet that same year he also added his name to the “Manifesto of the 121,” subtitled the “Declaration Regarding the Right of Insubordination in the Algerian War,” in which 121 intellectuals condoned civil disobedience for Algerian independence, presaging much of the French Left’s activism over the next decade. That same activism would render Surrealism obsolete in the domain of radical politics, superseded by the student movements and the extra-parliamentary agitation of the New Left at large. The impact of direct action was immediate; its afterlife still transcends aesthetics.

In the Frankfurt School’s attempted fusions of Freud and Marx—as in Wilhelm Reich’s comparable efforts before them—we find echoes of Surrealist precedent, particularly in the drive to counter positivism on the one hand and fascist mysticism on the other. Communism could promise a social utopia free of class hostilities. But what of the individual’s nonmaterial longings and desires? What of the need for myths unbeholden to rituals of collectivity, or the panacea of patriotism? When media theorist and activist Stephen Duncombe claims in his 2007 book, Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, that “fantasy and spectacle have become the property of fascism,” and calls upon the Left to “build a politic that embraces the dreams of people,” it is upon Surrealism that he draws, however intentionally or unwittingly. In current discourse on colonialism’s cultural histories—and the present tense of its racist legacies—we also find reverberations of the Surrealist past. As highlighted in the exhibition “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” currently on view at Tate Modern in London, the movement’s international and anti-imperialist orientation fomented offshoots from Cuba to Cairo to Japan. Perhaps uniquely among the early twentieth-century European avant-gardes, the group proved actively and consistently anti-colonialist from its inception.

Andre Breton, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky, and Jacqueline Lamba in Mexico City, 1938.

The Surrealists’ foray into the political realm, which stemmed from their revulsion over Marshal Pétain’s military aggressions against the Moroccan Berbers in the Rif War of 1921–26, initially took the form of an essay copublished with the Communists in the journal L’Humanité. Having helped spearhead a boycott of France’s colonial exhibitions, a dozen Surrealists would affirm in “Murderous Humanitarianism” (1932):

In a France hideously inflated from having dismembered Europe, made mincemeat of Africa, polluted Oceania and ravaged whole tracts of Asia, we Surrealists pronounced ourselves in favor of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the disposal of the revolution—of the proletariat and its struggles—and defined our attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the color question.

Alongside stalwart signatories like Breton and Éluard, René Crevel and Yves Tanguy, appears Pierre Yoyotte (ca. 1900–1940), a Martinique-born writer and author who, along with his sister Simone, was among Surrealism’s first Black members. Likewise, their compatriot and cofounder of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature of the 1930s, Aimé Césaire, told poet René Depestre in a 1967 interview that he found in Surrealism “a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything.” Surrealist concern not only for the “color question” but for the cultural and political struggle against colonialism recommended its strategies to avant-garde communities of color. Linking the “colonial problem” to a wider class struggle echoed (and anticipated) discourses ranging from Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the “southern question” to decolonization campaigns across Africa and Asia.

Yup’ik mask, late 19th–early 20th century.

At the same time, Surrealism’s mostly white members trafficked in “primitivist” objects both rhetorically and literally. Breton’s personal collection included myriad African and Oceanian masks and sculptures, whose “savage” significance he promoted in various texts and exhibitions. Prominent Surrealists like Max Ernst and Alberto Giacometti incorporated the expressive anatomies of various artifacts into their own work without regard for their ceremonial applications or origins. To be sure, the “dissident” Surrealist group around the journal Documents offered more nuanced approaches to far-flung cultures. Anchored by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, and others opposed to Breton’s peremptory leadership, they married anthropological and ethnographic study to irrational explorations of violence, sacrifice, and sacredness. Yet here, too, the emancipatory significance of such phenomena devolved not upon their original (unspecified) subjects, but rather a select coterie of French intellectuals. In championing anonymous, non-Western artisans, European Surrealists presumed to speak for them, thus assuming the role of self-appointed prophets of a non-bourgeois world.

No less problematic in this regard were the Surrealists’ sexual politics. While the members pursued liberation from the stifling institutions of family and monogamy, they did so in prescriptively masculine, heteronormative terms. Breton’s unreconstructed homophobia also meant that Surrealist challenges to erotic propriety excluded same-sex desire. The numerous female artists who gradually joined the movement’s ranks, meanwhile, could not undo its abidingly chauvinist bent. For, leaving aside the participation of actual women, the aesthetic category of “woman” served as a talismanic fetish: tantamount to the “primitive” in its supposed proximity to untamed nature, endowed with a primal, embodied intuition rather than a rationalist (and arid) intelligence. Although supposedly gifted with—and emblematic of—a higher psychic capability, female Surrealists never attained the social or professional power of their male counterparts. The “total subversion” of Breton’s sexual revolution proved, in short, less than total in its very premise.

Leonora Carrington, Chiki, Your Country, 1944, oil, tempera, and ink on canvas, 35 1/4 by 35 1/2 inches.

The Surrealists nevertheless believed their crusade for individual liberation to entail a collective emancipation as well. In collapsing the distance between reality and dream, poets and artists would offer to all—no matter their gender or race—a means of psychic fulfillment. In however small a measure, they saw the re-enchantment of a spiritually impoverished modernity as a potentially political act. The earliest formulations of such acts evoked a life of the mind, rather than matter: “The immediate sense and purpose of the Surrealist revolution,” claimed scholar and writer Maurice Nadeau in his Documents Surréalistes (1948), “is not so much to change anything in the physical and manifest order of things as to create an agitation in men’s minds.” Yet Breton soon read—and was “transported” by—the French translation of Trotsky’s 1925 biography of Lenin. A vague notion of psychic agitation became gradually—if imperfectly—yoked to aspects of international Communism, particularly in its non-Stalinist guises. The Surrealists came in short order, according to Breton in his 1934 lecture “What Is Surrealism?,” to predicate “the liberation of man upon the proletarian Revolution.” Indeed, in his seminal 1966 essay “The Politics of Surrealism, 1920–36,” art historian Robert S. Short writes:

From fascism, bourgeois mores, capital punishment, the press, lunatic asylums, to professional sport: the objects of Surrealist polemics paralleled those in the Communist party but in range extended far beyond them, finding targets in every section of the superstructure.

NOTWITHSTANDING ITS MARXIST BONA FIDES, the group found a chilly reception among the ranks of orthodox Communists. This was not due simply to Breton’s blatant Trotskyist sympathies. Dedicated to harnessing personal eroticism to (an as yet undetermined) social utopia, Party apparatchiks saw Breton’s “inner model” as anathema to the very essence of Communism: namely, a subordination of individual desires to the collective good. By the Surrealists’ own admission, their revolution was to be a “subjective idealist” one. “What is Surrealism,” asked the painter André Masson, “if not the collective experience of individualism?” Breton, Aragon, and Éluard’s respective declarations that their preferred activity was “to sleep”—and hence to dream—hardly suggested the stuff of dialectical materialism. It conjured, in fact, a solipsistic, even counterrevolutionary betrayal of the injunction to build socialism, rather than simply to desire or imagine it. For all his flair for the latter, Breton failed miserably at the practical tasks assigned by his local PCF cell. Called upon to file a statistical report on the gas industry in Italy, he simply shirked his responsibility. By 1933 he and most other Surrealists had been shown the door.

Victor Brauner, Hitler, 1934, oil on cardboard, 8 3/4 by 6 1/4 inches.

They pursued their own collective imperatives, however. The Surrealists’ avowal of their preference for dreaming, for example, came by way of a group survey—one of countless such official inquests published by the group. Particularly in its emergence out of the nihilist anarchism and radical individualism of Dada, Surrealism sought to discipline its energies into more productive—if not productivist—endeavors. These included the regular analysis of dreams, disseminated in a periodical reminiscent more of a scientific journal than an avant-garde magazine. They edited La Révolution Surréaliste at a centralized “Bureau of Research,” treated as a serious workplace rather than some bohemian hangout. Despite its rift with the Communist Party, the group ended up imitating the latter’s ideological intransigence; Breton commanded various expulsions and excommunications throughout the movement’s long history. As late as 1934, in his lecture “What Is Surrealism?,” he identified the group’s chief concerns as, one, exploring the rapport between conscious and unconscious life, and two, “the social action we should pursue.” For Aragon, that action eventually meant following Communist doctrine at the expense of Surrealist membership. Though he parted ways with his avant-garde confreres, Aragon continued to pursue some sort of accommodation between their aims. Addressing the menace of Nazism and the intransigence of Stalinist culture alike, Breton would coauthor a tract with Trotsky himself in 1938, “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art,” cosigned in Mexico by Diego Rivera:

We believe that the supreme task of art in this day and age is consciously to take an active part in preparing the revolution. However, the artist cannot serve the struggle for emancipation unless he has internalized its social and individual content, unless he feels its meaning and drama in his very nerves and unless he freely seeks to give his inner world an artistic incarnation.

Surrealism had for years to navigate the choppy waters between the aesthetic autonomy of modernism and the increasingly constrictive dictates of philo-Soviet realism—a treacherous passage that saw it assailed from the left and right alike.

