Author Description

For about ten years, beginning with the Armory Show in 1913, New York City was host to the odd-sounding accents and queerer-looking paintings and constructions of a mixed bag of European and American avant-gardists. Besides the inscrutable figure of artist Marcel Duchamp, the European contingent included such iconoclastic visitors as the playboy painter Francis Picabia, the composer Edgard Varese, the diplomat Henri-Pierre Roche (author of Jules et Jim and adviser to the extraordinary collector John Quinn), and painters Albert Gleizes and Jean Crotti. Among the Americans were the photographer/painter/constructor Man Ray, the Precisionist painter and Fortune photographer Charles Sheeler, the Futurist Joseph Stella, and the Pennsylvania artists Charles Demuth and Morton Schamberg. New York Dada is the first comprehensive study devoted exclusively to the accomplishments of these vanguard artists in America in the period 1915-23 - among the most underappraised, though most influential peri