Dada

Dada

Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centers in Zürich, Switzerland at the Cabaret Voltaire; New York Dada began circa 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris.

Tristan Tzara

French-Romanian poet, Zurich Dada: Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist.

Ernst, 1 Copper Plate 1 Zinc Plate 1 Rubber Cloth 2 Calipers 1 Drainpipe Telescope 1 Pipe Man, 1920.

Gouache, ink, and pencil on printed reproduction Ernst invented his own mechanistic forms as stand-ins for the human body. the artist took a page from a 1914 scientific text illustrating chemistry and biology equipment and, by overpainting certain areas and inserting his own additions, he transformed goggles and other laboratory utensils into a pair of hilarious creatures before a landscape.

Hugo Ball

Hugo Ball a philosopher and mystic as well as a poet introduced abstract poetry at the Cabaret Voltaire with his poem O Gadji Beri Bimba in June 1916.

Rayograph

Man Ray made his "rayographs" without a camera by placing objects-such as the thumbtacks, coil of wire, and other circular forms used here-directly on a sheet of photosensitized paper and exposing it to light.

Heartfield, Little German Christmas Tree, 1934

Photomontage he altered the words of a traditional German Christmas carol and twisted the form of a Christmas tree into a swastika tree. the heading reads: O Christmas tree in German soil, how crooked are your branches The text below states that in the future all trees must be cut in this form.

George Grosz, German

The principal painters associated with the New Objectivity partially supporting himself with drawings of the shady side of Berlin nightlife was obviously affected by Cubism and its offshoots, particularly Robert Delaunay and Italian Futurism After the war Grosz was drawn into Berlin Dada and its overriding leftwing direction. he expressed his most passionate convictions in drawings and paintings that continue an Expressionist tradition of savagely denouncing a decaying Germany of brutal profiteers and obscene prostitutes, and of limitless gluttony and sensuality in the face of abject poverty, disease, and death

Weimar Republic

Weimar Republic: an unofficial, historical designation for the German state as it existed between 1919 and 1933

Zurich Dada

Zurich Dada 1916 was primarily a literary manifestation, whose ideological roots were in the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, in the theater of Alfred Jarry, and in the critical ideas of Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire. In painting and sculpture, until the Cubist Francis Picabia arrived, the only real innovations were the free-form reliefs and collages "arranged according to the laws of chance" by Jean Arp three factors shaped their creative efforts: bruitisme (noise-music), simultaneity, and chance

mechanomorphic

having the form or qualities of a machine : described in mechanical terms. a mechanomorphic God.

Man Ray, Gift, replica of lost original of 1921, c. 1958. Flatiron with nails

which exists today as a replica of the 1921 original, was made in the spirit of Duchamp's slightly altered or "assisted" readymades. With characteristic black humor, Man Ray subverted an iron's normal utilitarian function by attaching fourteen tacks to its surface, transforming this familiar object into something alien and threatening.

Laws of Chance

Arp felt, were more in tune with the workings of nature. By relinquishing a certain amount of control, he was distancing himself from the creative process

Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916

Arp produced collages of torn, rectangular pieces of colored papers scattered in a vaguely rectangular arrangement on a paper ground He tore up a drawing that displeased him and dropped the pieces on the floor, then suddenly saw in the way they landed the solution to the problems with which he had been struggling

Schwitters, Merzbild 25A (Das Sternenbild) (Stars Picture), 1920.

Assemblage Schwitters did not restrict himself to the two-dimensional printed imagery He incorporates rope, wire mesh, paint, and other materials, indicating a strong concern for physicality in his surfaces. The snatches of text from German newspapers in this Merzbild can be decoded as referring to recent political events in Germany.

