Dada
Dada or Dadaism was an international art movement that developed in the context of the Great War and Futurism first established in Zürich, Switzerland, and later quickly spread to Berlin, Paris, New York City and a variety of artistic centers in Europe and Asia. The Dada movement's principles were first collected in Hugo Ball's Dada Manifesto in 1916. Ball is seen as the founder of the Dada movement. Other key figures in the movement included Emmy Hennings, Jean Arp, Johannes Baader, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Richard Huelsenbeck, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Tristan Tzara, and Beatrice Wood, among others. The movement influenced later styles like the avant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including Surrealism, nouveau réalisme, pop art, and Fluxus.
Etymology and naming
There is no single agreed origin for the name Dada. One widely repeated story holds that Richard Huelsenbeck jabbed a paper knife into a dictionary, landing on the French word dada. Other accounts emphasize its infantile sound or its multilingual neutrality, aligning with the movement’s internationalism. The related label "anti‑art" — often associated with Duchamp and the readymade—denotes practices that challenge accepted definitions of art.Origins and aims
Dada coalesced among émigré artists and writers in neutral Switzerland during 1916, with Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings founding the Cabaret Voltaire as a venue for nightly performances and manifestos. Participants framed their activity as a protest against war, nationalism, and cultural conformity, adopting strategies of nonsense, chance, and ridicule to negate prevailing aesthetic values.Techniques and media
Dadaists worked across media, including sound poetry, simultaneous recitation, collage and photomontage, and the use of found objects and assemblage. In New York and Paris, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades became emblematic of Dada’s anti‑art stance.Centres and chronology
Dada’s principal centres included Zürich, New York, Berlin, Cologne and Hannover, and Paris, each with distinct emphases—from performance and poetry in Zürich to politically charged photomontage in Berlin and object‑based experiments in New York. By the mid‑1920s, Dada’s energies in Paris merged into Surrealism, while its strategies of appropriation, performance, and institutional critique continued to inform later avant‑gardes.Publications and images
Dada circulated through journals and small‑press publications, posters, cards, and broadsides that combined texts, images, and typographic experiments.History
Dada emerged from a period of artistic and literary movements like Futurism, Cubism and Expressionism; centered mainly in Italy, France and Germany respectively, in those years. However, unlike the earlier movements Dada was able to establish a broad base of support, giving rise to a movement that was international in scope. Its adherents were based in cities all over the world including New York, Zürich, Berlin, Paris and others. There were regional differences like an emphasis on literature in Zürich and political protest in Berlin.Some sources propose a Romanian origin, arguing that Dada was an offshoot of a vibrant artistic tradition that transposed to Switzerland when a group of Jewish modernist artists, including Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Arthur Segal settled in Zürich. Before World War I, similar art had already existed in Bucharest and other Eastern European cities; it is likely that Dada's catalyst was the arrival in Zürich of artists like Tzara and Janco.
Prominent Dadaists published manifestos, but the movement was loosely organized and there was no central hierarchy. On 14 July 1916, Ball originated the seminal Dada Manifesto. Tzara wrote a second Dada manifesto, considered important Dada reading, which was published in 1918. Tzara's manifesto articulated the concept of "Dadaist disgust"—the contradiction implicit in avant-garde works between the criticism and affirmation of modernist reality. In the Dadaist perspective modern art and culture are considered a type of fetishization where the objects of consumption are chosen, much like a preference for cake or cherries, to fill a void.
The shock and scandal the movement inflamed was deliberate; Dadaist magazines were banned and their exhibits closed. Some of the artists even faced imprisonment. These provocations were part of the entertainment but, over time, audiences' expectations eventually outpaced the movement's capacity to deliver. As the artists' well-known "sarcastic laugh" started to come from the audience, the provocations of Dadaists began to lose their impact. Dada was an active movement during years of political turmoil from 1916 when European countries were actively engaged in World War I, the conclusion of which, in 1918, set the stage for a new political order.
Zürich
The origins of the Dada movement is commonly accepted by most art historians and those who lived during this period to have identified with the Cabaret Voltaire co-founded by poet and cabaret singer Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball.The name Cabaret Voltaire was a reference to the French philosopher Voltaire, whose novel Candide mocked the religious and philosophical dogmas of the day.
Ball and Hennings invited artists "whatever their orientation" and contributions "of all kinds," setting the stage for a wildly diverse output. Opening night was attended by Ball, Hennings, Tzara, Jean Arp, and Janco. These artists along with others like Sophie Taeuber, Richard Huelsenbeck and Hans Richter started putting on performances at the Cabaret Voltaire and using art to express their disgust with the war and the interests that inspired it.
