The Dada movement
Paris 1
The study of Parisian Dada is of limited interest to the art historian, for the French capital was predominantly the scene of an ideological or literary battleground. Actually, Dada produced only two French artists of major importance -- Duchamp and Picabia.
Out of the junction between on the one hand, Picabia and Tzara, who had arrived in Paris from Zurich respectively in 1919 and 1920, and on the other hand the group (André Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Paul Éluard) formed around the little periodical Littérature, was born the French branch of the movement, the most notorious because it was to serve somewhat as a sounding board to Zurich dadaism. Its brilliant Parisian career, opened with a flourish in January 1920, was to end in a slump four years later. Meanwhile it had sponsored a great number of manifestations, exhibitions, shows, public provocations, a burst of manifestos, pamphlets, magazines and books, sometimes extremely varied, but always bearing Dada's iconclastic and irreverential hallmark. However, the united face the dadaists showed the public was already cracked. Only a few weeks after its formation, the group split up into two factions: a Zurich radical wing, led by Tzara; and a Parisian tendency, represented by Breton and his friends who, more open to the literary tradition, was to resurface in 1924 under the new name of surrealism.
This hyperactive current surged on, from one country to another, all the way to the antipodes. About a hundred artists claimed to be inspired by Dada and produced highly varied works under its influence.
At the beginning, Dada borrowed elements from various pre-war "modernist" schools (futurism, cubism, expressionnism, etc.). But it exploited its predecessors' techniques to diametrically opposite purposes through a subtle process of "denaturation". In this way, for example, the typographical dismembering brought into fashion by the futurists in their Parole in Libertà would reappear systematically in the Dada tracts and pamphlets of Zurich, Paris and Berlin so as to become the undisputable trademark of the movement. It was no longer any question of pulling a new kind of beauty out of a jumble of type fonts, but rather of showing the vanity of all esthetic effort. Along the same lines, always following in the futurists' lead, Dada would make much of the machine. But where Severini and Balla were its high priests, Ernst, Duchamp and Picabia aspired only to desacralize it by replacing it in a perfectly unlyrical context (Duchamp's Broyeuse de chocolat). No more than man himself, the machine, his "daughter born without a mother," finds no favour in Dada's eyes: it is happily torn apart, raped, mocked, parodied. We find countless examples in Picabia's work of disparate mechanical elements distributed in haphazard order, as in Petite solitude au milieu des soleils, a machine that could never function and was therefore condemned to sterility.
1. Salon Dada. Poster, Paris, Montaigne Gallery, June 3-6-30 1921. The international exhibition organized by Tzara under the name of "Salon Dada" in the hall of the Montaigne Gallery, just above the Champs-Élysées theatre, assembled a medley of a hundred incongruous works submitted by about twenty French and foreign artists.