The artistic substance of Dada has rarely, if ever, been treated to purely aesthetic dissection. The works of visual art that came of the movement conceived in a Zurich cabaret in 1916 are invariably regarded as the extension or expression, or both, of a disturbance that went far beyond the limits of art and which gained its artistic context, since music, literature, drama and architecture were also involved, simply because artists happened to be associated with it. Artists, in fact, never ranked high in the Dada bureaucracy. As George Ribemont-Dessaignes explained in 1931, "What has been called the Dada movement was really a movement of the mind . . . and not merely a new artistic school." Dada was in fact Romanticism at its most self-conscious, ironic and, in a few instances, its most extreme. It was a protest against absolutely everything, including even Cézanne. An authentic Dada did not have to create at all in the conventional sense; he had on]y to be different, to despise the bourgeoisie, show contempt for its civilization and culture and be passionately interested in freedom, usually his own. Only a few years ago Marcel Janco retrospectively conferred the title of Grand Dada on Chaplin, Machiavelli and Napoleon.

Needless to say Dada contradicted itself, as Dadaists readily admitted it did, but many moons had to pass before a final contradiction asserted itself—the appreciated art of Dada's anti-art. For with the emergence in time of several Dada personalities, especially Kurt Schwitters, as respectable fine artists, Dada's social and political involvements can now be interpreted as largely the measure of the state of despair to which artists had been reduced during and following the First World War, not merely by the condition of society but by the condition of art. Dada artists were faced with a problem not only of style but of iconography. They could not go "back" nor could they advance without courting the abstraction of which they were the sworn enemies. Indeed, the obscenities, like the politics, of Dada reflect largely the repressions Dadaist artists felt at the hands of "modern aesthetic art," a contradiction in terms and a redundancy I am forced to employ because of the nature of my subject. Dada was violent because it could not create without admitting the authority of art which it was committed to destroy. And it died because it could not tolerate even its own authority. Gradually its demonstrations failed to sustain the feeling of a liberating novelty. The movement broke up amidst charges of betrayal from within. Members came to blows, others were merely disgusted. Some quit art altogether. Duchamp, already in America, ceased painting in the twenties. Huelsenbeck, a founder, was to become Charles R. Hulbeck and a New York analyst (Jungian) whose running feud with Tristan Tzara, the impresario of French Dada (Huelsenbeck represented the German and, at the time, Communist camp; eventually the positions were reversed) continues to this day. One Dadaist, Jacques Rigaut, committed suicide as had an early Dada, Jacques Vache, ten years earlier; others experienced religious conversion (Hugo Ball); still others passed into all but complete obscurity. Then Surrealism took over. Emotionally, art is very expensive.

It is interesting then to note that those Dadaists who survived as artists were principally Germans—Ernst, Arp (who as an Alsatian is only superficially an exception) and, of course, Schwitters. There is a good reason for this. Though the historical image of Dadaism is principally French in coloration simply because under Tzara's direction it became identified with the avant-garde, it is Northern sensibility that defines Dada's aesthetic. The appeal of Dadaism to an artist like Duchamp, who along with Picabia was Dada prior to its baptism in Zurich, lay precisely in the conceptual tendencies of Northern art and the hospitality the fantastic has always found there—from Bosch and Brueghel to the Expressionists. These qualities Duchamp identified with—which is to say the affinity existed, in his opposition to French métier and good taste. Doubtlessly Picabia, the Latin, was similarly attracted to the meticulousness and the "lunacy" of the North, just as today geometric art and antiseptically modern architecture are popular in South America. It is revealing of Dada's aesthetic orientation that Surrealism, replacing Dada in the late twenties, served as a reaction to Northern clarity; Dali's limpid watch perfectly expresses the aesthetic inertia (and "paranoia") induced by a conflict between linear and painterly pride. Surrealism, in short, throws Dada's sense of style into clear relief by amounting, as it were, to a French counter-revolution against the North, reopening the case for painterly painting. This was important in France because French primacy in the arts was based on it.