Having left Germany and Romania during World War I, the artists arrived in politically neutral Switzerland. They used abstraction to fight against the social, political, and cultural ideas of that time. They used shock art, provocation, and "vaudevillian excess" to subvert the conventions they believed had caused the Great War. The Dadaists believed those ideas to be a byproduct of bourgeois society that was so apathetic it would wage war against itself rather than challenge the status quo:
Ball said that Janco's mask and costume designs, inspired by Romanian folk art, made "the horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events" visible. According to Ball, performances were accompanied by a "balalaika orchestra playing delightful folk-songs." Often influenced by African music, arrhythmic drumming and jazz were common at Dada gatherings.
After the cabaret closed down, Dada activities moved on to a new gallery, and Hugo Ball left for Bern. Tzara began a relentless campaign to spread Dada ideas. He bombarded French and Italian artists and writers with letters, and soon emerged as the Dada leader and master strategist. The Cabaret Voltaire re-opened, and is still in the same place at the Spiegelgasse 1 in the Niederdorf.
Zürich Dada, with Tzara at the helm, published the art and literature review Dada beginning in July 1917, with five editions from Zürich and the final two from Paris.
Other artists, such as André Breton and Philippe Soupault, created "literature groups to help extend the influence of Dada".
After the fighting of the First World War had ended in the armistice of November 1918, most of the Zürich Dadaists returned to their home countries, and some began Dada activities in other cities. Others, such as the Swiss native Sophie Taeuber, would remain in Zürich into the 1920s.
Berlin
"Berlin was a city of tightened stomachers, of mounting, thundering hunger, where hidden rage was transformed into a boundless money lust, and men's minds were concentrating more and more on questions of naked existence... Fear was in everybody's bones" – Richard HülsenbeckRaoul Hausmann, who helped establish Dada in Berlin, published his manifesto Synthethic Cino of Painting in 1918 where he attacked Expressionism and the art critics who promoted it. Dada is envisioned in contrast to art forms, such as Expressionism, that appeal to viewers' emotional states: "the exploitation of so-called echoes of the soul". In Hausmann's conception of Dada, new techniques of creating art would open doors to explore new artistic impulses. Fragmented use of real world stimuli allowed an expression of reality that was radically different from other forms of art:
The groups in Germany were not as strongly anti-art as other groups. Their activity and art were more political and social, with corrosive manifestos and propaganda, satire, public demonstrations and overt political activities. The intensely political and war-torn environment of Berlin had a dramatic impact on the ideas of Berlin Dadaists. Conversely, New York's geographic distance from the war spawned its more theoretically driven, less political nature. According to Hans Richter, a Dadaist who was in Berlin yet "aloof from active participation in Berlin Dada", several distinguishing characteristics of the Dada movement there included: "its political element and its technical discoveries in painting and literature"; "inexhaustible energy"; "mental freedom which included the abolition of everything"; and "members intoxicated with their own power in a way that had no relation to the real world", who would "turn their rebelliousness even against each other".
In February 1918, while the Great War was approaching its climax, Huelsenbeck gave his first Dada speech in Berlin, and he produced a Dada manifesto later in the year. Following the October Revolution in Russia, by then out of the war, Hannah Höch and George Grosz used Dada to express communist sympathies. Grosz, together with John Heartfield, Höch and Hausmann developed the technique of photomontage during this period. Johannes Baader, the uninhibited Oberdada, was the "crowbar" of the Berlin movement's direct action according to Hans Richter and is credited with creating the first giant collages, according to Raoul Hausmann.
After the war, the artists published a series of short-lived political magazines and held the First International Dada Fair, 'the greatest project yet conceived by the Berlin Dadaists', in the summer of 1920. As well as work by the main members of Berlin Dada, the exhibition also included the work of Otto Dix, Francis Picabia, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Rudolf Schlichter, Johannes Baargeld and others. In all, over 200 works were exhibited, surrounded by incendiary slogans, some of which also ended up written on the walls of the Nazi's Entartete Kunst exhibition in 1937. Despite high ticket prices, the exhibition lost money, with only one recorded sale.
The Berlin group published periodicals such as Club Dada, Der Dada, Everyman His Own Football, and Dada Almanach. They also established a political party, the Central Council of Dada for the World Revolution.