1. Dada
“ Freedom : Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE”
“Dada Manifesto” [1919]

2. Began in neutral Switzerland in WWI
Also big in Paris.
Reached its peak between 1916 – 1924
“Anti – Art”
A movement against rigidity of society and art, and the barbarity of war – the public didn’t deserve art after the war.

3. Nonsensical drawings
Pastel and faded colors
Used collages and layers – to confuse the “unworthy beholder.”
“The beginnings of surrealism” – many Dada artists went on to become members of the Surrealist movement.
Subjects sometimes mundane, called art as irony. (e.g.– bicycle wheel, flyer.)

4. Max Ernst
Aquis submergus'

5. Hannah Hoch
Cut with a Kitchen Knife

6. Raoul Hausmann: ABCD (1924-25)

7. What a b what a b what a beauty
What a b what a b what a a
What a beauty beauty be
What a beauty beauty beauty be be be
What a be what a b what a beauty
What a be be be be be
What a be be be be be be be a beauty be be be
What a beauty.
by Kurt Schwitters

9. Reaction to the War

10. Otto Dix
Prager Street, 1924
Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity)

11. Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas,
1924

12. George Grosz Grey Day (1921)
Ridiculed contemporary culture & traditional art forms.
The collapse during WW I of social and moral values.
Nihilistic.

13. The Pillars of Society (1926)
George Grosz
The Pillars of Society (1926)

17. Lost Generation Ernest Hemingway T.S. Eliot F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gertrude Stein

18. Social Criticism
Sinclair Lewis – Babbit
H.L. Mencken