behalf of political movements of the left and the right (John Heartfield, Wieland Herzfelde, Franz Jung, Julius Evola). Richard Huelsenbeck became a New
York psychiatrist, George Grosz an American landscape artist. Some went on to found new artistic movements (most notably the Paris Dadaists turned
French Surrealists); others, like Hausmann and Schwitters, working in relative isolation, took independent, often eccentric artistic directions. But almost all of
them were strongly shaped by the movement in which they participated between 1915 and 1923. By the 1940s, mainly as a result of the Second World War,
a large number of the former Dadaists had come to live in the United States, repeating the exile that had brought many of them together in Zurich and New
York 25 years earlier. Among those who remained as permanent residents were Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Richard Huelsenbeck, and
Hans Richter. This coming together of the old clan marks the beginning of a surge of interest in the movement which had been largely forgotten even though its
influence was present everywhere. A key event in this renewal of interest was the publication in 1951 of Robert Motherwell’s anthology The Dada Painters
and Poets. This book, edited by one of the leading American painters of the mid-century, constituted the first real acknowledgment of the definitive role
Dada had played in shaping twentieth-century art.
The interest in Dada’s historical role has continued to grow from the late forties to the present. Two particularly significant events occurred at The University
of Iowa in 1978. In that year, the Program in Comparative Literature and the School of Art and Art History, with the cooperation of other academic
departments, the Museum of Art, and the University Libraries, sponsored an international conference on Dada and an exhibition entitled “Dada Artifacts.” It
was this pair of events which led directly to the establishment of the Dada Archive and Research Center at The University of Iowa. By the end of the
conference, the prominent scholars who had come from around the world to participate had agreed on the need for a single institution which would gather the
widely scattered documentation of the Dada movement, preserve that documentation for posterity, and disseminate it to the international community. It was
initially proposed to house such an archive at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Unfortunately, with the
death of Professor Michel Benamou, the director of the center in Milwaukee, it became impossible to establish the archive there. The responsibility then fell
clearly on the University of Iowa, where numerous faculty members and graduate students had strong research interests in Dada and where the 1978
conference and exhibition had been held. Furthermore, in preparing the “Dada Artifacts” exhibition, it had been learned that the Special Collections
Department of the University Libraries already has extensive holdings of rare items from the Dada period, including many of the highly ephemeral periodicals
such as Dada, Litt rature, and Merz. So, under the direction of Professors Rudolf Kuenzli of Comparative Literature and Stephen Foster of Art History,
the Dada Archive and Research Center was established in 1979.
The center has been involved in a number of vital and exciting programs and activities, among which are additional conferences on Dada and on the
avant-garde in general, team-taught interdisciplinary courses, various publications including the journal Dada/Surrealism, and a collection of first-generation
slides of visual works (originally known as the Photodocumentary Archive, now the Fine Arts Dada Archive.) Proposed future projects include additional
publications and research fellowships for scholars wishing to work at the center. The remainder of this article, however, will be devoted to a description of the
project with which the University Libraries are directly involved: the International Dada Archive (originally known as the Literary Archive).
Under the direction of Professor Kuenzli and the curatorship of Timothy Shipe, the activities of the International Dada Archive have been made possible
through generous financial support by various agencies of the University, The University of Iowa Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the National
Endowment for the Humanities. In addition, the administration and staff of the University Libraries have given their full cooperation in countless ways; the
project would have been inconceivable without this enthusiastic support.
The purpose of the archive is to preserve and disseminate the written documentation of the Dada movement, whether it relates to literature, painting, film, or
any of the arts. Gathering the written documentation of Dada has involved three distinct but related projects. The first is the most extensive bibliographic
search ever undertaken for published material relating to the Dada movement and to the individual participants. This includes all of the books written by the
individual Dadaists, their contributions to books and periodicals, books which they illustrated, the small magazines which emerged from various centers of the
movement, exhibition catalogs, and all sorts of secondary literature about the movement and the individual artists-all relevant material published from 1915 to
the present, whether in the form of books, parts of books, or articles in periodicals. The resulting catalog constitutes, in effect, the definitive bibliography of
the movement.
The bibliographic information thus gathered has been used in carrying out the second project: an inventory of published materials relating to Dada currently
housed in the University Libraries, and a systematic program for acquiring the material which the libraries do not yet own. Even before the archive was
founded, Iowa’s holdings in the field were among the most extensive in the world. The items turned up in the inventory included numerous rare first editions.
