According to this write-up, Society Anonyme was only at the 47th Street address for one year - 1920.
In 1920 Dreier and her friend and infamous fellow artist Marcel Duchamp decided to form a new organization devoted to exhibiting and promoting modern art to Americans. (Duchamp was one of the most provocative Dada/Surrealist artists of his time. He is best known for his Cubist/Futurist-inspired painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 which scandalized the American audience at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, and the urinal that he found and exhibited as the sculpture Fountain by the artist “R. Mutt”). They invited Man Ray, a Dada/Surrealist artist and avant-garde photographer to join them in their efforts.It was Man Ray who came up with the name “Société Anonyme,” which he thought literally meant “Anonymous Society” in French. Duchamp informed him that in French the true meaning is equivalent to the English word “Incorporated.” Drier liked the name because it had the ring of impartiality – it put the focus on the art, not the individual artists and puts a capitalist spin on an anti-materialist art organization. Drier rented two small rooms at 19 East 47th Street in New York City for the exhibit space and the library of the fledgling organization. When it was officially incorporated in New York, it became more Dada joke since it now meant “Incorporated, Inc.”On April 30, 1920, the Société Anonyme, with the now-appended title “Museum of Modern Art: 1920” had its first exhibition. Duchamp designed the space with a neutral, industrial look. The floor was ribbed rubber and the walls and woodwork were a pale blue. The exhibit featured the European artists Jacques Villon (half-brother of Marcel Duchamp), Alexander Archipenko, Juan Gris, Heinrich Vogler, Vincent van Gogh and the sculptor Brancusi. American artists included Joseph Stella, Patrick Henry Bruce, James Daugherty, and works by New York Dadaists Duchamp, Man Ray, Morton Schamberg and others.Dreier had hoped to raise enough money to establish a permanent space to exhibit modern art, but wasn’t successful. She gave up the 47th Street space after a year but the Société Anonyme continued to function as a museum-without-walls by holding exhibits, lectures and symposia in other galleries, clubs, workers’ centers and rental spaces. The Société also produced publications and had an acquisitions program. It continued to draw on the talents of international artists including Cubists, Dadaists, Futurists, Expressionists, Constructivists and other progressive artistic genres.Drier’s real hope of founding the first permanent museum of modern art in the United States was eclipsed when the Museum of Modern Art (now commonly referred to as MoMA) in New York City was established in 1929 by a more diplomatic Alfred Barr, the museum’s founding director, with very substantial financial backing from its most prominent supporters.Villon Duchamp drawing on Society Anonyme postcard.The postcards shown here are all from the Société’s first year on East 47th Street. Oddly enough these postcards are all real photo postcards that can hardly do justice to some of the most colorful and exciting artworks of that time. Other artists whose work is shown on the postcards (and are not already mentioned above) are Louis Eilshemius, Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Heinrich Campendonk and R. Villon-Duchamp (brother of Marcel Duchamp). - See more at:
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