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“Dada” – this was actually the name of a journal. But Dada was something much bigger than a journal. Dada was an association of like-minded people, a movement encompassing the international artistic avant-garde. Dada was a coming to light of the tendencies and emotional reactions which were developing simultaneously in various countries of the world. Dada was a revolt against traditional art – the Dadaists advocated anti-art. And Dada was the cradle in which Surrealism uttered its first words, made its first movements – in short, grew and matured. The Dada movement was the first chapter of Surrealism.

It is usual to regard Zürich as the birthplace of Dada, although its adherents appeared at the same time in America as well. In Europe, the Dada movement gradually spread over various countries. Little Switzerland was the only officially neutral country in Europe, the only tiny island of peace amid the fires of the World War. It was there that those young people who did not want to take part in the European war found refuge. Among those whom the winds of war had blown into Zürich were the Germans Richard Huelsenbeck and Hugo Ball, the Romanians Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janko, and the Alsatian Hans Arp, and many others, including some Swiss intellectuals, joined them as well. What united them more than anything was their hatred of the existing social order, of which they saw the senseless slaughter of the war as the result. Among them were pacifists of various hues, but they did not organise anti-war demonstrations, and did not take an active part in political movements. Their protest took special forms, related only to the fields of literature, the theatre and the visual arts. They all came from bourgeois families and they were all, first and foremost, opposed to official art.

In the spring of 1915 the Romanians Tzara and Janko settled in Zürich. In 1916, on one of the little streets of old Zürich, the German Hugo Ball opened the Cabaret Voltaire. Later he told the story of how the owner of a restaurant, Jan Efraim, gave him a hall for the cabaret on Spiegelgasse, and Hans Arp offered pictures by Picasso, himself, and his friends for exhibition. Tzara, Janko and the Swiss Max Oppenheimer agreed to perform in the cabaret. On February 5th, the first concert took place there: “Madame Hennings and Madame Leconte sang French and Danish songs. Monsieur Tzara read Romanian poems. An orchestra of balalaikas played delightful Russian folksongs and dances”, Ball wrote in his memoirs.[18]

The name Dada was invented on February 8th. The godfather of the emerging movement was Tristan Tzara. Legend has it that a paper-knife fell entirely accidently onto the page of a dictionary where Tristan Tzara saw this word. “DADA MEANS NOTHING”, Tzara wrote in the “Dada Manifesto 1918”. “We learn in the newspapers that the Kru negroes call the tail of a sacred cow: DADA. Brick and mother, in a certain region of Italy: DADA. Wooden horse, nurse, double affirmation in Russian and Romanian: DADA.”[19] Declaring that he was against all manifestos, Tzara wrote: “Thus DADA was born out of a need for independence, out of mistrust of the community. Those who belong to us keep their freedom. We do not acknowledge any theory. We have enough Cubists and Futurists: laboratories of formal ideas. Does one create art to make money and to stroke the nice bourgeois?”[20] The basis of Dada was its ambition to destroy, without exception, all old art, on the grounds that it was not free and had been established by the bourgeois order they candidly despised. Dada was the negation of everything: “Every hierarchy and social equation set up as our values by our valets: DADA; …abolition of memory: DADA; abolition of archaeology: DADA; abolition of prophets: DADA; abolition of the future: DADA…” wrote Tzara.[21] His concept of freedom even extended as far as emancipation from logic: “Logic is a complication. Logic is always false. It drags the edges of notions and words away from their formal exterior towards ends and centres that are illusory. Its chains kill, enormous myriapods stifling independence.”[22]

