Mamas of Dada: Women of the European Avant-Garde by Paula K. Kamenish (review)

In Mamas of Dada: Women of the European Avant-Garde, Paula K. Kamenish highlights six women in the Dada movement: writer, poet, performer and co-founder of the movement Emmy Hennings, poet and essayist Gabrielle Buffet, memoirist Germaine Everling, poet Céline Arnauld, poet, visual artist and memoirist Juliette Roche and visual artist Hannah Höch. Besides an introduction and a conclusion, the book consists of five chapters, each focusing on one woman, except for chapter two in which Gabrielle Buffet and Germaine Everling are discussed together. These six women have been selected because of "their avant-garde pursuits in the chief centers of Dada activity," and "because they left behind written records of their involvement with Dada" (viii). As Kamenish explains, her reasons for writing this book include the fact that women played a central role in the Dada movement, both as artists and supporters of the movement, but that their contributions have often been overlooked. Besides providing biographies of all six women, Kamenish also focuses on their work, its contemporary reception, and its influence.

As Kamenish indicates, most histories of Dada have focused on its male members. Studies that do discuss female Dadaists, moreover, have tended to focus on visual artists. Kamenish, however, has chosen to highlight Dadaist women who left behind poetry, essays, and memoirs. Her selection choice thus brings a relatively new contingent of Dada women into view. This is meant to provide a more "complete picture of Dada" (xii). Through selecting women who left behind written testimonies, Kamenish aims to give these women a voice.

Throughout the book, Kamenish shows that these women were central to the Dada movement. In discussing their works, she highlights interesting connections and mutual influences between the artistic works of these women and canonical artists of the time, and stresses the women artists' engagement with central themes in art of the period. For instance, she points out the similarities between Céline Arnauld's and Tristan Tzara's poetic works on the cinema, and highlights connections between one of Arnauld's poems and Futurist painting, demonstrating how both are dedicated to exploring "space and movement in real time" (76). Similarly, Emmy Hennings' autobiographical novella Gefängnis is likened to Kafka's work, broadening the artistic canon of the period. At the same time, through thorough analysis, Kamenish shows that these women artists wrote on themes of their own, that do not feature in the work of the canonical male artists of Dada. As such, Kamenish demonstrates that the movement of Dada was broader than its small canon, that women should be considered as being at the heart of the movement, writing and creating art about themes typical of the movement and the period, while, at the same time, showing that Dada is richer than has previously been suggested in its historiography.

The discussion of these six women, furthermore, allows Kamenish to give several observations about Dada as a movement, which may be useful to the "students of literature and art" (vii), whom the book is geared at. For one thing, she argues that it was not just a whimsical pastime during the war, but an important avant-garde movement, which linked the artistic developments that preceded it to those that followed. In addition, she corrects some preconceptions about Dada: as Kamenish argues, Dadaist art was not just nihilistic verses attacking the status quo; it also produced poetry rich in innovative and evocative language (Arnauld) and typographically innovative poems that responded to the times (Roche). Also, she makes clear that the movement's influence was not tied to one location, but extended to many places (Höch). Accordingly, in the book, we get a picture of Dada in Zurich, New York, Paris, Berlin, and Barcelona.

In addition, through the biographies of these six women and the discussion of their role in Dada, Kamenish gives insight into how an art movement garners success. Thus, while this is not...