Dadaism

Dadaism was a literary and artistic movement that was founded by the German writer Hugo Ball and began in 1916 in the “Cabaret Voltaire” in Zürich. Later the movement spread throughout Europe and the United States. The term Dadaism originates from the French word dada which means hobbyhorse in French and is said to have been chosen at random from a French-German dictionary by the artist Richard Huelsenbeck and writer Hugo Ball.

Dadaism emerged in response to the atrocities of World War I and society perceived as irrational. The Dadaists criticized the established order and attempted to create a new artistic and social vision. Dada members united the protest against the horrors of the First World War. With mockery, irony and stupidity they radically and provocatively turn against bourgeois society and the pathos they perceive as void of their values.

It is worth noting that there was no conventional or unifying aesthetic for Dadaism. Dadaists were experimental and new pieces of art featured irrationality, humor, and silliness and an example would be a painted mustache on a postcard of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa by Dadaist Marcel Duchamp. They furthermore fostered on-the-spot creativity i.e. through arranging pieces of poems to new poems spontaneously. Moreover, Dadaists often created new pieces of art through found objects or images from mass media. The famous Dadaist artist Hannah Hoch i.e. used collage and pasted together elements of different photos to create a new image and Marcel Duchamp was famous for his "readymade" his sculptural form which he formed through found objects.

Bibliography

Artland. „What is dadaism, dada art, or a dadaist?“ Artland Magazine, 6. Dezember 2023, magazine.artland.com/what-is-dadaism.

Dadaism or the meaning of nonsense. 1. Oktober 2020, www.lempertz.com/en/academy/detail/dadaism- art.html.

Esaak, Shelley. „What is dada art?“ ThoughtCo, 26. November 2019, www.thoughtco.com/what-is-dada- 182380.

Lesso, Rosie. „What is dadaism and where did it start?“ TheCollector, 14. Dezember 2023, www.thecollector.com/what-is-dadaism-and-where-did-dada-start.