CHAPTER 2
Louise Norton-Varèse, Edgard Varèse, Suzanne Duchamp, Jean Crotti, und Mary Reynolds (left to right), 1924
« Although in its time Dada was considered a ‹farce›, it was in fact a salutary adventure for artists and allowed them to breathe freely. »
Suzanne Duchamp

Dada in Zürich

Dada develops as a creative form of protest against war and militarism, and against the rationalization of art and the mechanization of the world.

In neutral Switzerland, artists and intellectuals combined their creative forces to protest against the hitherto unknown atrocities of war between the surrounding countries.
Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, Zurich resembled a cosmopolitan melting pot. On February 5, 1916, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings open the artists’ pub «Cabaret Voltaire» in the city.
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The artist’s pub «Cabaret Voltaire», 1916

From then onwards, under the artistic direction of Hugo Ball, every evening events full of turbulent-anarchic happenings were held, giving rise to radical design vocabulary, and generically and lyrical innovations. These formed not only the basis for a new artistic development, but also stood programmatically for the urgent demand of many artists for a new beginning, for an irreversible break with the dominant social orders and artistic traditions. Dada was born.
Ambiguous sound poems, absurd parodies, and presentations of texts declaimed simultaneously in different languages were staged here, as well as dances in improvised costumes, exhibitions of modern art, performances of experimental music, and spontaneous actions, also out on the streets. Art’s claim to be valid for all time gave way to a performative staging of reality. The collage, symbol for the disintegration of the world, but also for the assembly of new, independent realities, emerged as the preferred art form – in language, music, and fine art.

Man Ray, portrait of Tristan Tzara, ca. 1921

Tristan Tzara drew up the «Dadaist Manifesto» of 1918. In it, he defines Dada as radical anti-art, without a fixed program, and propagates artistic experimentation with coincidence and provocation. Through his international contacts, he contributes considerably to the propagation of Dadaism.
Nic Aluf, portrait of Sophie Taeuber-Arp with «Dada-head», 1920

In her works, Sophie Täuber-Arp dissolves the boundaries between applied and fine art and develops radical new design concepts. She was a multi-disciplinary artist who combined painting, sculpture, dance, and design, whereby she had a decisive influence on Dadaism in Zurich. She also played a central role in the performances in the Cabaret Voltaire and campaigned for the emancipation of women artists within the movement.
Hugo Ball performing his «Verse without Words», 1916

Hugo Ball established with his tone poems a completely new, absurd, and provocative art form, which radically questioned traditional speech and forms. As the organizer and head of the Cabaret Voltaire he hence defined the foundation of the Dada movement as a revolt against societal conventions, logic, and bourgeois aesthetics. His rejection of classical art movements and his invention of the «Verse without Words» are considered pioneering to this day.
Hans Arp, Self portrait with «Navel-monocle», 1926

Hans Arp was also a co-founder of the Cabaret Voltaire, where he influenced anti-conventional art by means of random techniques, playful destruction, and senselessness. Arp’s path-breaking collages and reliefs shattered traditional imagery and developed a unique form of organic abstraction.

DADA in Berlin

After the end of the First World War, politics took center stage in Berlin—the city was a powder keg in which the Dadaist movement exploded like a firework.

In 1918, Richard Huelsenbeck proclaimed the «Dadaist Manifesto» in the Berlin Secession. He founded the «Club Dada» together with John Heartfield, George Grosz, and many others. It presented itself in twelve events. The «Erste Internationale Dada-Messe» (First International Dadaist Fair) in 1920 formed the high point of their activities. Dada Berlin was characterized by a much more clearly propagated political focus than in Zurich, Paris, and New York. The actionist-inclined group positioned itself very clearly as revolutionaries and anarchists; their goals were not focused on a new aesthetic order, but they worked instead towards a political break with the past.

Hannah Höch with Dada dolls, 1925

Hannah Höch is regarded as the inventor of the socio-critical photomontage, with which she criticizes in satirical manner the bourgeois culture and society of the time. In her works Höch implemented the rebellious Dadaist concept of the Anti-Style and contributed in no small measure to the establishment of Dada as an art form with a pronounced socio-political attitude.
Max Ernst, Le Punching Ball ou l’immortalité de Buonarroti (The Punchingball or the immortality of Buonarroti), 1920

Max Ernst’s Dadaist works show the influence of Expressionism and Futurism. First and foremost, he created photocollages and photomontages which are seen as the initial impetus for his search for new means of expression. In them, he combines different techniques to create baffling images in which he often takes as his subject the absurd, the irrational and the accidental.
George Grosz in his atelier in Berlin in front of his painting «Stützen der Gesellschaft» (Pillars of Society), 1926

Georg Grosz uses Dadaism as a radical form of protest against war, bureaucracy, and conservative values, and denounces societal and political injustices through provocative, often satirical artworks and actions. He consequently also became known as «Propagandada». His oeuvre includes montages, caricatures, and polarizing images demonstrating the madness and absurdities of the age.
John Heartfield, Self-portrait, 1920

John Heartfield developed the photomontage as a form of artistic expression together with George Grosz and others. He uses the genre politically in order to protest against war, exploitation, and barbarism. Heartfield saw the Dadaists as radical opponents of exploitation and opposed energetically the societal and political situation of the time. His work established a connection between Dadaist art and political awareness.

Dada in Paris

In 1920, after the end of the First World War and following the expulsion of the refugees, the center of Dadaism shifted from Zurich to Paris.

