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Dada and Its Surroundings

The war radically changed the art scene in the vibrant cities of Europe. The international links that had brought forth artistic masterpieces, primarily between France, Italy, Germany and Russia, were abruptly torn apart. Many artists were conscripted into active service; some ‘enthusiastically rushed to the colours’; talented, influential, and gifted ones like Franz Marc, August Macke, Wilhelm Morgner, Umberto Boccioni fell in the war. Some suffered lasting psychological wounds like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Wieland Herzfelde, or they returned to their homelands, like Wassily Kandinsky or the brothers David and Vladimir Burliuk.

The intellectual elite that had stayed at home and those who had come back from the war sobered, sought new ways to express their experiences and insights. Some believed the most effective way to do something against the war was to publish a magazine. In Berlin, Neue Jugend (New Youth) appeared, since the existing magazines were either pre-censored or were politically neutral. Among the contributors were Hugo Ball, Franz Jung, Martin Buber, Theodor Däubler, Walter Benjamin, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Salomo Friedländer-Mynona, as well as the painters George Grosz, Ludwig Meidner and Heinrich Maria Davringhausen. Herzfelde organised poetry readings against the war in Berlin and other cities. The magazine Die freie Straße (The Free Street), published in 1916 in Berlin, by the poet Franz Jung and the painter Raoul Hausmann, followed a similar path.

In 1917, Richard Hülsenbeck came to Berlin from the Zurich Dada movement and, in this ‘prepared’ environment, was ‘stage-managing’ the Berlin Dada movement by February 1918. The Dada movement was joined in Berlin by George Grosz, Hannah Höch, Johannes Baader, Raoul Hausmann, the brothers Herzfelde/Heartfield, Yefim Golishev from Russia, and the poets Carl Einstein and Walter Mehring. George Grosz described the situation:

As Dadaists, we held ‘meetings’ for which we charged a few marks admission and where we did nothing else but tell people the truth, which means, in other words, insult them. …The meetings quickly sold out and were full of people angering and amusing themselves…We derided simply everything. Nothing was sacred to us. We spit on everything, and that was Dada. It was neither mysticism nor Communism nor anarchism…We were, however, the complete and pure nihilism, and our symbol was the nothing, the vacuum, the hole.

Dada shocked the world between the years 1916 and 1922. As the Dadaist Hans Richter put it, Dada was ‘not an art movement in the normal sense. It was a storm that broke over the art scene of the time, as the war upon the peoples.’ They consciously staged anti-art events. According to Max Ernst, it was the ‘outbreak of anger and zest for life’ at the same time. The indignation about the monstrous genocides during World War I was great and equally at the ‘civilisation that had brought it about.’ Dada was an international uprising.

‘Our demonstrations, provocations and opposition were just the means,’ said Hans Richter, ‘to enrage the square petty bourgeois and through rage to bring them to a shameful awakening. What really moved us was not so much the noise, or the contradiction, but rather the very simple elementary question, where to?’

In Zurich, in neutral Switzerland, at the start of 1916, Hugo Ball founded the Cabaret Voltaire out of which the Dada movement arose. The Romanian painter Marcel Janco, as well as Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara and Richard Hülsenbeck joined Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings. The word Dada was found coincidentally by picking through the Le Petit Larousse dictionary with a knife. The most dynamic of all the Dadaists was Tristan Tzara:

Always in movement… what would Dada be without Tzara’s poems, without his manifestos, not to mention the quarells, which he did masterfully evoke? He declaimed…interrupted his presentations with ringing, whistling, drum beating, shouting, sobbing, and with cowbells. Slamming the table or empty boxes gave voice to the wild demands for a new language in a new form.

The numbness was finally beaten out of the audience to the point that a veritable frenzy of participation exploded.

In his writings on psychoanalysis, Carl Jung defined the coincidence as ‘order outside of causality.’ The purpose of this ‘confused rush’ of everything by means of simultaneous poetry, asynchronous theatrical performance, and typography was to realise the principle of coincidence as a new stimulant.

Dada took ideas primarily from Futurism and established anti-art. Dada expressed itself in consciously chaotic manifestos and with bruitist poems that were also performed simultaneously in improvised theatrical presentations. Dada utilised slips of paper, leaflets, and posters, consciously mixing their typography. They discovered the collage as a suitable means of expression. Since Dada, collage has been an autonomous art medium. Dada was adapted in New York by Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. The Alfred Stieglitz gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue became their base of operations.

