Gallery · Room 08 · Zürich and beyond, 1916–1924
Dada
Artists who answered a world war with nonsense, collage and provocation.
Wall text
Dada began in neutral Zürich in the middle of the First World War. In 1916 the writer Hugo Ball and the performer Emmy Hennings opened a satirical nightclub, the Cabaret Voltaire. Ball also started a magazine of the same name, the first of many Dada publications. Its artists answered the war with nonsense, provocation and chance.
Dada was anti-bourgeois and leaned to the radical left, and it spread fast. Tristan Tzara's magazine Dada reproduced Francis Picabia's machine drawing Alarm Clock in 1919. The First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920 showed over 200 works. Sophie Taeuber-Arp painted, designed textiles and made puppets; she wrote 1920 and DADA into the painting shown here.
In Hanover, Kurt Schwitters took the word Merz from a scrap of the bank name Commerz- und Privatbank and gave it to his collages of tickets, wood and scrap. By the mid-1920s Dada had dissolved, much of it into Surrealism, but its collage, chance and found objects outlived it.
