DADA

DADA

(Started: 1916)

(Ended: 1924)

 Dadaism was an artistic and literary movement emerged during the World War I, in Zurich, Switzerland. The word “dada”, which means “hobby-horse” in French, was taken arbitrarily from a dictionary. Dadaist artists declared that all ethical, political, and aesthetic beliefs were ruined during the war. They supported a destructive, disrespectful, and liberating approach to art. Shocking was the basic tactic of Dadaists who hoped for society to leave the nationalism and materialism that caused the war and massacre. It was a literary movement as well as a visual one. Coincidence and senselessness was the main elements of the movement. A new conscious was defined with respect to the role of the subconscious in daily life and it objected developing an entire art theory that would be condemned to die in an art library. 

           Key artists:

·         Jean (Hans) Arp

·         Francis Picabia

·         Marcel Duchamp

·         Man Ray

·         André Breton

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia was one of the main figures in the Dada movement both in Paris and New York. He was known for a rich variety of work ranging from strange, comic-erotic images of machine parts, to text-based paintings that foreshadow aspects of Conceptual art. Even after Dada had been supplanted by other styles, the French painter and writer went on to explore a diverse and almost incoherent mix of styles. He shifted easily between abstraction and figuration at a time when artists clung steadfastly to one approach, and his gleeful disregard for the conventions of modern art encouraged some remarkable innovations even later in his career, from the layered Transparencies series of the 1920s, to the kitsch, erotic nudes of the early 1940s. Picabia remains revered by contemporary painters as one of the century's most intriguing and inscrutable artists.

          

 Sources:

           

Isms: Understanding Art by Stephen Little

http://www.theartstory.org/movement-dada.htm

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-picabia-francis.htm

http://www.huntfor.com/arthistory/C20th/dadaism.htm