Task 2 Dada and Sophie

The Dada movement was a art movement of the European avant grade in the 20th century.  At least two works qualified as pre-Dadaist, a posteriori, had already sensitized the public and artists alike: Ubu Roi (1896) byAlfred Jarry, and the ballet Parade (1916–17) by Erik Satie. The roots of Dada lay in pre-war avant-garde. Cubism and the development of collage, combined with Wassily Kandinsky’s theoretical writings and abstraction, detached the movement from the constraints of reality and convention. The influence of French poets and the writings of German Expressionists liberated Dada from the tight correlation between words and meaning. Avant-garde circles outside France knew of pre-war Parisian developments. They had seen (or participated in) Cubist exhibitions held at Galería Dalmau, Barcelona (1912), Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin (1912), the Armory show in New York (1913), SVU Mánes in Prague (1914), several Jack of Diamondsexhibitions in Moscow and at De Moderne Kunstkring, Amsterdam (between 1911 and 1915). Futurism developed in response to the work of various artists. Dada subsequently combined these approaches.  

Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I. For many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests, which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity—in art and more broadly in society—that corresponded to the war.

Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality. For example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest "against this world of mutual destruction."

Sophie latebeur 

Taeuber-Arp was Swiss through and through. That gave her an entree to an extraordinary moment when the most dangerous artists and poets in Europe came together in a nightclub in Zurich. Trained as an artist and designer, she played a founding part in the movement that blew conventional notions of art, craft, and culture itself to smithereens – and which still influences the most subversive pop culture today: dada.

The first world war destroyed European civilization. A continent that thought itself the most enlightened on Earth sent its young to die in a bloodbath of psychotic squander. Some young people rebelled. They walked away from the slaughter. Their natural destination was neutral Switzerland. So it was that in Zurich in 1916 the nonsense poet Hugo Ball and the maverick writer and drummer Richard Huelsenbeck – both Germans – led a raggle-taggle band of artists in wild, strange evening performances at the Dada cabaret.