Among the gems already in Special Collections were complete runs of many of the original Dada periodicals, as well as Marcel Duchamp’s so-called Green
Box, a container holding facsimiles of manuscript fragments of notes on his glass masterpiece, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, and
intended to be the literary version of that work. The gathering of the published material not already in the collections has been accomplished partly through the
libraries’ regular acquisitions program and partly through the Dada Archive’s own funding sources. The materials thus acquired are housed in the appropriate
locations in the library system–chiefly in Special Collections, the Art Library, and the stacks of the Main Library. There is also some nonprint material, such
as a recording of the complete music of Marcel Duchamp in the Music Library and a nearly complete collection of Dada films in Media Services.
The result of these two projects has been a collection of published Dada documents unequaled anywhere in the world. There is virtually no relevant book or
journal which a scholar cannot find at The University of Iowa. But the most valuable aspect of the word of the Dada Literary Archive, the part which makes it
a truly unique international resource, is the project of microfilming manuscripts and ephemera housed in public and private collections scattered throughout
Europe and North America. By using a portable microfilm camera, Professor Kuenzli was able to photograph material which would otherwise have been
unavailable because of the scarcity of commercial microfilming services in Europe and the understandable reluctance of some collectors to allow valuable
items to leave their custody. The sources of the manuscripts ranged from the world’s great art libraries to the proverbial shoe boxes beneath widow’s beds;
and the filming took place under the best and the most difficult conditions, from well-lighted research rooms to kitchen tables in remote Alpine villages. The
one common denominator, though, has been the incredible cooperativeness and interest in the project on the part of the owners and curators of the material.
This is certainly owing in part to the fact that, by making their irreplaceable manuscripts available for inspection on microfilm, they will spare the original
documents the wear of frequent use, a use which, no matter how careful and responsible, is bound to cause further deterioration. In the case of private
owners, most of whom are heirs of major Dada figures, the microfilming also means that they will be spared the responsibility of opening the material to
scholars, answering their countless questions, and often allowing them into their homes to consult the manuscripts. Beyond this, however, most of the public
and private curators of these documents have themselves a deep interest in the Dada phenomenon and are eager to assist in a project which will facilitate
knowledge and understanding of the movement.
The materials on these films, which are carefully kept in a fireproof vault in Special Collections, constitute the most complete collection of the unpublished
documentation of Dada in the world. A conservative estimate of the archive’s present manuscript holdings would be 25,000 items (100,000 frames), including
correspondence, literary manuscripts, drawings and sketchbooks, diaries, drafts of programs, invitations and manifestoes, personal reminiscences, film
scripts, and descriptions and inventories of artworks. The microfilms also contain many books and periodicals so rare that it would have been impossible to
obtain original editions for the University Libraries. Until now, the greatest strength of the collection has been in manuscripts of the German
Dadaists–precisely that area for which the available documentation has been the scantiest, in large part because of the ravages of the Second World War.
The collection is especially strong in manuscripts of Jean (or Hans) Arp, Johannes Baader, Hugo Ball, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield,
Hannah H ch, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters, and Christof Spengemann, representing primarily the Dada centers in Berlin, Hanover,
and Zurich.
Several tools have been developed to provide control of and access to the holdings of the International Dada Archive. The key to all of its resources is a card
catalog of the entire collection. Organized by names of individual Dadaists and by a few broad subject headings, the catalog serves as a guide to all material
related to Dada anywhere in the University Libraries, regardless of type (books, journal articles, manuscripts, ephemera) and location (Main Library stacks,
microfilms in Special Collections, the Art Library, or any of the other departmental libraries). A researcher working on, say, Raoul Hausmann–a typical
Dadaist in that he was a painter, monteur, sculptor, photographer, and writer of poetry, fiction and essays in German, French, and English–will consult the
catalog and be guided to books, articles, manuscripts, diaries, and letters written by and to Hausmann, exhibition catalogs, and secondary literature about
Hausmann. Once funds are available for retrospective conversion of the card catalog, an online catalog will be made available over the Internet.
February 2000 update: On February 3, 2000 the online catalog of the International Dada Archive became available to the public. Known as the
International Online Bibliography of Dada, the online catalog currently includes approximately thirty percent of the titles in the Archive’s card
catalog. Click here for more information.
In addition to the card catalog, a series of finding aids has been produced for the public and private collections that were microfilmed by the Archive. These
inventories are frame by frame listings of the contents of the microfilms. The finding aids are being scanned, and will be made available on the International
Dada Archive’s web site.
The International Dada Archive is an invaluable resource both to the students and faculty of The University of Iowa and to the large community of Dada
scholars throughout the world. For a wide range of literary and art historians interested in the avant-garde and the development of twentieth-century art, Iowa
is already becoming synonymous with Dada. The activities of the International Dada Archive fit perfectly within the lively context of the art