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.