One hundred years ago in Zürich, a group of artists turned a former dairy into a club they named Cabaret Voltaire, and called for revolutionary actions that would dissolve the boundaries separating life from art. The group included Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Marcel Janco, Sophie Taeuber and Richard Huelsenbeck. "Dada," as they named the movement, was the new normal—hypermodern, international, provacative, inventive. It became code for a radical avante-garde that questioned out-moded social values, the horrific destruction brought by nerve gas during WWI, and turned art into site interventions and performances advancing their goals. Above: Participants at the International Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists, Weimar, Germany, 1922; left to right: Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp, Max Burchartz, Lotte Burchartz, Hans Richter, Nelly van Doesburg, Cornelis van Eesteren, Theo van Doesburg, Peter Röhl, Alexa Röhl, Werner Graeff.

The group expanded when it moved to Paris, in 1920, joined by André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Hans Richter, Salvador Dali, Francis Picabia, Meret Oppenheim, and Giocometti. 

 
Above: The Greatest-Ever-Dada-Show" at Cabaret Voltaire, 1919.

With the hotly anticipated opening of Everything Is Dada, at Yale University Art Gallery in February, there is bound to be a flurry of related exhibitions on the horizon. For now, DART presents some additional information, courtesy the Guggenheim Museum Collections website:

One of the first large-scale movements to translate art into provocative action, Dada produced some of the most antibourgeois, antirational, anarchic, playful works to come out of the 20th century. It began in 1916 in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, where expatriate artists, poets, and writers gathered in refuge from World War I. Dada started as an indictment of the bourgeois values responsible for the horrors of the war, and assumed many forms, including outrageous performances, festivals, readings, erotic mechanomorphic art, nonsensical chance-generated poetry, found objects, and political satire in photomontage. Over several years it developed in New York as well as many European cities—primarily Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Paris, and Hannover—through the activities of such artists and writers as Jean Arp, Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters, and Tristan Tzara.

The term Neo-Dada, first popularized in a group of articles by Barbara Rose in the early 1960s, has been applied to a wide variety of artistic works, including the pre-Pop Combines and assemblages of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Happenings, Fluxus, Pop art, Junk art, and Nouveau Réalisme, as well as other Conceptual and experimental art forms. The unifying element of Neo-Dada art is its reinvestigation of Dada’s irony and its use of found objects and/or banal activities as instruments of social and aesthetic critique.

Everything Is Dada opens February 12 at Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT. Info
Moholy-Nagy: Future Present opens May 27 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY. Info

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