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| QUICK LINKS: Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Duchamp Table Salt, Schwitters Torso, Arp | Opened by Customs, Schwitters Flag, Johns |
Dada was an art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. The art, poetry and performance produced by dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature.
Dada artists felt the war called into question every aspect of a society capable of starting and then prolonging it – including its art. Their aim was to destroy traditional values in art and to create a new art to replace the old. As the artist Hans Arp later wrote: Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might.
In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and had political affinities with the radical left.
[Source: tate.org.uk]
[1640-10]
| The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is often called the Large Glass because that is precisely what it is: two pieces of glass, which are stacked vertically and framed like a double-hung window to reach over nine feet tall. Though the Large Glass is essentially a flat, two-dimensional object, it is emphatically not a painting, as it is mostly transparent—you can walk around it and view it from both sides—and Duchamp avoided using traditional materials like canvas and oil paint. Instead, he concocted the imagery on the glass surface out of wire, foil, glue, and varnish. He also allowed dust to collect on the glass as it laid flat in his studio, which he affixed with adhesive. [Source: khanacademy.org] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (aka Large Glass, The) | 1915-23 | Wire/Foil/Oil | Abstract |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Duchamp, Marcel | 1887-1968, aged 81 | French-American artist | Dada |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1640-11] | |
| Philadelphia Museum of Art | 278 x 176 |
 Image source: tate.org.uk | Table Salt is a collage made of printed material adhered to thin board. A bold, geometric pattern in dense black ink dominates a rectangular piece of buff paper measuring some thirty centimetres in height. In the upper zone, the German word ‘Tafelsalz’, oriented vertically, appears in capital letters; the source was a label for a packet of salt. Overlaying this pattern, and oriented in the opposite direction, is a line illustration of two fruits and the word ‘Aprikose’ (meaning ‘apricot’ in German). Mounted on a piece of off-white paper, the image is inscribed by the artist in pencil ‘Z.i.20 – Tafelsalz’ on its lower edge and signed and dated 1922. [Source: tate.org.uk] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Table Salt (Tafelsalz) | 1922 | Prntd Ppr on Ppr | Abstract |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Schwitters, Kurt | 1887-1948, aged 60 | German artist | Dada |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1640-12] | |
| Tate Galleries, Millbank, Westminster, London SW1P 4RG UK | 32 x 23 |
| Since earliest times images of the human body have played a central role in art. Since Auguste Rodin in particular, many artists have focused their attention on the representation of torsos. Arp also produced variations on this subject in numerous sculptures. As early as 1930, a human Torso formed one of his first three-dimensional works. In Leaf-torso we witness, however, the metamorphosis of human and plant. They provide evidence of Arp’s constant preoccupation with the natural processes of growth. Art is a fruit growing out of man like the fruit out of a plant like the child out of the mother… Jean Arp, Dada Diary, 1932 [Source: arpmuseum.org] |  Image source: sothebys.com |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Torso | 1932 | Sculpture | |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Arp, Jean (Hans Peter Wilhelm) | 1886-1966, aged 79 | German-French sculptor | Dada |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1640-13] | |
| Georges Pompidou Centre, Place Georges-Pompidou, 75004 Paris, France | 0 |
 Image source: tate.org.uk | This work is a collage made from different types of low quality paper such as packaging, wrapping and newsprint, which have then been overlaid in places by strokes of oil paint and crayon marks. The white paper support has buckled badly and the overall colour is now a yellowy brown, as the original colours have faded badly. Amongst the various collage elements, certain items stand out. Most notable are a partially visible torn photograph of a man in a suit in the bottom right corner, a page of typed Norwegian text covered with strokes of coloured paint in the bottom left corner, a colourful fruit wrapping slightly right of centre and at the top, three partially obscured German custom labels stamped with Hanover postage marks. It is this last element that gives the work its title. [Source: tate.org.uk] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Opened by Customs | 1937-8 | Paper | Abstract |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Schwitters, Kurt | 1887-1948, aged 60 | German artist | Dada |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1640-14] | |
| Tate Galleries, Millbank, Westminster, London SW1P 4RG UK | 33 x 25 |
| The forty-eight stars and red-and-white stripes depicted here picture an American flag from the year this work was made. Johns noted that using a recognisable image took care of a great deal for him because he didn’t have to design it. He made this work by combining panels, paint, and encaustic, a mixture of pigment and melted wax that captured the paint’s drips, smears, and brushstrokes. Beneath the flag’s familiar stripes, we can make out a collage of newspaper scraps whose dates locate this commonplace symbol within a particular moment. [Source: moma.org] |  Image source: moma.org |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Flag | 1954-5 | Oil | Abstract |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Johns, Jasper | 1930 – | American painter | Neo-Dada |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | ||
| MOMA, Museum of Modern Art, 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019, USA | 107 x 154 |
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