Dadaism in the North, however, had different motives. For one thing it hoped to profit sensuously from the exchange of ideas with the South, that is, it hoped to mitigate the rigidity of Northern conceptualism, which had already been attacked by the Expressionists. It succeeded as well as it did because first of all it did not violate Northern sensibility altogether. But more important, it enabled artists such as Ernst and Schwitters to link up with mainstream modernism and yet to preserve their conceptual habits to a certain necessary extent. Schwitters courted Cubism as one might cultivate a celebrity, while Dada for Ernst was largely a bridge to Surrealism. Advancing his education as a painter, Surrealist automatism permitted Ernst to break out of the repressive Northern idiom literally with a splash. Schwitters was himself all thumbs as a painter, but even the career of so negligible and perennial a Dadaist as Hans Richter shows a thwarted lust after the plastic, failing in which he became involved with concepts of time and movement and finally film—"plastic" substitutes. And look what happened to George Grosz.

There is more, however, to Dada's aesthetic significance than a conceptual sensibility. Dada's relationship to subject has been ignored, while its position on color has been unheard of. As for subject matter, a cornerstone of the Dada platform was its opposition to abstraction as devoid of the human, that is, social content. Already in Dada's politics and tactics we see demands for social restitution and involvement of, and in, the arts; and on the artistic front itself, the Dadaists closed ranks on the issue of representation by advancing one that was protectively coated with irony, perversion and disjunction of sense. But it was these shock values that enabled the Southern Dadaists to ignore the protest implicit in Duchamp's "ready-mades" in favor of the affront to respectable taste they otherwise constituted. (In France Dadaism was dissipated on bigger and bigger insults which more and more came to publicity and less to protest.) While the subversive content in the form of old prints, typeface, newspaper reproductions and the like in the collages of Ernst, Arp and Schwitters went similarly unremarked. (In Cubist collage realistic fragments did not carry the same ideological force; they merely paved the way for a compromise—Synthetic Cubism.) The upshot of this frustrated impulse to represent was Surrealism. As Dada petered out, Breton became interested in psychoanalysis and the content of the unconscious, which, adapted to Surrealist theory, provided the pretext for a new representationalism.

Color, however, is a more complex issue. For one thing the very idea of it runs counter to the representational tendencies of Dada. But this is natural because color was a traditional concern and besides that a mere detail. Theoretically, Dadaists had no patience with either. For another, it applies almost entirely (Ernst used color eventually but in a "literary" way) to the work of Kurt Schwitters. Color for Schwitters was the bridge between German Expressionism and Analytical Cubism. Analytical Cubism employed subdued earth colors to emphasize planar form. The ochers of Analytical Cubism were color but not important as color except as an oblique recollection of the primitive: they were connotative rather than denotative. Synthetic Cubism permitted the analytical Cubists to employ color in a way structurally comparable to the analytical style but only at the expense of introducing a conflict between the real and the abstract. The real, admitting painterly feeling previously "classicized" or "primitivized" by the analytical phase, eventually divided (as we have known for years) no less an artist than Picasso down the middle. Schwitters, in using castoff matter like stamps, labels, packaging, stubs, transfers, plus papers with printed matter or images on them, made the figurative data seem both incidental and accidental, focusing one's attention instead on abstract elements of form, space and color—but particularly color.

Since color in a way symbolizes all that certain fanatical Dadaists found objectionable in Schwitters, more or less ostracizing him, I prefer to elaborate the issue and sum up Dada's aesthetic position in the context of the inspired Schwitters exhibition at the Galerie Chalette (October, November). It is a compactly comprehensive and (obviously) provocative exhibition that is comprised of a private collection balanced by loans from collectors and museums, plus documents, first drafts and periodicals relating to Schwitters' career. In all there are some sixty works dating from 1918 to 1947, the year before his death. The exhibition is accompanied by another of the handsome catalogues which this gallery produces regularly; it includes four color plates, excerpts from Schwitters' writings and personal reminiscences by Jean Arp and Hans Richter.

