3 New York Dadas And The Blind Man

Three New York Dadas and The Blind Man. relates the story of the triangular relationship between Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, told in the words of two of its protagonists; and also reprints in facsimile the Dadaist magazine they produced together in New York in 1917: The Blind Man. The principal text is the first English translation of Roché's novel Victor. , an account of his friendship with Duchamp (nicknamed Victor by his close friends in those days). Although unfinished, Roché's text offers a unique account of New York Dada, all of whose principal characters and events make an appearance: Francis Picabia, Arthur Cravan, the Arensbergs and their soirées, the Blind Man's Ball and the scandal of Duchamp's "Fountain" at the Independents exhibition, a pivotal moment in modern art. The novel offers interesting insights into the sexual politics of the period, when a woman could be arrested or blackmailed for spending the night with a man to whom she was not married. Roché, a lifelong friend of Duchamp, appears to have been something of a devotee of triangular relationships, and went on to write a more famous novel on the topic (also autobiographical), Jules et Jim. -later made into a film by François Truffaut. Beatrice Wood's account of these events is taken from her memoirs; she went on to become a celebrated ceramicist, dying in 1998 aged 105. The introduction and commentary is by Dawn Ades, the well-known scholar of Dada and Surrealism.