Dada, or Dadaism, was an international art movement that began during World War I and its aftermath. It was influenced by the Futurist movement and first started in Zürich, Switzerland. Later, it spread quickly to Berlin, Paris, New York City, and other artistic centers in Europe and Asia. The principles of the Dada movement were first written in Hugo Ball's Dada Manifesto in 1916. Hugo Ball is considered the founder of the movement. Other important people in Dada 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 such as avant-garde and downtown music, as well as groups like Surrealism, nouveau réalisme, pop art, and Fluxus.

Etymology and naming

The name "Dada" does not have one clear origin. One common story says that Richard Huelsenbeck stuck a paper knife into a dictionary and found the French word "dada," which means "hobby horse." Other explanations suggest the name was chosen because it sounds childlike or because it can be understood in many languages, which matches the movement's global influence. The term "anti-art," often linked to artist Marcel Duchamp and his use of "readymades," refers to practices that question traditional ideas about what art should be.

Origins and aims

Dada began in Switzerland in 1916 among artists and writers who had moved there. Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings started the Cabaret Voltaire, a place for nightly shows and written statements. The group saw their work as a protest against war, national pride, and following the same cultural rules. They used silly ideas, random choices, and mocking to challenge popular artistic standards.

Techniques and media

Dadaists used many different types of art, such as sound poetry, collage, and photomontage. They also created art using found objects and assemblage, especially in Berlin. In New York and Paris, Marcel Duchamp's readymades became a symbol of Dada's rejection of traditional art.

Centres and chronology

Dada's main locations included Zürich (1916–), New York (around 1915–around 1923), Berlin (around 1918–around 1920), Cologne and Hannover (around 1919–around 1920), and Paris (around 1919–around 1924). Each place had different focuses, such as performances and poetry in Zürich, art with political messages in Berlin, and art using everyday objects in New York. By the mid-1920s, Dada in Paris became part of Surrealism. However, Dada's methods, like using existing art, performances, and criticizing institutions, influenced later art movements.

Publications and images

Dada spread through journals and small publications, such as Cabaret Voltaire, Dada, and 391, as well as posters, cards, and broadsides. These materials mixed words, pictures, and creative type designs.

History

Dada began during a time when other artistic and literary movements, such as Futurism, Cubism, and Expressionism, were popular. These movements were mainly centered in Italy, France, and Germany. However, unlike these earlier movements, Dada gained support worldwide, becoming an international movement. People who supported Dada lived in cities like New York, Zürich, Berlin, Paris, and others. There were differences in how Dada was practiced in different places, such as a focus on literature in Zürich and political protest in Berlin.

Some sources say Dada started in Romania, where a group of Jewish modernist artists, including Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Arthur Segal, moved to Zürich. Before World War I, similar art had already existed in cities like Bucharest. It is likely that the arrival of these artists in Zürich helped start the Dada movement.

Dada artists published manifestos, but the movement was not organized in a strict way. On July 14, 1916, Hugo Ball wrote the first Dada Manifesto. Tzara later wrote a second Dada Manifesto in 1918, which explained the idea of "Dadaist disgust." This idea described the conflict in avant-garde art between criticizing and accepting modern life. Dadaists believed modern art and culture were like choosing things like cake or cherries to fill an empty feeling, rather than being meaningful.

The Dada movement caused shock and controversy on purpose. Magazines and exhibits were banned, and some artists were even imprisoned. Over time, audiences became used to the surprises, and the movement's impact decreased. Dada was active during the political changes of World War I, which ended in 1918 and led to a new political order.

Most historians agree that the Dada movement began at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. This place was founded by poet Hugo Ball and cabaret singer Emmy Hennings. The name "Cabaret Voltaire" came from the French philosopher Voltaire, whose work criticized religious and philosophical ideas. Ball and Hennings invited artists of all kinds to perform, leading to a wide variety of creative work. The first night included performers like Tzara, Jean Arp, and Janco. These artists, along with others like Sophie Taeuber and Richard Huelsenbeck, used art to express their anger about the war and the ideas that caused it.

During World War I, the artists moved to Switzerland, a neutral country. They used abstract art, shocking performances, and "vaudevillian excess" to challenge the social and political ideas of their time. They believed these ideas came from a society that was too apathetic to stop war. Ball said Janco’s designs, inspired by Romanian folk art, showed the horror of the time. Performances often included music like the balalaika and African rhythms, as well as jazz.

After the Cabaret Voltaire closed, Dada activities moved to a new gallery, and Ball left for Bern. Tzara became a leader of the movement, sending letters to artists in France and Italy to spread Dada ideas. The Cabaret Voltaire later reopened and is still located at Spiegelgasse 1 in Zürich.

