PrimeLuck ArtsDada
Dada was a protest movement against war and against accepted ideas of art. It used chance, humour and everyday objects to question what art is.
- Period
- Early twentieth-century modernism
- Approximate dates
- c. 1916 to c. 1924
- Place of origin
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Key regions
- Switzerland, Germany, France, United States
- Art forms
- Collage, photomontage, readymades, performance, poetry
- Major artists
- Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hoch, Hugo Ball, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters
Visual introduction
Fountain
Marcel Duchamp · 1917 · Readymade porcelain urinal · Original lost; replicas exist
An ordinary object signed and presented as art, the most famous challenge to what art is.
Uviolett
Kurt Schwitters · 1926 · Collage
Built from found paper and printed scraps, turning rubbish into art in the Dada spirit that Schwitters called Merz.
Merz 50 (Composition)
Kurt Schwitters · 1920s · Collage
Torn paper, tickets and found scraps arranged into a composition, a Dada approach that Schwitters named Merz.
Historical context
Dada began in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, among artists and writers who had escaped the First World War. They saw the war as the result of a society that trusted logic and nationalism, and they answered with nonsense and mockery.
The movement spread to Berlin, Cologne, Paris and New York. Duchamp's readymades, ordinary objects chosen and named as art, and Hoch's photomontages are still influential in conceptual art, collage and political art.
Visual characteristics
Method: collage, photomontage, assemblage, found objects and chance.
Attitude: playful, absurd and political, against tradition and the art market.
Idea over craft: the question of what counts as art matters more than skill or beauty.
Related movements
Sources and further reading
Further reading: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Tate, Art Terms. Smarthistory.