Dada

Dada. A movement in European art (with manifestations also in New York), c.1915–c.1922, characterized by a spirit of anarchic revolt against traditional values. It arose from a mood of disillusionment engendered by the First World War, to which some artists reacted with irony, cynicism, and nihilism. Originally Dada appeared in two neutral countries (Switzerland and the USA), but near the end of the war it spread to Germany and subsequently to a few other countries. The unprecedented carnage of the war led the Dadaists to question the values of the society that had created it and to find them morally bankrupt. Their response was to go to extremes of buffoonery and provocative behaviour to shock people out of corruption and complacency. One of their prime targets was the institutionalized art world, with its bourgeois ideas of taste and concern with market values. The Dadaists deliberately flouted accepted standards of beauty and they exaggerated the role of chance in artistic creation. Group activity was regarded as more important than individual works, and traditional media such as painting and sculpture were largely abandoned in favour of techniques and devices such as collage, photomontage, and ready-mades, in which there was no concern for fine materials or craftsmanship; in literature the nonsense poem was a characteristic form of expression. Although the Dadaists scorned the art of the past, their methods and manifestos—particularly the techniques of outrage and provocation—owed much to Futurism; however, Dada's nihilism was very different from Futurism's militant optimism.

European Dada was founded in Zurich in 1915 by a group of artists and writers including Hans Arp, the German painter, sculptor, and film-maker Hans Richter (1888–1976), and the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara (1896–1963). According to the most frequently cited of several accounts of how the name (French for ‘hobby-horse’) originated, it was chosen by inserting a penknife at random in the pages of a dictionary, thus symbolizing the anti-rational stance of the movement. By the end of the war the movement was spreading to Germany, and there were significant Dada activities in three German cities: Berlin, Cologne, and Hanover. In Berlin the movement had a strong political dimension that was expressed particularly through the brilliant photomontages of Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971) and John Heartfield and through the biting social satire of Otto Dix and George Grosz; eventually it gave way to Neue Sachlichkeit. In Cologne a brief Dada movement (1919–20) was centred on two figures: Arp, who moved there from Zurich when the war ended; and Max Ernst, who made witty and provocative use of collage and organized one of Dada's most notorious exhibitions, at which axes were provided for visitors to smash the works on show. In Hanover Kurt Schwitters was the only important Dada exponent but one of the most dedicated of all.

Dada in New York arose independently of the European movement and virtually simultaneously. It was mainly confined to the activities of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia; their work tends to be more whimsical and less violent than that of their counterparts in Europe, although they still liked to shock. Duchamp was the most influential of all exponents of Dada and Picabia was the most vigorous in promoting its ideas, forming a link between the European and American movements. He founded his Dada periodical 391 in Barcelona and he introduced the movement to Paris in 1919. In Paris the movement was mainly literary in its emphasis, and its tendency towards the fanciful and the absurd formed the basis for Surrealism, which was officially launched there in 1924 but began to emerge a few years earlier. Other Dada groups appeared in Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. There was a Dada festival in Prague in 1921, in which Hausmann and Schwitters participated, and an international Dada exhibition was held in Paris in 1922. However, by this time the impetus was flagging, and at a meeting in Weimar in 1922, attended by Arp, Schwitters, and others, Tzara delivered a funeral oration on the movement.

Although it was fairly short-lived and confined to a few main centres, Dada was highly influential in its questioning and debunking of traditional concepts and methods, setting the agenda for much subsequent artistic experiment. Its techniques involving accident and chance were of great importance to the Surrealists and were also later exploited by the Abstract Expressionists. Conceptual art, too, has its roots in Dada. The spirit of the Dadaists, in fact, has never completely disappeared, and its tradition has been sustained in, for example, Junk sculpture and Pop art, which in the USA was sometimes known as Neo-Dada.