World War I had a profound influence on many artists of the time, but more than any other movement, Dadaism was a direct reaction to the slaughter, propogranda and inanity of the conflict, and the society that allowed it to happen. A number of artists, poets and musicans concluded that the very idea of human betterment was a pointless illusion. For this group, the main lesson of the war, if anything, was the bankruptcy of reason, politics, technology, and even art itself.

 

Several artists and poets founded a movement, initially in Zurich, whose members ridiculed anything having to do with culture, politics, or aesthetics. It was led by Tristan Tzara, a Romanian poet and writer, along with fellow Romanian Marcel Janco, who had gone to Zurich to study architecture, Richard Huelsenbeck, a German poet, and Hugo Ball, a German dramaturge and author.

 

Hugo Ball had moved to Zürich in May 1915 with Emmy Hennings, a cabaret singer, who became his wife in 1920. In 1916 they opened a 'literary' nightclub, Cabaret Voltaire, the venue for a Dada 'cabaret' of poetry readings, music and performances. Ball decor­ated the club with art by Dada members.

 

In 1916, members of the Zürich group had randomly found the word "dada" in a French-German dictionary, which means "hobby horse" in French but can also be a child's first word or "there there" or "yes yes" in a Slavic language. For the group, the name was purposely meaningless and considered that dada was "a state of mind." (Swiss neutrality allowed the group to perform plays and shows, to publish manifestos, plays, books and articles, and to create art under the name Dada without fear of reprisals.)

 

Dada later spread to Berlin, Paris and New York.  The Dadaists sought to embody the absurd in their work on the basis that absurb art reflects an absurb society. They attacked the idea of art by creating collage constructions from discarded junk.  Many of the artists affiliated with Dada made collages and updated Picasso and Braque's papier collés with the addition of ‘chance’ procedures and the addition of painting, photo-montage, and photo-mechanical processes.

 

The leading art exponents were Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and George Grosz. While Duchamp built machines with spinning disks that created surprising spiral patterns, Picabia covered canvases with disorienting stripes and concentric circles—an early form of optical experimentation in modern painting. Other key Dada artists included Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber, Max Ernst and Man Ray. Arp believed in a “law of chance,” which he said “embraces all laws and is unfathomable like the first cause from which all life arises [and] can only be experienced through complete devotion to the unconscious.” Between 1916 and 1917, he created a number of collages from torn, geometric pieces of coloured paper that he dropped into gridded arrangements on paper grounds.

 

Man Ray, whose photographs documented Duchamp’s optical machines, put his own stamp on photography by manipulating images in the darkroom to create illusions on film.

 

When Dadaists did choose to represent the human form, it was often mutilated or made to look manufactured or mechanical. The multitude of severely crippled veterans and the growth of a prosthetics industry, “struck contemporaries as creating a race of half-mechanical men.”

 

Dada was short lived, and during the 1920s, its ideas were absorbed into Surrealism, a linked movement that also questioned the status quo and the accepted notions of reality.