For the first time ever, a substantial selection from the Societe Anonyme collection, formed by Katherine S. Dreier and Marcel Duchamp, is traveling the country.
Published Art In America, June 29, 2006
In 1920, artist and social activist Katherine S. Dreier met with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray in New York to found the Societe Anonyme, the first museum of modern art in America. Initially infused with the Dada spirit, due to the artistic orientation of her collaborators, the Societe Anonyme was for Dreier a lifelong mission within which she would support and promote a wide range of European and American modernism. Carried forward by her vision, persistence and tireless correspondence, over the course of the next several years the Societe Anonyme would mount no fewer than 80 innovative exhibitions, among them the first solo shows in America of work by Kandinsky, Archipenko, Jacques Villon, David Burliuk, John Storrs and many others. The exhibitions were often accompanied by lectures, symposia, performances, publications and education programs. In short order, a collection began to form, with much of the work being donated by artists or purchased at modest cost by Dreier.
Although she had hoped to preserve the collection as an independent entity, in 1941 Dreier donated the Societe Anonyme’s holdings to the Yale University Art Gallery. She continued to expand the collection over the course of the next decade and several hundred works were added from her estate after her death in 1952. The collection eventually comprised over 1,000 works and included major pieces by such leading figures as Duchamp, Brancusi, Mondrian, Malevich, Lissitzky and many others. While it cannot be said that the Societe Anonyme collection fell into obscurity over the course of the next half-century, neither can it be claimed that the Yale University Art Gallery made major efforts to promote or draw attention to the collection, its unique character and its numerous achievements.
In late April 2006, the exhibition “The Societe Anonyme: Modernism for America” opened at the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, the first stop in a four-city tour that terminates at the Yale University Art Gallery. Organized by Yale curator Jennifer C. Gross, it marks the first time a selection of works from the Societe Anonyme collection has traveled outside of New Haven. The exhibition does not simply display the 200 selected pieces, but employs them in such a way as to permit the story of the Societe Anonyme to unfold as the viewer moves from one gallery to the next. Important Societe Anonyme exhibitions are simulated and glass-fronted cases replete with correspondence and ephemera of various kinds are strategically placed in order to promote a better understanding of the nature of Dreier’s enterprise.
In contrast to its “rival” institution, the Museum of Modern Art, whose founding it anticipated by nine years, the Soctete” Anonyme was a modest, low-budget operation. It took up brief, temporary residence in a series of rented rooms in midtown Manhattan in the 1920s and then borrowed exhibition space from galleries, museums and schools. Dreier made several trips to Europe and thereafter maintained contact with the artists and dealers whom she met, who became her “collaborators.” The global nature of the current art world seems far less remarkable in light of the international communication and interchange that took place during the interwar period within Dreier’s West Redding, Conn., mailbox.
While the installation of paintings in a few of the exhibition’s galleries may strike viewers as cacophonous and awkward, with poorly orchestrated juxtapositions, this effect was purposeful on the part of the organizers, as it reflects Dreier’s esthetic philosophy and intentions. Dreier was involved from a young age with Theosophy (a 19th-century belief system that sought to realize the spiritual unity in all things), and was inspired by the reading of Kandinsky’s Theosophy-based Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912) to synthesize the esthetic and spiritual. She believed that “cosmic forces” were at work in modern art, assuming a wide variety of forms and carrying even those with ordinary talent to great heights. She therefore sought through the Societe Anonyme to celebrate modernist work in all of its manifestations, without prejudice, hierarchy or categorization of any kind. In Societe Anonyme exhibitions, the works of artists from many nations were intermingled; paintings by major figures were installed beside those by unknowns. This approach was of course diametrically opposed to that, for example, of the Museum of Modern Art, which from its inception was geared to scholarship, art history and a focus on major masters. The Societe Anonyme may therefore be seen as revisionist before the fact and poses what today appears to be a refreshing alternative path through modernism. Within the space of the exhibition, any number of wholly unfamiliar artists—a large percentage of them women—are brought to light, and many seem deserving of further study.
