Europe After the Rain. Dada and Surrealism - ACE066.2

Photographs of Francis Picabia (who arrived in Zurich in 1918) and pages from his magazine, 391 – "every page must explode… art must be … useless and impossible to justify". Photograph at exhibition. Paintings by Picabia: Parade amoureuse (1917), Very Rare Painting on Earth (1915); Machine Turn Quickly / Machine, tournez vite (1916); Conversation I (1922). Triple photograph of Picabia; Around the Table, Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 quintuple photograph of himself, described as "the most hermetic and radical of all the anti-art Dadaists". Photographs of Duchamp’s family. Commentary on Duchamp’s "rapid succession of styles: Portrait of the Artist's Father (1910). Chess Game (1910). The Bush (1910), and his violent reaction "against painting as a source of pleasure" Yvonne and Magdeleine Torn in Tatters (1911), Portrait of Chess Player (1911). Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 (1912) "analysis of a moving figure influenced by photographic research" and diagrams illustrating this. Broyeuse de chocolat No.1 / Chocolate Grinder No.1 (1913) with Duchamp’s words over saying that he felt he "could avoid all contact with traditional pictorial painting…"; Broyeuse de chocolat No.2 / Chocolate Grinder No.2 (1914). "Ready-made works of art", Bicycle Wheel / Roue de bicyclette (1913-1964!) and Bottlerack (1914-1964!), with Duchamp’s words, "… you have to approach the object as if you had no aesthetic emotion…" Film of New York c.1915; photographs of Duchamp. Magazine article about Fountain / Fontaine (1917); quotations from New York Dada magazine, questioning why it should have been refused by the Society of Independent Artists; views of Fountain. Photograph of Duchamp working on The Large Glass, aka The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even / La Mariée mise à nu par ses celibataires même (1913/1936), together with drawings and plans for "a mechanistic representation of sexuality". Various features of the work in which, according to Duchamp, "… the Bachelors [serve] as an architectonic base for the Bride..."; VO quotes his explanation of the symbolism of the parts. The final work installed in a gallery, though abandoned by Duchamp as "definitively incomplete".