Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (review)

Women in Dada is a worthy introduction to the many women in the United States and Europe who participated in Dada. Women artists studied in the volume who were living in New York during the Dada years include the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Katherine Drier, Beatrice Wood, Florine Stettheimer, Mina Loy, Georgia O'Keefe, Clara Tice, and the Little Review editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. Essays are also devoted to the European Dada artists Suzanne Duchamp, who worked in Paris, Hannah Höch, who participated in Dada in Berlin, and Emmy Hennings and Sophie Taeuber, who lived in Zurich.

Women in Dada highlights both how international Dada was and how mobile were many of its participants, including the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Man Ray, who lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic. As the essays by Elizabeth Hutton Turner and William Camfield indicate, in addition to the women themselves, certain key views of women, created by both men and women, also circulated freely from one shore of the Atlantic to the other. The image of "la jeune fille américaine," for example, originated in the American cinema with the performances of Mary Pickford in such roles as Annie Oakley, argues Turner, and then surfaced in Paris in Picabia's oil painting Udnie (jeune fille américaine: danse), (1913-1914) and in Jean Cocteau's scenario for the ballet Parade (1917). Camfield begins his essay on Suzanne Duchamp by pointing out that when she produced Un et une menacés in 1916 in Paris, a mixed media work which identifies inanimate geometrical forms as animate beings, "only five other artists had produced anything resembling it," and all of them were then working in New York (82).

One of the strengths of Women in Dada is the quantity of close readings of works by women. As already mentioned, William Camfield studies the Dada work of Suzanne Duchamp, particularly ARieTe d'oubli de la chapelle étourdie. Barbara Bloemink does delightful readings of Florine Stettheimer's paintings Family Portrait No. 2, Nude Self-Portrait, and Portrait of Myself. Carolyn Burke reads Juliette Roche's verbal/visual poem "Brevoort" and "N'Existe Pas." Paul Franklin does a detailed reading of Beatrice Wood's painting Beatrice et ses douze enfants. Eleanor Apter analyzes Katherine Drier's work in light of Drier's close friendship with Marcel Duchamp. Apter sees in their respective productions a dialogue that mirrored their personal relations and that culminated in Drier's poignant lost portrait of Duchamp. This portrait, of which only a photograph remains, was possibly not lost at all but "thrown out by Duchamp himself," when he acted as Drier's executor (398).

Maud Lavin, in an article that is reprinted from her book on Hannah Höch, does a thorough reading of Hoch's photomontage series, From an Ethnographic Museum, in light of contemporary views of ethnography and gender. She concludes: "Höch deviated from the nonambiguous, folkloric representation of African and other tribal peoples . . . and laid the foundation for a critique of racism, even if she did not pursue it further," because what most preoccupied Hoch was "the display of culture marked as different" which for Hoch in the early 1920s was primarily "the modern European woman" (352). Renée Riese Hubert does a carefully nuanced reading of the more ephemeral work of Emmy Hennings and Sophie Taeuber, who were both performers and dancers. Taeuber was a gifted costume designer, as well. Particularly strong is Hubert's focus on a memorial essay written by Hennings about Taeuber, whose style of dance was nevertheless "so different from her own" (572).

Also included in Women in Dada are several critiques of how women were represented in Dada art by men. Dorothea Dietrich analyses representations of women in the collages of Kurt Schwitters. Amelia Jones and Marisa Januzzi read Man Ray's Catherine Barometer sculpture. Barbara Zabel, Amelia Jones, and Willard Bohn all pay close...