The Blind Man

Last updated
Issue 1, April 1917 The Blind Man, issue 1, April 1917.jpg
Issue 1, April 1917
Issue 2, May 1917 The blind man MET b1120124 001.jpg
Issue 2, May 1917

The Blind Man was an art and Dada journal published briefly by the New York Dadaists in 1917.

Contents

History

Henri-Pierre Roché and Marcel Duchamp, visiting from France, organized the magazine with Beatrice Wood in New York City. Mina Loy also contributed to the first, Independents' Number issue.

They published only one more issue, with the following contributors:

Volume 2 is best known for the group's reaction to the rejection of Duchamp's Fountain by an unjuried art show in 1917. Although the magazine had a brief life, it was influential as the first publication by Dadaists in the United States.

After The Blind Man, Duchamp also launched another short-lived magazine, of which only a single issue was made, Rongwrong. [1] [2]

Facsimile

As part of the Dada centennial celebrations, Ugly Duckling Presse published a 1000-copy, boxed-set, limited-edition facsimile of the two editions of The Blind Man, called The Blind Man: New York Dada, 1917. [3]

Footnotes

  1. "DADA and Modernist Magazines – Rongwrong". www.dada-companion.com. Archived from the original on 11 November 2018. Retrieved 22 November 2018.
  2. Hofmann, Irene E. (1996). "Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection". Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies. 22 (2): 131–197. doi:10.2307/4104318. JSTOR   4104318. Text also published here.
  3. "A Trove of Dadaist Fun Is Reissued" by Joseph Nechvatal, Hyperallergic , January 19, 2018

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dada</span> Avant-garde art movement in the early 20th century

Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire, founded by Hugo Ball with his companion Emmy Hennings, and in Berlin in 1917. New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris. Dadaist activities lasted until the mid 1920s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marcel Duchamp</span> French painter, sculptor, and chess player (1887–1968)

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. He has had an immense impact on 20th- and 21st-century art, and a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By the time of World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as "retinal", intended only to please the eye. Instead, he wanted to use art to serve the mind.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Found object</span> Non-standard material used in work of art

A found object, or found art, is art created from undisguised, but often modified, items or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often because they already have a non-art function. Pablo Picasso first publicly utilized the idea when he pasted a printed image of chair caning onto his painting titled Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). Marcel Duchamp is thought to have perfected the concept several years later when he made a series of ready-mades, consisting of completely unaltered everyday objects selected by Duchamp and designated as art. The most famous example is Fountain (1917), a standard urinal purchased from a hardware store and displayed on a pedestal, resting on its side. In its strictest sense the term "ready-made" is applied exclusively to works produced by Marcel Duchamp, who borrowed the term from the clothing industry while living in New York, and especially to works dating from 1913 to 1921.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francis Picabia</span> French painter and writer (1879–1953)

Francis Picabia was a French avant-garde painter, writer, filmmaker, magazine publisher, poet, and typographist closely associated with Dada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Suzanne Duchamp</span> French painter

Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti was a French Dadaist painter, collagist, sculptor, and draughtsman. Her work was significant to the development of Paris Dada and modernism and her drawings and collages explore fascinating gender dynamics. Due to the fact that she was a woman in the male prominent Dada movement, she was rarely considered an artist in her own right. She constantly lived in the shadows of her famous older brothers, who were also artists, or she was referred to as "the wife of." Her work in painting turns out to be significantly influential to the landscape of Dada in Paris and to the interests of women in Dada. She took a large role as an avant-garde artist, working through a career that spanned five decades, during a turbulent time of great societal change. She used her work to express certain subject matter such as personal concerns about modern society, her role as a modern woman artist, and the effects of the First World War. Her work often weaves painting, collage, and language together in complex ways.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mina Loy</span> British writer and designer of lamps (1882–1966)

Mina Loy was a British-born artist, writer, poet, playwright, novelist, painter, designer of lamps, and bohemian. She was one of the last of the first-generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia, and Yvor Winters, among others. As stated by Nicholas Fox Weber in the New York Times, "This brave soul had the courage and wit to be original. Mina Loy may never be more than a vaguely familiar name, a passing satellite, but at least she sparkled from an orbit of her own choosing."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henri-Pierre Roché</span>

Henri-Pierre Roché was a French author who was involved with the artistic avant-garde in Paris and the Dada movement.

