Who's the Dada?

Perhaps if the curators of this scholarly show had completely entered the spirit of their subjects, they would have titled this exhibition Who's the Daddy?, or maybe, in tribute to the artists' love of puns and the revolutionary anti-art movement they helped launch, Who's the Dada? It would have been a great title in all sorts of ways.

First, Duchamp, Picabia and Man Ray were the three godfathers of conceptual art, the inventors of the readymade, the installation, the use of chance in art and the technologically produced artwork.

Second, these three friends were also the three pranksters of modernism, who mocked all around them and turned jokes, like dressing up in drag or painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa, into philosophical artworks.

Third, they were playboys, whose treatment of women both in life and art was irredeemably patriarchal. And fourth, Who's the Daddy? would have given this irreverent trio an overdue dose of their own irreverence.

The exhibition delivers a strong revisionist art historical punch, which dumps the conventional Modernist history of "isms" as well as the idea that Duchamp was a maverick out on his own. The participation of the artists in Dada, a movement dedicated to the mockery of everything to do with art, and also Surrealism, is polemically played down and instead we are told a story of friendship, whose scale is so epic that one wonders when the film rights will be optioned.

Our three heroes begin making paintings in the Modernist styles of the day in the opening years of the 20th century. Each has a different character and métier. Duchamp is chilled out, cerebral and later specialises in found objects. He is only 24 when he meets Picabia, at a gallery in Paris in 1911, where both are exhibiting.

Picabia, the eldest of the three, aged 32 at the time, is - to use the parlance of our times - a party animal, collects fast cars, and becomes best known as a painter. A few years later, in New York, in 1915, Duchamp meets Man Ray, the youngest of the three, an American novice, just beginning to absorb European avant-gardism. He is great with technology, but not very theoretical, and he becomes, above all, a photographer.

The trio share their passions for machines, photography and sex. Together they charter new artistic territory and each room in the show, which spreads 182 works over 13 rooms on Level 4 of Tate Modern, unveils a new artistic revolution, starting with Duchamp's legendary The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even, a representation of relations between the sexes as a perverse mechanical diagram.

Duchamp, as is well known, invents the readymade with his urinal, spade and bottlerack, but Picabia and Man Ray are also central to the "readymade" idea, the former copying diagrams of machines and the latter developing his Rayograms, photographs created without the use of a camera.

Buzzing off each other's ideas, drinking, womanising and playing chess together, they expressed a disdain for all accepted notions of art, which led to periods when they withdrew from the art scene altogether. In their old age, in the postwar years, they condemned the commercialisation of the avant-garde and longed for the old days of revolution.