Surrealism

Nilson Carroll ART 353 Research Paper The Dada Text In July 1916, as the Great War raged across Europe, Hugo Ball read aloud the first Dada manifesto at the Cabaret Voltaire (Ades, Caberet 16). In typical Dada hyperbole, the manifesto made wild claims about the power of the word Dada and how it indicated a new tendency in art and literature. The manifesto, and the many that were written after it, identified and combated what the Dadaists saw as the bourgeois corruption that had caused the war and diluted art into something worthless. Through written manifestos, Dada poetry and collage, wild forms of theater and new ideas on visual art, Dada found a common voice among several different groups of artists from across Europe and in New York. Today, Dada is understood as an art movement, chronologically somewhere in between Futurism and Surrealism. Yet, Dada cannot be understood simply as a visual art movement, but instead as a literary movement. Rather than through painting or sculpture, Dada is best understood through the text, manifestos, poetry, and magazines produced by the Dadaists. Dada visual art by artists like Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, or Hans Arp do not rely on traditional formal elements of art, but rather on the titles of the works. Dadaists have more in common with their contemporary, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, than with any painter, and they are more concerned with Symbolist poets Arthur Rimbaud and Comte de Lautréamont than with modern painters Édouard Manet and Paul Gauguin (Drucker 197). Hugo Ball’s contribution, the formation of the Cabaret Voltaire, cannot be overestimated to the formulation of Dada. The Cabaret Voltaire event was essentially a stage play, with the Dadaists on stage reciting poetry (some original and some appropriated), performing wild dances, acting childish and telling jokes, and playing primitive music. There was some art

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exhibited at the event, such as a few Picasso paintings and illustrations by the early Dada

Cited: Ades, Dawn. “Cabaret Voltaire.” The Dada Reader. Ed. Dawn Ades. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 15-19. Print. Ades, Dawn. “Littérature.” The Dada Reader. Ed. Dawn Ades. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 161-64. Print. Ball, Hugo. “Cabaret Voltaire.” The Dada Reader. Ed. Dawn Ades. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 20-21. Print. Camfield, William. Francis Picabia: His Art, Life, and Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Print. Caws, Mary Ann. “Introduction.” Approximate Man and Other Writings. Tristan Tzara. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973. 15-38. Print. Drucker, Johanna. The Visible Word. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Print. Gaiger, Jason. “Interpreting the readymade: Marcel Duchamp’s Bottlerack.” Frameworks for Modern Art. Ed. Jason Gaiger. London: Yale University Press, 2003. 57-103. Print. Hutton Turner, Elizabeth. “La Jeune Fille Américaine and the Dadaist Impulse.” Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender & Identity. Ed. Noami Sawelson-Gorse. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. 4-20. Print. Lykiard, Alexis. “Introduction.” Maldoror. Comte de Lautréamont. Cambridge: Exact Change, 1994. 1-19. Print. Malevich, Kasimir. "Suprematism." Theories of Modern Art. Ed. Herschel B. Chipp. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968. 341-46. Print. Mondrian, Piet. “Natural Reality and Abstract Reality.” Theories of Modern Art. Ed. Herschel B. Chipp. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968. 321-23. Print. Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997. Print. Tzara, Tristan. “Dada Manifesto 1918.” The Dada Reader. Ed. Dawn Ades. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 36-42. Print. 7 Figures Figure 1. Francis Picabia, Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity, 1915, ink on paper. 8 Figure 2. Alfred Stieglitz, studio photograph of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917, 9 Figure 3. Hans Arp, Arrangement According to the Laws of Chance (Collage with Squares), 1916-17, torn and pasted papers, ink, and bronze paint, 49 x 35 cm. 10