Dada
WAKE UP!
Can a urinal or a print of the Mona Lisa with a mustache painted on it be art? With World War I as its backdrop, the artists of the Dada movement met absurdity with absurdity. The Industrial Revolution had created weapons that eliminated scores of people in ways previously unimaginable. Dada artists created provocative, contradictory, and irrational “anti-art” as a protest against the civilizations that allowed the war, insulting their cultural treasures—art. What is art if humanity has become so debased?
WHEN & WHERE
c 1916–1920
Zurich, Berlin, New York
Dada artists had no set aesthetic or media. Collage, paint, and sculpture were popular choices, with chance and chaos serving as creative vehicles. Many images contained human-machine hybrids and disfigured bodies. Some artists even incorporated trash into their work. Theirs was an art of the street, no longer separated from everyday life. Dadaists divorced art from the idea of beauty, and challenged viewers to think critically.
In 1916, Hugo Ball founded a café called Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Germany, where Dadaists engaged in discussions, poetry readings, and performances. They displayed images that mocked the government, art world, and contemporary culture in nonsensical arrangements along the walls interspersed with declarative political statements.
After the war, many of the movement’s artists evolved into Surrealists and spread out across the European continent and to New York. —ARR
Selected artists: Jean (Hans) Arp, Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters, Tristan Tzara
FUN FACT
The origin of the name Dada is in dispute. The most popular theory is that Dada artists randomly stabbed at a French-German dictionary and hit the word “dada,” French for hobbyhorse. The other is that the word is simply nonsense or babble, reflecting the artists’ attitude toward fine art.