Books by Catherine Hug

Dadaglobe Reconstructed

by Tristan Tzara, Karl Buchberg, Samantha Friedman, Adrian Sudhalter, Anne Sanouillet, Michel Sanouillet, Catherine Hug, Lee Ann Daffner

2016 marks the centennial of Dada's birth in Zurich, a landmark in 20-th century culture. Kunsthaus Zurich celebrates the Dada anniversary with the exhibition Dadaglobe Reconstructed. It reunites some one hundred artworks sent to Tristan Tzara for Dadaglobe, the unrealized anthology of the Dada movement.
Had it been realized as planned in 1921, Dadaglobe would have constituted the movement's most ambitious publication: 160 pages illustrated with more than 100 reproductions of artworks by some thirty artists from seven countries. Edited by Tristan Tzara, the Dada movement's Romanian-born co-founder, it was meant to be Dada's apotheosis as an artistic and literary movement of truly international reach.
Dadaglobe was not merely designed to be a vehicle for existing works. Rather, it was intended to serve as one of Dada's most generative catalysts for the production of new ones. Tzara's request for four types of visual submissions--photographic self-portraits, original drawings, photographs of artworks, and book layouts--provided parameters for production and simultaneously encouraged their subversion.
The Dadaglobe Reconstructed exhibition reveals for the first time that many of Dada's most iconic artworks were created in direct response to Tzara's call and conceived specifically for presentation as a reproduction, rather than being admired as an original. Dadaglobe was meant to be a manifesto on the revised status of the artwork in reproduction. Its legacy altered the terms of 20-century artistic discourse.
Due to a lack of funding and many difficulties in organization, Dadaglobe remained unpublished. This left a void where there ought to have been a magnum opus, an absence at the core of Dada and at the heart of twentieth century avant-garde artistic production.
The belated presentation of the artworks intended for Dadaglobe in this exhibition, and their publication as reproductions in the coinciding book, enables a major historical revision. It brings the notoriously unwieldy Dada movement into sharp focus and restores a crucial missing chapter in the history of modernism.
The book features all works submitted for Dadaglobe in a complete reconstruction of Tzara's concept. The essays, examining the history and significance of Dadaglobe as an avant-garde undertaking, are also richly illustrated.
Kunsthaus Zurich's Dadaglobe exhibition is planned to be shown also at the MoMA later in 2016 (TBC). MoMA would do their own edition for sale at the museum only. North American and world sales right remain with VSS.

Francis Picabia Our Heads are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction

by George Baker, Briony Fer, Catherine Hug, Gordon Hughes, Anne Umland, George Thomas Baker, Carole Boulbes, Masha Chlenova

By rejecting consistency, Picabia powerfully asserted the artist's freedom to change

Irreverent and audacious, restless and brilliant, Francis Picabia achieved fame as a leader of the Dada group only to break publicly with the movement in 1921. Moving between Paris, the French Riviera, Switzerland, and New York, he led a dashing life, painting, writing, yachting, gambling, racing fast cars, and organizing lavish parties. Like no other artist before him, Picabia created a body of work that defies consistency and categorization, from Impressionist landscapes to abstraction, from Dada to stylized nudes, and from performance and film to poetry and publishing. A primary constant in his career was his vigorous unpredictability.

Illustrated with nearly 500 reproductions, this sweeping survey of Picabia's eclectic career embraces the challenge of his work, asking how we can make sense of its wildly shifting mediums and styles. In her opening essay, curator Anne Umland writes that with Picabia, familiar oppositions between high art and kitsch, progression and regression, modernism and its opposite, and success and failure are undone.

In 15 superb essays, additional authors--including distinguished professors George Baker, Briony Fer, and David Joselit and renowned Picabia scholars Carole Boulbès and Arnauld Pierre--delve into the radically various mediums, styles, and contexts of Picabia's work, discussing his Dada period, his abstractions, his mechanical paintings, his appropriations of source imagery, his multifaceted relationship with print (both in his paintings and as a publisher and contributor to vanguard journals), his forays into screenwriting and theater, and his complex politics. Marcel Duchamp, of course, but also Nietzsche and Gertrude Stein make repeat appearances along the way.

Turning to Picabia's contemporary legacy, Cathérine Hug maps the history of his critical reception and interviews contemporary curators and artists, including Peter Fischli, Albert Oehlen, and David Salle. A lively 30-page chronology illustrated with archival photographs and ephemera gives readers a year-by-year account of the artist's colorful life and of his interactions with fellow artists and critics, friends, and lovers.

Together these essays suggest that the unruly genius of Picabia offers us a powerfully relevant and provocative alternative to the familiar narrative of modernism.

Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction accompanies the major 2016 exhibition on the artist, jointly organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Kunsthaus Zürich.

Francis Picabia was born in 1879 in Paris, the only child of a Cuban-born Spanish father and a French mother. His first success came as a painter in an Impressionist manner. He went on to become one of the principle figures of the Dada movement in New York and Paris. In 1925 Picabia moved to the south of France, where he lived and worked through World War II. Following the war, Picabia returned to Paris, where he died in 1953.

Suzanne Duchamp Retrospective

by Catherine Hug, Carole Boulbes, Talia Kwartler, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Effie Rentzou, Amy Sillman

Revitalizing the life and artistic legacy of Suzanne Duchamp, sister of Marcel Duchamp and Dada pioneer in her own right

Suzanne Duchamp (1889-1963) was part of a famous artistic family that included her brothers Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon, and she has been continually overshadowed by her more famous (male) counterparts. In 1920, Francis Picabia wrote, "Suzanne Duchamp does more intelligent things than paint." As an artist and Dadaist, she developed a delicate, cryptic and humorous visual language. In fact, Duchamp was a leading exponent of Dada in both Europe and the Americas, building upon her brother's concept of readymades to produce "mechanomorphic" multimedia assemblages.
With over 60 works, many published for the first time, this catalog finally awards Suzanne Duchamp the recognition she deserves in the history of modern art. It showcases her influential work from her Dada period made on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as earlier and later pieces.