Dada () or Dadaism was an international art movement that developed in the context of World War I, its aftermath, and the Futurist movement. First established in Zürich, Switzerland, it later quickly spread to Berlin, Paris, New York City and a variety of artistic centers in Europe and Asia.Mario de Micheli (2006). Las vanguardias artísticas del siglo XX. Alianza Forma. pp. 135–137. The Dada movement focused on rejecting prevailing ideas surrounding art, and more broadly in society. The Dada movement's principles were first collected in Hugo Ball's Dada Manifesto in 1916. Ball is seen as the founder of the Dada movement. Other key figures in the movement included Emmy Hennings, Jean Arp, Johannes Baader, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Richard Huelsenbeck, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Tristan Tzara, and Beatrice Wood, among others. The movement influenced later styles, like the avant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including Surrealism, nouveau réalisme, pop art, and Fluxus.Oxford Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art, Oxford University, pp. 171–173
In turn, it itself also did not arise out of nowhere. 35 years earlier, an art movement similar to Dadaism in general, called Fumism, was known in Paris; some of the old Fumists were in close contact with the new Dadaists.Yuri Khanon: «Dada before Dada», Chapter: «..Fumists..» (in Russian)
Etymology There is no single agreed origin for the name Dada. One widely repeated story holds that Richard Huelsenbeck jabbed a paper knife into a dictionary, landing on the French word dada ("hobby horse"). Other accounts emphasize its infantile sound or its multilingual neutrality, aligning with the movement's internationalism. The related label "anti‑art"—often associated with Duchamp and the readymade—denotes practices that challenge accepted definitions of art.
Style Dada coalesced among émigré artists and writers in neutral Switzerland during 1916, with Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings founding the Cabaret Voltaire as a venue for nightly performances and manifestos. Participants framed their activity as a protest against war, nationalism, and cultural conformity, adopting strategies of nonsense, chance, and ridicule to negate prevailing aesthetic values.
Dadaists worked across media, including sound poetry, collage and photomontage (especially in Berlin), and the use of found objects and assemblage. In New York and Paris, Marcel Duchamp's readymades became emblematic of Dada's anti‑art stance.
Techniques Dadaism also blurred the line between literary and visual arts:
Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that laid the foundation for Surrealism.Marc Lowenthal, translator's introduction to Francis Picabia's I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation
Collage The Dadaists imitated the techniques developed during the cubist movement through the pasting of cut pieces of paper items, but extended their art to encompass items such as transportation tickets, maps, plastic wrappers, etc. to portray aspects of life, rather than representing objects viewed as still life. They also invented the "chance collage" technique, involving dropping torn scraps of paper onto a larger sheet and then pasting the pieces wherever they landed.
Cut-up technique Cut-up technique is an extension of collage to words themselves, Tristan Tzara describes this in the Dada Manifesto: TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. The poem will resemble you. And there you are – an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
Photomontage
The Dadaists – the "monteurs" (mechanics) – used scissors and glue rather than paintbrushes and paints to express their views of modern life through images presented by the media. A variation on the collage technique, photomontage utilized actual or reproductions of real photographs printed in the press. In Cologne, Max Ernst used images from the First World War to illustrate messages of the destruction of war. Although the Berlin photomontages were assembled, like engines, the (non)relationships among the disparate elements were more rhetorical than real.
Assemblage The assemblages were three-dimensional variations of the collage – the assembly of everyday objects to produce meaningful or meaningless (relative to the war) pieces of work including war objects and trash. Objects were nailed, screwed or fastened together in different fashions. Assemblages could be seen in the round or could be hung on a wall.
Readymades Marcel Duchamp began to view the manufactured objects of his collection as objects of art, which he called "readymades". He would add signatures and titles to some, converting them into artwork that he called "readymade aided" or "rectified readymades". Duchamp wrote: "One important characteristic was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the 'readymade.' That sentence, instead of describing the object like a title, was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal. Sometimes I would add a graphic detail of presentation which in order to satisfy my craving for alliterations, would be called 'readymade aided."The Writings of Marcel Duchamp" One such example of Duchamp's readymade works is the urinal that was turned onto its back, signed "R. Mutt", titled Fountain, and submitted to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition that year, though it was not displayed.
Many young artists in America embraced the theories and ideas espoused by Duchamp. Robert Rauschenberg in particular was very influenced by Dadaism and tended to use found objects in his collages as a means of dissolving the boundary between high and low culture.