Yet that dilemma proved in many ways propitious. In Short’s view, Surrealism proceeded “by contradiction and not by argument.” And a language of contradiction—or, more precisely, of paradox—could be made to serve the dialectical metaphors of Marxist revolution, if not its materialist operations. A case in point is the extent to which Surrealism assimilated the Cubist strategy of collage, expanding both its content and its applications to painting, cinema, photography, and photomontage. “The chronotope of revolution,” writes the Filipino activist and intellectual E. San Juan Jr. in “Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avantgarde” (2003), “is essentially a collage, more precisely a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.” The Surrealists were drawn to the suggestive power of objects displaced from their original context and set into new, allusive frameworks, whether in the cityscapes of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico or the “painted collages” of Max Ernst. Physical dislodgment, which the Surrealists sometimes called dépaysement (literally: uncountrying, displacement from home), bespoke a potential disruption of meaning, and hence also of social and political ramifications. If the impulsions of automatic writing and painting eluded ideological pragmatism, the visual consequence of incongruity (of catachresis, parapraxia, and their various cognates) held some promise in the domain of a political aesthetics.

John Heartfield, The Sleeping Reichstag, 1929, print,
61/4 by 10 inches.

It is no coincidence, for instance, that, even as he distanced himself from Surrealism, Aragon eulogized what he called the “revolutionary beauty” of anti-Nazi photomontages by the German Communist artist John Heartfield. By the time of Heartfield’s 1935 exhibition in Paris, Communist leaders roundly opposed Surrealism on the grounds that its aesthetic could not speak to the masses—that its idiom was predicated, in fact, upon a willful refusal of communicability. While not a Surrealist, Heartfield had plainly adapted many of its strategies, along with the Dada he had practiced in Berlin immediately after WWI. In assailing the ironies and iniquities of Nazi propaganda, Heartfield cut out and reconfigured photographs from the mass media so as to subvert—by way of visual puns, superimpositions, and radical discrepancies of scale—their original intention and reception. Disavowing the expressivity of painterly modernism, Heartfield allied himself with the Communist commitment to rationalized collectivity; yet in his provocative transposition of familiar imagery into new contexts, he drew upon Surrealist dépaysement. Published in the Communist illustrated daily AIZ and titled “The Sleeping Reichstag,” his 1929 photomontage of a somnolent delegate seated atop the German parliament building—an image of negligent dozing rather than creative (and potentially revolutionary) dreaming—is not far in its basic conceit from Magritte’s contemporary image of the Paris Opera inexplicably given over to bucolic ruin. Surrealism’s poetry, Aragon writes in “John Heartfield and Revolutionary Beauty” (1935), constitutes “an end in itself”; Heartfield’s imagery, by contrast, suggests “what an art for the masses, that magnificent and incomprehensibly decried thing, can be.”

No quarter remained for Surrealism within the ranks of the Communist International by the mid-1930s. Revolution never receded from the former’s purview, however. In 1934, the same year the Soviet Union decreed Socialist Realism the official aesthetic of the Comintern, Yoyotte brilliantly synthesized the potential synergy between Marxism and Freudianism in his essay “Antifascist Significance of Surrealism.” Any possible Communist liberation from economic misery, he writes, would need to address as well the widespread “psychological misery” to which fascism also appealed with a supplementary “essentially emotional and ideational revolution.” If an emancipatory, egalitarian, and non-nationalist movement for working people would not address these ideational needs, then a less liberatory program would—one substituting manufactured spectacle for collective dreams. Nearly a century on, we find ourselves in a political predicament not far from that of Yoyotte and his peers. As the specter of international fascism stalks democracy once again, more is at stake than simply the question of economic poverty or the purity of any ideology equipped to fix it. The larger problem is an abiding psychological malaise, exploited once again by forces as reactionary as they are irrational.

This article appears in the April 2022 print issue,  pp. 36–43.

ARA MERJIAN Though the meme is a digital phenomenon, the language used to describe it is organic, even biological: mutation, transmission, extinction. Out of curiosity I looked at the Wikipedia entry for memes, and among other things, it says “memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts.” From an aesthetic point of view we might think of the meme in terms of what Umberto Eco called the “open work”: unfinished, unresolved, in process, participatory. On the other hand, the notion of memes spreading through the behavior generated in their hosts sounds decidedly posthuman, as if we’re merely physiological hosts to a virus that is autonomous even as it’s contingent on human behavior.

MIKE RUGNETTA It makes me think of William Burroughs’s idea that “language is a virus,” which he explored through his cut-up technique of writing that approaches words as found objects. His point, I think, was that your capacity for making meaning gets adjusted by the material that you consume, willingly or not. But when you’re talking about memes in these terms, you have to be careful not to remove the agency of the people who are creating and responding to memes.

MERJIAN The question of agency is a really thorny one. An aspect of the meme that is celebrated in progressive circles is its collective, almost authorless shareability. In that regard it’s related to the utopian thinking of some members of the early twentieth- century avant-garde—that there would be a progressive death of the author, as the artist’s hand and individual voice became less important. But at the same time, the evacuation of agency is inevitably framed by questions of race and gender, even when that framing isn’t acknowledged. Aria Dean writes about the meme’s “tactical similarity” to historical Black cultural forms. The meme is another instance in American media where content is generated by a Black subculture that then gets appropriated. Of course, the meme is intrinsically about appropriation. That is its essence. But the few people who have been remunerated for their memes through licensing or sponsorship deals have tended to be largely white, middle-class internet users, rather than the users who generated the original—if we can call it that—content.

RUGNETTA There have been several high-profile creators of formats or phrases who have not been compensated, perhaps the best-known being Peaches Monroee, who coined the phrase “on fleek.” As for your point about the utopian promise of the meme, as a recovering tech-utopianist I can say that was definitely my mindset in 2007–09, when I was working at Know Your Meme, the meme cataloguing website, as a writer, producer, and host of their YouTube show. We often discussed memes as a widescale creative collaboration that posed a meaningful challenge to the media property regime. I was excited to prove that people do amazing things when media is freely available. I didn’t grapple meaningfully—until embarrassingly recently—with the fact that some of the same people who were doing what we labeled as an impressive collaborative art project were also making Nazi jokes and spreading racist beliefs, with the same media creation techniques they used to make memes.

MERJIAN The web’s anonymity means that individual voices and different political subcultures can be subsumed into a kind of hegemonic culture. Dislodgement and displacement are the very engines of meme-making. The form remains the same, while its framing is changed. That operation creates irony. That’s how memes work. They’re defined not just by their iterability, but also by irony. And that relates to what we could call an avant-garde genealogy of collage and the readymade, of objects and images that are dislodged from their original context and thereby ironized. That shift isn’t declarative and strident, but subtle, almost undetectable. In his essay “Is Space Political?” Fredric Jameson says that it’s the condition of irony to remain invisible. I wonder if we might think about how that irony can be a weapon in the hands of political subcultures and communities that want to use the meme for positive change.

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RUGNETTA Before this meeting, I followed the Canadian Leftist Meme Stash Instagram account and saw a picture of a werewolf labeled “[Justin] Trudeau selling $14 billion of weapons to Saudi Arabia while they commit genocide in Yemen” next to a cute little dog labeled “Trudeau wearing goofy socks.” In a way, you could say this is irony. It is trying to make a very serious, meaningful point through a very silly picture that is not of the highest quality. It only says what it does because words have been added to the top. It is a very serious point that people should know and care about, but it’s a picture of a werewolf and a silly dog. Irony allows you to make important points with silly images, because you can say: “This not a dissertation. This isn’t an ad council spot for broadcast television.” It’s something people are meant to look at quickly, laugh, and understand.

MERJIAN A visual sound bite.

RUGNETTA There’s also this really Millennial or Gen Z attitude that everything sucks. The whole world is bad, and there’s nothing you can do about it. So this funny dog and this stupid werewolf are Justin Trudeau ruining the country and the world. Have a nice Monday! Blergh!

MERJIAN It’s significant that Heartfield started out making collages with George Grosz, a fellow German Communist, by engaging with low culture and recontextualizing images that were being disseminated through the abundantly illustrated print media, in cacophonous and riotous compositions. As his work became no less political but what we would call more propagandistic, he started keeping the images intact, and the irony was more forceful through its simplicity. Context is king. A lot of them graced the cover of Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung [AIZ], the weekly Communist paper, but again, these are not lengthy disquisitions on politics but images that are meant to be absorbed almost instantaneously into the collective consciousness and agitate the viewer. This is the argument art historian Andrés Mario Zervigón makes in his book John Heartfield and the Agitated Image [2012]. Sabine Kriebel’s similarly incisive book on Heartfield, Revolutionary Beauty [2014], looks at the “sutured illusionism” of his photomontages, how he covers up the rupture of mass media imagery and leaves us with a deceptively seamless image.

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RUGNETTA It makes me think of when someone on Twitter shares a screenshot of a particularly egregious New York Times headline, like one where they repeat a lie from Trump without identifying it as such, and the body of the tweet is just: “I—.” That’s all you need to frame a headline for people to know what you mean. You’re tired, you’re sick of it, and you don’t know what to do. We can do better—but maybe we can’t, I don’t know! But for this to be communicated effectively, the account’s followers need to know the tweeter’s perspective. That’s the AIZ. And there needs to be the slightest adornment to show it has been editorialized. That’s “I” and a dash. Memes don’t do or mean a specific thing on their own. They operate very specifically in a community.

MERJIAN There was a story in the Times about how Pepe the Frog—a cartoon character that became a right-wing meme in the US—was deployed to a completely different end by protesters in Hong Kong.

RUGNETTA I love that the protesters in Hong Kong have no idea.

MERJIAN I’m sure that there are counter-Pepe memes.

RUGNETTA Yeah, the creator, Matt Furie, went to lengths to rehabilitate Pepe the Frog. He won a lawsuit. But fighting semiotics is like shouting at the ocean. The OK hand gesture became a white power symbol. A campaign was waged on 4chan to add that to its meaning. You can’t un-add that meaning. You just have to wait for it to fade.

