FANTASTIC ART DADA SURREALISM
Alfred H. Barr, Jr. [Editor]
Alfred H. Barr, Jr. [Editor]: FANTASTIC ART DADA SURREALISM. New York: Museum of Modern Art, July 1937. Second Edition, revised and enlarged. Green cloth stamped and decorated in gold. Printed dust jacket. 294 pp. 222 black and white plates. Original MoMA exhibition handbill laid in. Gutters lightly toned. Photogram dust jacket by Man Ray with vintage tape reinforcement to spine heel and a taped short closed tear to rear panel. Upper jacket edge slightly roughened. A nearly fine copy in a very good dust jacket. A superior copy of this seminal catalog.
7.75 x 10.25 hardcover book with 294 pages and over 200 black and white plates. Title page and cover glyph by Hans Arp. Catalog from a seminal MOMA exhibit, which ran from December 1936 to January 1937. The second and third editions of the catalog included the essay that Museum director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., had written for this brochure as well as essays by the French poet and critic Georges Hugnet that had arrived too late for inclusion in the first edition.
Acknowledgements
Preface to the First Edition by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
Introduction by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
Dada by Georges Hugnet
In the Light of Surrealism by Georges Hugnet
Brief Chronology by Elodie Courter and A. H. B., Jr.
Plates
Catalog of the Exhibition
Films
Brief Bibliography
Includes work by Arcimboldo, Hieronymous Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Peter Huys, Leonardo Da Vinci, Giovanni Battista Bracelli, William Hogarth, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Cole, Eugène Delacroix, James Ensor, Henry Fuseli, Francisco Goya, Victor Marie Hugo, Edward Lear, Odilon Redon, Henri Rousseau, Marc Chagall, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Hans Arp, Johannes Baader, J. T. Baargeld, Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer, Edward Burra, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dali, Oscar Dominguez, Leonor Fini, Alberto Giacometti, George Grosz, Raoul Haussmann, Hannah Höch, Valentine Hugo, Marcel Jean, René Magritte, André Masson, Edouard Mesens, Joan Miro, Henry Moore, Richard Oelze, Meret Oppenheim, Wolfgang Paalen, Dr. Grace Pailthorpe, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Christian Schad, Kurt Schwitters, Yves Tanguy, Sophie Henriette Täuber-Arp, Peter Blume, Alexander Calder, Federico Castellón, Arthur Dove, Walker Evans, Wyndham Lewis, Georgia O’Keefe, Wallace Putnam, David Alfaro Siqueiros, James Thurber, Antonio Gaudi, and Kurt Schwitters.
"Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, The Museum of Modern Art’s first exhibition to focus on Dada, was organized by founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., in 1936. It was the most comprehensive presentation of Dada works since the Dadaists’ own exhibitions. It was also the first to be organized by a nonparticipant and the first to present Dada as a historical movement. The exhibition was rife with controversy and provoked fierce reactions from battling factions among the Dadaists and the Surrealists. For example, Tristan Tzara, a leader of the Dada movement and one of the exhibition’s most important lenders, threatened to forbid Barr from exhibiting his loans when he learned that the exhibition’s title had been changed from The Fantastic in Art to include Surrealism and that the French Surrealist André Breton was to write the catalogue preface. For their part, Breton and French Surrealist poet Paul Éluard disapproved of the final format of the exhibition; they wanted it to be an official Surrealist “manifestation.” Critical response to the exhibition was mixed. In 1937, when the show circulated around the country, lender Katherine Dreier withdrew her artworks and feuded with Barr over his inclusion of works by children and “the insane,” and A. Conger Goodyear, President of the Museum’s board of trustees, requested that other items be removed." [MoMA]