Over spring break, I travelled to Amsterdam and Malaga, Spain with a childhood friend. Amsterdam is one of the cultural capitals of Western Europe and had a prolific art scene throughout its history. I didn’t know much about Malaga before I arrived but I soon learned that while it is primarily a beach and party town, it also prides itself as the birthplace of Pablo Picasso. Malaga is home to a significant collection of his work and other prominent Spanish artists. As I toured museums in both cities, I was struck by the international reach of some contemporary art movements. Among movements such as Impressionism, Cubism, and Expressionism, it was the Dadaist movement in particular surprised me with its worldwide reach.
Dadaism originated with a collection of artists in Zurich who fled from the horrors of World War I. After the armistice of 1918, many of the artists returned to their home countries and founded their own Dada movements. Dada quickly spread to Berlin and New York and within a few years could be seen throughout Europe and by the late 1920s even Japan. Dada made its name by challenging the basic norms of society and the existing conceptions of what could be defined as art. Its rejection of societal norms found followers and ready contributors from all over the world. The word ‘dada’ itself was used for its multilingual and completely ambiguous meaning. In French it means ‘hobby horse’, in German ‘get off my back’ and in Romanian it is simply a variant of ‘yes’ or ‘indeed’.
In Berlin, the Dada movement focused on hypocrisy within politics and the plight of ordinary people as a result of war. Both the Berlin and Zurich Dadaists constructed manifestos outlining the aims and values of Dada artists. The New York Dada movement was much less literary than its European counterpart and focused more directly on the world of aesthetic art. Led by European transplants like Marcel Duchamp, New York Dadaists sought to undermine what was deemed as conventional art through irony. Duchamp and others in the New York scene took everyday objects and submitted them to exhibitionists. The most famous of these everyday objects-turned-artwork was Duchamp’s Fountain, an upward facing urinal. In each respective Dada movement, many of the artists, already international transplants, led transitory lives and never rooted themselves in one place. Dada movements formed and split up sporadically through the 1920s but the fundamental ideas of the movement largely remained and inspired avant-garde artists throughout the world.
After the popularisation of Dada in major cultural centres, the ideologies of the movement attracted artists in France, The Netherlands, Georgia, Yugoslavia, Russia and Japan. Each of these movements shared an aversion for anti-establishment art and politics. They tied themselves to one another through abstract art aimed at fighting conservative and traditional values. Despite the worldwide attraction of Dadaism, the movement did not maintain a coherent collection of artists long enough to form a comprehensive global alliance between its followers. Although, perhaps that was the very essence of Dada. They despised the mainstream and the conventional; creating an established school of art would mean becoming what they stood against.