At the Cabaret Voltaire something was always happening. At first, its organisers were content to perform poetic and musical works that were comparatively inoffensive to conventional tastes – they read the poems of Kandinsky and Blaise Cendrars and they performed Liszt’s “Thirteenth Rhapsody”. Russian and French evenings were organised. At a French evening on March 14th, Tzara read poems by Max Jacob, André Salmon and Laforgue, while Arp read out extracts from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi. In the evenings, they sang the songs of Aristide Briand. At the same time, their own individual works were performed, demonstrating Dada’s nihilist position in relation to all art of the past, even the most recent past. The idea of values that lay at the heart of the bourgeois aesthetic was something they utterly rejected. Hugo Ball wrote in his diary on 11 February: “Huelsenbeck arrived. He came out in favour of the intensification of Negro rhythm. If he had his way, he would replace the whole of literature with a drum-roll.”[23] On March 29, Huelsenbeck, Janko and Tzara read out the simultaneous poem of Tristan Tzara “The Admiral is Looking for a House to Rent”, together with Negro chants – works in which the principles of anti-art were formulated. “It is a contrapuntal recitative, in which three or more voices speak at the same time, sing, whistle or do something in the same spirit, but in such a way that the content of the thing that is put together from the intersections of their “parts” becomes melancholy, cheerful and odd”, Hugo Ball wrote of Tzara’s poem. “In this simultaneous poem the waywardness of the voice is clearly demonstrated, together with its dependence on the accompaniment. …The ‘Simultaneous Poem’ originates in the value of the voice. …It indicates… the clash of the ‘vox humana’ with the menacing and destructive world from whose rhythm and noises it cannot hide.”[24]

George Marinko, Sentimental Aspects of Misfortune, c. 1937.

Tempera on masonite, 35.7 × 40.3 cm.

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.

Jacques Hérold, The Game, the Night, 1936.

Private Collection.

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky), The Nice Weather, 1939.

Private Collection.

Later, in 1920, the Dadaists published one of their manifestos in which there were instructions on how “To Make a Dadaist Poem”:

And here you will have a writer who is infinitely original and with a charming sensibility, even though it is misunderstood by the masses.[25]

Tristan Tzara himself never wrote poems using this method, a fact which clearly holds a touch of irony. However, the conception of spontaneity, and the method according to which, in his own words, “thought produces itself in the mouth”, later became, to a considerable degree, the foundation of the working methods of the Surrealists.

In July 1916, a plan for an artistic and literary journal to be called Dada was announced, but the first number did not appear until July 1917. In 1916, Tzara began to correspond with the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume, who introduced him to Max Jacob, Reverdy and Apollinaire. Apollinaire had become as much of an idol for the leader of the Dada movement, as much of an inspiration as he had been for the Paris avant-garde, “the most lively, alert and enthusiastic of the French poets”.[26] Tzara dedicated several lyrical poems to Apollinaire, full of restrained melancholy. In 1918, the Paris journal SIC published Tzara’s poem “The Death of Guillaume Apollinaire”:

Dadaism in Zürich was making its presence felt most strongly in literature. All the evenings at the Cabaret Voltaire were accompanied by sketches in fancy-dress, masques and productions of Dadaist plays. However, in the galleries, and even in Zürich’s biggest museum, the Kunsthaus, exhibitions were organised in which Tzara read lectures on modern art. Here, attention was focused on the Expressionists, to whom several of the members of the Zürich Dadaists belonged, and in particular on the abstract painting of Kandinsky. The Zürich Dadaists had some artists of their own as well: Marcel Janko illustrated Tzara’s poems with engravings, and Hans Arp, who also wrote poetry, was now appearing more often at the cabaret evenings in the capacity of an artist. The opening of the Dada Gallery, at which Tzara gave a lecture on Expressionism and Abstractionism, took place on 27 March 1917, and the following day Tzara gave a lecture on Art Nouveau. In the spring of 1917, after a long stay in America, Francis Picabia arrived in Switzerland. He composed poems that were very similar to those of Tzara. They began to correspond, feeling that they were soul mates. Picabia, inspired by the correspondence, went back to the work in drawing that he had long neglected, while Tzara busied himself enthusiastically on the journal Dada. Tzara invited Francis Picabia to the exhibition at the Kunsthaus. They spent three weeks together in Zürich in January and February of 1919. The association, and then the friendship, of Tristan Tzara and Picabia was the beginning of the contact between the Zürich Dadaists and their like-minded colleagues in Paris. On January 17, 1920, Tzara went to see Picabia in Paris, where he immediately became acquainted with André Breton, Paul Éluard and Philippe Soupault, and became involved in the events staged by the Paris Dadaists – the future Surrealists.