<i>Fountain</i> (Duchamp) 1917 sculpture by Marcel Duchamp

Fountain is a readymade sculpture by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, consisting of a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt". In April 1917, an ordinary piece of plumbing chosen by Duchamp was submitted for an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, the inaugural exhibition by the Society to be staged at the Grand Central Palace in New York. When explaining the purpose of his readymade sculpture, Duchamp stated they are "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice." In Duchamp's presentation, the urinal's orientation was altered from its usual positioning. Fountain was not rejected by the committee, since Society rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee, but the work was never placed in the show area. Following that removal, Fountain was photographed at Alfred Stieglitz's studio, and the photo published in the Dada journal The Blind Man. The original has been lost.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Cravan</span> French poet, Dadaist and boxer

Arthur Cravan was a Swiss writer, poet, artist and boxer. He was the second son of Otho Holland Lloyd and Hélène Clara St. Clair. His brother Otho Lloyd was a painter and photographer married to the Russian émigré artist Olga Sacharoff. His father's sister, Constance Mary Lloyd, was married to Irish poet Oscar Wilde. He changed his name to Cravan in 1912 in honour of his fiancée Renée Bouchet, who was born in the small village of Cravans in the department of Charente-Maritime in western France.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven</span> German artist and poet (1874 –1927)

Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven was a German-born avant-garde visual artist and poet, who was active in Greenwich Village, New York, from 1913 to 1923, where her radical self-displays came to embody a living Dada. She was considered one of the most controversial and radical women artists of the era.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Readymades of Marcel Duchamp</span> Series of artworks by Marcel Duchamp

The readymades of Marcel Duchamp are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art". By simply choosing the object and repositioning or joining, titling and signing it, the found object became art.

<i>391</i> (magazine) Barcelona magazine (1917-1924)

391 was a Dada-affiliated arts and literary magazine created by Francis Picabia, published between 1917 and 1924 in Barcelona, Zürich and New York City.

<i>291</i> (magazine)

291 was an arts and literary magazine that was published from 1915 to 1916 in New York City. It was created and published by a group of four individuals: photographer/modern art promoter Alfred Stieglitz, artist Marius de Zayas, art collector/journalist/poet Agnes E. Meyer and photographer/critic/arts patron Paul Haviland. Initially intended as a way to bring attention to Stieglitz's gallery of the same name (291), it soon became a work of art in itself. The magazine published original art work, essays, poems and commentaries by Francis Picabia, John Marin, Max Jacob, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, de Zayas, Stieglitz and other avant-garde artists and writers of the time, and it is credited with being the publication that introduced visual poetry to the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New York Dada</span>

New York Dada was a regionalized extension of Dada, an artistic and cultural movement between the years 1913 and 1923. Usually considered to have been instigated by Marcel Duchamp's Fountain exhibited at the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, and becoming a movement at the Cabaret Voltaire in February, 1916, in Zürich, the Dadaism as a loose network of artists spread across Europe and other countries, with New York becoming the primary center of Dada in the United States. The very word Dada is notoriously difficult to define and its origins are disputed, particularly amongst the Dadaists themselves.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Juliette Roche</span> French painter

Juliette Roche (1884–1980), also known as Juliette Roche Gleizes, was a French painter and writer who associated with members of the Cubist and Dada movements. She was married to the artist Albert Gleizes.

<i>Dadaglobe</i> Uncompleted avant-garde anthology

Dadaglobe was an anthology of the Dada movement slated for publication in 1921, but abandoned for financial and other reasons and never published. At 160 pages with over a hundred reproductions of artworks and over a hundred texts by some fifty artists in ten countries, Dadaglobe was to have documented Dada's apogee as an artistic and literary movement of international breadth. Edited by Dada co-founder Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) in Paris, Dadaglobe was not conceived as a summary of the movement since its founding in 1916, but rather meant to be a snapshot of its expanded incarnation at war's end. Not merely a vehicle for existing works, the project functioned as one of Dada's most generative catalysts for the production of new works.

Charles W. Duncan (1887–1970) was an American avant-garde painter in the circle of artists that gathered around the photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz. He is now known primarily as the subject of one of Charles Demuth's famous poster portraits.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Varèse</span> American translator

Louise Varèse, also credited as Louise Norton or Louise Norton-Varèse, was an American writer, editor, and translator of French literature who was involved with New York Dadaism.

<i>Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating</i> Fictitious work by Marcel Duchamp

Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating is a fictitious work of art by Marcel Duchamp.

<i>Rongwrong</i>

Rongwrong was a New York Dadaist magazine of which one issue was published in May 1917. The magazine was co-created and edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood.