Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centers in Zurich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire. New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris. The movement was developed in reaction to World War I, and it consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works. The art of the movement began primarily as performance art, but eventually spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture.
Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The movement aimed to destroy traditional values in art and to create a new art to replace the old. Dada artists felt the war called into question every aspect of a society capable of starting and then prolonging it – including its art. As the artist Hans Arp later wrote: Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. In addition to being anti-war, Dada was also anti-bourgeois and had political affinities with the radical left.
Dadaism has had a profound influence on modern art, foreshadowing abstract and conceptual art, performance art, op, pop, and installation art. The movement has brought many famous artworks, including Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), Bicycle Wheel (1913), and Man Ray’s Ingres’s Violin (1924), among others.
