Dada Art

Dada is said to be a catalyst which helped poets, artists and disaffected intellectuals in a dozen countries during the Great War to focus their hatred and ideals into a programme of cultural action. Dada stands for exacerbated individualism, universal doubt and aggressive iconoclasm.

Its purpose was to ridicule what its participants considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world. In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchist in nature.

Tatlin At Home - Raoul Hausmann - 1920

Exposing the norms and rules of hierarchy, of order and discipline in society, of rationally controlled inspiration in imaginative expression, Dada resorted to chance, the unconscious and the primitive, where man is at the command of nature and gives up pretending to be its master. Dada relished in the shock effect of its profanities among the right thinking.

Through Birds, Through Fire, But Not Through Glass - Yves Yanguy - 1943

The Dadas mocked Western confidences for their ego of their beliefs of the sensible and worth of reason. They criticized the Renaissance movement for their anthropocentrism ways and their ideas of reality which they assumed the world was organized according to humanly intelligible laws. For the Dadas, nature was a state of constant flux. It was energy and motion in a simultaneous process of becoming and disintegration, alien and indifferent to the affairs of men.

'Rape' - Rene Magritte - 1934

The war showed how the radical forces in nature which men acknowledge and respect had become murderously destructive through neglect by an excessive intellectual, mechanistic civilization. The Dadas believed that the War was a ‘direct product of the competitive urge of industrial capitalism, with its mechanized trench warfare as a grotesque and monstrous version of the productive process itself’.

'Perpetual Motion' - Rene Magritte - 1935

Dadas behaved as if they had come through the experience of life as a tragedy and emerged on the other side. Their most fatalistic statements were always punctured by self-irony. They accepted the confusion of things, playfully mimicking in their work the ebullient anarchism of the life-force.

Dada, like Surrealism, imagined the artist as a spiritual adventurer for whom productivity was of secondary importance. Dadas stylistic originality derived from early Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism. For example, collage from Cubism, typographical acrobats and noise music from Futurism and the unconstrained use of colour from Expressionism.

'The Spirit of our Time' - Raoul Hausmann - 1920
(The dummy or mannequin was a recurring image in Dada and Surrealist art. This head expresses the brutal determination which Hausmann saw operating on the minds of contemporary city dwellers: "An everyday man only has the capacities chance has glued to his cranium; his brain is empty").