Artist Comes to Dada: Dimitri Petrov Exhibits Work

By Mikhail Horowitz

For our second visiting blog from Mikhail Horowitz we republish his review in the Kingston Daily Freeman of Dimiti Petrov's exhibition at the Visual Arts Gallery at Ulster County Community Collection, which ran from October 17-November 12, 1982.

Mikhail relates that he "met Dimitri Petrov, grandmaster of Dada, when I was reviewing his exhibition at UCCC in July of 1982. Petrov, a personal friend of Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp, among many other great European artists displaced by World War II and living in New York City, was warm and forthcoming to a small-town journalist; we hit it off immediately and became friends. A few years later, in 1986, when he lay dying in Woodstock, the painter Ernest Frazier and I would visit him, devouring his wild stories of the Dadaists and Surrealists of his acquaintance as he sketched, from a supine position on his bed, with a piece of charcoal affixed to a long pointer stick on a canvas propped up by his wife, Barbara. Here follows the review of his show at UCCC."