Dada

DADA. Started in Zurich in 1916 by the Romanian Tristan Tzara, the Alsatian Hans Arp, the German Hugo Ball, and other expatriate anti-war artists, poets, and performers from many countries, the dada movement quickly spread across Europe and even to Japan and the United States before it disintegrated in the mid-1920s. Defiant yet playful, its best manifestations were characterized by a wild humor all its own. “No one can escape from Dada,” wrote Tzara, the movement’s most persistent promoter. “The real Dadas are against Dada.... Dada is opposed to the future. Dada is dead. Dada is crazy. Long live Dada.”

Anti-academic, anti-institutional, anti-esthetic, in most countries dada tended to be antipolitical as well. In Berlin, however, a Central Dada Council for World Revolution issued incendiary tracts in 1918, and in Cologne leading dadas helped found the Communist Party of the Rhineland. The dadaists’ pranks and practical jokes revealed their hostility to the bourgeois order and clearly appealed to revolutionary-minded youth; it is not surprising that Hitler denounced the movement in Mein Kampf. Even where dada did not engage political questions as such, it still functioned as a subversive force. In 1921, for example, the Paris dadas—André Breton, Benjamin Péret, and others who would soon proclaim themselves surrealists—staged an elaborate, prolonged mock trial of best-selling nationalist author Maurice Barrès that provoked a huge scandal.

Dada manifestations in the United States, centered in New York, were fewer and less impressive than those in Europe. Most of what passed for American dada activity was little more than a casual by-product of often brief sojourns of such globe-trotting exemplars of the movement as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, of France; the eccentric German baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven; Swiss-born poet/pugilist Arthur Cravan and his English companion, poet/painter Mina Loy. America’s ephemeral dada periodicals—the Blind Man (two issues, 1917), Rongwrong (one issue, 1917), and New York Dada (one issue, 1921)—lacked the punch of their European counterparts, and their influence was negligible. More significant was the aggressive vehicle of Cravan’s views, the Soil, edited by Robert Coady, which, with its passion for jazz, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, silent film comedies, boxing champion Jack Johnson, and other liberatory aspects of popular culture, actually was closer to the consciously revolutionary orientation of the later surrealists than to the dadaists’ naive nihilism.

Unlike such earlier currents as symbolism, futurism, and cubism, in which the role of women was greatly restricted, dada from the start enjoyed the active participation of many women, and the New York dada milieu was no exception. It is a notable if rarely acknowledged fact that dada entered the English language most vigorously through poetry written by Loy and Freytag-Loringhoven in New York in the late 1910s. Interestingly, some of the latter’s poems were published in the socialist magazine the Masses.

In a list of active dadas published in the Berlin Almanach Dada in 1920, Tzara included such Americans as the wealthy art collector W. C. Arensberg, socialite Mabel Dodge, novelist Hutchins Hapgood, abstract painter John Marin, and photographer Alfred Stieglitz—not one of whom can be said to have reflected more than the faintest traces of a dadaist outlook. In Chicago, Ben Hecht, who had taken part in the First International Dada Fair in Berlin, 1920, started his Literary Times a few months later, with Max Bodenheim; more provocative than the New York productions, it was no less eclectic.

America’s most notable dadaist was Man Ray. Painter, collagist, photographer, film-maker, and writer, he was born in Philadelphia in 1890 and grew up in New York. Already painting as a child, by 1909 he was attending night classes taught by Robert Henri and George Bellows at the art school of the anarchist Francisco Ferrer Social Center, where he held his first exhibition in 1912. The following year he met the poet Adon Lacroix, who introduced him to the work of Lautréamont and other forerunners of the European avant-garde and became his “wife.” A link between New York’s anarchist and dadaist circles, Man Ray drew covers for Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, issued the proto-dadaist Ridgefield Gazook in 1915, and four years later, with the anarchist poet/sculptor Adolph Wolff, produced a one-shot anarchist/dadaist review titled TNT.

In 1921 he moved to Paris and joined the dadaists there. Three years later he helped found the surrealist movement, of which he became a prominent figure. More works by Man Ray were reproduced in La Révolution Surréaliste than by any other artist, and it was a one-man show of his that inaugurated the Galerie Surréaliste in 1925. Although he never shared the Marxist orientation of his surrealist comrades, he regularly collaborated on surrealist books and journals, and participated in the movement’s collective exhibitions until his death in 1976.

Hecht, Ben. A Child of the Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954.

Jones, Dafydd. Dada Culture. New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi Verlag, 2006.

Motherwell, Robert. The Dada Painters and Poets. New York: Wittenborn, 1951.

Naumann, Francis M. New York Dada, 1915–23. New York: Abrams, 1994.

Ray, Man. Self-Portrait. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963.

Schwarz, Arturo. New York Dada. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1973.

National Gallery of Art 2006 Dada Exhibition. https://web.archive.org/web/20090114080143/http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2006/dada/cities/index.shtm