DaDaism

Existentialism and its influences on modern art

DaDA : The Art Movement

• Artistic and literary movement that began in France and Germany in 1914

• A definition: Contributors sought to ridicule the culture of their time through deliberately absurd performances, poetry, and visual art. Dadaists embraced the extraordinary, the irrational, and the contradictory

• Reaction to the unprecedented brutality of WWI and the onset of WWII

• Artists’ works were motivated by the belief that European values of nationalism, militarism, and rational thought were responsible for the horrors of the war

• Many artists created works that were playful drawings, paintings, and sculptures that depicted strange and mysterious machinery- a jab at new technology

• Dada became a political movement in protest of war. They published magazines, poetry, and manifestos

• Many defined Dadaism as “nihilistic”- rejecting all moral values

• But Dadaists demanded that Dada was “an affirmation of life in the face of death!”

Dada=Rocking Horse(French, child’s word for a horse)

• Tristan Tzara, French poet and author of the “Dada Manifesto” (1918) proclaimed:

“DADA MEANS NOTHING”

DaDa Art

“Hydrometric demonstration of how to kill by temperature”

Max Ernst 1920

‘Tatlin at Home’

Raoul Hausmann 1920

‘Switzerland, Birth-Place of Dada’

Or ‘Physiomythological Flood Picture’

Max Ernst and Hans Arp 1928

‘Dadaville’

Max Ernst 1923-24

End