Art Term
Dada was an art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. The art, poetry and performance produced by dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature
Dada artists felt the war called into question every aspect of a society capable of starting and then prolonging it – including its art. Their aim was to destroy traditional values in art and to create a new art to replace the old. As the artist Hans Arp later wrote:
Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might.
In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and had political affinities with the radical left.
The founder of dada was a writer, Hugo Ball. In 1916 he started a satirical night-club in Zurich, the Cabaret Voltaire, and a magazine which, wrote Ball, ‘will bear the name ”Dada”. Dada, Dada, Dada, Dada.’ This was the first of many dada publications. Dada became an international movement and eventually formed the basis of surrealism in Paris after the war.
Leading artists associated with it include Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Kurt Schwitters. Duchamp’s questioning of the fundamentals of Western art had a profound subsequent influence.
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Christine Battersby
Parodic humour was integral to Dada, and the influence of Nietzsche on dada is well known. However, the connections between …
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Lydie Fischer Sarazin-Levassor
In 1927 Marcel Duchamp married Lydie Fischer Sarazin-Levassor. The wedding was filmed by Man Ray and attended by Picabia. Here, …
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Michael White
When Kurt Schwitters began making collages in 1918, the initial term he used to describe them was Merzzeichnungen (Merz drawings). …
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Paul Farley
Was this the same Kurt Schwitters, founder of Merz, collaborator with Dadaists, Cubists and Constructivists, who won first, second and …
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Karin Orchard
Karin Orchard, Kurt Schwitters: Reconstructions of the Merzbau; Tate Papers no.8
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1921, editioned replica 1972
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1915–23, reconstruction by Richard Hamilton 1965–6, lower panel remade 1985
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Spring 2013 Tate Britain presents Schwitters in Britain, the first major exhibition to examine the late work of Kurt Schwitters, one of the major artists of European Modernism. The exhibition includes collages, assemblages and sculptures
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Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia 21 February – 26 May 2008 Exhibition of leading figures in the New York Dada movement at Tate Modern
Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971): Painter, Photographer
Raoul Hausmann was a leading member of the satirical and highly political Berlin branch of Dada, where in 1918 he pioneered the technique of photomontage - the art of affixing and juxtaposing photographs or other "found" illustrative material onto a flat surface, not unlike an embellished type of collage. Hausmann eventually quit painting towards the end of the Dada movement in favour of fine art photography. See also: Is Photography Art?
Man Ray (1890–1976): Painter, Photographer
Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia and raised in New York, Man Ray had his first solo show of paintings and drawings in 1915. His first Dada-style work, an assemblage he called "Self-Portrait", was shown in 1916. After meeting Marcel Duchamp, he founded the American branch of the Dada movement, and co-founded a contemporary arts group known as the Others. In 1921, disillusioned with the reception given to Dadaist ideas by New Yorkers he left America to live and work in Paris, where he created one of his best known Dadaist artworks: "Indestructible Object" (1923), a metronome with a photo of an eye attached to its clicking arm. He also taught himself the art of photography, rapidly becoming one of the greatest photographers in Europe. By the time Dada dissolved, Ray was already an active Surrealist.
Francis Picabia (1879-1953): Painter, Avant-Garde Artist
A volatile, anarchic character, François Marie Martinez Picabia was (ironically) one of the few avant-garde artists to be financially independent, due to his father's wealth and position as a Cuban diplomat. In 1911, after flirting with Impressionism and Cubism, he joined the Puteaux and Section d'Or group, becoming friends with Marcel Duchamp and Guillaume Apollinaire. Other members of the group included the Cubists Albert Gleizes, Roger de La Fresnaye, Fernand Léger and Jean Metzinger. In 1913, Picabia travelled to New York where his work was included in the Armory Show. Afterwards Alfred Stieglitz staged a solo exhibition for him, at Gallery 291. Around this time Picabia began making satirical mechanistic images (his noted "portraits mécaniques"), a series he continued with during the war which he spent mainly in Barcelona, although he made contact with Dadaists in Zurich. As a result of his attraction to the Zurich avant-garde, he launched his Dada periodical "391". After the war, Picabia became a convinced Dadaist: first in Zurich alongside Tristan Tzara, then in Paris. However, his enthusiasm for its nihilistic stance eventually waned, and when he fell out with Tzara and joined the Surrealism school, Dada dissolved.
Tristan Tzara (1896-1963): Avant-Garde Activist
The nihilist Tristan Tzara (aka Samuel Rosenstock) was an avant-garde Romanian poet and performance artist, as well as a journalist, playwright, art critic, and film director. He became one of the pioneer activists of Dada in Zurich, where his shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his writings and manifestos, were the driving features of extremist Dadaism. In 1919, Tzara moved to Paris where he joined the staff of Littérature magazine. Unfortunately, his heated personality and uncompromising activism led him into a series of conflicts within the Dada movement, both in France and Romania. Although he never actually left Dada (it dissolved while he was still a member), he too eventually took up Surrealism.
Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948): Collage Artist
The pioneering, poetic, romantic loner Kurt Schwitters was one of the few purists in the Dada movement. Based in Hanover, where he founded his own branch of Dada, he became renowned for using fragments of refuse with which to make sense of a world that he found politically, culturally and socially mad. Despite this, he had no political views, and almost all his work was personal or autobiographical. Although he produced a few high quality traditional paintings and sculptures, he never really deviated from his avant-garde Dadaist-style collages and paper constructions, which eventually took over his house.
Collections
Noted Dada collections can be seen at:
- Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris - Tate Modern Gallery, London - Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
For Neo-Dada works and other avant-garde postmodernist works, see: Best Contemporary Art Festivals.
Neo-Dada
Dada styles and ideas affected numerous other 20th century movements, including Surrealism, Pop-Art and Fluxus, as well as several contemporary artforms like assemblage, installation and performance. It may also be said to have anticipated several key concepts of postmodernist art. In the 1950s and 1960s, some American artists like Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), Claes Oldenburg (b.1929), Jasper Johns (b.1930) and Jim Dine (b.1935) even used the term "Neo-Dada art" to describe their "anti-aesthetic" works which used modern materials, popular iconography, and absurdist content. See also the work of some European artists, like the Swiss kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely (1925-1991). In early 2002, an international group of anarchic artists (the Kroesos foundation) were also dubbed "Neo-Dadaists" when they took over the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich until their eviction three months later.