MERJIAN What if a Black Lives Matter activist decided that they wanted to détourne Pepe the Frog, to make him a Black Lives Matter meme? Would it be just a question of the quantity—a barrage of reuses? Or does it have to be more organic? A semiotic virus that takes on a life of its own, regardless of anyone’s intentions?

RUGNETTA Changing the meaning of a preexisting symbol is a tactic used by many internet shitheads. They’re often successful. That’s how Pepe the Frog became a racist mascot. Whether or not a community on the left could do something similar comes down to the question of whether it truism that the right is better than the left at meme-making. Like all truisms, it’s repeated regardless of whether it’s true or not. It’s a tautology. The right is better at creating memes because their memes are given visibility, and they’re given visibility as demonstration of the success of memes on the right.

Hannah Hoch: Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919, collage, 45 by 35¼ inches.

MERJIAN I was convinced that meme-making was largely the domain of the left. I think of it as intrinsically creative and ironic— all the things that the right wing isn’t, at least in my own, admittedly limited, purview. I think that limitation has a lot to do with my intellectual and informational bubble. We get catalyzed by our own feeds. The algorithm tells us to look at more of what we’re already looking at. Perhaps I was also inclined to see things in that light because of my art historical background. Memes share many aesthetic—or anti-aesthetic—strategies with Dada and John Heartfield’s work, which are decidedly left-wing. Dada’s use of photography—cut from mass-media publications and inserted into new contexts—compels reflection on both the original source of images and their new pictorial “home.” Hannah Höch’s collage Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany [1919] alludes to the cultural and gender politics of the fraught new Weimar government. She shows heads of prominent male politicians, as well as a map of those European countries where women possessed the right to vote at the time, along with ballerinas, crowd scenes, ball bearings, an elephant, and so on. What’s striking is the discrepancy of scale, and the lack of anything that might conceptually link these images. The viewer has to come up with that connective tissue. Heartfield’s photomontages for AIZ were produced at a different political moment, a time of emergency for the left. They become increasingly mordant and politically charged in inverse proportion to their formal effects. That is, Heartfield hides his hand, or his scissors. Photographs of Göring, Goebbels, and Hitler take on new, scathing meaning precisely in the understated nature of their transformation. Instead of the gymnastic frenzy of Höch’s montage, we get popular images that Heartfield has adjusted only slightly, or to which he adds text or a title that ironizes the new image and its meaning. A famous example is his The Meaning Behind the Hitler Salute: Little Man Asks for Big Donations. Motto: Millions Stand Behind Me! [1932], where he puts a man in a suit thrusting cash toward Hitler’s raised hand, so the “millions” in the Fuhrer’s slogan refers to money, not people. Heartfield’s proto-memes depend on the mass replication of their source images. That’s what makes them comparable to the memes of today. The unlimited repetition of meme formats—like “the most interesting man in the world” meme, the evil Kermit meme, the distracted boyfriend meme, or Drakeposting—relies on the familiarity of the frame. Lest these contemporary examples seem pathetically apolitical in comparison to Heartfield (especially when our moment faces ideological threats no less dire), we might recall that these formats are themselves routinely used for political messaging. I’ve seen one satirizing the symbolic rewards for essential workers that fail to compensate for the lack of material ones: Drake recoils in disgust from the prospect of paying them a living wage and health insurance, then smiles at the gesture of daily applause.

Pop art was also about the iteration and multiplication of received images, and there’s an irony to its strategy of making us look more closely at things that we take for granted in everyday life. But Pop is more ambivalent politically than Dada. Dada was aggressively countercultural and rooted—at least in its Berlin strain—in radical Communist politics. So that definitely bears on my sense of the “memes” of the historical avant-garde, which is not necessarily true of memes today. By the way, I had never seen 4chan before I looked at it ahead of this conversation. It’s so low rent! I thought I’d stumbled upon the internet circa 1999.

RUGNETTA Their software hasn’t been updated much. It’s like the punk rock bar that smells bad and doesn’t have working bathrooms. You’re proving that you really want to be there by putting up with the lack of amenities. It’s hostile to outsiders, which is ideal if you don’t want normies coming to your space and seeing what you’re up to. You want to make it kind of weird. And that message-board technology is quick. You want to have a very fast-paced, dense set of interactions, and the simplicity of the technology allows that to happen. I’m sorry that you went to 4chan. But it’s interesting what you say about the genealogy of the meme on the left as going back to Dada. It makes me wonder what could be the genealogy of memes on the right. Where does that lead to? Does it lead to Futurist proto-Fascist collage? Or does it lead to conservative political comics? Nothing comes to mind. Maybe it’s the prevalence of technological capability. MS Paint and Photoshop—the tools for making memes—are widely available to everybody. They’re part of what it means to be a computer user, whether you’re on the right or on the left.

—Moderated by Brian Droitcour

This article appears in the November/December 2020 issue, pp. 18–20. 

Twenty years of Fascist cultural policy had proscribed depictions of class consciousness, material struggle, or poverty, dismissing these as heretical and “Bolshevik.” Neorealism promised the nation— recovering from a bombastic dictatorship—a new self-image at once humble and ostensibly uncorrupted. A good deal of Italian neorealism’s perceived authenticity lay in the relative asceticism with which its examples were undertaken: shoestring budgets (with a few notable exceptions) and nonprofessional actors, whose lived proximity to the stories in question lent the films a degree of raw truth. Rome’s Cinecittà Studios had been bombed during the war, forcing many directors to pursue on-location shooting—a topographic immediacy with enormous influence on later twentieth-century cinema. Neorealist films altered both spatial and temporal perceptions. Works like Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943) and Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero (1948) plunge viewers into the nearly real-time plight of believable and flawed protagonists. Portraying a poor elderly pensioner and his dog struggling to stay afloat in a hostile Rome, Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D (1952) homes in at one point on a young, pregnant maid grinding coffee by hand. The camera lingers on her body and face for the duration of her menial task; without the quick cuts of montage, the most banal of chores in this dingy kitchen takes on a more noble mantle, universal in its dignity. Once Italian cinema after Umberto D began to merge with other genres and styles, its ethical imperatives enjoyed an extensive cinematic afterlife.

Indeed, neorealism perennially remerges as a yardstick by which to measure contemporary films concerned with the far-reaching implications of seemingly quotidian problems. Like its original iteration in Italy, neorealism’s revivals have tended to follow periods of social and economic crisis. In the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, for example, the film critic A.O. Scott rejected the notion that audiences craved merely “fanciful or temporary” escapism. “What we need from movies, in the face of a dismaying and confusing real world,” he avowed, “is realism.” Calling attention to American productions like Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart (2005) and So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain (2008), Scott’s polemical “Neo-neorealism” essay implicitly highlighted the obsolescence of national denominations in an age of globalized culture, while also affirming an abiding desire to “escape from escapism.”² The New Yorker critic Richard Brody challenged Scott’s inclusions, dismissing the “facile materialism of neorealism” as a specious standard and calling it essentially a synonym for independent cinema writ large.³ Yet neorealist films persist as the continual touchstones—both stylistic and critical—for disparate cinematic works.

Sean Baker: Tangerine, 2015.

Cuarón’s Roma is not the only recent film to have been discussed in relation to neorealism. Take, for example, the 2015 film Tangerine directed by Sean Baker, which follows a transgender sex worker of color and her friends through public spaces in Los Angeles (crosswalks, parking lots, a booth in a Donut Time shop) and the city’s linguistic mix (English, Armenian, Spanish, Black vernacular). Shot on three iPhones, the film features an often bumpy cinematography that inflects it with a certain verisimilitude—particularly since early twenty-first-century experience has become contiguous with our smartphone screens. Or consider Jia Zhangke’s Unknown Pleasures (2002), which focuses on estranged young adults in the city of Datong to explore the digital addictions that now shape our very perception of the real. Limiting camera movement and montage in his mostly medium-shot long takes, Jia uses digital format—with its harsh contrast and frequently antiseptic look—to evoke his protagonists’ nervous disaffection. The frequent dismissal of digital film as looking “too real” has been turned by Jia and other directors into a new realist stratagem. Aiming at more heightened effects, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi employs extensive shot/reverse-shot sequences in his dramatization of strained relationships in working-class Tehran; yet like those of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Majid Majidi, Farhadi’s recent films have repeatedly earned the designation of “Neorealism, Iranian style.”⁴

We can think of Italian neorealism as global in two respects—it was shaped by international influences, and it subsequently exerted considerable formal and thematic impact abroad. Yet, rather than rehearse the countless echoes of “neo-neorealism” across the globe today, what if we were to ask why the term is so frequently invoked to begin with? Instead of appraising the relative “realism” intrinsic to each new production—American or international—what if we considered why the quest for “realism” refuses to disappear as a cinematic paradigm? If neorealism’s relevance now transcends geography, then surely the very definition of the term has evolved in turn. Despite its origins in and enduring associations with Italy, neorealism was perhaps already global from the start—an often overlooked dimension that nevertheless bears upon its persistent influence.

Roberto Rosselini: Germany Year Zero, 1948.

