Dada

Art History 2UST CFAD

Asst. Prof. G. Malihan

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Dada• Early 20th-century art movement, whose members sought to ridicule the culture of their time through deliberately absurd performances, poetry, and visual art. 

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Dadaists embraced the extraordinary, the irrational, and the contradictory largely in reaction to the unprecedented and incomprehensible brutality of World War I (1914-1918).

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“Smokers,” 1920-25.

• Their work was driven in part by a belief that deep-seated European values—nationalism, militarism, and even the long tradition of rational philosophy—were implicated in the horrors of the war. 

• Often described as nihilistic—that is, rejecting all moral values

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“Leinie Spoor,” 1932

• Dadaists considered their movement an affirmation of life in the face of death. 

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• Dada movement acquired a name and a recognizable identity only in 1916, but the work of several artists anticipated dada's spirit a few years earlier.

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Dada group photograph, 1921

•  In 1913 French artist Marcel Duchamp made the first of his readymades, in which he elevated everyday objects, such as a bicycle wheel or a bottle rack, to the status of sculpture simply by exhibiting them in a gallery and pronouncing them art. 

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Duchamp and French artist Francis Picabia took up temporary residence in New York City in 1915.

There,  they created playful paintings, drawings, and sculptures that depicted figures in the form of mysterious machinery—a jab at new technology. 

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Their work drew the attention of a small but active circle of sympathetic American patrons, writers, and artists, including photographer Man Ray.

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Man Ray, Cadeau , 1921,

Dada ridiculed contemporary culture and traditional art forms.

 movement was formed to prove the bankruptcy of existing style of artistic expression rather than to promote a particular style itself.

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 It was born as a consequence of the collapse during World War I of social and moral values which had developed to that time. 

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Dadaists typically produced art objects in unconventional forms produced by unconventional methods. 

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Several artists employed the chance results of accident as a means of production, for instance.

 Literally, the word dada means several things in several languages: it's French for "hobbyhorse" and Slavic for "yes yes." 

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Some authorities say that the name Dada is a nonsensical word chosen at random from a dictionary.

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In 1916 he gave up the Cubist style completely and began to produce the images of satiric, machinelike contrivances that are his chief contribution to Dadaism.

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Francis Picabia (1879-1953)• The drawing Universal

Prostitution (1916–19) and the painting Amorous Procession (1917) are typical of his Dadaist phase.

• Their association of mechanistic forms with sexual allusions were successfully shocking satires of bourgeois values.

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• The work of French painter Francis Picabia from 1915 to 1920 displays his fascination with mechanical objects. 

• Parade Amoureuse (1917), suggests a somewhat mysterious coupling of two machines.

Parade Amoureuse

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SALOME

Francis Picabia

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CataxJesus y el Delfin

Francis Picabia19

Luscunia

Francis Picabia

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French artist who broke down the boundaries between works of art and everyday objects.

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After the sensation caused by “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” (1912), he painted few other pictures.

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His irreverence for conventional aesthetic standards led him to devise his famous ready-mades and heralded an artistic revolution.

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• French-born artist Marcel Duchamp changed the course of modern art in 1913 by exhibiting a bicycle wheel turned upside down and mounted on a kitchen stool. 

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Bicycle Wheel

• Bicycle Wheel was the first of Duchamp’s so-called readymades, ordinary objects that he turned into objects of art by changing their context and exhibiting them as sculpture.

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Bicycle Wheel

Two Nudes1910

El Mattoral

Marcel Duchamp

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German dadaists produced the movement’s first substantial body of visual artwork in the form of photocollage.

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Using images cut out of newspapers and commercial packaging, artists Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, and Hannah Höch made brutally satirical collages attacking German society and government.

German artist George Grosz created equally biting drawings that indicted a society in deep disarray after losing the war.

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By the end of 1922 the Dada movement had begun to fall apart.

Quarrels developed between some members, and others seemed to tire of maintaining a stance of outrage against society

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Other centers of Dada activity in Germany include Cologne, where Max Ernst made paintings and collages, and Hannover, where Kurt Schwitters assembled sculpture from bits of commonplace debris.

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Schwitters’s projects, which he called Merz, (a made-up word), culminated in a work called Merzbau (1923-1936, destroyed), an assemblage of cast-off objects that almost entirely filled his studio and family home.

Dada's last stronghold was Paris, to which nearly all its major participants—Tzara, Ernst, Picabia, Duchamp, Man Ray, and Arp—moved between 1919 and 1922.

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Enak's Tears (Terrestrial Forms)1917

Birds in an Aquarium1920

Jean Arp32

Objects Arranged According to the Law of Chance1930

Jean Arp

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Head and Shell1933

Jean Arp

Human Concretion Without Oval Bowl

1933

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Raoul Haussman

Spirit of Our Time (Mechanical Head)1919 Sans Titre

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ABCD1924 Dada Siegt

1920Raoul Haussman 36

Cherry Picture1921

Collage of colored papers, fabrics, printed labels and

pictures,pieces of wood, and

gouache on cardboard background

Kurt Schwitters 

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Hitler Gang1944

Collage

Kurt Schwitters 

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Construction for Noble Ladies1919Assemblage

Kurt Schwitters 

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Blood and Iron Goering The Executioner1933John Heartfield 

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Auch ein Propagandaminister 1935

War and Corpses: The Last Hope of the Rich

1932

John Heartfield 

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Fotomontage aus der Sammlung: "Aus einem ethnographischen

Museum"1929

The Sweet One

Hannah Hoch42

Strange beauty. Fotomontage aus der Sammlung:

"Aus einem ethnographischen Museum"Hannah Hoch

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Technique of reproducing a texture or relief design by laying paper over it and rubbing it with some drawing medium, for example pencil or crayon

Max Ernst and other Surrealist artists incorporated such rubbings into their paintings by means of collage.

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It is also a popular method of making rubbings of medieval church brasses and other ancient monuments and inscriptions.

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