Dadaism

Emerging amid the brutality of World War I, the revolutionaryDada movement took disgust with the establishment as its starting point. From1916 until the mid-1920s, artists in Zurich, Cologne, Hanover, Paris, and NewYork launched a radical assault on the politics, social values, and cultural conformitywhich they regarded as complicit in the devastating conflict. Dada artists shared nodistinct style but rather a common wish to upturn societal structures as muchas artistic standards and to replace logic and reason with the absurd, chaotic,and unpredictable. Their practice encompassed experimental theater, games,guttural sound-making, collage, photomontage, chance-based procedures, and the“readymade,” most notoriously Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, Fountain (1917).Throughout, the Dadaists considered the visual appearance of their worksecondary to the ideas and critiques it expressed. In this sense, Dada may beseen as a fundamental precursor to conceptual art. With a selection of keyworks from some of the most famous proponents of Dada such as Tristan Tzara,Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, Francis Picabia, and Man Ray,this book introduces this urgent, subversive, and determined 20th-centurymovement and its lasting influence on modern art. About the series Born back in 1985, the BasicArt Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection everpublished. Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art History series features: approximately 100 colorillustrations with explanatory captions a detailed, illustratedintroduction a selection of the mostimportant works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with afull-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait andbrief biography of the artist.