Articles from 1922
A segment from a longer article on the origins of Dada by the father of Dada. This column pertains specifically to how the movement took root in Germany as a result of the First World War.
A veteran of the U.S. First Division, Sixteenth Infantry, tells the chilling story of that rainy night in November, 1917, when the first German raid upon the American trenches took place:
It was on that night that Company F took over its first front line position, received its baptism of fire, bore the brunt of the first German raid and lost the first American troops killed and captured in the World War.
…two hundred and forty Bavarians, the widely advertised cut-throats of the German Army, hopped down on us. The first raid on American troops was in full swing. They had crawled up to our wire under cover of their artillery barrage and the moment it lifted were right on top of us.
The U.S. Army would not launch their own trench raid for another four months.
Sounding a good deal like Simon Cowell (b. 1960), British painter C.R.W. Nevinson (1889 – 1946) had some nasty words for the American people and the art market they created.
Here emphatically they have lost their courage. They are afraid to buy what they like; they rely entirely on the auction-room value. To read the American art news is like reading our Financial Times. The American art critic has no use for a picture which does not tell a story…
Pegged as a Futurist, Nevinson is best remembered for his W.W. I paintings of the Western Front, which can be read about here.
Attached is one of the first American reviews of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, it was penned by literary critic Gilbert Seldes (1893 – 1970):
In essence The Waste Land says something which is not new: that life has become barren and sterile, that man is withering, impotent, and without assurance that the waters which made the land fruitful will ever rise again.
Why Dada? is a thoughtful essay by Sheldon Cheney (1886 – 1980), a Dada enthusiast and founder of the American monthly THEATRE ARTS MAGAZINE. This is a fine article which attempted to explain Dada to the American public and identified several American artists who subscribed to Dada principles.
…at last years exhibitions the Futurists and Cubists joined the academicians in denouncing the Dadaists as fakers, charlatans, and ignoramuses who know nothing of the laws of art and only wish to shock the public into considering them a sensation! And the Dadaists get unlimited joy out of the situation, but hold to the center of the stage…
Oddly, this essay has more to do with the evolution of golf from a shepherd’s pastime to the sport of kings, however there are some references made to the evolution of golf clothing:
Royalty did, however, dress up the game. It gave us the brilliant garments that golf captains wear in Britain. When I first went abroad I thought that I had never seen more splendid creatures. And the modern golf costume is a thing of mode and cut…
A Burberry’s tweed, self-belted golf suit for the fashionable woman of 1922.
Marion Hall Zinderstein Jessup has one of the most versatile games on the courts. Overhead and off the ground, she possesses virtually all the strokes in tennis, forehand, backhand, lob, smash, volley and block volley, yet she has a weakness, one that has cost her many an important match, and when she met Mrs Mallory in 1920, probably the national championship.
The author of this article, Gilbert Coleridge, has written an honest character study of Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) in hopes to better understand the man in the context of his time. One of the interesting hypothetical questions he poses asks how would Oscar Wilde (a man who lived only for pleasure) have got on during the highly rationed home front of 1914-1918 war?
He was an arresting figure in person, of commanding height, with a clean-shaved oval face. The latter was marred by a weak mouth, from which poured, with fascinating languor sometimes, torrents of paradox, quaint wit, perverse and startling epigrams, all spoken in a tone which left the listener wondering whether the speaker was really in earnest, or only talking for effect.
Another article about Oscar Wilde can be read here.
This article is a simply wonderful read for many reasons and the chief among them is that the journalist hated Los Angeles. The New York writer Karl K. Kitchen was dispatched to Beverly Hills to interview the recently divorced Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and he seemed to have had a nice enough time with the estranged couple, so much so that the Hollywood Royals invited him to dine at their house. The whole article is written in a very chatty way and there is one small, but distinct, slanderous aside referring to Jewish power in the nascent film industry.