Remarkably, Duchamp called for all of the paintings to be framed by paper lace—a “feminine,” doilylike trim.2 On the one hand, the cheap paper frames parodied the practice of bestowing value uponpainted works by enclosing them in ornate frames. On the other hand, as seen at the Hammer, the paper lace frames unite all of the works on display as an installation, while compromising the power and seriousness of the individual works (i.e., they look quite funny). This is particularly true of those paintings, like the Archipenko and the Gris, that are extremely “masculine” in feel (thus engaging a sense of androgyny that anticipates the drawing of a moustache and goatee on the image of the Mona Lisa, which Duchamp was to do later that year back in Paris).3 As a further point, the stark whiteness of the paper frames distorts the perception of forms in some of the paintings contained within.
The next gallery at the Hammer represents the extended series of solo shows organized by the Societe Anonyme by focusing on small presentations of work by six artists: Kandinsky, Klee, Heinrich Campendonk, Fernand Leger, Louis Eilshemius and Stella. Kandinsky, sublimely represented by, among other works, his early painting The Waterfall (1909) and the Bauhaus work Multicolored Circle (1921) was of particular significance to Dreier. Motivated by her Theosophical beliefs, she gravitated throughout her life toward a spiritually-based abstraction in both her style of painting and the work she collected.4 Dreier visited Kandinsky in Germany and France on many occasions, maintained an avid correspondence with him and made him honorary vice president of the Societe Anonyme from 1925 until his death in 1944 (Duchamp occupied the position of secretary). The undisputed gem among Dreier’s mail is the postcard, in a glass case in the last room of the exhibition, jointly written to Dreier from the bar-restaurant Oasis in Montparnasse in 1933 by Kandinsky (in German) and Duchamp (in French), in which they relate that they are eating blini and thinking of her.
The large gallery space that follows is devoted to work featured in the “International Exhibition of Modern Art” held at the Brooklyn Museum, Nov. 19, 1926-Jan. 1, 1927, the most ambitious public program organized by the Societe Anonyme.5 Determined to demonstrate the vitality of modern art, Dreier gathered more than 300 works by 106 artists representing some 19 countries. She organized the show with advice from a wide and impressive team of consultants, among them Duchamp, Leger, Kandinsky, Campendonk, Schwitters, Stieg-litz and Anton Giulio Bragaglia. A highly important collaborator was Herwarth Walden of Berlin’s Der Sturm Gallery, who was one of Dreier’s longtime mentors, About one quarter of the artists in the exhibition were American and most had never shown with the Societe Anonyme before. Many were from the Stieglitz circle, including Stieglitz himself (he showed “Equivalents” and, at Dreier’s invitation, gave a public talk). The exhibition is also notable for having featured the American debuts of both Miro and Mondrian.
As it was the most significant presentation of modern art in America since the Armory Show in 1913, and given that it traveled to three additional venues, one cannot help but wonder why this remarkable exhibition is not better known.1‘ One of the reasons might be that while certain Paris-based modernists are represented, among them Gleizes, Metzinger, Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Picabia (with a remarkable, snakeskin-framed landscape populated by macaroni palm trees with green feather fronds), Dreier clearly favored German and Russian art and tended to avoid the French avant-garde, which was preferred by American collectors. In the 124-page, profusely illustrated catalogue that Dreier prepared to accompany the show, she wrote dismissively of Picasso, who was represented by a modest work on paper. “A middle-aged gentleman who started life full of enthusiasm and helped to create the cubist movement, which, however, is far bigger than he is. He is a master in his own way. Though a fighter in his youth, he settled down to retirement as far as the world of art goes today painting his own individual pictures.”
In addition to the fact that she put people off with her unpopular preferences and opinions, another reason Dreier’s Brooklyn show fell off the radar might have been the ahistorical nature of her installations. Like the 1913 Armory Show, A.E. Gallatin’s Gallery of Living Art, which opened at New York University in 1927, was organized according to artistic movements or styles, which helped make unfamiliar art somewiiat more intelligible to audiences. By contrast, Dreier avoided grouping the art in any systematic way; even the works of individual artists were often separated. Major and minor artists and greater and lesser works were freely integrated, while national boundaries were ignored.
