Overview

Hugo Ball-poet, philosopher, novelist, cabaret performer, journalist, mystic-was a man extremely sensitive to the currents of his time and carried in their wake. In February 1916 he founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The sound poems and performance art by Ball and the other artists who gathered there were the beginnings of Dada. Ball's extraordinary diaries, one of the most significant products of the Dada movement, are here available in English in paperback for the first time, along with the original Dada manifesto and John Elderfield's critical introduction, revised and updated for the paperback edition, and a supplementary bibliography of Dada texts that have appeared since the 1974 hardcover edition of this book.

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9780520204409

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Reviews

A rich feast for historians, art lovers and devotees of esoteric literature. -- Publishers Weekly

A diary that is fragmentary, subjective, often opaque, presenting the image of a man talking to himself, justifying himself, bending reality into the shape of his own capabilities - but the only key to this public man. Hugo Ball, aesthete, poet, socialist, monk, and one of the founders along with Arp, Janco, Tzara and Huelsenbeck (for a review of his memoirs see below) of Dada in Zurich, 1916. The cradle of Dadaism was Bali's own Cabaret Voltaire (Voltaire represents the Enlightenment's anti-Christ, the arch-enemy of romanticism) and yet his involvement with this seminal movement of modern art was short-lived. His vivid descriptions of the wild performances, including programs of the evenings, are exciting and revelatory but comprise little of the diary. The author, who chose the infamous name of the group with the help of Huelsenbeck, was thinking not of a French hobbyhorse or a sign of affirmation but of the Pauline Dionysius the Areopagite: I was called upon twice by Dionysius. D.A. - D.A. Despite his interest in a total art of pictures, music, dance, poems, his greater commitment was theological and moral. What an odd sort of founder for modern iconoclasm this devout Catholic, sometime disciple of Nietzsche and Bakunin, author of Zur Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz and of an early appreciation of friend Hermann Hesse, seems to be. But the contradictions and fertility of his imagination mirror the Zeitgeist of German humanism from which Expressionist-related theories of art developed. Editor Elderfield also includes a foreword to the 1946 edition by cabaret-performer Emmy Hennings, Ball's wife, a lecture on Kandinsky whom Ball regarded as his aesthetic priest, and the original Dada Manifesto. An invaluable source for art historians and cultural critics. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Hugo Ball (1886-1927) was the author of Herman Hesse, His Life and Work and Flight Out of Time, his edited diaries from 1910-1921, published in German editions in 1927. John Elderfield is Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the author of books on Henri Matisse, Kurt Schwitters, and others.

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