c. 1916–1924

Dada

In the middle of the First World War, artists and writers who had fled the war met in Zurich. To a world that had steered itself into the abyss with reason and order, they responded with nonsense, chance and provocation. Dada is less a style than an attitude, and it is still changing art today.

A cabaret in the Spiegelgasse

Zurich, 5 February 1916. In a back room in the Spiegelgasse, the poet Hugo Ball and the singer Emmy Hennings opened an artists’ venue, the Cabaret Voltaire. In neutral Switzerland, young people from all over Europe who had escaped the war gathered: the Romanian Tristan Tzara, the Alsatian Hans Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, who had come from Berlin, the painter Marcel Janco. In the evenings there was reading, singing, drumming and dancing.

In June 1916 Ball appeared in a costume of stiff cardboard that made him look like a cardboard bishop. He recited verses without words: “gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori”. Ball believed he had invented a new genre, the sound poem, though Paul Scheerbart and Christian Morgenstern had anticipated it.

A word without meaning

Those involved told different stories about where the name Dada came from. According to a well-known version, a paper knife was stuck into a dictionary at random and landed on the French “dada”, hobby-horse. In Romanian and Russian it means “yes, yes”; in German it sounds like baby talk. Precisely this openness of meaning suited it. Dada did not want to explain anything, but to shake language itself, which had been abused in war propaganda and heroic speeches.

Chance as method

Hans Arp let scraps of paper fall onto a sheet and glued them where they landed. Tristan Tzara recommended writing a poem by cutting a newspaper article into words, shaking them in a bag and drawing them out one by one. The Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp danced at Dada evenings in Zurich, designed marionettes and textiles, and created abstract compositions that are now among the most important works of early abstraction.

Berlin: Dada turns political

In 1918 Huelsenbeck brought Dada to Berlin. In the city of revolution and street fighting, the movement became biting and political. Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, George Grosz and John Heartfield developed photomontage: they cut pictures out of newspapers and magazines and assembled them into new, often satirical images. Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife takes aim at the military, politicians and bourgeoisie of the young Weimar Republic.

In 1920 the First International Dada Fair at Otto Burchard’s gallery in Berlin showed almost 200 works. From the ceiling hung a dummy in an officer’s uniform with a pig’s head. The organisers were later charged with insulting the army.

Cologne and Hanover

In Cologne, Max Ernst and Johannes Theodor Baargeld founded a Dada group of their own. In 1920 they mounted an exhibition in the courtyard of a pub, entered through a men’s lavatory. The police closed it temporarily.

In Hanover, Kurt Schwitters worked on his own. He never joined the Berlin Dadaists; Huelsenbeck in particular kept his distance. He developed an art of his own and called it “Merz”, a fragment of the words “Commerz- und Privatbank”. He glued tickets, sweet wrappers and pieces of wood into pictures and over many years built the Merzbau in his house, a walk-in spatial sculpture destroyed in a bombing raid in 1943.

New York: the readymade

In New York, almost at the same time, a Dada scene formed around Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia. In 1917 Duchamp submitted a standard urinal titled Fountain under the name “R. Mutt” to an exhibition that had promised to show every work without a jury. It was not exhibited. The original is lost; it is known through a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz and through later replicas. Some researchers suspect that the idea may have come from the poet and artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. This has not been proven.

From Dada to Surrealism

From 1920, Tzara, Picabia and young poets such as André Breton met in Paris. But the group soon fell out. Breton turned away from pure nonsense and in 1924 founded Surrealism, which took up many of Dada’s ideas but shaped them into a programme.

Why it still matters

Dada asked what art actually is, and left the answer open. Collage and photomontage, performance and sound poetry, the readymade and the art of chance: hardly any movement produced so many forms in so short a time that are still in use today. Fluxus, Pop Art and Conceptual Art are scarcely conceivable without Dada.