“The Other Side of the Moon: Women of the Avant Garde”

With a selection dating from between 1918 and 1939, “The Other Side of the Moon” gathers work by eight female artists whose production coincides with a very fecund period, touching on movements such as Constructivism, Bauhaus, Dada, and Surrealism. Despite their close relation to these major groups, the most celebrated artists in this exhibition—Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Sonia Delaunay, Hannah Höch, Florence Henri, Claude Cahun, and Dora Maar—made works that, as seen here, offer a broader vision of European modernism, illuminating it in nuanced and varied ways.

It appears that the curator, Suzanne Meyer-Büser, has chosen definitive samples of the artists’ creativity: The selection here includes the highly modern designs of Delaunay (a large group of her beautiful fabric designs and patterns are on display), the surreal collages of Höch, the intense photography of Cahun, surreal images by Maar, the experimental New Vision photography of Henri, and eccentric puppets and a walk-in painting (actually a reconstruction of the interior of a bar design) by Taeuber-Arp.

Two lesser-known figures in the show are the Russian-Polish sculptor Katarzyna Kobro and the French filmmaker Germaine Dulac. Korbo’s pioneering spatiotemporal sculpture e.g. Raum-Komposition, 1928, echoes the primary nature of the De Stijl visual language, while Dulac is credited with making one of the first Surrealist films. In this regard, the show also makes a case for a different, perhaps feminine, approach to creativity, one that did not automatically turn to the more traditional modes of production (i.e., painting and sculpture). Yet this is a show as much about artistic circles as it is about individuals. A key point made by Meyer-Büser is the importance of community for these women, all of whom knew one another.