Universal Principles of Art

25 DADA

NONSENSE, NON-ART, AND CREATIVE MAYHEM LEAD TO NEW VITALITY IN ART

In 1916, a group of artists working in Zurich, Switzerland, named themselves by the nonsense word “Dada.” Meeting in and around the Café Voltaire, they promoted an art of rejection and extreme behavior, using poetry, theater, painting, and sculpture to mount an attack on what they saw as the entrenched bourgeois values that had driven Europe into World War I. Led by the poet Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), along with artists Hugo Ball (1886–1927), Hannah Höch (1889–1978), Francis Picabia (1879–1953), and others, the movement embraced the irrational and nonsensical in an exuberant and highly experimental fashion. Performances included simultaneous poetry (two poems being read ...