Although little known today, Marthe Donas, a Belgian, contributed to Modernist art with Cubist-inspired works like "Still Life with Bottle and Cap,” 1917. It consists of lace, sandpaper, cloth, netting and paint on composition board.
:No understanding of Modernism in America is complete without knowledge of the crucial role played by the Katherine Dreier and the Société Anonyme. Concerned that avant-garde art, introduced to America at the Armory Show of 1913, was losing steam in this country, around 1920 artist/patron Dreier (1877–1952) began a campaign to promote the new ideas and new art forms. In so doing, she became one of the most significant champions of Modern art.
"The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America," an ambitious exhibition organized by the Yale University Art Gallery, celebrates Dreier's central leadership role and documents the transformation of the organization from a driving force for the acceptance of the avant-garde to an important collection of art. Comprising some 240 works, it is on view at the Dallas Museum of Art through September 16.
The exhibition is fascinating both for its rich array of fine works by celebrated artists and often-eye-popping art by relatively unknown figures.
Tours on the continent early in the Twentieth Century made Dreier keenly aware of the latest developments of the European avant-garde. By 1916, her contacts with Modernist provocateur Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) set the stage for a crusade to promote avant-garde zeal and creative vision in the United States.
The daughter of wealthy, socially progressive German immigrants, Dreier had trained to be an artist and was committed to experimental art. Duchamp, a highly innovative Modernist recently arrived from France, socialized with the Arensberg and Stettheimer circles of progressive patrons and artists.
Great friends and effective collaborators in the cause of Modernism in America, Katherine Dreier and Marcel Duchamp met often at her Connecticut estate. In this 1936 photograph, she confers with him under his mural "Tu m',” with his repaired "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” (known as "Large Glass”) to the right.
Dreier and Duchamp formed an unlikely but effective partnership — she the indefatigable administrator and he the charismatic insider with a wide network of avant-garde contacts. "No art world team has ever been less likely yet has accomplished so much," says Yale University Art Gallery curator Jennifer R. Gross.
In 1920, with the assistance of Duchamp and Man Ray (a Dada and Surrealist artist and photographer born in Philadelphia as Emmanuel Radinsky), Dreier founded an organization that, at Ray's playful Dadaesque suggestion, was called the Société Anonyme, Inc (meaningless French for Incorporated, Inc). Colors of the rainbow converged on the nonsensical title in the organization's signboard.
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