Italian neorealism never formed a coherent movement or group. Its examples ranged from the Catholic-inflected anti-Fascism of Rossellini (Rome, Open City, 1945; Paisan, 1946) to the Communist commitment of Visconti (La Terra Trema, 1948) to Giuseppe De Santis’s seamless fusion of Marxism and noirish melodrama (Bitter Rice, 1949) to the often oneiric spirituality of Federico Fellini (La Strada, 1954; Nights of Cabiria, 1957). Indeed, neorealism’s practitioners never even agreed on its basic rationale. Fellini averred that “neorealism is not a question of what you show, its real spirit is how you show it”; Visconti, by contrast, insisted that neorealism was “above all a question of content.”⁵ Yet whether its imperatives were understood as ethical or topical, philosophical or aesthetic, neorealism’s approach to representation was quickly echoed in various national cultures, countering Hollywood’s slick productions with stylized grit and unabashedly ideological engagement. As a client of America’s Marshall Plan initiative, Italy reaped the rewards of the anti-Communist Truman Doctrine after 1948. Lent momentum by neorealism’s success, the cinema emerged as one of the country’s most eminent cultural exports—not merely a measure of pride and prestige, but proof of Italy’s national rebirth as a full-fledged democracy.

Interestingly, neorealism often proved less popular within Italy than abroad, both at the box office and on festival and award circuits. Given its wide-ranging critical reception, filmmakers like Luis Buñuel, Satyajit Ray, Ousmane Sembène, and Charles Burnett all felt compelled to respond to aspects of neorealism, deploying its most prominent elements (location shooting, nonprofessional actors, etc.) within a range of sociopolitical, linguistic, and artistic contexts across the Global South, from India to Senegal, Latin America to Watts.

Yes, Watts. The fact that poor, predominantly Black areas of Los Angeles and New York were then understood by many to belong to an expanded Third World—and hence to offer a narrative of resistance and redemption that contributed to an international struggle of the disenfranchised—underscores both the evolving globalism of postwar culture as well as the cinema’s role in articulating it. Shot in 1972 and 1973 in Watts by first-time director and producer Charles Burnett, Killer of Sheep refuses narrative conventions and coherence in its evocation of urban, African American, working-class life. Though the film faced major distribution hurdles when released in 1978, its official re-release three decades later witnessed extensive comparisons to Italian neorealism. However, despite the influence on Burnett of neorealism’s precursors and successors—from Jean Renoir to Satyajit Ray— the global inflections of his particular realism prove anything but clear-cut.

Charles Burnett: Killer of Sheep, 1978.

Ray himself has spoken of the formative impact of Zavattini and De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) on his own Pather Panchali (1955)—a stylistic and thematic influence evident even later in works ranging from Norman Loftis’s Messenger (1994) to Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna (2008). Ray’s work did not launch an Indian neorealist cinema movement, so much as extend and revive formal and sociopolitical elements already latent in the nation’s filmic approaches to reality, such as the naturalist depictions of disenfranchised peasant subjects in Baburao Painter’s silent films. Other directors applied neorealist strategies—even as they changed and updated them—to comparable projects of postcolonial national and cultural identity. Take Sembène’s Black Girl (La Noire de . . ., 1966), which follows Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), a young Senegalese woman who moves from Dakar to Antibes to work as a domestic for a white French family. The film departs from neorealist precedent even as it draws upon it, using flashback sequences and first-person narration—strategies eschewed by neorealism proper.

Yet toward the film’s end, after the defiant and dignified Diouana commits suicide by slitting her throat, we glimpse a brief account of her death among the faits divers in a newspaper, an offhand item that underscores her anonymity and unimportance in a white, bourgeois world. It was precisely the amplification of the ostensibly inconsequential on which much of Italian neorealism staked itself. Moral narratives could be constructed from the most seemingly insignificant events—ennobled and exalted because of their overlooked, even abject origins. Zavattini and De Sica developed Bicycle Thieves out of—as Zavattini put it—”a little news item . . . considered by most people throwaway material.”⁶ That news item became the story of a poor father who is robbed, who robs in turn to save his job, and whose apprehension, humiliation, and contrition ironically redeem him in the eyes of his plucky son.

What had first appeared as a seemingly hyperlocal set of parables, practices, and aesthetic choices was thus almost immediately recognized for its transnational relevance and adaptability. The roots of an increasingly global cinema in the second half of the twentieth century are more tangled than any seemingly straightforward Italian genealogy would suggest, however. Film scholar Rachel Gabara has noted, for example, that Sembène and other African directors encountered neorealism as it filtered not directly from the source, but rather by way of the New Latin American Cinema Movement of the 1960s. Though its aesthetic impact lay in the capacity to amplify and interrogate local, quotidian, even dull aspects of postwar Italian life, neorealism arguably constituted a global phenomenon from its fitful inception. Canonized as a wholly “national” cinema, neorealism in fact bore various international origins.

The seemingly inimical precedents of Soviet realist cinema and Hollywood production proved equally influential on neorealism.⁷ Italian neorealism found itself canonized through French film theory, whether that of André Bazin or Gilles Deleuze, while many of its examples remained indebted to both interwar American literature (by such authors as Steinbeck, Saroyan, Cain, et al.) and aspects of German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) aesthetics from the 1920s. Yet there is another, less celebratory sense in which Italian neorealism might be thought of as global, particularly if we consider its entanglements with a kind of colonial world-making with which cinema has long been complicit. Many of the strategies that came to characterize Italian neorealism had been incubated in Fascist film production, particularly in the “empire cinema” used to propagandize colonialist expansion. Formal devices characteristic of some neorealist films, such as the deep-focus long shot— subsequently taken up in the 1960s by proponents of Latin America’s “third cinema” (specifically the Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino)—cannot be wholly disentangled from more complicated political origins.⁸

Indeed, film historians have pointed out that despite its avowed anti-Fascist stance, Italian neorealism owes many of its technical and aesthetic innovations to the regime’s own cinematic initiatives: from the early film careers of Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti themselves, to films set in Libya and the Horn of Africa, which privileged on-location shooting over studio sets and exploited free labor by Indigenous people as crew and nonprofessional actors.⁹ Other scholars have critiqued neorealism’s bolstering of the pernicious myth of Italians as reluctant Fascists and benevolent colonizers. Many of the films’ classical examples stage the redemption of Italian masculinity, exculpating the “common man” from complicity with Fascist violence by projecting villainous perversion onto Nazi caricatures (such as the predatory homosexuality of Major Bergmann and Ingrid in Rossellini’s Rome, Open City or the pedophilia of Herr Henning in the same director’s Germany, Year Zero).

Significantly, Italian neorealism just as dozens of countries declared their independence from colonial rule in the mid-1950s and 1960s. “There is a direct line,” writes the cultural historian Michael Denning, “between the pioneering cinematic alternatives to Hollywood (the Left-inspired Italian neorealism) and the various Third World cinemas.”¹⁰ These new alternatives aimed to replace what Solanas and Getino, in their pioneering 1971 essay, “Towards a Third Cinema,” refer to as “Establishment cinema,” typified first by Hollywood, and then by European art cinema. “As a rule,” they write of the pacificatory entertainment long peddled in various decolonizing postwar societies, “films only dealt with effect, never with cause; it was cinema of mystification or antihistoricism. It was surplus value cinema. Caught up in these conditions, films, the most valuable tool of communication of our times, were destined to satisfy only the ideological and economic interests of the owners of the film industry, the lords of the world film market, the great majority of whom were from the United States.”

Solanas and Getino insist that even ostensibly “local,” nationalist cinema production was conditioned by the Hollywood system of production and distribution. While ostensibly Argentine in its origins, their own documentary-based film, La Hora de Los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968) constitutes a paean to international class struggle, beginning with the “45 million Latin Americans living a life of poverty.” Between an onslaught of chilling statistics, cacophonous sounds, jump cuts, and quotes by Aimé Césaire (the Afro-Caribbean poet and founder of the Négritude movement), Solanas and Getino home in on what the film calls “the geography of hunger”: a revolutionary geography lent flesh and humanity in the faces of the workers and peasants on whom the camera lingers intermittently. It was now incumbent upon cinema, Solanas and Getino claimed, to respond to “the existence of masses on the worldwide revolutionary plane.”¹¹ If a through line from neorealism to Cuarón’s Roma passes by way of Solanas and Getino’s promise of a revolutionary Latin American cinema, Cuarón’s film nevertheless falls indisputably short. So let us conclude where we began: with one of the latest films claimed for the global neorealist canon.

So Yong Kim: Treeless Mountain, 2008.

Roma is fraught with many of the tensions that characterized neorealism itself: between the local and the global; between historical reckoning and colonial amnesia; between shiny commodity and gritty, unadorned revolutionary art; between fetishizing and fully humanizing working-class characters. Roma’s black-and-white photography (often associated with European art cinema, a first for Cuarón), combined with its irresistibly fluid cinematography and its centering on an Indigenous domestic worker who speaks Mixtec, might bespeak this bind most plainly. Perhaps these sites of ambivalence and friction are precisely where neorealism’s legacy is to be located in Roma, more than in its adherence to a laundry list of technical prescriptions or politico-philosophical propositions. The film recalls both Sembène’s Black Girl and a recent wave of films by Latin American women directors that New Republic staffer Miguel Salazar has dubbed “nanny-inspired cinema”: for example, La teta asustada (The Milk of Sorrow, 2009) by Peruvian director Claudia Llosa; La Nana (The Maid, 2009) by Chile’s Sebastián Silva.¹² Roma tells the story of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), an Indigenous woman who comes from Oaxaca—a state with a long history of conflict between its sizable Indigenous community and colonizing elites—to Mexico City to cook, clean, and care for a white, upper middle-class family based on Cuarón’s own.

Chicano studies professor Sergio de la Mora has noted how Roma draws Mexico’s racialized caste system to the fore¹³—much like Sembène’s Black Girl did with the colonial relations of domestic work that endured between Senegal and France, even after Senegal gained formal independence in 1960. And yet several critics have argued that the film does little to dismantle the structures of white supremacy that naturalize the labor that Cleo performs for her employer, Sofia.