A short while previously, even Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of Dada, had moved from Zurich to Paris. Suzanne Duchamp and Jean Crotti, recently married, were also at the heart of the dynamic environment of Dadaism in Paris. They cultivated close friendships with Francis Picabia and his partner Germaine Everling in particular, and were also in regular contact with Marcel Duchamp, who traveled frequently between Paris and New York at this time.
As early as 1921, however, there were signs of a split between Dada and Duchamp and Crotti in the form of their new art movement, which bore the title «Tabu». Tabu led the boundary-breaking ambitions of Dadaism in a new direction which demonstrated more strongly metaphysical characteristics.
In 1923, Dada in Paris ended in a scandal. During a soirée, at which a performance of Tristan Tzara’s play «Le coeur à gaz» (The Gas Heart) was staged, with costumes by Sonia Delaunay, a brawl broke out with the Surrealists surrounding André Breton. After this, the differences between Breton, Picabia, and Tzara seemed irreconcilable.

Paul Thompson, Jean Crotti in his New York studio, ca. 1915

Even while he lived in exile in New York during the First World War, Jean Crotti began to combine Dadaist principles with abstract art and fragments of language experimentally in his painting. Back in Paris, in 1919 he married Suzanne Duchamp, with whom he later founded the two-person art movement «Tabu».

Francis Picabia in his studio in New York City, ca. 1915

In his «mechanical drawings» and humorous-provocative works, Francis Picabia fundamentally questioned the traditional art conventions and left his mark on Dadaism as «Anti-Art». He expanded the possibilities of artistic expression through his innovative approaches like the combination of text and image, motifs of machinery, and collage techniques, and had a considerable influence on the Dadaist scene in Paris and New York.
André Breton at «Festival Dada» in the Theatre de l’Oeuvre in Paris, 1920

André Breton organized provocative happenings, including for example the famous sham trial of Maurice Barrès in 1921, which represented a Dadaist spectacle. Breton championed in particular the removal of Dadaism from the purely artistic sphere and campaigned for actions that related more strongly to real life and societal conditions. However, this led to a rupture with the Dadaists. In 1924, he authored the «First Surrealist Manifesto».

Sonia Delaunay-Terk in Delaunay‘s apartment on Boulevard Malesherbes, Paris, 1924

Sonia Delaunay-Terk designed costumes for Dadaist performances on a number of occasions, and was a lively member of the avant-garde circles in Paris. Within the Dada movement, she campaigned against traditional gender roles and the exaltation of male contributions, and worked actively towards the demolition of gender images.

Dada in New York

New art for the New World – Dadaism spills across the ocean to New York.

Parallel to the hub in Zurich, a further nucleus of Dadaism developed in the pulsating New York of the 1910s. It demolished norms, questioned gender roles, and redefined the concept of art. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Beatrice Wood, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray had a lasting influence on a new understanding of art with their texts, publications, photographs, and art objects. This was to change the art history of the entire twentieth century.

Marcel Duchamp, Portrait multiple de Marcel Duchamp (Multiple-portrait of Marcel Duchamp), 1917

Marcel Duchamp challenged the traditional concept of art with his so-called «readymades». He transformed everyday objects, like the famous urinal «Fountain», into artworks, whereby the idea or the concept behind art became the center of focus, not the object manufactured by a workman.

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven dancing, ca. 1922

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven epitomized Dada body and soul. She was a walking performative artwork who, disregarding social expectations, shocked people on the streets of New York, on occasion with a shaved head, and on others naked or with eccentric clothing and noisy accessories consisting of spoons or tins of tomatoes. In her experimental and ecstatic texts she focused on women’s lust provocatively and in great detail, thereby challenging the normative gender roles of the time.
Beatrice Wood (on the right) with Marcel Duchamp (on the left) and Francis Picabia (center), 1920s

Together with Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood was the co-founder of the art magazine «The Blind Man», one of the first Dadaist manifestations in New York. Wood had a decisive influence on the movement by rebelling against societal norms with her provocative, experimental art, calling into question gender roles and thereby permanently expanding the artistic and societal discourse.
Charles Fraser, Man Ray with Photokina-Eye, 1960

Man Ray questioned art hierarchies and propagated artistic freedom, creativity, and humor as central principles of the Dada movement. «Rayographie», his experimental photography technique in which he exposed objects directly onto light-sensitive paper without a camera, was as revolutionary as his readymades.

The Coup of the Twentieth Century: The Readymade

The basic concept of the readymade is simple: You take an everyday object you have found and declare it to be a work of art.

A photograph of Marcel Duchamp from his portable ‹miniature museum›, known as «La boîte en valise» (Bos in a Suitcase), and a painting after the photograph by Suzanne Duchamp show one of their first joint readymades. After Suzanne Duchamp and Jean Crotti married in Paris on April 14, 1919, Marcel Duchamp sent them as a wedding present instructions as to how they should execute the readymade. Later he said of the collaborative work: «It was a book on geometry, which he (Crotti) was to hang up by a thread on the balcony of his apartment in rue Condamine; the wind was to blow the book and choose its own problems, turn the pages and rip them out.»
Suzanne Duchamp, Le readymade malheureux de Marcel, 1920
Marcel Duchamp, Le readymade malheureux (The unhappy readymade) from La boîte en valise (Box in a Suitcase), 1959

Das Ready-Made

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