Zürich Dada, led by Tzara, published a magazine called Dada starting in July 1917. Five editions were made in Zürich, and two more in Paris. Other artists, like André Breton and Philippe Soupault, formed groups to help spread Dada’s influence.

After World War I ended in 1918, most Zürich Dadaists returned to their home countries. Some, like Sophie Taeuber, stayed in Zürich into the 1920s.

In Berlin, Dada was more political and focused on social issues. Richard Huelsenbeck described the city as one of intense hunger and hidden rage. Raoul Hausmann criticized Expressionism in his 1918 manifesto, arguing that Dada should use new techniques to explore art differently. Berlin Dadaists created art that challenged the ideas of the time, using satire, propaganda, and public protests.

In 1918, Huelsenbeck gave his first Dada speech in Berlin and later wrote a manifesto. After the Russian Revolution, Hannah Höch and George Grosz used Dada to support communist ideas. They developed a technique called photomontage with others like John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann. Johannes Baader, known as the "crowbar" of the Berlin movement, created the first giant collages.

After the war, Berlin Dadaists published political magazines and held the First International Dada Fair in 1920. This event included work by artists like Grosz, Hausmann, Höch, Baader, Huelsenbeck, and Heartfield, as well as Otto Dix, Francis Picabia, and Jean Arp.

Poetry

After World War I, Dadaists used methods such as shock, randomness, and rejecting traditional rules to challenge established artistic traditions. In 1920, Tzara suggested a technique where words from a newspaper were cut out and randomly chosen to create poetry. This process allowed the natural world to help shape the art, with the final poem being described as a "fruit" of the selected words.

In literature, Dadaists focused on poetry, especially a type called "sound poetry" created by Hugo Ball. These poems rejected traditional ideas about poetry, such as structure, order, and the relationship between sounds and meaning. Dadaists believed that the way language was used in everyday life, like in newspapers, made it lose its true value. By breaking down language and poetic rules, they aimed to return language to its simplest and most natural form. They stated, "With these sound poems, we wanted to replace a language that journalism had made empty and unusable."

Another Dadaist style was "simultaneous poems," which were performed by multiple speakers at the same time. Their overlapping voices created a confusing and chaotic sound. These poems reflected modern life, including themes like advertising, technology, and war. Unlike other movements, such as Expressionism, Dadaism did not criticize modern life or city living. Instead, it saw the busy, complex world of the city and future as a natural place where new ideas in art and life could grow.

Music

Dada was not limited to visual and literary arts; it also influenced sound and music. These movements had a big impact on 20th-century music, especially on avant-garde composers in New York during the mid-20th century, including Edgard Varèse, Stefan Wolpe, John Cage, and Morton Feldman. Kurt Schwitters created what he called sound poems, while Francis Picabia and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes wrote Dada music performed at the Festival Dada in Paris on May 26, 1920. Other composers, such as Erwin Schulhoff, Hans Heusser, and Alberto Savinio, also wrote Dada music. Members of Les Six worked with Dada artists, and their music was performed at Dada events. Erik Satie also explored Dadaist ideas during his career.

Legacy

The Dada movement was widespread but not stable. By 1924 in Paris, Dada was blending with Surrealism, and many artists moved on to other ideas, such as Surrealism, social realism, and other modernist styles. Some experts say that Dada was the start of postmodern art.

By the time World War II began, many European Dadaists had moved to the United States. Some artists, like Otto Freundlich and Walter Serner, were killed in Nazi death camps because Adolf Hitler saw Dada as a form of "degenerate art" and persecuted it. As people felt more hopeful after the war, the Dada movement became less active, and new art and literary movements emerged.

Dada has influenced many anti-art and political movements, such as the Situationist International and groups like the Cacophony Society that challenge culture. In 2012, the anarchist band Chumbawamba compared its own legacy to that of the Dada movement in a final statement.

At the same time that the Zürich Dadaists performed at the Cabaret Voltaire, Lenin was planning his revolution in Russia nearby. Playwright Tom Stoppard used this event as the basis for his 1974 play Travesties, which includes characters like Tzara, Lenin, and James Joyce. French writer Dominique Noguez humorously imagined Lenin as part of the Dada group in his book Lénine Dada (1989).

The old building of the Cabaret Voltaire fell into poor condition until 2002, when a group calling itself Neo-Dadaists, led by Mark Divo, occupied it for three months. The group included artists like Jan Thieler, Ingo Giezendanner, Aiana Calugar, Lennie Lee, and Dan Jones. After they were removed, the space became a museum about Dada. The work of Lee and Jones remained on the museum walls.