Ousmane Sembène: Black Girl, 1966.

Unlike Diouana in her alienated off-screen voiceover in French—a testament to the linguistic hegemony of an occupying power—Cuarón’s Cleo speaks Mixtec in several intimate scenes with her fellow domestic worker and childhood friend, Adela (Nancy GarcÍa GarcÍa). Cleo and Adela’s uninhibited speech in a non-hegemonic language—in the kitchen, after work doing exercises by candlelight, at a diner counter while gossiping about boys back home—has not insulated the film from accusations of denying women’s agency and ignoring Indigenous erasure, from skeptics such as the contrarian Brody and Cherokee scholar Joseph M. Pierce. Classical neorealism à la Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti turned a blind eye to Italy’s colonial past just as it availed itself of some of its most pernicious tools in order to recast Italians as hapless victims rather than oppressors. It thus comes perhaps as little surprise that this ambivalence reverberates in its ongoing expression around the globe.

As crisis once again reigns the world over, so too does an appetite for realism among viewers and filmmakers alike. For the founding mythmakers of neorealism, the photographic image was to be put to work to capture “life as it is,” “the real things, exactly as they are,” in all their quotidian duration, to quote Zavattini once again. In postwar Italy, “life as it is” was marked by the crises of mass trauma, displacement, and poverty—issues that until then had been left out of the frame of mainstream cinema. Indeed, neorealism’s initial global resonance, film scholar Karl Schoonover has recently argued, was due in part in its ability to mobilize spectators outside Italy’s borders as “extranational eyewitnesses” to the country’s tragic postwar plight. Today, many cinematic afterlives in many places suggest that the form still compels us to keep our collective eyes trained on “the real” in a moment of crisis.¹⁴ And yet, as neorealism’s uneven legacy in Cuarón’s Roma attests, the lofty promise of unmediated access to reality has always produced blind spots.

¹ Cesare Zavattini, “A Thesis on Neo-Realism” (1952–54), Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-Realism, ed. and trans. David Overby, Hamden, Conn., Archon Books, 1978, p. 67.

² A.O. Scott, “Neo-Neo Realism,” New York Times, Mar. 17, 2009, nytimes.com.

³ Richard Brody, “About ‘Neo-Neo Realism,’” New Yorker, Mar. 19, 2009, newyorker.com.

⁴ Stephen Weinberger, “Neorealism, Iranian Style,” Iranian Studies 40, no. 1, Feb. 2007, pp. 5–16; Hamid Naficy, “Neorealism Iranian style,” Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style, eds. Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2011, pp. 226–39.

⁵ Federico Fellini, “The Road Beyond Neo-Realism,” in Federico Fellini, La Strada, eds. Peter Bondanella and Manuela Gieri, New Brunswick and London, Rutgers University Press, 1987, p. 217; Luchino Visconti, “Intervista a Luchino Visconti,” in Leggere Visconti, eds. Giuliana Callegari and Nuccio Lodato, Pavia, Amministrazione Provinciale di Pavia, 1976, p. 86.

⁶ Cesare Zavattini, cited in L’avventurosa storia del cinema italiano, eds. Franca Faldini and Goffredo Fofi, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1979, p. 134.

⁷ While prominent neorealist practitioners and theorists like Zavattini famously positioned themselves in opposition to Hollywood, it proves difficult to decouple Italian experiments from commercial American precedents. See in particular Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson, Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2007, and Global Neorealism, pp. 226–39.

⁸ Eileen Jones, “The Death of Revolutionary Film Form,” Jacobin Magazine, Feb. 19, 2020.

⁹ See Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascism’s Empire Cinema, Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2015. For instance, Rossellini’s early collaboration with director Goffredo Alessandrini, Luciano serra, pilota, won the Mussolini Cup alongside Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia at the Venice International Film Festival in 1938.

¹⁰ Michael Denning, cited in Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar, “Introduction,” Global Neorealism, p. 9.

¹¹ Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” New Latin American Cinema, vol. 1, ed. Michael T. Martin, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1997, p. 34.

¹² Miguel Salazar, “The Story Behind Roma,” New Republic, Dec. 18, 2018, newrepublic.com.

¹³ Sergio de la Mora, “Roma: Repatriation vs. Exploitation,” Film Quarterly 72, no. 4, Summer 2019, filmquarterly.org.

¹⁴ Karl Schoonover, Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Originally trained as an engineer, Ferrari began his artistic career working with ceramics in Italy. Having settled back in Buenos Aires by 1955, he pursued sculpture in a variety of materials before experimenting with the ink drawings and collages that would define his oeuvre and its ever more ideological preoccupations. Ferrari’s work is not often nuanced. For a series he began in 1985, Ferrari had caged pigeons shit on reproductions of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment fresco from the Sistine Chapel. In the collage Final Judgment (2005), he covered the apse of a church with an image of Jews wearing Star of David patches during the Holocaust so that a crowd of seated cardinals appears to be gazing raptly at a horrific spectacle–turned–Catholic rite. 

View of León Ferrari’s exhibition “Toasted Angels, Sounds of Steel,” 2020, at KOW.

To be sure, the events to which Ferrari’s work reacted hardly called for understated responses. Between the 1960s and ’80s, Argentina was rocked by coups d’état, currency devaluation, and student and labor unrest. The metaphorical transgressions in his work paled in comparison to Argentina’s actual political violence. With his safety increasingly at risk, Ferrari fled to São Paulo in 1976, returning to Buenos Aires only in 1991. Some of his later efforts lack the proverbial teeth of his early work. His 2004 model fighter jet adorned with feathers and his 2002 blender filled with Virgin Mary figurines, for instance, reprise the impudence of La Civilización Occidental y Cristiana to repetitive and even gimmicky effect. 

Ferrari’s critiques of Christianity (and of Catholicism more particularly) are not mere caprice, however. They form part of a larger assault on deeply ingrained origin stories and founding narratives that have served both nationalist hegemony and political repression. The irreverence of a collage like Angels (1986)—in which images of ceramic putti hover beside a camouflaged tank—draws on the legacy of Dada. In turn, Ferrari’s assemblages echo (however obliquely) in a range of contemporary practices. The works in Rachel Harrison’s recent retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, for instance, brought to mind many of Ferrari’s pieces and their wry humor. 

Perhaps more important, his provocations take on new inflections in the current political atmosphere, in which polemics, self-righteousness, and tribal allegiances reign supreme. Ferrari is widely known as an “iconoclastic” artist. Yet he obsessively invokes Christian icons in his work, calling to mind the old adage that only a theist can be a sinner. His work shows that to transgress the propriety of Christian iconography, one must possess a degree of aesthetic respect for that canon, even while channeling its images into new, less repressive meanings.

This article appears under the title “León Ferrari” in the April 2020 issue, p. 89.

View of Arturo Herrera’s 2019 exhibition at Corbett vs. Dempsey.

Venezuela-born, Berlin-based artist Arturo Herrera breathes life into well-worn practices of modernist collage, exploring the tensions between exactitude and spontaneity, placement and displacement. As chameleonic as he is consistent, he also plies such tensions in many other mediums, ranging from wall painting to screen prints to stainless steel relief and glass sculpture. This latest show featured a few recent series that employed different formats, scales, and materials yet shared some common tropes—most notably, the playful, partial occlusion of figurative imagery by nonobjective forms, and motifs concerning modern dance and the body’s movement in space.

Seven collage works, “I Heard Them and I Still Hear Them/Elements Nº 1–7” (2018), feature materials in arrangements of nested rectangles. Found black-and-white photographs of anonymous individuals engaged in various everyday activities float atop reproductions from a French catalogue of Picasso’s work and pieces of colored paper, the layered compositions pasted onto plywood supports painted in various modes of abstraction. The most salient feature of the pieces is their proliferation of right angles, a quality in many cases enhanced by the artist’s cropping of the Picasso plates. In one collage, Herrera has emphasized the empty space around the Picasso reproduction, using that blankness to set off a rectangular slice of abstraction at left. In the same work, the rippling reflection of an anonymous man wading into water in a photograph rhymes subtly with the black-and-white Picasso reproduction to which the image is affixed. The Spaniard’s legacy informs these works not simply through imagery but also through the anxiety of his influence, both as the preeminent avant-garde artist and the co-originator of modernist collage.

In fifteen collages titled “Set Design Studies for Dance/Elements Nº 1–15” (2019), Herrera has created more chaotically organized compositions, layering swatches of painted canvas, screen-printed imagery, photographs of dancers, and strips of felt on pink construction paper. Rather than presenting practical set designs, these studies evoke the potential (and lyrical) intersection of dancing bodies with sets, props, curtains, and other scenographic elements. Here, too, Herrera obscures and reveals in equal measure. A slice of felt descends over the photograph of a dancing figure, leaving only her feet exposed. If the photographs offer glimpses of some larger narrative, their partial concealment reveals the proverbial dance of form—the play of shapes torn from and shorn of context—to be the real subject of the works. Some of the pieces’ formal consonances—an arm rhyming with a wayward felt swatch, for instance—would have benefited from more breathing room. The works were hung in a tight grid that somewhat obscured the cadences within and among the compositions. 

Arturo Herrera: Body and Feet Positions in Relation to Line of Dance Nº 6, 2019, clear and black glass panel over pencil drawing on wall, 16 1/2 by 23 2/5 inches; at Corbett vs. Dempsey.

