Weird Hat Thing. Mustache Mona Lisa. Anti-Art. WW1. Location. Dada - Art History Basics on Dadaism (1916-1923) Dada was, officially, not a movement, its artists not artists and its art not art.
That sounds easy enough, doesn't it? Of course, there is a bit more to the story of Dadaism than this simplistic explanation. Dada was a literary and artistic movement born in Europe at a time when the horror of World War I was being played out in what amounted to citizens' front yards. Due to the war, a number of artists, writers and intellectuals -- notably of French and German nationality -- found themselves congregating in the refuge that Zurich (in neutral Switzerland) offered. Far from merely feeling relief at their respective escapes, this bunch was pretty ticked off that modern European society would allow the war to have happened.
Banding together in a loosely-knit group, these writers and artists used any public forum they could find to (metaphorically) spit on nationalism, rationalism, materialism and any other -ism which they felt had contributed to a senseless war. Tzara, "Dadaism" *There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass.
It is the work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away. Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed. On the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough, bouncing, riding on hiccups. I say unto you: there is no beginning and we do not tremble, we are not sentimental.
I destroy the drawers of the brain and of social organization: spread demoralization wherever I go and cast my hand from heaven to hell, my eyes from hell to heaven, restore the fecund wheel of a universal circus to objective forces and the imagination of every individual. Wikipedia. Dada (/ˈdɑːdɑː/) or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century.
Dada in Zurich, Switzerland, began in 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter, but the height of New York Dada was the year before, in 1915.[1] The term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 when he created his first readymades.[2] Dada, in addition to being anti-war, had political affinities with the radical left and was also anti-bourgeois.[3] Francis Picabia, Dame! Illustration for the cover of the periodical Dadaphone, n. 7, Paris, March 1920 Overview[edit] Francis Picabia, (left) Le saint des saints c'est de moi qu'il s'agit dans ce portrait, 1 July 1915; (center) Portrait d'une jeune fille americaine dans l'état de nudité, 5 July 1915: (right) J'ai vu et c'est de toi qu'il s'agit, De Zayas!
Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. To quote Dona Budd's The Language of Art Knowledge, Zurich[edit]