Collection: Dadaism

Dada took shape on 5 February 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, founded by Hugo Ball (1886–1927) and Emmy Hennings, with Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Hans Arp (1886–1966), Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943), and Richard Huelsenbeck joining within weeks. The movement was a deliberate rejection of the cultural values that had produced the First World War, and its programme of anti art performance, sound poetry, photomontage, collage, and chance composition spread to Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, Paris, and New York between 1916 and 1924.

Berlin Dada from 1918, organised around Hannah Höch (1889–1978), Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, and George Grosz, was the most overtly political wing and developed photomontage as a tool of left-wing critique. Hannover Dada, around Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) and his Merz constructions and the long poem Ursonate, pursued a more lyrical assembly aesthetic. Cologne Dada centred on Max Ernst and Hans Arp before Ernst moved to Paris in 1922. New York Dada, with Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), Francis Picabia (1879–1953), and Man Ray (1890–1976), produced the readymade, beginning with Duchamp's Fountain of 1917. The Paris group of 1919–24 dissolved into the founding circle of Surrealism around André Breton.