The typical Schwitters collage is so well known that it barely requires description. It is a mixture of formality of design and informality of means—castoff bits of paper junk interrupting and lapping the verticals and horizontals of more or less geometric designs. These are pasted onto surfaces that, rarely large, were sometimes no larger than a book of matches. This scale is important because it proves that Schwitters recognized the anti-heroic implications of his medium, which, precluding vast designs, insisted instead on a scale commensurate with its ignoble character. Schwitters' famous grottos, The "MERZ-bauen" (MERZ-structures), including the first one in Hanover (destroyed during the Second World War) and a second one in London, which along with his unique palette of trash and his sound-poems apparently satisfied some Dadaists as to his basic good faith, were large. Built into a room, they were three-dimensional collages one could live in; but they were also private temples in which he celebrated the ritualistic impulse of his art for his own spiritual enrichment and apparently for the fascinated entertainment of his friends. At any rate, between 1918 and roughly 1931 (there is an understandable gap in the exhibition between 1931 and 1937), Schwitters produced the bulk of his best work. The exhibition includes some of the best of these that I have seen—Red on Red (1924), Okolade (1926), Einhundert-tausend Mark (1924), "R" (1929). Excepting Untitled (1920) and P (Dada) (1921), I care less for his more complex compositions—the means seem to me too much stressed—but cannot deny their more sumptuous effect which might have meant more coloristically had not tatters of the former structural sense, which it was the function of color to enlighten, remained to obscure their intention.

Had Schwitters been a better painter, the entire neo-Dada trend, deriving largely from his collage idea, would have been inconceivable. For the least of his works are those in which paint is involved, such as the corrupt Neo-Plastic Das Gustave-Finzler-Bild, with wood additions, and the messy Cherry Picture from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art which somehow suggests a pinball machine destroyed by Futurist fire. They prove at least why Schwitters opted for collage; he simply froze when handling paint and what is more could not produce color with the subtlety and variety he demonstrated in collage. Nevertheless, his collages show a general decline in quality after 1931 (some have said sooner). Growing obscurity now extends to color and organization, which in some examples is simply chaotic. Structural unity giving way, a spewing forth of wildly overlapping shapes resulted, destroying the base plane with "holes" that were frequently implemented by illusionistic details. In the confusion these details became equal and assertive. In fact the old conflict between the real and the abstract asserted itself. And in an apparent effort to introduce movement, Schwitters had become too "painterly."

Doubtless the increasing social disorder at home and Schwitters' inevitable exile first to Norway and then, following the Nazi invasion, to Great Britain, all played a role in destroying both Schwitters' consistency and concentration. But the passing of Dadaism from the scene earlier contributed greatly to his vulnerability. Schwitters, who derived a great deal of psychological support from Dada despite criticism and rejection from German Dada militants such as Huelsenbeck, tried to keep it alive through his magazine, MERZ. It ran for twenty-four issues between 1923 and 1932, after which he joined the Abstract Creation group in Paris in an effort to relocate himself in the post-Dada era. He never gave up. There is a collage by Schwitters in the Kate Steinmetz Collection of the Pasadena Art Museum, entitled For Kate and dated 1947. It was reproduced in an issue of Art International (January 25, 1963) which dealt extensively with pop art. Not only does this collage of comic-book images seem to anticipate pop art, but it also recalls two of his collages of 1918, which I shall mention later. I submit the following interpretation. Schwitters' own art had become too rarefied for him, and his old Dadaist fighting spirit emerged, not without nostalgia, a final time, protesting to Schwitters the desperately placeless bourgeois he had become. Nobody seems to have noticed this last bright star falling in the darkness.

In approaching Schwitters' work it helps to bear in mind the intensely factional and political character of the Dada movement, because the very qualities that some Dadas found suspect in his art are precisely the ones we admire today—their ingratiating wit, their intelligibility, their aesthetic irony. Schwitters was in short a serious artist at a time when it was neither fashionable nor simple to be one, especially if you claimed to be Dada. Outwardly observing the mores of Dadaism, he nonetheless insisted on creating fine art with it. A first step was to establish MERZ, a word derived from one of his collages, as the name of his version of Dada which he felt was true Dada, "Kerneldadaism" as opposed to "Huelsendadaism," and essentially abstract. To both French and German Dadas this was treason. A casual remark by Charles Hugnet in The Dada Spirit in Painting sums up the least acrimonious but official disenchantment with the renegade artist. Wrote Hugnet, "Holding steadfastly to the poetic sphere he remained prudently bourgeois in politics." [1932, 1934, reprinted in The Dada Painters and Poets, edited by Robert Motherwell. Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., New York, 1951.]

