Dadaism was an art movement of the European
avant-garde in the early 20th century. Dada in Zurich, Switzerland,
began in 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter, but the height of
New York Dada was the year before, in 1915.
Dada emerged amid the brutality of World Wad I
(1914–18)—a conflict that claimed the lives of eight million military
personnel and an estimated equal number of civilians. This unprecedented
loss of human life was a result of trench warfare and technological
advances in weaponry, communications, and transportation systems.
For the disillusioned artists of the Dada movement, the war merely confirmed the degradation of social structures
that led to such violence: corrupt and nationalist politics, repressive
social values, and unquestioning conformity of culture
and thought. From 1916 until the mid-1920s, artists in Zurich, New
York, Cologne, Hanover, and Paris declared an all-out assault against
not only on conventional definitions of art, but on rational thought
itself. "The beginnings of Dada,” poet Tristan Tzara recalled, "were not
the beginnings of art, but of disgust.”