As the quality of the work is consistently high, the visitor to the Hammer finds much that fascinates and delights in the intermingling of known and unfamiliar artists. Particularly noteworthy among the latter are the Hungarian Laszlo Peri, Austrian-born Erika Giovanna Klien and Stefi Kiesler (the wife of Frederick Kiesler), and Lotte Reiniger, a German filmmaker whose extraordinary full-length silhouette animation, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), a surprise highlight of the exhibition was included because it was among the Societe Anonyme’s “educational initiatives,” shown in 1931 at an event the Societe sponsored at The New School for Social Research called “Art of the Future.” With regard to the installation at the Hammer, it should be noted that liberties were taken with the hanging policy of the Sociele Anonyme: at numerous points, conventional groupings of works are seen, as in sections devoted to work by artists of the Steiglitz circle, to Russian artists, to de Styl and to the work of Kurt Schwitters.
That a large section of one of the final galleries is devoted to Duchamp is important to the telling of the story of the Societe Anonyme, as he played such an important role. While his friendship and advice were always of value to Dreier, his significance to the organization seems to have been greatest at its very beginning and in its late years, when he assisted Dreier with the transfer of the collection to Yale, the preparation of the first collection catalogue (compiled with George Heard Hamilton and completed in 1950) and the dissolution of her estate, for which he served as executor. At the time of her death, Dreier had the largest collection of Duchamp’s work after the Arensbergs. Although the Large Glass, which was long in her possession, was reunited with the Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the remarkable Tu m’, which is included in the present exhibition, went with her estate to Yale.
The exhibition “The Societe Anonyme: Modernism for America” has put an end to the anonymity of the Societe Anonyme and restored an important chapter of modernism to its rightful place. Whereas previously only about a half-dozen works from the Societe Anonyme were on view at any time in the Yale University Art Gallery, after the exhibition’s return the curators are planning to devote special galleries to the permanent display of selections from the collection, assuring that the story will continue to be told.7
- Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada 1915-23, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1994, p. 156.
- Man Ray designed the lighting for this exhibition and made photographic postcards of some of the works, a number of them showing the paintings with their paper lace frames.
- Yet another spoof on the work of Archipenko is found in Duchamp’s anonymous “Archie Pen Co.,” the advertisement for Archipenko’s solo Societe Anonyme show of 1921. Reproducing one of Archipenko’s figurative reliefs with a particularly tapered bottom, it appeared in The Arts, February-March 1921.
- Dreier’s openness to other forms of modernism is again witnessed in the fact that in one of her visits to Berlin, she saw the “First International Dada Fair” with work by George Grosz, John Heartfield, Otto Dix, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Hitch and others, and wanted to bring it to New York. Permission to take the show out of Germany was denied. Jennifer R. Gross, “Believe Me, Faithfully Yours,” in The Societe Anonyme: Modernism for America, New Haven and London, Yale University Press and New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, 2006, p.” 127.
- Of the works on display in the section of the Hammer show devoted to the Brooklyn Museum exhibition, 30 were included in the original exhibition, while 16 were not. The latter, however, were selected to reflect the works featured in the exhibition and to represent the diversity of the artists and the stylistic jumps that characterized the show.
- Selections from the Brooklyn show traveled to the Anderson Galleries, New York, the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, and the Toronto Art Gallery, the latter organized under the auspices of the Canadian painter Lawren Stewart Harris, whose work was included in the exhibition.
- The question remains: If the exhibition presented only about 20 percent of the Society Anonyme Collection, what else is on deposit at the Yale University Art Gallery? There can be little doubt that the work in the exhibition includes the best of the collection’s major pieces. Many of the excluded works are drawings and prints, or works that would have duplicated others (for example, multiple examples by a single artist), works that (for a wide variety of reasons) were never included in Societe Anonyme exhibitions, or simply lesser or less relevant work than the exhibited selection. For more on the collection, see Robert L. Herbert, Eleanor S. Apter and Elise M. Kenney, eds., The Societe Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University: A Catalogue Raisonne, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984. This catalogue raisonne is also available online through the Yale University Art Gallery Web site.“The Societe Anonyme: Modernism for America” is currently on view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles {Apr. 23-Aug. 20, 2006]. It will then travel to the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. [Oct. 14, 2006-Jan. 21, 2007], the Dallas Museum of Art [June 10-Sept. 16,2007] and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, Tenn. [Oct. 26, 2007-Feb. 3, 2008]. The exhibition will finish at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn., in 2010. A 230-page catalogue edited by Jennifer R. Gross was published by Yale University Press. Author: Roni Feinstein is an art historian and writer who lives in Boca Raton.