As optically striking as they are conceptually beguiling, nine works combining glass panels and wall drawings were displayed in the final gallery with enough room around them to accommodate the athleticism to which their title alludes: “Body and Feet Positions in Relation to Line of Dance Nº 1–9.” Based on the imagined trajectory of a dancer across a stage, a single abstract form was drawn at even intervals and the same height on three walls. Before each drawing hung an individual glass plate topped with black glass shapes in different configurations that partially filled in the outline on the wall, evoking the gestures and pauses that punctuate a dancer’s movement. The works’ diagrammatic nature calls to mind graphs or maps, while their conceptual and structuralist dimensions conjure installations by Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, and other artists concerned with the potential intellectual depth of flatness. The dance motifs, in other words, become abstracted and schematized, inevitably recalling Duchamp’s glass works. Yet Herrera’s slick panels also have a sensuous materiality: the black areas have a liquid, pooled quality—as if the results of pouring molten glass on the surfaces and allowing it to cool—appearing, by turns, pictorial and sculptural, flat and subtly bulbous. Dance, in short, anchors the artist’s latest series less as an end in itself than as a point of departure for formal and conceptual experimentation, the works shifting between bodily sensuality and cerebral pure form.

This article appears under the title “Arturo Herrera” in the March 2020 issue, pp. 86–87.

For Die Brücke, innovation entailed a turning backward, to places, epochs, and subjectivities unsullied by industrial modernity and its overweening aesthetic refinements. By most accounts, avant-garde primitivism rippled outward from Paris in tandem with Cubism. Yet Kirchner and his colleagues admired objects seemingly unspoiled by Western modernity at the Dresden Museum of Ethnology. This is not to say that Kirchner ignored Western art. In his Portrait of Hans Frisch (ca. 1907), the subject’s face is daubed with motley color and his dark blue suit swirls with languid impasto. The image betrays a burgeoning interest in Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch, both of whose work he viewed during this period, as does the nearby portrait Doris Standing (1906). Here, though, Kirchner pairs demonstrative brushwork with a notable flattening of form. Like van Gogh and Munch, Kirchner, as attentive to inner states as to physical presence, increasingly married Impressionism’s schematic figuration to gestural flourishes. Showing two figures squeezed together by a narrow vertical frame and linked by a huge nest of interconnected hair, Two Nudes (1907) further evinces the tension in Kirchner’s work between the aesthetic poles of realism and symbolism.

As the Berlin room demonstrated, Kirchner was a painter not simply of bodies, but also of spaces, which he presented as, by turns, alienating and idyllic. The warped interior of The Toilette (Woman before the Mirror), 1913–20, wouldn’t have been out of place as a set design for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. In Tower Room, Fehmarn (Self-Portrait with Erna), 1913, the erotic presence of a nude female body does nothing to make the compressed interior feel less claustrophobic. Two Nude Figures in a Landscape (1913), by contrast, exemplifies the affinity of the Brücke artists for the rejuvenating asylum of the natural world. The figures’ hunched, naked forms seem as much a part of the landscape as the rocks with which they rhyme formally do, just as their color echoes the stone outcropping at left.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Two Nudes, 1907, oil on canvas; at Neue Galerie.

Kirchner’s famous 1913 Berlin street scenes feature prostitutes and bourgeois men pressed together in masses of transactional anonymity. The war would soon exacerbate the experience of modern cities as sites of estrangement. Kirchner’s nervous breakdown during his military service found expression in his work, most notably his painting Self-Portrait as a Soldier (1915), in which he depicted himself in uniform and raising an arm with its hand chopped off. Kirchner’s actual injuries were less physical than mental, and he sought treatment in the mountains of Davos beginning in 1917. A number of paintings, like the 1917–19 Life in the Alps (Triptych), capture the bucolic existence he witnessed there, while a large tapestry and a small rug he designed at this time evoke a folkish simplicity not only in their imagery but also in their medium.

As the Expressionist who engaged most extensively with photography, Kirchner left behind over a thousand negatives. He shot many of his photographs in his studio, which appears as an active site for performances, artistic exchange, and the radical rejection of bourgeois norms. The exhibition includes several photographic reproductions, as well as drawings, a caryatid sculpture, and a wide range of prints—a medium in which Kirchner produced some of his most striking work. To cite just one example, the woodcut Windswept Firs (1919) places the viewer in a dense forest in which two figures walk along a path lit by a starry sky. Even more evocative of nature as a site of healing is Kirchner’s painting (1919–20) of a gorge in the Tinzenhorn mountain. A chapel nestles amid the landscape of purple and green crests, above which the sky glows green.

Kirchner would return to this area for years to come. A 1937 painting of his mountainside studio shows an interior space crisply delineated and utterly confusing, a warren of angled walls and rectangular features suggesting mirrors, doorways, or framed canvases. To the right appears a doorway through which we see blue sky and trees—a rustic tranquility rendered all the more ironic for the date of its representation. In 1937, numerous paintings by Kirchner were hung in the Nazis’ infamous “degenerate art” exhibition. Less than a year later, the artist took his own life.

This article appears under the title “Ernst Ludwig Kirchner” in the January 2020 issue, pp. 81–82.

“French Artists Spur on an American Art,” proclaimed an October 1915 article in the New York Tribune detailing a Parisian flair newly imported to America’s artistic circles. “I have not painted a single picture since coming over,” quipped Duchamp in prophetic intimation of his abandonment of painting (and, eventually, of art tout court).² Instead of singling out American painters or sculptors, Picabia praised the country’s “vast mechanical development”—of increasing interest not merely as a subject of depiction, but as a potential replacement for aesthetic representation altogether.³ Duchamp’s readymades, Picabia’s mechanomorphic drawings, and, eventually, the assemblage objects of their friend Man Ray: these phenomena promised (threatened?) to redefine the parameters of art altogether. On the horizon was not—as with Cubism or Futurism, Fauvism or Expressionism—a revolution of form, but a less tangible recalibration of content and concept.

Dada did not spring forth fully formed in New York from Duchamp’s, or Picabia’s, or Man Ray’s head. It emerged collectively and cumulatively, gradually and fitfully. “New York Dada,” in fact, is better understood as a retrospective designation, gathering under a single name disparate encounters, events, images, and objects. Already Dada in spirit were the antics and poetics of the nomadic Swiss boxer-artist-writer Arthur Cravan, who created a small sensation during his 1916–17 sojourn in New York, mixing self-mythologization and self-effacement in ways that anticipated a range of performative practices. The Dada ethos had likewise incubated in the work orchestrated by photographer Alfred Stieglitz—first with the journal Camera Work (1903–17) and then its successor 291 (1915–16), the latter named for the Fifth Avenue address of his gallery, also called 291, which operated from 1905 to 1917. There, Stieglitz almost single-handedly introduced an American public to the European avant-garde, while sponsoring extended visits to Europe by local artists like Marsden Hartley. Picabia notably exhibited a range of mechanomorphic paintings at 291 following his own participation in the Armory show, securing in Stieglitz’s patronage a further foothold in the New York scene.

“Dada Will Get You if You Don’t Watch Out: It Is on the Way Here,” published in the New York Evening Journal, Jan. 29, 1921.

Picabia’s journal 391—a clearinghouse of Dadaist pranksterism and parody launched from Barcelona in 1917—explicitly acknowledged Stieglitz’s legacy with a variation on his publication’s name, even as Dada exchanged his Pictorialist sympathies and idealistic avant-gardism for an increasingly nihilistic irony. If Duchamp’s Nude had rankled all but the most broad-minded in 1913, his 1917 Fountain—an inverted porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt,” barred by the Society of Independent Artists from its annual exhibition—forswore the very norms of authorship to which art appeared ontologically bound. Aesthetics no longer inhered in the work itself, no longer issued from its visual finesse or morphological contingencies. Instead, the object became a kind of hitching post for ideas and questions prompted by its mere irreverent presence. Like Courbet’s guerrilla retrospective installed near the 1855 Exposition Universelle, or the Impressionists’ defiant Salon des Refusés eight years later, Duchamp’s submission of a piece of plumbing to an art exhibition inaugurated a new era, potentially hermetic and egalitarian in equal measure. “In art,” goes one of Paul Gauguin’s oft-cited lines, “one is either a plagiarist or a revolutionary.”⁴ Anticipating postmodernist sensibilities, the readymade suggested these alternatives would be reconciled in a single object.

“All members of the DADA movement are presidents,” Picabia declared in his 1920 “Manifesto of the Dada Movement”; “Dada belongs to everybody,” wrote Tristan Tzara in the one and only issue of New York Dada published in 1921, “like the idea of God or the tooth-brush.”⁵ At the same time, however, Tzara averred that there “is nothing more incomprehensible than Dada. Nothing more indefinable.”⁶ Such willful ambivalence had appeared already in the deadpan of Duchamp’s Fountain or the shovel of his In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915)—both mass-produced items like the toothbrush. By selecting and signing these objects, Duchamp liberated aesthetics from both highbrow convention and the ceremonious imprimatur of the artist’s touch. The same works, however, hinge in significance upon an expressly intangible gambit—one requiring familiarity with its intellectual stakes and metaphysical premise. Did the readymade democratize art, or further rarefy it? Did Dada’s objects open up aesthetics to a wider civic engagement, or further alienate a public loath to part with the ease and immediacy of “optical” pleasures? As various avant-garde movements squared off over the carcass of figuration in the wake of Cubism, Dada changed the rules of the game entirely.