Yet Schwitters was the only Dadaist, however manqué, to do something concrete about the crisis of mainstream modernist painting. (Sculpture was only just beginning to assimilate Cubism, and Arp's Dadaism was pre-Surrealist.) The orthodox Dadaists avoided the challenge by insisting that the body wasn't worth saving. Surrealism likewise ignored the challenge, and it wasn't until Surrealism encountered Cubism in the United States in the late thirties that it engaged the problem. But Schwitters subjected it to an emergency operation. He grafted his bits of refuse to Cubism and Neo-Plasticism and sent these ideas back into the world, patched like a beggar, but intellectually presentable again. The primary aesthetic fact of Schwitters' medium was that its colors must have obviously been fascinating to a German who had Expressionism in his blood but not its desperation or, perhaps, its courage. For another thing, Schwitters was enough of a Dadaist to feel the inhuman chill held out to art by analytical abstraction. Surprisingly, he got much of his dexterity in manipulating the Cubist format from Neo-Plasticism, which allowed him to move freely over the picture plane. Futurism helped of course, but, as I have said, in the interests of an analogous painterliness. But it was his benign scraps of weather-beaten color that brought the blush of life back into abstract art. Schwitters' popularity today is fitting when once more color is an issue in an abstract art for which Surrealism provided only a placebo, just as his "classicism" strikes a responsive chord wherever the hard-edge idiom seeks relief and expansion of sensibility in chromatic brilliance and clarity.

Nor can one ignore the significance of Schwitters to pop arat. Collages like King Edward and Emperor William II and Die Handlung Spielt in Theben (both 1918), not to mention details elsewhere, must have seemed in their day, with their montages of newspaper photographs and prints of events, fashions and mores of the day, like pop art to the general. After seeing them, it is impossible to accept the proto-pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, for instance, as a major artist, for Rauschenberg converts Dada irony à la Schwitters into the very aestheticism it was designed to subvert—not to mention his grand scale. Perhaps Donald Judd is right in treating him strictly as a formalist.

Dadaism, at least French Dadaism, and now pop art, fell into a similar aesthetic trap. What Schwitters was doing was actually restoring the primitivistic bias of modernism in bourgeois terms. He brought it out of the jungle and relocated it in the gutters of the modern world. But the Dadaists were unwilling to descend to this level with him, a descent which purged him of aesthetic affectation. They had become the aristocrats of anarchy—too abstract! Instead they confused literal anarchy for symbolic anarchy and could only degenerate into spectacle. Correspondingly, contemporary pop art, which is a form of Establishment Dadaism, cannot raise the level of the vitality of a once more depleted modern art because it cannot lower itself wholeheartedly beneath the level of the established aesthetic.

I seem to have shown, on the one hand, that Dadaism unconsciously entertained a new figuration, while on the other I have stressed the fact that Schwitters' strength lay primarily in the abstract. But this of course is only the difference between Schwitters and orthodox, theoretical Dadaism. Otherwise, I have also shown that color for Schwitters possessed an emotional value that was inseparable from its physical sources and implications—that is, it cannot be construed as entirely denotative of itself. The hidden connotations of Schwitters' color take us back to his means, to the fecal litter of bourgeois culture. Schwitters also used color, then, to defy the impoverishment of the particular.

Still, I must say that I am, with all my admiration for his work, uncertain of its durability. Schwitters gave Cubism only a few extra years, not an eternity. No matter how remote a Dadaist Schwitters finally appears, he shared Dadaism's impetus and perhaps its fatality too. For without the socio-aesthetic correlation of Dada in mind it would have been impossible for me to make the observation above, connecting medium and culture, and noting their implications for each other. To a certain extent this interaction still matters. But the possibility is that in time the medium will turn back into itself, into what it is, and seem cheap. This is the real "homeless representation" of Dada. Age is not all that gives Schwitters at his best a certain faded quality. So far, however, no Schwitters has dated nearly so quickly as, say, Duchamp's ready-mades. Because of his acquired sophistication, that is, art, Schwitters escapes the basically provincial character of the Northern mind, though as I have said it was just this almost "stupid" provincialism, hard and ungainly, that acted as a tonic to Southerners who had reacted against refinement in art. What distinguished Schwitters from the rest of Dada was not his policy of aesthetic appeasement, but his ability to grow in spite of it, probably because of it, and his natural death from it and other causes.