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A few years after his arrival in the United States, Marcel Duchamp,
together with his friends Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, published
three small and very short-lived issues of what can only be described
as genuine Dada-journals: The Blind Man No.1 (April 1917; Arturo
Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, vol. 2, New York:
Delano Greenidge, 1997, # 346), The Blind Man No. 2 (May
1917; # 347) and Rongwrong (July 1917; #348). Of the three, the
Blind Man No. 2 is best remembered for publishing documents surrounding
the scandal of Duchamp's 1917 urinal Fountain. But the other
numbers also hold an abundance of material on the budding, European-infiltrated
and subversive New York art scene.
Without further ado,
dear reader, please see for yourself!
Only once before, in 1970, were print-facsimiles of the
three magazines made. Published in a small edition by Arturo Schwarz (Documenti
Dada e Surrealisti, Archivi d'Arte del XX Secolo, Rome; editor: Gabriele
Mazzotta, Milan) in a brown cardboard folder whose design imitates wood,
Dada Americano also includes reprints of Duchamp's and Man Ray's
one and only issue of New York Dada (April, 1921) as well as the
latter's four-page foldout of the Ridgefield Gazook (No. 0, March
31st, 1915).
The following clickable
flip-through visuals of all pages of both issues of the Blind Man
as well as Rongwrong are scans from the 1970 Schwarz edition
and make their full content available to a large audience for the first
time. The original magazines are part of the Vera, Silvia and Arturo
Schwarz collection Dada and Surrealist Art at the Israel Museum of Art,
Jerusalem.
In recent years, the International Dada Archive of the University
of Iowa has started to scan and mount documents from their collection:
A number of early Dada magazines may be viewed at http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/collection.htm
(suggested reading: Beatrice Wood, I Shock Myself,
San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1985, esp. pp. 26-36; Francis M. Naumann,
New York Dada 1915-1923, New York: Abrams, 1994, esp. pp. 46-47,
184-187; Francis M. Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, New York: Abrams (distrib.),
1999, pp. 74-75)
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| Marcel Duchamp, Cover for
The Blind Man No.1 (April 1917) © 2000 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris |
Marcel Duchamp, Cover for The Blind Man No.
2 (May 1917) © 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP,
Paris |
Marcel Duchamp, Cover for Rongwrong (July
1917) © 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris |
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