If painting and sculpture still played a role, it was increasingly as the foil to less conventional practices. At 33 West 67th Street, the home of Walter and Louise Arensberg served not only as a nexus of gatherings throughout the late 1910s, but also as a site of display—set into compelling relief by Francis M. Naumann Fine Art’s recent exhibition “New York Dada and the Arensberg Circle of Artists.” The Arensbergs purchased six paintings and a lithograph from the Armory Show, while also during these fervent years acquiring works by Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso, as well as American artists like Charles Sheeler and John Covert.

More than a collector or patron, Walter Arensberg authored various literary experiments, making him ever more akin to his artist friends (Picabia described him to Tzara, in fact, as “the true Dada of New York”).⁷ Duchamp’s “bachelor machines” and Picabia’s object-portraits find verbal counterparts in Arensberg’s verses. Published in the short-lived Dada periodical The Blind Man in May 1917, his poem “Axiom” reads as an accretion of playfully enjambed lines invoking “a determinable horizon,” “simultaneous insularity,” and “goods opposed tangentially.” His poem “Theorem,” in the same issue, speaks of “the ascent of two waves” being “timed / at the angle of incidence / to the swing of a suspended lens” and an emotion that “assumes on the uneven surface . . . the three dimensions / with which it is incommensurate.”⁸

Arensberg’s language proves wayward precisely in its exactitude. Indeed, his lines recall Duchamp’s “theorem” for his own 3 Standard Stoppages
(1913–14)—a work that challenged not only the hegemony of painting but the epistemological sovereignty of geometry: “If a straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter onto a horizontal plane twisting as it pleases [it] creates a new image of the unit of length.”⁹ In both instances, an axiom falls well short of the axiomatic, even, or especially, in its mock-apodictic conviction. We find a similar method in Man Ray’s “Revolving Doors” collages of 1916–17, which he adapted from Duchamp’s mechanical imagery and matched with accompanying texts.¹⁰ These “pseudo-scientific abstractions,” as Man Ray later called them, evoke figures in flattened, schematic form “without the go-between of a ‘subject.’”¹¹

André Raffray: Chez Arensberg, 1981–84, gouache and tempera on paper, 15 by 28 inches.

Exchanging artistic subjectivity for the anonymity of industrial modernity, the readymade and mechanomorph poked mordant holes in the sanctimony of bourgeois expression. Art history has long since canonized the readymade as the model for various critical practices of the late twentieth century, from the performative interventions of Bruce Nauman to the appropriationist strategies of the Pictures Generation to aspects of relational aesthetics today. Yet the hallowed trio of Duchamp, Picabia, and Man Ray often eclipses other individuals and activities from this same era—individuals for whom artistic subjectivity was never something to give away, precisely because it was, for them, already so precarious and marginalized.

Striking in this regard is the prominence in the Arensberg circle not only of émigrés from Europe’s wars, but of numerous women artists and authors, including Beatrice Wood, Katherine S. Dreier, Gabrielle Buffet, Juliette Roche, Mina Loy, the Stettheimer sisters, and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. As then independent art historian and curator Francis Naumann first demonstrated in his groundbreaking exhibition “Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1996, women were not ancillary to the development of New York Dada but active creators in their own right—a fact that Amelia Jones and other scholars have further detailed.¹²

A German national and brazen provocateur, the Baroness pioneered aspects of sound poetry, produced multimedia assemblages, and made her body into a makeshift nexus of artistic attention. Dressing in outlandish costumes wrought from street debris and cheap jewelry, she flaunted her sexual avidity and flouted gender norms in ways arguably more transgressive—and consistently aggressive—than Duchamp did in his famed Rrose Sélavy drag persona.¹³ To Man Ray’s New York (1917), with its clamped wooden slats evoking a stepped-back skyscraper, the Baroness’s equally architectural Cathedral (ca. 1918) offered an organic alternative, its splintered wood shaft suggesting not the anonymity of industry but the worn fragility of the body.¹⁴ Beatrice Wood, a lover and protégée of Duchamp, experimented with her own readymade objects, inserting a real bar of soap into the crotch of a glazed figure and titling it Un peu d’eau dans du savon (A Little Water in Some Soap), 1917. She showed the piece in the same Independent Artists exhibition from which Fountain was excluded (a rejection which she pointedly, though anonymously, helped denounce in The Blind Man).¹⁵ Duchamp’s travails with Fountain proved institutional and intellectual; Wood’s experience was of a different order. Convinced that any young woman exhibiting a nude like Un peu d’eau must be sexually accommodating, men inserted their business cards into the work’s frame. In addition to any critical resistance they might encounter, women faced an abiding chauvinism on the level of vocation itself.

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven: Limbswish, ca. 1917–19, metal spring and curtain tassel, 18 inches tall.

If such sexism has receded, it has hardly disappeared. Reviewing the 1996 “Making Mischief” exhibition, critic Hilton Kramer took umbrage at what he deemed “the plethora of amateur art produced by the girlfriends and mistresses of the male artists who dominated New York Dada.”¹⁶ With the exception of a couple of works by the Baroness, even the massive traveling survey “Dada,” which premiered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 2016, framed New York’s contributions as the fruit of a few (anti-)heroic men. Leaving aside Kramer’s inscrutable benchmark of quality, and the insulting presumption that a woman could not be an artist and a companion, the male dominance of New York Dada in fact belied all manner of intervention and exposition by women, whether behind the scenes or in plain sight. As Naumann crucially demonstrated, the cast-iron assemblage God (1917)—long attributed to the New York Dadaist Morton Livingston Schamberg—was in fact a collaboration with the Baroness.¹⁷ A trained painter who exhibited at the Armory Show, Dreier helped establish the Society of Independent Artists before cofounding the Société Anonyme with Duchamp and Man Ray in 1920—the first American venue devoted exclusively to exhibiting modern art, a subject on which Dreier would later lecture tirelessly. And, as art historian Bradley Bailey has established in a recent article, Louise (Norton) Varèse not only penned her own defense of Fountain in The Blind Man, but also had a hand in the work’s very conception and submission.¹⁸

Such recognition is not merely the consequence of retrospective acknowledgment. In 1922, Jane Heap, editor of the prominent journal the Little Review, declared the Baroness “the only one living anywhere who dresses dada, loves dada, lives dada.”¹⁹ Walking the Greenwich Village streets with a live canary strapped to her head in a cage, and writing verse no less concerned with the messy contingencies of embodiment, the Baroness defied the cool detachment of her male Dada peers. “The machine,” Picabia had announced already in 1915, “has become more than a mere adjunct of human life. It is really a part of human life—perhaps the very soul.”²⁰ The Baroness, by contrast, insisted upon the unruliness of the flesh, in both its eroticism and its scatological functions: “If I can eat I can eliminate—it is logic—it is why I eat! My machinery is built that way. Yours also—though you do not like to think of—mention it.”²¹ “America’s comfort,” she writes elsewhere, in words evocative of her and Schamberg’s God sculpture, “[is] sanitation—outside machinery—has made America forget its own machinery—body!”²² The Baroness and her work help us to take stock of how the studied uselessness and waywardness of Dada objects, texts, and apparatuses—including the body itself—remained bound to an abidingly human (though not humanist) dimension.

Marcel Duchamp: Roché, 1917, pen and ink on paper, 8 7/8 by 5 3/4 inches.

Like the Baroness, a great number of those involved with New York Dada were of German extraction (including Arensberg, Dreier, and Schamberg)—origins bearing upon their experience in wartime America, rife with anti-German sentiment. As art historian Michael Taylor has noted, the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition coincided with America’s belated entry into the war alongside the Entente Powers. However distant that reality, the habitués of New York Dada did respond obliquely to its hostilities.²³ Hans Richter writes of Duchamp’s activity at the time that the artist “reversed the signposts of value so that they all point[ed] into the void.”²⁴ After 1914 the abyss had taken on historical—rather than merely conceptual or existential—dimensions. Teeming with rats, fleas, and corpses, the trenches threading from Flanders to Verdun and beyond opened up a very real chasm across Europe’s Western front. If accident came to play a vital role in Dada experimentation, it is no coincidence that novelist Erich Maria Remarque would describe the basic condition of life in the German trenches as one of mere “chance”; if the mechanized body obsessed the Dadaists, this cannot be separated from the world of “automatons” into which the war—as Remarque would remind us—had plunged an entire generation of young men.²⁵ In the service of senseless death, the highest advancements in Western technology revealed themselves to be in fact the most abject, giving the lie to any narrative of culture’s civilizing progress. It was that lie to which Dada responded, whether from atop the “volcano” of politics in post-WWI Berlin—as the German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeack put it²⁶—or across the Atlantic in less direct registers.

Huelsenbeck’s 1920 Dada Almanach excluded New York contributions from the movement’s running history, as did some other subsequent volumes. Richter, by contrast, went so far as to declare Man Ray’s (accidental) invention in Paris of the cameraless rayograph as belonging to New York Dada.²⁷ “Dada in New York must remain a secret,” Man Ray wrote to Tzara not long before decamping—like Duchamp—for France in the summer of 1921.²⁸ The Arensbergs moved to California that same year. Though others remained, things had changed in America’s lone Dada outpost. The January 29, 1921, edition of the New York Evening Journal admonished readers “Dada Will Get You If You Don’t Watch Out: It Is On the Way Here.” The warning arrived too late. The announcement of Dada’s arrival in fact witnessed its departure.

