Nothing has ever, or will ever, shake the world like World War I. Technology, which had been touted as something that would change the world for the better, was being used to kill people by the thousands instead. Just 150 miles outside of Paris, 120,000 Frenchmen were killed in a deadly German offensive. This led to a separate group of French soldiers being brought in as reinforcements to spend their march baa-ing like lambs being sent off to the abattoir in a poignant, if futile protest.

Amidst this backdrop of tragedy, a profound transformation was underway. Art, constantly intertwined with the fabric of societal unrest, found new expression. Out of the ashes of conflict emerged a radical movement: Dadaism. 

The scale of death and destruction of the war fundamentally altered how artists perceived the world. The frivolous pursuit of entertaining the public took a backseat, replaced by a fervent desire to rebel, to challenge, and to provoke through their art.

With its origins rooted in Zurich, Switzerland, Dadaism spread quickly to New York City and Paris. Dadaism was pivotal in changing the way the world viewed art by challenging traditional ideas and paving the way for surrealism, conceptual art, and performance art.

What is Dadaism? 

Even though Dadaism was truly born in response to World War I and the bourgeois, the building blocks of the movement had been around for years before. Movements like Cubism and Futurism set the stage for Dada art.

While Dadaism would become an international movement, the heart of the entire thing undoubtedly started in Europe. Many Dadaists believed that things like capitalism and consumerism were part of the reason for World War I, and Dada artwork was a form of protest against these sensibilities. 

Dada artwork was believed by many Dadaists to not even really be art at all. Dadaism rejected things like traditional artistic aesthetics and instead, was meant to offend those who observed it.

One Dadaist, Hugo Ball, described the movement, 

“ For us, art is not an end in itself … but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in.”

In Switzerland, Dada was started by a group of artists and intellectuals like Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and Marcel Janco. These people had swayed towards the unconventional before, but with Dada, they really found their footing. 

Artists that engaged with Dadaism didn’t stick to just painting or pencil on a canvas, or even still art as a whole. Instead, performance art, poetry readings, and everything in between were welcomed and celebrated. 

Other unconventional techniques that Dada was known for were collage, photomontage, readymades, and absurdism. Examples of famous Dada pieces would include things like a urinal, a graffitied Mona Lisa, and a clothing iron with tacks attached. 

Practitioners of Dadaism leaned heavily into the idea of “anti-art”, making work that was nonsensical, irrational, and often dark to criticize the politics of the day and the disillusionment of the public with the war. 

While it was hard to pinpoint exactly what Dada was, the legacy of it remains to this day. Dada was meant to challenge both people and perceptions and in that, it continues to succeed. 

Dada, the Mysterious Moniker 

No one quite knows where the name “Dada” originated from, but there are a few theories that prevail.

The first thought about the name is that Dada was chosen because it’s a nonsense word. The Dada movement itself embraced nonsense and anti-art sensibilities, so it makes sense that a meaningless word would fit the movement best. 

Next is the idea that the term “Dada” came from the Romanian word for yes, “Da”. Two of the founding members of the Dada movement were Romanian, and they would frequently utter the phrase “Da, da,” meaning “Yes, yes.” It’s not known how this phrasing would have become the name for the movement itself.

The third theory for the “Dada” moniker was that a group of Dadaists, in search of a name for their movement, stabbed a paper knife into a French-German dictionary. Their searching knife landed on the word “dada”, which is French for a hobby horse.

Despite these varying theories, there isn’t one that rises above the others. But many consider it fitting that the randomness of the Dada movement would come alongside a mysterious name.