Several major exhibitions have explored Dada's impact on art and society. In 1967, a large Dada exhibition was held in Paris. In 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, along with the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, organized a Dada exhibition. The LTM label has released many Dada-related recordings, including interviews with artists like Tzara, Picabia, Schwitters, Arp, and Huelsenbeck, as well as music by artists such as Satie, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Picabia, and Nelly van Doesburg.

Musician Frank Zappa called himself a Dadaist after learning about the movement. David Bowie used William S. Burroughs' cut-up method to write lyrics. Kurt Cobain also used this method for many of his Nirvana lyrics, including In Bloom.

Art techniques developed

Dadaism mixed the ideas of literary and visual arts by using new methods. Dada artists used techniques from the cubist movement, such as pasting cut pieces of paper and other items like transportation tickets, maps, and plastic wrappers to show parts of everyday life instead of painting still life scenes. They also created a method called "chance collage," where torn paper pieces were dropped onto a larger sheet and then pasted where they landed.

The "cut-up technique" involved using words from newspapers, as described by Tristan Tzara in the Dada Manifesto. To make a Dadaist poem, one would cut out words from a newspaper article, place them in a bag, shake the bag, and then arrange the words in the order they came out. This process created poems that seemed original but were not meant to be taken seriously by others.

Dada artists, called "monteurs" (mechanics), used scissors and glue instead of paint to show their views of modern life through images from the media. A type of collage called "photomontage" used real or printed photographs from newspapers. For example, Max Ernst in Cologne used images from World War I to show the effects of war. In Berlin, photomontages were made like machines, but the way the pieces connected was more about ideas than real relationships.

Assemblages were three-dimensional versions of collages, made by combining everyday objects to create art that could be either meaningful or meaningless in relation to war. Objects were attached together using nails, screws, or other methods. These pieces could be viewed from all sides or hung on walls.

Marcel Duchamp saw ordinary objects, like those he collected, as art. He called these objects "readymades" and sometimes added signatures or titles to them, calling them "readymade aided" or "rectified readymades." One example was a urinal he turned upside down, signed "R. Mutt," and titled Fountain. He submitted this piece to an art exhibition, though it was not displayed.

Many young American artists, like Robert Rauschenberg, were influenced by Dadaism. They used found objects in their art to mix high and low culture, showing how different types of art could be connected.

Artists

The important contributions of female artists to the Dada movement were often ignored, and instead, their roles were linked mainly to their relationships with male Dadaists. Because of this, their work was not written about as much as it should have been. Other notable female artists include Suzanne Duchamp, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Beatrice Wood, Clara Tice, and Ella Bergmann-Michel.

Emmy Hennings was a German performer, poet, and co-founder of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich with her partner, Hugo Ball. A novel titled What Was Beautiful and Good by Jill Blocker describes her life. The book shows that Emmy was not only a muse or background figure to male artists but also a creative person in her own right—sensitive, spiritual, and ahead of her time.

— Julian Schütt, great-godson of Emmy Hennings

International groups, such as the Emmy Hennings Gesellschaft in Flensburg, Germany, work to honor and protect her legacy.

Hannah Höch of Berlin was the only known female Dadaist in Berlin during the movement. She was in a relationship with Raoul Hausmann, who was also a Dada artist. She expressed the same anti-war and anti-government ideas as other Dadaists but added a focus on women’s rights to her work. Her art, mostly collages and photomontages, used careful arrangements and detailed titles to highlight unfair treatment of women.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a Swiss artist, teacher, and dancer who created many types of art and crafts. While married to Dadaist Jean Arp, she was known in the Dada community for her dancing. She worked with choreographer Rudolf von Laban and was praised by Tristan Tzara for her dancing skills.

Mina Loy, born in London, was active in the literary part of the New York Dada scene. She wrote poetry, created Dada magazines, and acted in and wrote plays. She contributed writing to the Dada journal The Blind Man and to Marcel Duchamp’s Rongwrong.

Filmography

• 1968: Germany-DADA: An Alphabet of German DADAism on YouTube, Documentary by Universal Education, Presented by Kartes Video Communications, 56 minutes
• 1971: DADA "Archives du XXe siècle" on YouTube, A program produced by Jean José Marchand, directed by Philippe Collin and Hubert Knapp, This documentary was first broadcast on RTF on 28 March 1971, 267 minutes
• 2016: Das Prinzip Dada, Documentary by Marina Rumjanzewa [de], Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (Sternstunde Kunst [de]), 52 minutes (in German)
• 2016: Dada Art Movement History – "Dada on Tour" on YouTube, Bruno Art Group in collaboration with Cabaret Voltaire & Art Stage Singapore 2016, 27 minutes