Dada was an avant-garde art movement formed in the early 20th century in Zürich in reaction to the horrors of the First World War. The Dada artists believed that the war called into question any aspect of their society including the creation of art, therefore aiming at the demolition of traditional artistic values. On this basis, a new form of art should be created that would make political statements against war, was anti-bourgeois, and radically left. Dada artists rejected the aestheticism of the modern capitalist society and showed this attitude in the expression of nonsense and irrationality in their artworks.
The founder of the Dada movement was the writer Hugo Ball, who started the satirical night-club Cabaret Voltaire, as well as a magazine called Dada in Zürich. The movement consecutively included several visual and literary forms of art, including collage, sculpture, cut-up writing, and sound poetry. The Zürich movement spread internationally and was especially successful in New York starting in 1915, later flourishing in Paris during the 1920s. Representatives of the Dada movement included Jean Arp, Johannes Baader, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Emmy Hennings, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Man Ray, Hans Richter, and Kurt Schwitters among many others. Dada inspired other art movements, especially SurrealismSurrealism was a 20th-century philosophical, literary, and artistic movement seeking to channel the unconscious to access the imaginary. Proponents of Surrealism rejected the notion of understanding life in rational and conventional terms in favour of asserting the value of the unconscious mind, dreams, the strangely beautiful, and the uncanny. André Breton, the leader of a group of poets and artists More, Pop ArtPop Art is a dynamic genre of modern art that emerged during the mid-20th century as a bold challenge to traditional art conventions. It focused on popular culture, using images from advertising, comic books, and the everyday to comment on the nature of mass production and consumerism. This entry delves into the key concepts, artists, and the broader impact of More, and Fluxus.