Dada and the Origins of Surrealism

Dada emerged in neutral Zurich in February 1916, when the writer Hugo Ball, together with Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, and the Alsatian artist Hans Arp, opened the Cabaret Voltaire, a nightclub given over to nonsensical poetry, noise performance, and deliberately absurd art. Dada was less a coherent style than a shared refusal: appalled by the senseless slaughter of the First World War, its participants concluded that the rational, orderly civilization that had produced such a catastrophe did not deserve art made according to its rules, and they embraced chance, nonsense, and outright anti-art gestures instead. From Zurich the movement spread quickly to Berlin, where it took on a sharper political edge under artists such as Hannah Höch and George Grosz, to Cologne, to New York, where Man Ray and Francis Picabia were active, and to Paris, where by the early 1920s many of its participants would help found Surrealism.