The Dada Movement
Berlin, Cologne
Raoul Hausmann: Tête mécanique 1919-1920. Berlin. Hannah Höch Collection
The Dada movement, formed in Zurich 1916, was a reaction to World War I, its anarchic iconoclasm appealing to the artists George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, and Max Ernst. Also a reaction to the horrors of the war was the Neue Sachlichkeit/New Objectivity movement, which expressed the bitter social criticism of George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix.
Raoul Hausmann: Dada siegt!
Richter and Huelsenbeck were responsible for bringing the Dada virus to Berlin where it found a highly favourable culture medium in the little libertarian group formed by Raoul Hausmann, Franz Jung, Johannes Baader, George Grosz, John Heartfield and a dozen young intellectuals more or less recently graduated from Herwarth Walden's Sturm. The Berlin movement's originality stemmed from its political militantism: it was involved in the social upheavals and the Spartakist revolution which broke out at the end of the war in the German capital. Its plastic works, ferociously subversive, retain for us the cruel image of the twilight of the bourgeoisie.
George Grosz : Man of Opinion
Hannah Höch (1889-1978) is best known as one of the originators of the medium of photomontage, and the only female member of the Berlin Dada group, an artistic grouping which protested the unprecedented destruction of World War I by putting into question all prexisting rules, traditions, and conventions. Höch created some of the most memorable and radical images of the period from photographs clipped from mass-media periodicals, a method she used throughout her career.
Hannah Höch
Hannah Höch - Cut With the Kitchen Knife
She cuts up faces and bodies and fits together parts mismatched in size, color, and style, achieving through paper surgery, a biting critique on the folly of beauty culture. Even the most painstaking and time consuming pieces convey a sense of spontaneity and freshness.
From Not a Sugar Dada's Girl
In Cologne, Dada was the result of a local group's meeting with Hans Arp, messenger of the Zurich movement. The local base got organized right after the end of the war around Max Ernst, who had been previously drawn to Chirico's "metaphysical" painting, and around a communist activist, Johannes Theodor Baargeld.
Under the influence of the Arp-Baargeld-Ernst trio, Cologne became the scene of tremendous activity. For a while the city even turned into the capital of collage, especially of collaborative assemblages like the Fatagaga ("Fabrication de tableaux garantis gazométriques"), mass produced by the "Centrale W/3".
Kurt Schwitters - Tafel Salz (1922)
In Hanover, the Dada spirit was embodied by a single man, Kurt Schwitters, trained under the sign of expressionnism but who, as early as 1918, had renounced figurative games to create a highly personal plastic grammar, substituting all kinds of rubbish found in public garbage dumps for noble pigments. All these cast off materials were transformed by him into admirable compositions in which colours and volumes made mysterious alliances. He called these strange paintings Merzbilder (after the central syllable of Kommerzbank) and named them by numbers in chronological order of their composition.
Poems by Richard Huelsenbeck in English translation by Johannes Beilharz:
http://www.jbeilharz.de/huelsenbeck/rh_poems.html
These poems were first published in the volume Phantastische Gebete (Fantastic Prayers) in 1916 (Collection Dada, Zurich), then reissued in 1920 in an expanded edition with illustrations by George Grosz by Malik Verlag, Berlin.
The translation is based on the text of the 1960 edition published by Arche Verlag, Zurich with a new dedication and preface by Richard Huelsenbeck.
Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (First International Dada Fair), Berlin 1920: photos and a Hausmann painting from tumblr.
