Dadaism

During World War I, a group of artists decided that the world had gone crazy. So they made crazy art to match. They called their movement Dada, a word that does not really mean anything. Dadaists made art from trash, wrote nonsense poems, and put mustaches on famous paintings. They wanted to shock people and make them question everything. Dada was wild, funny, and completely different from anything before it.

Breaking the Rules

Dada artists believed that if the world did not make sense, art did not have to either. Marcel Duchamp put a bicycle wheel on a stool and called it art. He even displayed a bathroom fixture in a gallery and signed it with a fake name. Hugo Ball read nonsense poems while wearing a funny costume. These artists wanted to tear down the old rules about what art should be.

Art from Anything

Dadaists made art from scraps, old newspapers, and random objects. They cut up words and pictures from magazines and rearranged them into collages. Hans Arp dropped pieces of paper on the floor and glued them where they fell. Raoul Hausmann made photomontages by cutting and pasting photos together. Dada only lasted a few years, but it inspired many later art movements, including Pop Art and modern performance art.

Fun Facts

• Nobody knows for sure where the name Dada came from. Some say they picked it randomly from a dictionary.
• Marcel Duchamp once drew a mustache on a picture of the Mona Lisa and called it a new artwork.
• Dada started in Zurich, Switzerland, in a small club called the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916.

Did You Know?

Marcel Duchamp's artwork of an upside-down bathroom fixture is now considered one of the most important artworks of the 1900s, even though many people thought it was just a joke!