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.