Dada Art Movement – Characteristics

How to identify Dada art (1916-1923)?

Every art movement listed on this website is presented with its unique characteristics so if you happen to walk into a museum, you could easily identify to which movement an artwork belongs. In the domain of Dada art, that might not be possible for two reasons. One, well, there is no movement, at least not an official one. Hence there is no common characteristics among the artworks, heck, they don’t even call their productions art! They used everyday objects to make an anti-art statement. Then to make matters more confusing, their approach using mundane objects became an art movement in its own right in the second half of twentieth century called Conceptual Art. However, there are some elements that bring together the work of Dada artists which are distinct from that of Conceptual artists who would emerge decades later.

1. Iconoclastic and playful.
Art had long thrived on rebelliousness, but the Dada artists were not just disrespectful, they physically attacked traditional art and defaced it. Dark and irreverent humor was always a theme in their works.

Marcel Duchamp, La Joconde/ L.H.O.O.Q., 1919
Marcel Duchamp painted a mustache and a goatee on a reproduction post card of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. He wrote at the bottom the letters “L.H.O.O.Q.” which is a pun in French. When pronounced, it sounds like “Elle a chaud au cul,” meaning “she has a hot arse” or “she’s horny.”

Francis Picabia’s Nature Morte: Portrait of Cézanne/Portrait of Renoir/Portrait of Rembrandt (1920)
The French painter nailed a toy monkey to a board and around it he wrote names of three of the greatest artists.

Francis Picabia. L’Œil cacodylate (The Cacodylic Eye). 1921
Legend has it that the artist contributed only his signature and date. He created this while hospitalized for an infection in his eye. He invited all his friends as they visited him to contribute something. It was a radical collaborative work, the earliest of its kind.

2. Illogical and absurd
Dada artists relied on madness and absurdity to shock their audience. You could find that in a blurred photo with creepy double eyes or a laundry iron with spikes! The iron in particular stands for another common theme in their art, that is the use of everyday objects (next characteristic on the list below).

Man Ray, Marquise Casati (1922)

Cadeau, Man Ray, 1921

3. “Readymades”: everyday objects as art
What Dadaists were notorious for was their challenge of the accepted definition of art. They pioneered what became a post-modern feature later in the twentieth-century. Today we call that conceptual or installation art. Theirs was different in the way that they put on display what they considered absurd: a coat rack or a urinal! Then they couldn’t believe it when they were taken seriously. The mass-produced objects, they called “Readymades,” which they would buy from local stores had no aesthetic value, yet when submitted to art exhibits, they were accepted! They philosophized it by declaring, as bizarre as it sounds, that artists no longer need to be the creators of their own art. The most outrageous act in that vein was Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain.” He bought a porcelain urinal, gave it the humorous title, turned it upside down and signed it “R. Mutt” in reference to the manufacturer and a character in a comic strip. Today we consider it one of the most important works of the last century because it forced us to question our understanding of art. Decades later, Andy Warhol would famously employ similar ordinary objects for art. On another occasion, he mounted a wheel on a kitchen stool and called it “Bicycle Wheel.”

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (an upside down urinal), 1917

Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1951 (the 1913 original was lost)

Hat Rack (1917) by Marcel Duchamp

The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse (1920) by Man Ray

4. Collages and disturbing photomontages
The artistic collage, made up of different materials and fragments of printed text, was a Cubist invention, preceding Dada art by several years, however the Dadaists endorsed it to some extent. The Dada collages you will encounter are not many, and those you find will not be easily distinguishable from the Cubist type. If Cubist artists tried to convince us that a collage of various materials can be refined art, the Dada artists tried to do the opposite, i.e. they were turning that medium into anti-art. They did not even call them collages, that sounded “too artistic.” Instead, they pioneered the now-familiar “photomontages” because it evoked machine production and no personal artistic involvement. (Note: While collages bring together different materials, a photomontage is mainly cut-out photographs.)

Although most of their collages were photomontages, there were a few non-photographic ones like Arp’s iconic work to which he did not give a title. He created the collage by arbitrarily dropping torn rectangular pieces of paper on the canvas, or at least that was his story!

