Dada

also: Dadaism

movement 1916-1924 Switzerland Germany

Dada was born in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire, a noisy meeting place for expatriate artists and writers in wartime neutral Zurich. Convinced that Europe's reason, nationalism, and good taste had produced the slaughter around them, its members invented an anti-art of nonsense, chance, and deliberate provocation. The idea spread fast: to New York, where Marcel Duchamp exhibited manufactured objects as readymades; to Berlin, where Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann turned magazine scraps into biting photomontage; to Hanover, Cologne, and Paris. Tristan Tzara's cut-up poems, Jean Arp's collages arranged by the laws of chance, and Kurt Schwitters' Merz constructions all attacked originality, craft, and beauty as values. By the mid-1920s the movement had dissolved into Surrealism and other causes, but its inventions - the readymade, photomontage, chance composition, and the artwork as assault - permanently widened what art could be.

Grand opening of the first Dada exhibition, Berlin, 5 June 1920.
Grand opening of the first Dada exhibition, Berlin, 5 June 1920.Public domain (credit: Unknown author Unknown author) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Deliberate anti-art stance: refusal of beauty, craft, and originality as values
  • Chance operations replacing artistic control (Arp's torn collages, Tzara's cut-up verse)
  • Readymades and found objects presented as art by the artist's act of choice
  • Photomontage and collage built from printed ephemera and mass-media scraps
  • Provocative performance, manifestos, and typographic play
  • Nonsense, irony, and wordplay running through image and text alike

Key figures

  • Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) — Poet whose manifestos and cut-up verse gave Dada its voice in Zurich and Paris
  • Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) — Inventor of the readymade, declaring everyday objects art by choice alone
  • Hannah Höch (1889-1978) — Berlin pioneer of photomontage turned against Weimar's establishment
  • Jean Arp (1886-1966) — Made collages and reliefs by chance, surrendering the artist's control
  • Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) — Built his one-man Merz movement from discarded scraps and print

Example works

  • Fountain — Marcel Duchamp (1917)
  • Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany — Hannah Höch (1919)
  • Merzbau — Kurt Schwitters (begun 1923)

Sources

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