In spite—or perhaps because—of its protean and hybrid development in New York, Dada left behind what Amelia Jones has called a “seemingly insurmountable mountain of archival and secondary materials.”²⁹ In many ways, secondariness was the primary drive of Dada. For it was at the margins of the “fine arts” that its adherents aimed many of their interventions—in quips to local newspapers or even more ephemeral improvisations, long since turned into archival relics. “New York Dada and the Arensberg Circle of Artists” rightly insisted on the Arensberg apartment as, first and foremost, a site of interpersonal exchange. To be sure, painting and sculpture abounded among the Arensberg set, far more than in Zurich or Paris—something the Naumann exhibition put into relief with works by John Covert, Clara Tice, and Jean Crotti. But even more striking, precisely in its offhandedness, is a work like Duchamp’s “portrait” of Henri-Pierre Roché—a paper dinner placeholder bearing a few seemingly abstract lines. When held up to the light, visually converging recto and verso, it reveals the eponymous subject’s last name in elongated half-letters.

Katherine S. Dreier: Stonington Harbor, 1923, oil on canvas, 24 by 43 inches.

The history of New York Dada transcends its particular corpus of works. It offers a lesson about art history more broadly, concerning the hazards of slotting phenomena into aesthetic categories that are too rigid. Though associated with the Italian Futurists, Joseph Stella proved an enthusiastic accomplice of Duchamp; known chiefly for their subsequent contributions to Precisionism, Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler were also fellow travelers of the Arensberg set; Florine Stettheimer remained active in the same circles while disavowing any explicit affiliation. Duchamp set about disenchanting and ironizing the revered procedures of aesthetics; the historicization of that disenchantment has birthed numerous museological objects and replicas. The artist himself anticipated that inexorable fate with his Boîte-en-valise (1936–41), a portable suitcase containing miniature reproductions of his most (in)famous works, including Fountain.   

Dada’s most incisive legacy endures not in any material artworks, however, but in the ideas attendant upon them—a reflexivity that, at the very least, still promises to challenge the seemingly unequivocal legitimacy of aesthetic commodification. The dematerialized and politicized practices of the 1960s neo-avant-garde, and whatever remains of its successors today, owe an incalculable debt to Dada in America and abroad. “All New York is dada, and will not tolerate a rival—will not notice dada,” May Ray confessed to Tzara.³⁰ The absurdities teeming day-to-day in New York often outstrip what any artist might dream up. Yet part of Dada’s achievement here was to go at least partly unnoticed, even as it changed the very substance of art itself.

¹ Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, New York, Thames and Hudson,
1965, p. 81.
² Duchamp quoted in “French Artists Spur on an American Art,” New York Tribune, October 24, 1915, section 4, p. 2.
³ Picabia quoted in ibid.
⁴ Gauguin quoted in Susan Ratcliffe, ed., Oxford Treasury of Sayings and Quotations, Oxford University Press, 2011, §21, p. 30.
⁵ Francis Picabia, “Manifesto of the Dada Movement” (1920), reprinted in Francis Picabia, I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation, trans. Marc Lowenthal, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2007, p. 179; Tristan Tzara, “New York-Dada,” New York Dada, April 1921, p. 3. Tzara wrote in response to the request by the New York group to name its periodical “Dada.”
⁶ Tristan Tzara, “New York-Dada,” p. 3.
⁷ Cited in Michael Taylor, “New York,” in Leah Dickerman, ed., Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, 2005, p. 281.
⁸ Walter Arensberg, “Axiom,” and “Theorem,” Blind Man, no. 2, May 1917, n.p.
⁹ See the Museum of Modern Art’s gallery label (2006) for Marcel Duchamp, 3 Standard Stoppages, moma.org.
¹⁰ Man Ray, “Revolving Doors,” reprinted in Man Ray: Writings on Art, ed., Jennifer Mundy, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, p. 35.
¹¹ Man Ray, Self-Portrait, New York, McGraw Hill, 1963, p. 68; Man Ray, “Explanatory Note: March 1916,” reprinted in Man Ray: Writings on Art, p. 35.
¹² See in particular Amelia Jones, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2005, and Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, ed., Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1999.
¹³ Jones, Irrational Modernism, pp. 4–11. Jones insists upon the “lived Dada” of the Baroness’s art, over and against the more conceptual interventions of Duchamp and Picabia, who she argues led more or less bourgeois lives.
¹⁴ Ibid, pp. 192–95.
¹⁵ Beatrice Wood (in conjunction with Marcel Duchamp), “The Richard Mutt Case,” Blind Man, no. 2. On Wood’s authorship of the text see Beatrice Wood, I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1985, p. 31, and Francis Naumann, New York Dada 1915-1923, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1994, p. 185.
¹⁶ Hilton Kramer, “Here Comes the Whitney, Now That Dada’s Dead,” New York Observer, Dec. 2, 1996, pp. 1, 32.
¹⁷ Naumann, New York Dada, pp. 128–29, 171–72.
¹⁸ Bradley Bailey, “Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’: The Baroness Theory Debunked,” Burlington Magazine, no. 161, October 2019, p. 805. Louise Norton’s contribution to Blind Man, no. 2, is titled “Buddha in the Bathroom.”
¹⁹ Jane Heap, cited in Dikran Tashjian, “From Anarchy to Group Force,” Women in Dada, p. 279; emphasis mine.
²⁰ “French Artists Spur on an American Art,” op. cit.
²¹ Else [sic] von Freytag-Loringhoven, “‘The Modest Woman,’” Little Review 7, no. 2, July–August 1920, p. 37; cited in Jones, Irrational Modernism, p. 156.
²² Von Freytag-Loringhoven, “‘The Modest Woman,’” pp. 37–38.
²³ Taylor, “New York,” p. 277.
²⁴ Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, p. 91.
²⁵ Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front [1929], trans. Brian Murdoch, London, Vintage, 1996, pp. 72, 83. While Murdoch translates the latter phrase as “dulled and ever-moving automatic actions,” Remarque’s other English translator, Arthur Wesley Wheen, renders it as a “gloomy world of automatons” (New York, Ballantine Books, 1986, p. 115). The latter evokes a trope familiar from a wide swath of avant-garde work in the wake of the Great War, from Fernand Léger’s abstracted figure drawing Card Game (1917) to various Dadaist depictions of soldiers outfitted with prosthetic limbs, more machines than men.
²⁶ Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991, p. 52.
²⁷ Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, p. 98.
²⁸ Man Ray, Letter to Tristan Tzara, June 8, 1921, reprinted in Man Ray: Writings on Art, p. 65.
²⁹ Jones, p. 30.
³⁰ Man Ray, Letter to Tristan Tzara, June 8, 1921, reprinted in Man Ray: Writings on Art, p. 65.

That physical closeness belies an insidious distancing in Tooker’s work is especially apparent in his city scenes, the best-known example of which is The Subway (1950), at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In the DC Moore presentation, the painting Tree (1965) portrayed an analogous sense of isolation through a view of the natural world rather than the urban labyrinth. A man and a woman stand on opposite sides of a small tree, close to its trunk, their proximity and postures suggesting a level of complicity. Yet they look away from each other, separated not only by the tree but by some less visible impediment. The lithograph Voice (1977) features a similar but more dramatic composition, depicting two apprehensive-looking figures pressing against opposite sides of a door, their faces visible to the viewer but not to each other.

In 1943 and 1944, at the Art Students League of New York, Tooker studied with the stalwart painter of Coney Island crowd scenes, Reginald Marsh, whose use of egg tempera was of a piece with his mistrust of modernism. But Tooker’s style was shaped more significantly by the paintings of Jared French and Paul Cadmus, which are often deemed “magic realist” (though that term, coined in Europe, is something of a misnomer in an American context, and indeed Tooker rejected it) and which feature frank expressions of same-sex desire.

Guitar (1957) brings together two elements commonly found in Tooker’s work: the compositional device of rendering the image as a scene in a window, and an exploration of racial themes. (Tooker, with his partner, the painter William Christopher, was actively involved in the Civil Rights movement.) In this painting, we view a touching scene of interracial intimacy. A nude white woman reclines on a bed foreshortened in a shallow room, as an African American man leans out the window and puffs on what may be a postcoital cigarette, his hand poised over his guitar mid-strum. A trio of red details—window curtains pulled back to reveal the woman’s midriff, a ribbon unfurled across the sill, and a velvet frame around the painting—alludes to a carnal encounter that would have outraged contemporary sensibilities (and laws). Less straightforward is the appearance of an African American man in Builders (1952), the left sleeve of his shirt inexplicably torn open. As striking as this painting’s almost religious evocations—the spectral main figure appears almost to be walking on a body of water in the background—are the plants that sprout from the soil depicted along the work’s bottom edge, as if in the foreground of a Renaissance panel.

While studying English literature at Harvard, Tooker made repeated visits to the Fogg Museum’s Renaissance and medieval collections—encounters that would echo in his practice for more than half a century. A 1964 study for a work titled Sleep shows Tooker roughing out one-point perspective, while the painting Window XI (1999) evokes the contrapposto of ancient statuary. This latter painting, like Guitar, portrays two figures in a window: one half-naked man gazing at the viewer, and another behind him with his back turned. The front-facing figure’s bent, upraised arm runs along the painting’s (and window’s) frame. The warm red background seems to leach into his body, and his sensuality—a sliver of underwear creeping above his pants—is matched by the sentience conveyed by his faint smile. For all Tooker’s resistance to modernism, his painting exceeds the strictures of academic dogma or pastiche. Appearing almost cinematic, the drawing Window (1994) offers a close-up view of a couple lit from below as they lean out of their apartment building with evident curiosity. Even when human beings fail to connect in Tooker’s images, they strive to shake off the confines of solitude.

This article appears under the title “George Tooker” in the December 2019 issue, pp. 96–97.