D ada i Sm MoMA The Museum of Modern Art
History Dada emerged amid the brutality of the first World War (1914 18) a conflict that claimed the lives of eight million military personnel and an equal number of civilians. This unprecedented loss of human life was a result of trench warfare and technological advances in weaponry, communications, and transportation systems. Dada s subversive and revolutionary ideals emerged from the activities of a small group of artists and poets in Zurich, eventually cohering into a set of strategies and philosophies adopted by a loose international network of artists aiming to create new forms of visual art. The artists affiliated with Dada did not share a common style or practice so much as the wish... to destroy the hoaxes of reason and to discover an unreasoned order. For Dada artists, the aesthetic of their work was considered secondary to the ideas it conveyed. For us, art is not an end in itself, wrote Dada poet Hugo Ball, but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in. The climax of International Dada Fair of 1920, the central symbol of which was an effigy of a German officer with the head of a pig that hung from the ceiling. For the disillusioned Dada movement, the war confirmed the degradation of social structures that led to such violence: corrupt and nationalist politics, repressive social values, and unquestioning conformity of culture and thought. From 1916 until the mid-1920s, artists in Zurich, New York, Hanover, and Paris declared an all-out assault against not only on conventional definitions of art, but on rational thought itself. They were also experimental, provocatively reimagining what art and art making could be. Using unorthodox materials and chance-based procedures, they infused their work with spontaneity and irreverence. Wielding scissors and glue, Dada artists innovated with collage and photomontage.
Marcel Duchamp A central figure, Marcel Duchamp, declared common, manufactured goods to be readymade artworks, radically challenging the notion of a work of art as something beautiful made by a technically skilled artist. Marcel Duchamp was a pioneer of Dada, a movement that questioned long-held assumptions about what art should be, and how it should be made. He selected mass-produced, commercially available, often utilitarian objects, designating them as art and giving them titles. Readymades, as he called them, disrupted centuries of thinking about the artist s role as a skilled creator of original handmade objects. Duchamp claimed to have chosen everyday objects based on a reaction of visual indifference, with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste. In doing so, Duchamp paved the way for Conceptual art work that was in the service of the mind, as opposed to a purely retinal art, intended only to please the eye. Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). Oil on canvas. 57 7/8 x 35 1/8. Philadelphia Museum rt.
Hannah Höch Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (1919). Artwork description & Analysis: Hannah Höch is known for her collages composed from newspaper and magazine clippings, sketches and texts pulled from her journals. As part of Club Dada in Berlin, Höch unabashedly critiqued culture by literally slicing it apart and reassembling it into vivid, disjointed, emotional depictions of modern life. In Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, Höch pits human against machine.
Hugo Ball Performing at Cabaret Voltaire (1916) Artwork description & Analysis: Ball designed this costume for his performance of the sound-poem, Karawane, in which nonsensical syllables uttered in patterns created rhythm and emotion that could be universally understood. Words that become increasingly stressed during vowel sequences Ball likened to elephants plodding along. Ball said of this costume: My legs were in a cylinder of shiny blue cardboard, which came up to my hips so that I looked like an obelisk. Over it I wore a huge coat cut out of cardboard, scarlet inside and gold outside. Ball designed this costume for his performance of the sound-poem, Karawane, in which nonsensical syllables uttered in patterns created rhythm and emotion that could be universally understood.
Kurt Schwitters This highly animated picture is dominated by rectangular pieces of paper that cover the surface of the work. Schwitters created the illusion of depth by placing those papers with darker components behind those that are lighter in aspect. The brightest piece of paper, in the center of the composition, shows an eye-catching cluster of red cherries and the printed German and French words for the fruit. In the winter of 1918 19 Schwitters had collected bits of newspaper, candy wrappers, and other debris, and began making the collages and assemblages for which he is best known today. The Cherry Picture belongs to a group of these works he called Merz, a nonsensical word that he made up by cutting a scrap from a newspaper: the second syllable of the German word Kommerz, or commerce. By 1921 Schwitters had been painting seriously for ten years, largely in different naturalistic styles. In doing so, he learned how all art was based on measurement and adjustment and the manipulation of a variable but finite number of pictorial elements. Merz Picture 32 A. The Cherry Picture 1921 MediumCut-and-pasted colored and printed paper, cloth, wood, metal, cork, oil, pencil, and ink on paperboard Dimensions 36 1/8 x 27 3/4 (91.8 x 70.5 cm)
Max Ernst The Gramineous Bicycle (1921) Gouache and ink on botanical chart with ink inscription National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Artwork description & Analysis: Max Ernst and his early collaborator Hans Arp were responsible for bringing Dada to Paris, where Surrealism would later take hold. The Gramineous Bicycle is an example of an early collage, in which Ernst overpainted a botanical chart into abstracted elements. His work, which would become increasingly dream-like, often dealt with the deconstructed human body. In this painted collage, Ernst transformed plant illustrations into biomorphic forms that seem both human and foreign. Collages such as this were precursors to his Surrealist works.
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