Dada for beginners: art against a world at war

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

In 1916, while millions of young men were dying in the trenches, a small group of refugees in neutral Zurich decided that a civilization able to do this had lost its reason. If reason led to the Somme and Verdun, they would make art from nonsense, chance and laughter. They called it Dada. It was a protest, a joke and a kind of exorcism, and it changed what we are allowed to call art. Within a few years it had spread to Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, Paris and New York, each city giving it a different temper.

Three layers

Historical What the records show. Later tradition The legends. Modern What we have inherited.

The Cabaret Voltaire

Historical In February 1916 the German poet Hugo Ball and the performer Emmy Hennings opened the Cabaret Voltaire in a bar in Zurich. Writers and artists from many countries gathered there: the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, the Alsatian artist Jean Arp, the Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber. Ball performed sound poems of invented words, such as “gadji beri bimba”, dressed in a stiff cardboard costume, and later wrote that he felt like a priest. Taeuber danced in masks and made abstract textiles and puppets.

Chance

Historical Arp made collages by dropping torn squares of paper onto a sheet and gluing them where they fell, or so the story goes. Tzara explained how to make a poem by cutting words out of a newspaper, shaking them in a bag and copying them out in the order they came. Chance took the artist’s ego out of the work, and let something else speak.

Berlin Dada and Hannah Höch

Historical After the war, Dada in Berlin became sharply political. Hannah Höch cut photographs from magazines and reassembled them into photomontages. Her large work of 1919 to 1920, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, now in Berlin, mixes politicians, machines, dancers and slogans. The men of Berlin Dada did not always treat her as an equal, and she said so. In Hanover, Kurt Schwitters built collages from tram tickets and scraps he called Merz.

Duchamp and the readymade

Historical In New York in 1917, a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt” was submitted to an exhibition that promised to show anything. It was rejected. Alfred Stieglitz photographed it, and the little magazine The Blind Man defended it: the artist had chosen it, and given it a new idea. Marcel Duchamp later claimed it as his. The original is lost; the ones in museums are replicas from the 1950s and 1960s.

Later tradition A letter Duchamp wrote to his sister in 1917 says a female friend sent it in. Some historians think that friend was the poet and artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who made her own found-object art. Others point to other explanations. I find the question fascinating and leave it open.

The esoteric angle

Historical Dada was not occult, but it touched the same nerve. Ball, who had studied mysticism, later returned to Catholic faith and wrote about saints. Chance procedures are a cousin of divination: you set up a method, let go of control and read what appears. The Surrealists would take this much further.

Modern Cut-up poems, collage and found-object art are all Dada children, and so is a lot of what witches do with altars made of found things.

Try it yourself

Make a Tzara poem. Take a page of a newspaper, cut out twenty words, put them in a bag, shake it, and copy them out in the order they come. Read the poem aloud. Does any line surprise you?

Before and after

Before this: Early abstraction.

After this: Surrealism.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.