I.

Introduction

Dada, early 20th-century art movement, whose members sought to ridicule the culture of their time through deliberately absurd performances, poetry, and visual art. Dadaists embraced the extraordinary, the irrational, and the contradictory largely in reaction to the unprecedented and incomprehensible brutality of World War I (1914-1918). Their work was driven in part by a belief that deep-seated European values—nationalism, militarism, and even the long tradition of rational philosophy—were implicated in the horrors of the war. Dada is often described as nihilistic—that is, rejecting all moral values; however, dadaists considered their movement an affirmation of life in the face of death.

II.

Earliest Forms

The dada movement acquired a name and a recognizable identity only in 1916, but the work of several artists anticipated dada's spirit a few years earlier. In 1913 French artist Marcel Duchamp made the first of his readymades, in which he elevated everyday objects, such as a bicycle wheel or a bottle rack, to the status of sculpture simply by exhibiting them in a gallery and pronouncing them art. Duchamp and French artist Francis Picabia took up temporary residence in New York City in 1915, where they created playful paintings, drawings, and sculptures that depicted figures in the form of mysterious machinery—a jab at new technology. Their work drew the attention of a small but active circle of sympathetic American patrons, writers, and artists, including photographer Man Ray.

III.

Cabaret Voltaire

Dadaism was launched in earnest in February 1916 when Hugo Ball, a German poet and musician, and his wife, performer Emmy Hennings, opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, Switzerland. As a neutral country, Switzerland was a haven for opponents to the war, and from the beginning the Cabaret attracted an international group of artists and intellectuals. They soon rallied under the banner of dada, a term whose origin remains in dispute. German writer (and later psychologist) Richard Huelsenbeck claimed that he and Ball chose it as a stage name for a female dancer in the Cabaret; but Romanian-born French poet Tristan Tzara, who became dada's chief promoter, also claimed authorship. In any case, the name dada, French for “rocking horse”, won general support for its ambiguity and evident inanity. In a manifesto of 1918, Tzara proclaimed, “DADA MEANS NOTHING.”

Nightly events at the Cabaret Voltaire were intentionally outrageous and drew in part on performances by poets who were members of a closely related Italian art movement called futurism, which celebrated machinery, speed, and other aspects of modern life. Intelligibility was at a minimum, and costumes were often outlandish. French artist Jean Arp was an occasional participant in the Cabaret Voltaire and described one evening’s performance as 'Total pandemonium. The people around us are shouting, laughing, and gesticulating. Our replies are sighs of love, volleys of hiccups, poems, moos…Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an oriental dancer. [Romanian artist Marcel] Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost.' Dadaists promoted the art of children, the insane, non-Westerners, and any other people outside the accepted norms of European society.

IV.

Dada in Germany and France

Within a year of its founding in 1916, the focus of dada shifted. The Cabaret Voltaire lasted only five months, and Ball quit the movement in 1917. Tzara remained active in Zürich, publishing the magazine Dada, but Huelsenbeck returned in 1917 to Berlin, the war-ravaged capital of Germany, where dada became far more political. Huelsenbeck made commitment to the political philosophy of socialism a central dada tenet, and later recalled, 'there were artists and bourgeois. You had to love one and hate the other.'

While Huelsenbeck proclaimed 'The dadaist considers it necessary to come out against art, because he has seen through its fraud as a moral safety valve,' other German dadaists produced the movement’s first substantial body of visual artwork in the form of photocollage. Using images cut out of newspapers and commercial packaging, artists Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, and Hannah Höch made brutally satirical collages attacking German society and government. German artist George Grosz created equally biting drawings that indicted a society in deep disarray after losing the war.

Other centers of dada activity in Germany include Cologne, where Max Ernst made paintings and collages, and Hannover, where Kurt Schwitters assembled sculpture from bits of commonplace debris. Schwitters’s projects, which he called Merz, (a made-up word), culminated in a work called Merzbau (1923-1936, destroyed), an assemblage of cast-off objects that almost entirely filled his studio and family home. Dada's last stronghold was Paris, to which nearly all its major participants—Tzara, Ernst, Picabia, Duchamp, Man Ray, and Arp—moved between 1919 and 1922.

V.

Dada’s Legacy

By the end of 1922 the dada movement had begun to fall apart. Quarrels developed between some members, and others seemed to tire of maintaining a stance of outrage against society. In Paris the dadaists were joined by a group of writers, including Frenchmen André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, and Philippe Soupault, who transformed dadaist interests in irrationality and chance into a new movement known as surrealism. Dada's influence was also felt in a number of later movements. They include a group of 1960s performance artists known as Fluxus; the pop art movement, which incorporated images from popular culture; and the conceptual art movement, which viewed ideas in themselves as art.