Kurt Schwitters established Dada in Hanover and created his own distinctive image. Schwitters presented his Merz-paintings. He remained faithful to Dadaism and collage for his entire life. He built and created his collages out of ‘estranged’ materials. ‘I called my new creations made from, as a rule, any material Merz, clippings from an advertisement of the Commerzbank. Later the term Merz was extended to my poetry and in the end to all my related activities. Now, I call myself Merz.’ The Parisian Dada movement was almost exclusively made up of writers; few artists were found in their numbers. In 1920 Hans Arp, Max Ernst, and Johannes Baargeld joined together in Cologne. In Berlin, Dada took on more of a political hue.

Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild 25A, 1920.

Miscelleanous materials, collage on cardboard, 104.5 × 79 cm.

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

Otto Dix, The War (Artillery), 1914.

Oil on cardboard, 98 × 69 cm. Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf.

Explosive Visual Language

Some painters also expressed themselves in an explosive and chaotic manner. Now the inner world of the imagination and the horrific experiences were visually exorcised with enthusiasm and emphasis. This occurred as a conscious reaction, as a sort of accusation, laced with irony and despair. Contemporary issues were treated with the greatest drama and dynamic tension, and brought together in a critically explosive mixture.

The works of Otto Dix and George Grosz from the years 1914 to 1918 bubbled over with chaotic dynamism and omnipresent stimulation. They are examples of an immense discharge of energy, anger, and inner tension. In the painting The War from 1914, Otto Dix vented his aggression with a vehement use of the brush.

In 1914, George Grosz was called up for active duty and discharged in 1916 because of illness. However, in 1917 he was once again called to military service. As Grosz explained:

The breather was a fruitful time in my life, both realistically and romantically. My favourite colours were deep red and blackish blue. I felt the earth upon which I stood shake, and this shaking became visible in my paintings and watercolours.

In his autobiography, published in 1955, A Little Yes and a Big No, he states: ‘Then, my art was a kind of valve – a valve from which the pent up hot steam was let out.’ In 1916–1917, Grosz painted The Funeral (Dedication to Oskar Panizza). ‘On a black coffin, death rides through the milling masses of human faces and grimaces, crying shrilly and calling in vain.’ (Grosz). His view of the big city life was apocalyptic. ‘There is something cosmic about it, perhaps something meteor-like… Metro railway cars rush, as if a thunderstorm trembling, lightening fast they enter and are gone,’ so his works were described by his friend, the poet Theodor Däubler.

George Grosz, Dedication to Oskar Panizza, 1917–1918.

Oil on canvas, 140 × 110 cm. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.

George Grosz, Republican Automaton, 1920.

Watercolour, ink and Indian ink on cardboard, 60 × 47.3 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, The General, 1917.

Oil on canvas, 130 × 105 cm. Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn.

Veristic Tendencies

Germany, a Winter’s Tale, named after Heinrich Heine’s work, was painted by George Grosz after his return from military service in 1918. At that time, Grosz was of the opinion that art that did not put itself at the disposal of the political struggle was meaningless.

‘My art,’ so he wrote in his memoirs, ‘should be a rifle and a sabre… In the middle, I placed the everlasting German, fat and frightened at a slightly wobbly little table with a cigar and a morning paper. Beneath, I depicted the three pillars of society: church, school, military. The man held desperately to the knife and fork; the world shook around him; a sailor, as a symbol of the revolution, and a prostitute completed my view of the times back then.’

A few months before in 1917, his friend, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen had completed perhaps the most significant antimilitarist painting of his time, The General. With smoothly styled cinematic cruelty, Davringhausen depicted the catastrophic state of the war. He eagerly depicted the details with exacting precision. The glowing colourful splendour underscored the heated atmosphere bursting with tension. A collage-like simultaneity of places and conditions organise the divergent scenes into a unified context. Using simultaneity to convey a message goes back to the Futurists; the infantilism is drawn from the sources of the ‘primitives’. It is a completely new way of defining an image. It is consciously alienated from the aesthetical preconceptions and, thereby, it is impossible to ignore its contemporary references.

Giorgio de Chirico, The Worrying Muse, 1916.

Oil on canvas, 97 × 66 cm. Gianni Mattioli collection, Milan.