Jean (Hans) Arp. Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Law of Chance). 1916–17.

Kurt Schwitters, Merz 19, 1920. Paper collage.

While Cubist collages tried to display harmony and beauty, Data photomontages were brutal and disturbing. The Dada artists emerging from the shadow of the WWI horrors, focused mainly on violent imagery and nonsensical juxtapositions.

Hannah Höch’s work (view below) is an iconic example of a chaotic Dada photomontage. Its ridiculously long title suggests that she sliced with a kitchen knife (a female housework symbol) through the uber-masculine political machine of Germany at the time (note the spinning gears and ball bearings in the composition). The Weimar Republic had just emerged following World War I as the first democratic German government. That would come to an end with the arrival of Hitler in 1933. What did she find inside of the cut out machine? The antiwar radical German Expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz at the center! Her head is the one being thrown in the air by a body that is dressed in female dancer clothes. It is a moment of female victory. All across the collage, you will see powerful male figures: German politicians (e.g. the overthrown Kaiser Wilhelm II at the upper right), the current president, Friedrich Ebert (upper center), Communist leaders (Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin at the center right) and the recently-assassinated German Communist leader Karl Liebknecht (lower left). You will also find soldiers and symbols of military and industrial power. The revolutionary element in her collage is emphasized by images of crowds of German demonstrators. At the bottom right, there is a map of Europe highlighting countries that had recently given women the right to vote, juxtaposed with a photograph of the artist’s head. Placing photos of fellow Dada artists next to Marx and Lenin, with cutout words —“Die grosse Welt dada” (the great Dada world) is not arbitrary but a signal that their movement is revolutionary. The overall work is meant to declare that empowered women and Dada art are destabilizing the patriarchal culture. Höch’s ultimate mockery of the masculinity of her era was through sticking heads of military leaders onto the bodies of exotic dancers!

Hannah Hoch – Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919).

Hausmann composed a photomontage that was a harsh satire on the world of art of his day (view below). The subject of his work is a man with a cartoonishly large head, mouth and eyes. Despite the large eyes and mouth (and oversized pen), he sees and says nothing because they are actually hollowed out, i.e. he is a worthless art critic. He is perfectly coiffed and dressed in a double-breasted suit trying to blend in the upper society. A woman from that society is there to show him what she chooses to. His visiting card declares him to be: President of the Sun, the Moon, and the little Earth, Dadasopher, Dadaraoul, Ringmaster of the Dada Circus. At the back of his neck is a German 50-mark bank note that looks like you could rotate it like a key, as if he is a toy to manipulate with money.

Raoul Hausmann. The Art Critic. 1919-1920.

Raoul Hausmann, A Bourgeois Precision Brain Incites a World Movement, also known as Dada siegt (Dada Triumphs), 1920.

5. The Dada Cyborg: Look for disturbing man-machine fusions
Many years before sci-fi writers started contemplating a future where there might be a human-machine hybrid, Dada artists were among those who gave it thought and represented it in their artworks.

The Spirit of Our Time – Mechanical Head, Raoul Hausmann (1919)
The artist created a wooden dummy head that lacks any unique features or emotions. He attached a ruler, a piece of a typewriter, a small cup, a spectacles case and a watch, as if to say the modern man has become a perfect receptacle of information, without a soul!

A victim of Society (later titled ‘Remember Uncle August, the Unhappy Inventor’) Painting by George Grosz (1919).
The titles gives away the overall meaning of this photomontage. It is a suffering man (perhaps following the horrors of WWI). Is he physically disabled? Is he psychologically disturbed? There is a question mark on his head regarding his future or his fate. His face is disfigured by (or fused with) machine parts. Note that he has a spark plug for a nose. A razor is next to his neck. Perhaps, he’s contemplating suicide!

The Convict: Monteur John Heartfield after Franz Jung’s Attempt to Get Him Up on His Feet, 1920 by George Grosz
The subject who is a friend of the artist is depicted with a machine heart.

How Dada art got its name? and where?

