Unit 4 Sample Essay
The Dada movement arose in the early 20th century as a reaction to the
widespread carnage and destruction that resulted from World War I. A large and
diverse group of European artists led principally by Tristan Tzara—working in media as
varied as performance, dance, photography, painting and all manner of visual arts—
considered it absurd that such vocal nationalist pride (supposedly a rational concept)
could bring about events like trench and chemical warfare, not to mention the deaths of
tens of millions of people. Believing that if a rational world can create such destruction,
then the rules that govern a rational world no longer apply, the Dadaists sought to
express this belief through works of art that opposed the norms of bourgeois culture and
illuminated the idiocies of society. For these reasons, the work of the Dada movement
is often referred to as “anti-art.”
Dada is a seminal avant-garde movement in the history of modern art, namely
because it sought to deconstruct the aesthetic experience of popular art. Although the
Dada artists were heavily influenced by the concerns and philosophies of preceding
modern movements like Cubism, Expressionism, Constructivism, and Futurism, the
appearance of many Dada works of art seem to lack precedent. Perhaps the most
famous example of this is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, in which he took an everyday
urinal, inverted it, and signed the object “R. Mutt.” This work, considered to be the first
readymade, was so unconventional and odd that it encapsulated the idea of a work of
art that lacked definition and defied categorization. Furthermore, the sheer lack of
production in the work was Duchamp’s humorous and ironic take on what constituted art
itself.
Hans Arp was another artist key to the Dada movement. Rather than using
elements of humor and irony, Arp relied on the element of chance to create his work.
He famously created a series of collages based on chance, where he would stand
above a sheet of paper, dropping squares of contrasting colored paper on the larger
sheet's surface, and then gluing the squares wherever they fell onto the page. Arp
believed the end result would provoke a visceral reaction, like fortune telling from I-
Ching coins. Arp's chance collages have come to represent Dada's aim to be "anti-art."
During Dada’s relatively short lifespan, the movement’s uncanny sense of satire,
irony, and experimentation proved quite influential and in turn spread to a number of
cities throughout Europe. As it spread, several artist collaborations took place, including
but not limited to Tristan Tzara and Andre Bréton, and Hans Arp and Max Ernst. The
Dadaists’ ideas regarding the deconstruction of artistic form and convention were
eventually adopted by those artists who would found Surrealism in the 1920s, such as
Bréton and Ernst. Interestingly enough, long before New York City would become a
hub for avant-garde artists, Marcel Duchamp traveled to New York and helped introduce
the radical notion of “anti-art” to an American public who had experienced very little
European modern art, if any at all. Duchamp’s presence and work in New York would
prove to have a lasting impact. In the decades to follow, particularly in the 1940s and
Saylor URL: www.saylor.org/arth208 Unit 4
The Saylor Foundation Saylor.org
Page 1 of 2
50s, a great number of American artists would cite Duchamp as a great influence on
their work. This is especially apparent in the work of Jasper Johns, Robert
Rauschenberg, and other artists who would come to form the mid-century Neo-Dada
movement.
Saylor URL: www.saylor.org/arth208 Unit 4
The Saylor Foundation Saylor.org
Page 2 of 2