Schwitters, Picture with Light Center, 1919

Collage of cut-and-pasted papers and oil on cardboard extract elegance from these lowly found materials. He carefully structured his circular and diagonal elements within a Cubist-derived grid, which he then reinforced by applying paint over the collage, creating a glowing, inner light that radiates from the picture's center.

conceptual art

Conceptual art, sometimes simply called conceptualism, is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns

Morton Schamberg, God, 1917, American artist, painter and photographer one of the most daring of all Dada objects

Consisting of an inverted household plumbing trap mounted on a wooden miter box, this construction offers a more tongue-in-cheek eulogy to the machine. Members of the New York Dadaists, Morton Schamberg and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven used irony and irreverence to topple artistic conventions.

ready-mades; assisted ready-mades

Duchamp's most outrageous and far-reaching assault on artistic tradition by far was his invention in 1913 of the "readymade," defined by the Surrealist André Breton as "manufactured objects promoted to the dignity of art through the choice of the artist." that art could be made out of virtually anything, and that it requires little or no manipulation by the artist. An "assisted" readymade also required some intervention by the artist, as when Duchamp mounted an old bicycle wheel on an ordinary kitchen stool Because the readymade could be repeated indiscriminately, Duchamp decided to make only a small number yearly, saying, "for the spectator even more than for the artist, art is a habit-forming drug and I wanted to protect my readymade against such contamination."

Jean (Hans) Arp

French-German was the major visual artist to emerge from Zurich Dada. He was born in Strasbourg, then a German city in the disputed region of Alsace but subsequently recovered by France. Swiss landscape seems to have made a lasting impression on him, and the abstraction to which he eventually turned was based on nature and organic shapes He experimented with geometric abstraction based on Cubism, and by 1915, in Zurich, he was producing drawings and collages whose shapes suggest leaves and insect or animal life but which were actually abstractions. Arp further clarified his ideas:

Hausmann, The Spirit of Our Time (Mechanical Head), 1919

Hausmann created a kind of three-dimensional collage. To a wooden mannequin head he attached real objects, including a metal collapsing cup, a tape measure, labels, and a pocketbook. implied that human beings had been reduced to mindless robots, devoid of individual will

Hugo Ball, reciting the poem Karawane at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916. Photograph

Hugo Ball, reciting the poem Karawane at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916. Photograph Neo-Dada art of the Wrapped in a cardboard costume, he recited his "sound poem," Karawane, from the two flanking music stands. Ball's thesis—that conventional language had no more place in poetry than the outworn human image in painting—produced a chant of more or less melodic syllables without meaning such as "zimzim urallala zimzim zanzibar zimlalla zam...." Despite the frenzied reactions of the audience to this experiment, its influence—like much else presented at the Cabaret Voltaire—affected the subsequent course of twentieth-century poetry.

Cabaret Voltaire

In February 1996， Hugo Ball founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich as a meeting place for these free spirits and a stage from which existing values could be attacked. creation of an art that was more cerebral than visual

Ernst, Celebes, 1921

Is a mechanized monster whose trunk-tail-pipeline sports a cowskull-head above an immaculate white collar. A headless classical torso beckons to the beast with an elegantly gloved hand. The images are unrelated on a rational level; some are threatening (the elephant), while others are less explicable (the beckoning torso). is informed by a collage aesthetic as well as by the early paintings of De Chirico; it appeals to the level of perception below consciousness.

Society of Independent Artists

It has been called the most important exhibition ever held in the United States. TheArmory Show was a stunning exhibition of nearly 1,400 objects that included both American and European works, but it is best known for introducing the American public to the new in art: European avant-garde paintings and sculpture.

Photomontage

Photomontage: relies on material appropriated from its normal context, such as magazine illustration, and introduces it into a new, disjunctive context, thereby investing it with new meaning Höch here presents a satirical panorama of Weimar society. She includes photographs of her Dada colleagues, Communist leaders, dancers, sports figures, and Dada slogans in varying typefaces. At the very center of the composition is a photo of a popular dancer who seems to toss her out-of-scale head into the air. photographs of gears and wheels: both a tribute to technology and a means of imparting a sense of dynamic, circular movement. her colleagues is the preponderance of female imagery in her work, indicative of her interest in the new roles of women in postwar Germany

John Heartfield, German

Photomontages He composed images from the clippings he took from newspapers, retouching them in order to blend the parts into a facsimile of a single, integrated image. These images were photographed and made into photogravures for mass reproduction.

Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23. Oil, lead wire, foil, dust, and varnish on glass

This painting on glass, which was in gestation for several years, is the central work of his career. The glass support dispensed with the need for a background since, by virtue of its transparency, it captured the "chance environment" of its surroundings. The Large Glass depicts an elaborate and unconsummated mating ritual between the bride in the upper half of the glass, and the uniformed bachelors in the lower half. These forms are rendered with a diagrammatic precision that underscores the pseudoscientific nature of their activities. The final touch came when the Glass was broken while in transit and was thereby webbed with a network of cracks. Duchamp is reported to have commented with satisfaction, "Now it is complete."

Zurich

Zurich, in neutral Switzerland, was the first important center in which an art, a literature, and even a music and a theater of the fantastic and the absurd arose. In 1915 a number of artists and writers, almost all in their twenties and in one way or another displaced by the war, converged on this city. Birthplace of Dada

Picabia, Ideal, 1915

a broken bellows camera, equipped with an automobile brake in working position and a gear shift in neutral, signifying the frustrations experienced by someone trying to present experimental art in philistine America.

Grosz, Republican Automatons, 1920

applies the style and motifs of De Chirico and the Metaphysical School to political satire, as empty headed, blank-faced, and mutilated automatons parade loyally through the streets of a mechanistic metropolis on their way to vote as they are told.

Duchamp, Tu m', 1918. Oil on canvas

his last painting on canvas It includes a compendium of Duchampian images: cast shadows, drawn in pencil, of a corkscrew and two readymades, Bicycle Wheel and Hat Rack; a pyramid of color samples (through which an actual bolt is fastened); a trompe l'oeil tear in the canvas "fastened" by three real safety pins; an actual bottle brush; a sign painter's hand (rendered by a professional sign painter), as well as the outlines at the left and right of 3 Standard Stoppages.

Marcel Duchamp 1912-18, 51

ideas comparable to those that would define Zurich Dada one year later were fermenting independently in a small, cohesive group in New York.

Grosz, Dedication to Oskar Panizza, 1917

is his most Cubist Inspired work. The title refers to a writer whose work had been censored at the end of the nineteenth century. But the larger subject, according to Grosz, was "Mankind gone mad." the dehumanized figures represent "Alcohol, Syphilis, Pestilence." The buildings lean crazily; an insane mob is packed around the black coffin on which Death sits triumphantly, swigging at a bottle; the faces are horrible masks; humanity is swept into a hell of its own making; and the figure of Death rides above it all. the artist controls the chaos with a geometry of the buildings and the planes into which he segments the crowd

Grosz, Fit for Active Service (The Faith Healers), 1916

one of the many political publications with which Grosz was involved. the macabre and his detestation of bureaucracy, with a fat complacent doctor pronouncing his "O.K." of a desiccated cadaver before arrogant Prussian-type officers

Merz-Column or Merzbau

the culmination of his attempts to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. He began the first one in his house in Hanover around 1920 as an abstract plaster sculpture with apertures dedicated to his Dadaist and Constructivist friends and containing objects commemorating them. Schwitters wrote, "valleys, hollows, caves appear, and these lead a life of their own within the overall structure. The juxtaposed surfaces give rise to forms twisting in every direction, spiraling upward."

Man Ray, Seguidilla, 1919. Airbrushed gouache

the first paintings made with an airbrush, which he called Aerographs. Normally reserved for commercial graphic work, the airbrush made possible the soft tonalities in the dancing fans and cones of Seguidilla The artist was delighted with his new discovery. "It was wonderful," he said, "to paint a picture without touching the canvas."

Berlin dada 1916-21 First International Dada Fair, 1920, Berlin

where the artists covered the walls of a Berlin gallery with photomontages, posters, and slogans like "Art is dead. Long live the new machine art of Tatlin." The rebellious members of Dada never espoused a clear program, and their goals were often ambiguous and sometimes contradictory: while they used art as a means of protest, they also questioned the very validity of artistic production.