Dada

Dada () or Dadaism was an international art movement that developed in the context of World War I, its aftermath, and the Futurist movement. First established in Zürich, Switzerland, it later quickly spread to Berlin, Paris, New York City and a variety of artistic centers in Europe and Asia. The Dada movement focused on rejecting prevailing ideas surrounding art, and more broadly in society. The Dada movement's principles were first collected in Hugo Ball's Dada Manifesto in 1916. Ball is seen as the founder of the Dada movement. Other key figures in the movement included Emmy Hennings, Jean Arp, Johannes Baader, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Richard Huelsenbeck, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Tristan Tzara, and Beatrice Wood, among others. The movement influenced later styles, like the avant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including Surrealism, nouveau réalisme, pop art, and Fluxus. Dada did not constitute a single aesthetic or political programme, and its character varied substantially among its centres and participants. Scholarship distinguishes both destructive and constructive tendencies within the movement, while its practices ranged from anti-art, political satire and cultural negation to experiments with abstraction, chance, language, performance, machines, film and, for some participants, spiritual or mystical ideas. In turn, it itself also did not arise out of nowhere. 35 years earlier, an art movement similar to Dadaism in general, called Fumism, was known in Paris; some of the old Fumists were in close contact with the new Dadaists.