Dada and Op Art bookend one of the longest-running arguments in twentieth-century culture, and between them run the five most controversial movements in art history, each one scandalous for a completely different reason.
A century on, the shock has mostly worn off into decoration, printed on mugs, tote bags and phone cases until the original row is barely visible underneath. What got each movement branded controversial at the time was a named jury, a rival artist, a national exposé or a piece of legislation, not vague public distaste, and it was different in every case. The five entries below stay with that documented record rather than with the version now sold as merchandise.
All five movements now sit inside the canon, taught on every survey course and hung in the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate alongside the Impressionism that once looked safer by comparison. What set them apart was never the paint itself but the reception it provoked: a rejection, a trial, a secret patron or an unpaid printing bill. The five below run roughly in the order the movements themselves first emerged, from Futurism’s opening manifesto in 1909 to Op Art’s Fifth Avenue moment in 1965.
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Dada to Op Art: the 5 most controversial movements in art history
1. Futurism (1909)
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched the movement with his Manifesto of Futurism, first published in La gazzetta dell’Emilia on 5 February 1909 and reprinted in the French newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. One clause promised to “glorify war, the world’s only hygiene, militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for woman”, while another called outright for the destruction of museums and libraries. The politics caught up with the poetry: Marinetti founded the Futurist Political Party in 1918, saw it absorbed into Mussolini’s Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in 1919, and became one of the first members of the National Fascist Party.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
2. Dada (1917)
Marcel Duchamp bought a porcelain urinal from the J. L. Mott Iron Works showroom in New York, signed it “R. Mutt” and submitted it, titled Fountain, to the Society of Independent Artists’ supposedly unjuried exhibition in the spring of 1917. Duchamp sat on the Society’s own board, which made its rejection of the piece rather awkward: he resigned in protest, as did the collector Walter Arensberg. Alfred Stieglitz photographed the work for The Blind Man magazine that May, where Beatrice Wood wrote in its defence: “He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view.” The original was soon lost. The version now shown in museums is one of 14 replicas Duchamp signed and dated himself in 1950.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
3. Surrealism (1934)
Surrealism’s most public row was internal. In 1934, the movement’s founder, André Breton, put Salvador Dalí on a mock trial, accusing him of sympathising with what Breton called “the Hitler phenomenon”. Dalí’s defence was blunt: “I am Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention,” and he talked his way out of expulsion that day. He was not so lucky five years later. After writing to Luis Buñuel in praise of Franco’s Falange and against socialism and Marxism, Breton formally expelled him in the pages of Minotaure magazine in May 1939, citing Dalí’s “espousal of race war” and what Breton dismissed as an “over-refinement” of Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
4. Abstract Expressionism (1995)
In the early 1950s, the CIA judged Abstract Expressionism useful proof that the United States was a haven of free thought and free markets, and financed its promotion abroad through the Congress for Cultural Freedom from 1950 to 1967. Robert Motherwell, whose Elegy to the Spanish Republic series addressed political subjects directly, is the artist most explicitly tied to that promotion. The historian Frances Stonor Saunders brought the story to a wide audience in The Independent on 22 October 1995, then expanded it in her 1999 book Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. Not everyone accepts the account: the critic Michael Kimmelman has argued that much of it is “false or decontextualized”.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
5. Op Art (1965)
Bridget Riley’s Current, painted in 1964, was reproduced on the catalogue cover of The Responsive Eye, curated by William C. Seitz at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965. The exhibition made Op Art a household phrase almost overnight and handed Riley’s black and white patterns straight to the fashion trade. The United States had no copyright protection for artists at the time, so her designs were reproduced on dresses, textiles and advertising with neither her permission nor a fee. Riley grew disillusioned with the exhibition circuit that followed, and her experience fed directly into new copyright legislation, passed in the United States in 1967 after an initiative by New York’s own artists.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Five different shapes of controversy
What these five rows do not share is a single villain. Duchamp was rejected by a jury he had helped set up himself. Marinetti’s own manifesto anticipated the politics that would go on to claim him within a decade of writing it. Dalí was tried by his own movement, not by outsiders. Motherwell and the wider Abstract Expressionist promotion only became public in 1995, decades after the paintings were made. Riley’s dispute was with the marketplace rather than with critics or the state. Five movements, five different opponents.
Each row also left something checkable behind it. The Fountain replica now on display is one of 14 Duchamp signed in 1950. Dalí’s expulsion notice ran in Minotaure in May 1939. Saunders’s account of the Congress for Cultural Freedom is still in print more than 30 years after The Independent first carried it. Riley’s argument with the fashion trade helped bring in copyright legislation that still protects artists today. A scandal that leaves behind a document, a law or a signed replica tends to outlast one that only ever lived in a newspaper column, which is as good an explanation as any for why these five arguments are still being had.
