The difference between Dada and Surrealism

The difference between Dada and Surrealism is that Dada was a protest and Surrealism a programme. Dada arose in 1916 during the First World War and wanted to demolish the rules of art with chance, nonsense and readymades. Surrealism was founded in 1924 by André Breton and wanted to explore the unconscious, the dream and desire. Several artists moved from one to the other.

Facts

Protest against programme

Dada was born at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in February 1916. Neutral Switzerland was full of refugees from the war, and a group of artists and poets, among them Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp, performed sound poems, nonsense and provocations. If reason had led to the trenches, they argued, reason was not to be trusted. Dada was against everything, even against itself, and refused to become a style.

Surrealism, by contrast, had a leader, a theory and a manifesto. André Breton, who had been involved in Paris Dada, wrote the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. He defined Surrealism as pure psychic automatism, a way of expressing the real functioning of thought without the control of reason. Where Dada wanted to tear down, Surrealism wanted to build something new out of the dream and the unconscious, inspired by Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis.

The object: readymade and dream object

Dada's best-known work is Fountain of 1917, a porcelain urinal that Marcel Duchamp signed R. Mutt and submitted to an exhibition in New York, where it was not shown. The point was not that the urinal was beautiful but that the artist's choice made it art. The readymade asks a question about the limits of art; it is an idea more than an image.

Surrealism's objects, by contrast, are charged with desire and unease. Meret Oppenheim's fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon of 1936 makes an everyday thing impossible to use and at the same time bodily. The object is meant to arouse not a question about art but a feeling, like a dream you cannot shake off.

The image: collage and dream painting

The Dadaists in Berlin worked with photomontage. Hannah Höch cut pictures out of newspapers and assembled them into sharp, political commentaries on the Weimar Republic, the role of women and the war. George Grosz drew the profiteers of society with a poisonous sting. The form is fragmented and unruly, and chance was welcome to decide.

Surrealist painting is often more meticulous than one would think. Salvador Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory in 1931 with melting clocks in a landscape of stillness, in an almost photographic technique. René Magritte wrote beneath a painted pipe that it is not a pipe, in The Treachery of Images. The other direction was automatic: Joan Miró and Max Ernst let chance and improvisation guide the hand, and Ernst rubbed out textures from wooden floors and leaves with frottage.

The people who changed camps

The boundary between the movements runs through the same people. Max Ernst was a Dadaist in Cologne and in 1922 moved to Paris, where he became one of Surrealism's most important painters. Man Ray was part of New York Dada alongside Duchamp and then became the Surrealists' photographer in Paris. Duchamp himself never joined Surrealism but helped design the great Surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1938.

In the app's network you can see how the artists are connected: teachers, friends and rivals, and how the threads run from Zurich and Berlin to Paris. The Swede Viking Eggeling was part of Zurich Dada and made abstract film. In the 1930s Swedish artists such as Erik Olson of the Halmstad Group took up Surrealism; see the 1930s.

The women in the movements

The history of the movements was long written as that of the men, but women were there from the start. Emmy Hennings helped found the Cabaret Voltaire, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp danced, wove and made abstract compositions in Zurich Dada. Hannah Höch was the only woman in the inner circle in Berlin and often had to fight to be taken seriously.

Surrealism celebrated woman as muse and dream, but several women became independent artists in their own right in or near the movement: Meret Oppenheim, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning and Lee Miller. Frida Kahlo was counted by Breton among the Surrealists and exhibited with them, but she herself rejected the label, saying that she painted her own reality, not dreams. Her The Two Fridas of 1939, with two self-portraits side by side whose exposed hearts are joined by a blood vessel, shows how close Surrealism and the personal could lie.

How to tell them apart

Ask what the work wants. If it wants to shock, mock or question art itself, often with humour and with everyday materials, it is probably Dada. If it wants to open a door to the dream, with enigmatic images, sexual undertones and a mood of unease, it is Surrealism. Dada is often roughly and quickly made, Surrealism often carefully painted.

The date helps too: a work from 1916–1922 is usually Dada, one from after 1924 usually Surrealism. Both left a great legacy. The readymade led to conceptual art and Pop art, the dream image to advertising, film and photography. Read more in the guides to Dada and Surrealism, and in the eras the avant-garde and the interwar years.

How to tell them apart

Exercise

A work from 1931 shows soft, melting clocks in a still landscape, carefully painted. Which movement does it belong to?