Dada: Art as Protest against War and Reason

Dada is an art movement and protest that was born in Zürich in 1916 in the middle of the First World War. The Dadaists attacked the values that had led to the war and made fun of art itself with nonsense, collage, readymades and provocative performances.

Facts

Cabaret laughter in Zürich

During the First World War refugees, deserters and artists gathered in neutral Switzerland. In February 1916 Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, a tavern where poets and artists read sound poems, danced in masks and played music. Among them were Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck. The Swedish-born artist Viking Eggeling joined the circle in Zürich in 1918.

How the word dada arose is unclear. According to one story it was found when someone stuck a knife into a dictionary, and in French it means hobby-horse. According to another it is just two childish syllables. The very vagueness suits the movement, which wanted to lack meaning and which saw the war as proof that the rational society had collapsed.

Duchamp and the readymade

In New York Marcel Duchamp had begun even before 1916 to place ordinary objects in exhibition rooms and call them art. His Fountain of 1917, a urinal that he signed R. Mutt and submitted to an exhibition, was rejected by the organisers and is now one of the most famous artworks of the twentieth century. The idea of the readymade was that it is the artist’s choice and the context that make something art, not the skill of the hand.

Man Ray and Francis Picabia worked in the same spirit in New York, among other things with ironic machine pictures and photography without a camera. In 1919 Duchamp gave the Mona Lisa a moustache and a sexually suggestive title in a laconic joke about the saints of art.

Berlin, Hanover and politics

In Berlin Dada became political. George Grosz, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch made photomontages from newspaper clippings to mock militarism, the bourgeoisie and the Weimar Republic. Höch was the only woman in the Berlin group and cut together images of women, machines and politicians in works such as Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany. The first International Dada Fair was held in Berlin in 1920. Otto Dix painted the invalids of the war ruthlessly in a nearby spirit.

In Hanover Kurt Schwitters developed a Dada of his own under the name Merz, in which he joined tickets, newspapers and scraps into collages and built an entire room, the Merzbau. In Cologne Max Ernst worked; he soon moved on towards Surrealism.

The end and the legacy

Around 1922–1924 the movement came to an end, partly under its own power and partly when many of its members moved to Paris and joined Surrealism around André Breton. The Dadaists had said that Dada did not want to become a style, and the movement was sometimes called anti-art.

The legacy is large. The idea that art is a matter of concepts rather than craft leads straight into Conceptual art, and Pop Art went on putting everyday objects into art; see also Andy Warhol. René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images plays with similar thoughts about picture and word. Dada techniques such as photomontage and typographic experiments still shape graphic design, see typography in the design section, and the movement’s place in the interwar period stands for how art could respond to war and crisis. Read also about Futurism and modernism.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What did Duchamp call an ordinary object that he declared to be art?