Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalism, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works.[6][7][8] The art of the movement began primarily as performance[9] art, but eventually spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent toward violence, war, and nationalism and maintained political affinities with radical politics on the left-wing and far-left politics.[10][11][12][13]
There is no consensus on the origin of the movement's name; a common story is that the artist Richard Huelsenbeck slid a paper knife randomly into a dictionary, where it landed on "dada", a French term for a hobby horse.[14] Others note it suggests the first words of a child, evoking a childishness and absurdity that appealed to the group. Still others speculate it might have been chosen to evoke a similar meaning (or no meaning at all) in any language, reflecting the movement's internationalism.[15]
The Dadaist movement included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art and literary journals. Passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. Key figures in the movement included Jean Arp, Johannes Baader, Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Emmy Hennings, Hannah Hch, 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 ralisme, pop art, and Fluxus.[20]
Avant-garde circles outside France knew of pre-war Parisian developments. They had seen (or participated in) Cubist exhibitions held at Galeries Dalmau, Barcelona (1912), Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin (1912), the Armory Show in New York (1913), SVU Mnes in Prague (1914), several Jack of Diamonds exhibitions in Moscow and at Moderne Kunstkring, Amsterdam (between 1911 and 1915). Futurism developed in response to the work of various artists. Dada subsequently combined these approaches.[17][22]
Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality.[7][8] For example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest "against this world of mutual destruction".[7]
According to Hans Richter Dada was not art: it was "anti-art".[21] Dada represented the opposite of everything which art stood for. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend.
Additionally, Dada attempted to reflect onto human perception and the chaotic nature of society. Tristan Tzara proclaimed, "Everything is Dada, too. Beware of Dada. Anti-dadaism is a disease: selfkleptomania, man's normal condition, is Dada. But the real Dadas are against Dada".[23]
A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that "Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, a "reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide".[25]
Years later, Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path... [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization... In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege."[25]
The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature, poetry, art manifestos, art theory, theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works.
The creations of Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray, and others between 1915 and 1917 eluded the term Dada at the time, and "New York Dada" came to be seen as a post facto invention of Duchamp. At the outset of the 1920s the term Dada flourished in Europe with the help of Duchamp and Picabia, who had both returned from New York. Notwithstanding, Dadaists such as Tzara and Richter claimed European precedence. Art historian David Hopkins notes:
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, Zrich, Berlin, Paris and others. There were regional differences like an emphasis on literature in Zrich and political protest in Berlin.[27]
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.[32]
There is some disagreement about where Dada originated. The movement is commonly accepted by most art historians and those who lived during this period to have identified with the Cabaret Voltaire (housed inside the Hollndische Meierei bar in Zrich) co-founded by poet and cabaret singer Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball.[33] 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 Zrich. 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 Zrich of artists like Tzara and Janco.[34]
The name Cabaret Voltaire was a reference to the French philosopher Voltaire, whose novel Candide mocked the religious and philosophical dogmas of the day. Opening night was attended by Ball, 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 "vaudevilleian excess" to subvert the conventions they believed had caused the Great War.[35] 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:[36]
We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin again after the tabula rasa. At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shocking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order.
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.[35] 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.[38][39]
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.
After the fighting of the First World War had ended in the armistice of November 1918, most of the Zrich 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 Zrich into the 1920s.
Raoul 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:[41]
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.[42] 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".[43]
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