Over spring break, I travelled to Amsterdam and Malaga,\nSpain with a childhood friend. Amsterdam is one of the cultural capitals of Western\nEurope and had a prolific art scene throughout its history. I didn\u2019t know much\nabout Malaga before I arrived but I soon learned that while it is primarily a\nbeach and party town, it also prides itself as the birthplace of Pablo Picasso.\nMalaga is home to a significant collection of his work and other prominent Spanish\nartists. As I toured museums in both cities, I was struck by the international\nreach of some contemporary art movements. Among movements such as Impressionism,\nCubism, and Expressionism, it was the Dadaist movement in particular surprised me\nwith its worldwide reach. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dadaism originated with a collection\nof artists in Zurich who fled from the horrors of World War I. After the\narmistice of 1918, many of the artists returned to their home countries and\nfounded their own Dada movements. Dada quickly spread to Berlin and New York\nand within a few years could be seen throughout Europe and by the late 1920s even\nJapan. Dada made its name by challenging the basic norms of society and the existing\nconceptions of what could be defined as art. Its rejection of societal norms\nfound followers and ready contributors from all over the world. The word \u2018dada\u2019\nitself was used for its multilingual and completely ambiguous meaning. In French\nit means \u2018hobby horse\u2019, in German \u2018get off my back\u2019 and in Romanian it is simply\na variant of \u2018yes\u2019 or \u2018indeed\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Berlin, the Dada movement\nfocused on hypocrisy within politics and the plight of ordinary people as a\nresult of war. Both the Berlin and Zurich Dadaists constructed manifestos\noutlining the aims and values of Dada artists. The New York Dada movement was\nmuch less literary than its European counterpart and focused more directly on\nthe world of aesthetic art. Led by European transplants like Marcel Duchamp,\nNew York Dadaists sought to undermine what was deemed as conventional art\nthrough irony. Duchamp and others in the New York scene took everyday objects\nand submitted them to exhibitionists. The most famous of these everyday\nobjects-turned-artwork was Duchamp\u2019s Fountain<\/em>,\nan upward facing urinal. In each respective Dada movement, many of the artists,\nalready international transplants, led transitory lives and never rooted\nthemselves in one place. Dada movements formed and split up sporadically\nthrough the 1920s but the fundamental ideas of the movement largely remained and\ninspired avant-garde artists throughout the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the popularisation of Dada in\nmajor cultural centres, the ideologies of the movement attracted artists in\nFrance, The Netherlands, Georgia, Yugoslavia, Russia and Japan. Each of these\nmovements shared an aversion for anti-establishment art and politics. They tied\nthemselves to one another through abstract art aimed at fighting conservative\nand traditional values. Despite the worldwide attraction of Dadaism, the\nmovement did not maintain a coherent collection of artists long enough to form\na comprehensive global alliance between its followers. Although, perhaps that was\nthe very essence of Dada. They despised the mainstream and the conventional;\ncreating an established school of art would mean becoming what they stood\nagainst. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019t know much about Malaga before<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-lM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1350"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1351,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350\/revisions\/1351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}