If you dig into the roots of the word Dada, which the artists used to label their own movement, you will not find a definitive answer. You will come across explanations that list connections with the French language, German or Romanian! What matters is the founders, in war-neutral Switzerland, chose a meaningless word—even if it is probably the French word for hobby-horse (rocking horse). They intentionally chose a nonsensical word without an ism to denote that they lost all faith in Western art, culture and ideologies. So what is Dada? When one of the Dada leaders, Tristan Tzara, was faced with that question in 1918, his answer was, “Dada means nothing.”

What gave rise to Dada art?

1. WWI butchery: Dada holds a mirror to a world gone mad

At the start of WWI (1914-1918), a group of draft dodgers made up of artists, poets and intellectuals fled to the largest city of neutral Switzerland, Zürich. They were mostly French and German. In October 1916, as the Battle of Verdun (Feb. – Dec. 1916) was taking away lives at a horrific rate, a few of them gathered to express their frustration at what befell their old continent. Their outrage became a disgust by everything modern and rational. How could the most advanced nations engage in the bloodiest war the world had ever seen? Some of them were anarchists (anti-authority) and others were pacifists (anti-war). Among the biggest names of that group were Hugo Ball (poet) and Marcel Duchamp (artist). Since the French Revolution and the rise of Enlightenment values, Reason had been viewed as a great pillars for all European thought, but if Europe after all descend into mass destruction, then Unreason is the cure. If the civilization, that created the greatest art, tore its apart, then anti-art is the solution. They refused to call their “protest” a movement, and insisted that theirs is not art! Their creations followed no rules, meant to be absurd and shocking. They were fed up with modern life, and found it meaningless, so they decided to create art that is just that, without any meaning.

One of the popular, and probably apocryphal, stories about the origin of the name “Dada” involves two German poets Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck. They stab a French German dictionary with a knife that lands on the French word Dada that means hobbyhorse. That childish word and that action of random violence fit perfectly the context and content of Dada. Nonsensical violence in their homelands during WWI is the reason such characters congregated as exiles. As for childishness, or rather playfulness, that became a cornerstone for all Dada art. The “Dadaists” broke away from all conventional (read: serious) art.

The birthplace of Dada was a place called Cabaret Voltaire. It was founded by war resisters Hugo Ball (poet), along with like-minded people Tristan Tzara (poet), Richard Huelsenbeck (poet and doctor) and Hans Arp (artist). Another colorful character among the founders was Hugo Ball’s lover who was also a cabaret dancer, poet, prostitute, morphine addict and a thief! But don’t be fooled by the name of the café that refers to the great Enlightenment philosopher, whose name had stood for rationality. Clearly, that was a satire against traditional philosophy. That place became a launching pad of attacks against everything traditional, from politics and morality to music, art and aesthetics.

When Tristan Tzara explained their movement, he said, “Tristan: We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin again after the tabula rasa [clean slate]. At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shocking the bourgeois, demolishing his idea of art, attacking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order.”

At Cabaret Voltaire, the regulars all banded together to fight accepted bourgeois morality and taste. Their chaotic evenings were full of incomprehensible Dada declarations, boisterous performances, outrageous costumes, noise music, African tribal chants, nonsensical poems, poems made up of words pulled out of hats, or multilingual phrases. One almost wishes to be there for one evening to have the ultimate avant-garde experience! Hans Arp had to following to say about their cabaret: “While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell.” Finding solace in elements of African culture was to express their despair against the so-called civilized European society. Such evenings would spread to other cafes and clubs, embraced by artists, theatre actors, musicians and writers. Later Dada ideas would also spread to other cities like New York City, Berlin, Cologne and Paris.

Hugo Ball in performance, Zurich, 1916
View an adaptation by the American rock band Talking Heads (1979) of Hugo Ball’s Dada poem “Gadji beri bimba”

In New York, the leading figure of Dada was the French refugee, Marcel Duchamp. Many of his works became iconic, one of which was a urinal, which he submitted to an exhibition in 1917. He introduced into artistic vocabulary the term “Assisted Readymades” referring to arbitrary mass-produced objects.