Poetry
Dadaists used shock, nihilism, negativity, paradox, randomness, subconscious forces, anti-poetry and antinomianism to subvert established traditions in the aftermath of the Great War. Tzara's 1920 manifesto proposed cutting words from a newspaper and randomly selecting fragments to write poetry, a process in which the synchronous universe itself becomes an active agent in creating the art. A poem written using this technique would be a "fruit" of the words that were clipped from the article.
In literary arts, Dadaists focused on poetry, particularly the so-called sound poetry invented by Hugo Ball. Dadaist poems attacked traditional conceptions of poetry, including structure, order, as well as the interplay of sound and the meaning of language. For Dadaists, the existing system by which information is articulated robs language of its dignity. The dismantling of language and poetic conventions are Dadaist attempts to restore language to its purest and most innocent form: "With these sound poem, we wanted to dispense with a language which journalism had made desolate and impossible."
Simultaneous poems (or poèmes simultanés) were recited by a group of speakers who, collectively, produced a chaotic and confusing set of voices. These poems are considered manifestations of modernity including advertising, technology, and conflict. Unlike movements such as Expressionism, Dadaism did not take a negative view of modernity and the urban life. The chaotic urban and futuristic world is considered natural terrain that opens up new ideas for life and art.
Music Dada was not confined to the visual and literary arts; its influence reached into sound and music. These movements exerted a pervasive influence on 20th-century music, especially on mid-century avant-garde composers based in New York—among them Edgard Varèse, Stefan Wolpe, John Cage, and Morton Feldman. Kurt Schwitters developed what he called sound poems, while Francis Picabia and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes composed Dada music performed at the Festival Dada in Paris on 26 May 1920. Other composers such as Erwin Schulhoff, Hans Heusser and Alberto Savinio all wrote Dada music, while members of Les Six collaborated with members of the Dada movement and had their works performed at Dada gatherings. Erik Satie also dabbled with Dadaist ideas during his career.
Circulation Dada's principal centres included Zürich (1916–), New York (), Berlin (), Cologne and Hannover (), and Paris (), each with distinct emphases—from performance and poetry in Zürich to politically charged photomontage in Berlin and object‑based experiments in New York. By the mid‑1920s, Dada's energies in Paris merged into Surrealism, while its strategies of appropriation, performance, and institutional critique continued to inform later avant‑gardes.
Dada circulated through journals and small‑press publications (e.g., Cabaret Voltaire, Dada, 391) posters, cards, and broadsides that combined texts, images, and typographic experiments.
History Dada emerged from a period of artistic and literary movements like Futurism, Cubism and Expressionism; centered mainly in Italy, France and Germany respectively, in those years. However, unlike the earlier movements, Dada was able to establish a broad base of support, giving rise to a movement that was international in scope. Its adherents were based in cities all over the world including New York, Zürich, Berlin, Paris and others. There were regional differences like an emphasis on literature in Zürich and political protest in Berlin.
Some sources propose a Romanian origin, arguing that Dada was an offshoot of a vibrant artistic tradition that transposed to Switzerland when a group of Jewish modernist artists, including Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Arthur Segal settled in Zürich. Before World War I, similar art had already existed in Bucharest and other Eastern European cities; it is likely that Dada's catalyst was the arrival in Zürich of artists like Tzara and Janco.
Prominent Dadaists published manifestos, but the movement was loosely organized and there was no central hierarchy. On 14 July 1916, Ball originated the seminal Dada Manifesto. Tzara wrote a second Dada manifesto,"Tristan Tzara: Dada Manifesto 1918" by Charles Cramer and Kim Grant, Khan Academy. (Text at upenn.edu.) . (Text ) considered important Dada reading, which was published in 1918. Tzara's manifesto articulated the concept of "Dadaist disgust"—the contradiction implicit in avant-garde works between the criticism and affirmation of modernist reality. In the Dadaist perspective modern art and culture are considered a type of fetishization where the objects of consumption (including organized systems of thought like philosophy and morality) are chosen, much like a preference for cake or cherries, to fill a void.
The shock and scandal the movement inflamed was deliberate; Dadaist magazines were banned and their exhibits closed. Some of the artists even faced imprisonment. These provocations were part of the entertainment but, over time, audiences' expectations eventually outpaced the movement's capacity to deliver. As the artists' well-known "sarcastic laugh" started to come from the audience, the provocations of Dadaists began to lose their impact. Dada was an active movement during years of political turmoil from 1916 when European countries were actively engaged in World War I, the conclusion of which, in 1918, set the stage for a new political order.
Zürich