Dadaism

In reaction against World War 1, the Dada movement claimed to be anti-art. It had a very strong and destructive element. Dada writers and artists were concerned with shock, protest and nonsense. They rebelled bitterly against the horror that is WW1, the decadence of European society, the shallowness of blind faith in technological progress and the inadequacy of religion and conventional moral codes of an continent in upheaval. They rejected all tradition and sought complete freedom.

This movement developed spontaneously as a literary movement. This occurred after Hugo Ball, a poet, opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland. This was a gathering place for independent young poets, painters and musicians.

Tristan Tzara, a young and volatile Paris-based Romanian poet who edited the periodical DADA since July 1917, was perceived to be Dada’s guiding spirit. He explored sound-, nonsense-, and chance poetry in a joined journey with other Dada artists. He published numerous manifestos and contributed handsomely to all major Dada publications and events. Dada artist’s graphic works are characteristics by chance placement and absurd titles. The origins of the name Dada couldn’t even be confirmed or agreed upon by Dadaists, such was the anarchy of the movement.

Marcel Duchamp, a French painter, became its most prominent visual artist. Earlier, cubism had influenced his analysis of subjects as geometric planes, while futurism inspired him to convey times and motion. Being Dada’s most articulate spokesman, Duchamp perceived art and life were processes of random chance and willful choice. Artistic acts became matters of individual decision and selection. This philosophy of absolute freedom allowed Duchamp to create ready-made sculptures such as a bicycle wheel mounted on a wooden stool or even exhibit found objects, such as a urinal, as art.

Alfred Stieglitz, photograph of The Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp, 1917.

When an object is removed from its usual context, we suddenly

see it with fresh eyes and respond to its intrinsic visual properties.

Dada quickly spread from Zurich to other European cities. Dadaist claimed that they were not creating art but mocking and defaming a society gone insane. Despite of this, Dadaist produced meaningful visual art and influenced graphic design. They claimed to have invented photomontage, a technique of manipulation found photographic images to created jarring juxtapositions and chance associations. This medium was practiced beautifully in the works of Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch as early as 1918.

Hannah Höch, Da--dandy, collage and photomontage, 1919. 

Images and materials are recycled, with both chance juxtapositions

and planned decisions contributing to the creative process.

Kurt Schwitters, from Hanover in Germany, create a nonpolitical offshoot of Dada, which he dubbed as Merz. He gave Merz meaning as the title of a one-man art movement. It began 1919, his Merz pictures were collage materials to compose color against colour, form against form and textures against textures. His complex designs combined Dada’s elements of nonsense, surprise and chance with strong design properties. Between the years of 1923 and 1932, Schwitters published 24 issues the periodical Merz. It was during this time that he ran a successful graphic design studio and the Hanover employed him as a typography consultant for several years. But when he tried to join the Dada movement, labeling himself as the artist who nails his images together, he was refused membership for being to conservative.

 

Kurt Schwitters, pages from Merz 11, 1924.

 Ads for Pelikan tusche and inks demonstrate Schwitters’s 

growing interest in constructivism during the 1920s.

Schwitters wrote and designed poetry that played sense against nonsense. He defined poetry as the interaction of elements such as letters, syllables, words and sentences. In the 1920’s his works was influenced by the development of constructivism. In 1940 he fled to the British Isles where he spent his last years and reverted to traditionalist painting.

John Heartfield, Weiland Herzfelde and Georges Grosz, all of which were Berlin Dadaists, held vigorous revolutionary political beliefs and oriented many of their artistic activities toward visual communications to raise public consciousness and promote social change.

Heartfield used harsh disjunctions od photomontage as a potent propaganda weapon. He also introduced innovations in the preparation of mechanical art for the offset printing of his posters, book and magazine covers, political illustrations and cartoons. His montages are the most urgent in the history of the technique.

Heartfield didn’t take photographs or retouched images, but worked directly with glossy prints acquired from magazines and newspapers. He only occasionally commissioned a needed image from a photographer.

John Heartfield, cover for AIZ, 1934. 

Shells form a cathedral to symbolize the mentality of military

expansion and the arms race. A swastika, dollar mark,

and pound sign top the towers.

John Heartfield, anti-Nazi propaganda poster, 1935.

The headline, “Adolf, the Superman: Swallows gold and talks tin’”

is visualized by a photomontage X-ray of Hitler showing an

esophagus of gold coins.

Weiland Herzfelde was a critic, poet and publisher. He initiated the Malik Verlag publishing house, an important avant-garde publisher for Dada, as well as left-wing political propaganda and experimental literature.

Georges Grosz, a painter and graphic artist, was closely associated with the Herzfelde brothers. He attacked corrupt society with satire and caricatures and advocated a classless social system. His drawings project the angry intensity of deep political convictions in what he perceived to be a decadent, degenerate milieu.

"The Guilty one remains unknown" by George Grosz, 1919	“Pimps of Death” by Georges Grosz, 1919

Dada was a hugely liberating movement that continued to inspire innovation and rebellion. Dada was born in protest against war and its destructive and exhibitionist activities became more absurd and extreme after the war ended. Controversies and disagreements broke out among its members, which caused the movement to split into two factions

André Benton, a French poet and writer, was also associated with Dada and emerged as a new leader who believed that Dada had lost it relevance. He saw the necessity of Dada taking one new directions. Having pushed its negative activities to the limit, lacking a unified leadership and with its members facing the new ideas that eventually led to surrealism, Dada foundered and ceased to exist as the movement as a whole ended in 1922. Despite of this, Heartfield and Schwitters continued to evolved and produced the finest work after the movement’s demise. Dada’s rejection of art and tradition enabled it to enrich the vocabulary started by futurism and Dadaists helped strip typographic design of its traditional precepts. Dada also continued cubism’s concept of letterforms as concrete visual shapes, not just phonetic symbols.