2. Cynicism towards technology

Not only did Dada artists feel cynical about religion, patriotism, morality and modernity but also technology. The earliest decades of the century was a period where technology was progressing at a dizzying pace: the telephone, the train, the telegraph, the automobile and the camera. The Dadaists were not particularly against technology but they could not how the Machine Age that promised to be utopian be true while wholesale slaughter is happening across Europe, while trenches are filled with mud, blood and human waste.

Despite questioning the benefits of technology, they still endorsed it in their artworks. Using photographs, they introduced a new type of collage: the photomontage. They also used the “mass-produced fruits” of technological progress, the so-called readymade objects and displayed them in a mockery of contemporary culture. With technology, Dada art became a mutlimedia art movement.

3. Anti-art had to happen after decades of Modernist challenges to the meaning of art

Art historians often mark 1870 as the beginning of modern art where realistic visual portrayal of subjects disintegrated on the canvas. The modern era brought about art movements that experimented with light and outlines (Impressionism), color (Fauvism), form (Cubism). New materials were introduced into the traditional canvas by Cubist painters creating collages. Each one of such movement was akin to an attack on the established understanding of the meaning of art. Dada arrived on the scene after half a century of radical experiments in breaking the conventions of art, laid since the onset of the Renaissance during the 1500s. The Dadaists took art one step further fueled by their pessimism and nihilism to defiantly declare their works anti-art! If their predecessors were breaking conventions on the canvas, the Dada artists just ripped the canvas apart. They replaced the canvas with a urinal! They defaced with a mustache and a goatee a reproduction of the iconic Mona Lisa. Dada is a challenge for its audience to define what makes art, how art should be made and what art should be appreciated.

Rebels of a new generation

Anyone studying the history of Western art will notice that almost every art movement springs out from an artistic rebellion against the conventional art of its time. That was the case, for example, with Neoclassical art, Impressionist art or Cubist art. The Dada artists however did not arrive to rebel against conventional art, but art itself! They called on the viewers to cease calling their trash art, theirs was anti-art. A mockery of art! With a grim sense of humor, irrationality and anti-aesthetics, they broke art standards and ridiculed contemporary society. They even refused to call their movement a movement, and it was not one. There were no formal characteristics or a particular philosophy to unite their works. They refused to adopt an “ism” and opted for an absurd, childish name: Dada.

They did not create “pretty pictures” like the Impressionists or the Post-Impressionists. They rejected German Expressionist emphasis on emotions and calm analysis of the modern, hostile society. They also rejected Cubism with its geometric experiments in form or clever collages. Nonetheless they found inspiration in Cubist collages but when they reintroduced them, they were made grotesque, disturbing and nonsensical.

They were inspired by the ongoing abstraction of art and the Futurist obsession with technology. However, they certainly rejected the Italian Futurist celebration of the Machine Age. Dada could be seen as left-wing anarchist, while Futurism is right-wing proto-fascist. Dada owes its genesis to a group of artists who were self-exiles during WWI. Meanwhile, the Futurists were actually celebrating the horrific WWI and the technology that facilitated the wholesale slaughter.

The Dada artists are best known for their rebellion against the centuries-old medium of the canvas. They incorporated any “rubbish” they could find including fabrics, pieces of metal or paper, newspaper clippings and pieces of old machines. Originality in art creation was meaningless to them. There was no one main medium of choice.

One of the great ironies in art history is that Dada works are now displayed in museums, some of which are considered among the most important icons of Western art. Their non-organized movement had a lasting effect on art in the Western world throughout the 20th century, starting with Surrealist art. Even though Dada is not postmodern, Post-modern art and Post-modernism’s roots belong to Dada’s revolutionary ideas which was summed up in one of their many declarations as follows:

Dada knows everything. Dada spits on everything. Dada says nothing. Dada has no fixed idea. Dada does not catch flies. The cabinet has been overthrown. By whom? By Dada. Futurism has died. Of what? Of Dada. Dada runs everything through a new sieve. Dada is bitterness laughing at everything that has been accomplished, sanctioned, forgotten in our language, in our brain, in our habits. Dada says to you: Here is Huamnity and the beautiful absurdities that have made it happy up to its present advanced age.