Dada

   a countercultural, artistic response to World War I. Although there are other accounts of the word's origins, the most accepted version has Hugo Ball* and Richard Huelsenbeck locating "Dada" randomly in a Larousse Dictionary. Founded in February 1916 at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, Dada used the ludicrous and shocking to mock those values and conventions (including Expressionism*) that had induced the horrors of the war. Its originators included the writers Ball and Tristan Tzara, the painter Marcel Duchamp, the sculptor Hans Arp, and Huelsenbeck. It emphasized the visual arts; one typical Dada product was a reproduction of the Mona Lisa decorated with a mustache and an obscene cap-tion. After the war Tzara went to Paris and connected with Marcel Duchamp, an artist who had pioneered a similar movement in New York with Francis Picabia and Man Ray. Aiming to demolish all that was conventionally artistic, Parisian Dada spent itself by 1922, devoured by its own nihilism. Led by Andre Breton, it gave way to Surrealism.

   Because the members of the German contingent tended to view Dada more seriously than their French counterparts, German Dada's postwar experience was unlike that in France. Founded in April 1918 by Huelsenbeck, the Berlin* Dada Club emphasized its aim to shock. Politically engaged, German Dada evolved into a sober art that focused on the external world, dealt with the grim reality of life, and sought to raise society's moral level. (A distinct movement, led by Max Ernst,* was centered on Cologne.) In June 1920 several club members organized the First (and last) International Dada Fair in Berlin (Picabia and Ernst were both represented). As with other socially conscious intellectuals (e.g., those associated with the Bauhaus*), the Dadaists demanded that art incorporate a political message. They often used collage (and sometimes photomontage) to evoke the jagged dimension of life. Increasingly viewed as a radicalized form of Expressionism, Dada soon gave way to social realism; its key artists, notably George Grosz* and Otto Dix,* shifted by 1924 to Neue Sachlichkeit* (New Objectivity) or Magic Realism.

   REFERENCES:Barron, German Expressionism; Elderfield, "Dada"; German Realism of the Twenties; Long, German Expressionism; Motherwell, Dada Painters; Sheppard, "Dada and Mysticism"; Weinstein, End of Expressionism; Willett, Art and Politics.