<h1>The Hurricane of Dadaism Changed the Perspective on Art and the World 100 Years Ago</h1>

Adolf Loos: House of Tristan Tzara, Paris (1925-26)

Zurich - The artistic and literary movement Dadaism radically transformed the perception of art and society 100 years ago. The artists were having a great time while doing so. "I scream, I scream, I scream and I am very sympathetic to myself," wrote, for example, the founder Tristan Tzara. His colleague, painter Marcel Duchamp, exhibited a urinal as an art object titled Fountain, elevating an ordinary item to a work of art. One of the Dadaists' credos was that the artwork is what the author says and thinks about it. The golden age of Dadaism lasted only about six years: from the famous stabbing of a knife into the dictionary in 1916 to the shift to Surrealism and Tzara's slogan: "Dada means nothing."

What famous works were created by Dadaism? Besides Duchamp's most famous Fountain, there is also an iron with spikes titled A Gift from the American Man Ray, Duchamp's famous Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee, or the Mechanical Head by the Austrian Raoul Hausmann, who worked in Czechoslovakia before the war. Another Dadaist contribution was collages and assemblages, simultaneous poems, or wordless poems.

The movement originated on February 5, 1916, in the Zurich cabaret Voltaire, where the first performance took place. The founder of the movement, which injected new blood into modern art, is primarily considered to be the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara.

If it weren't for World War I, Dadaism probably wouldn't have emerged. Zurich, in neutral Switzerland, became the ideal place for many artists (but also for revolutionaries - Lenin was preparing here for his return to Russia). The German-French artist and poet Hans Arp later said about its origin: "Madness and murder had already been unleashed when Dada emerged in 1916 from the dark depths of Zurich. ... Dada wanted to tear humanity from its miserable incapacity and save people from the furious madness of the war period."

How did the name of the movement come about? There are several versions. According to the most well-known, a knife was plunged into the dictionary, and its tip landed on the word dada. According to another version, Tzara let a drop of water from a dropper fall onto a randomly opened page of the dictionary, and the drop splattered on the word dada. According to another version, Tzara pronounced the word dada in a café. Dada means a rocking horse or also a hobby in French, agreement in Russian or Romanian, a cube in some Italian dialects, and, for Germans, it expresses foolish naivety.

Artists in the cabaret recited, for example, poems without content, based solely on clusters of syllables and letters; Tzara wrote poems from random words that he pulled from a hat, and at other times, all recited poems at once. In July 1916, the first issue of the Dada magazine was published at Tzara's initiative, and the movement gained international status. Then came the first so-called ready-made objects (the aforementioned Duchamp’s Fountain), collages by George Grosz or John Heartfield, and Dada established itself in France, Germany, and the USA.

The first international Dada exhibition took place in 1920 in Berlin. It was typical for the decoration of the gallery, where visitors were welcomed by a hanging figure with a pig's head dressed in a police uniform.

Duchamp later wrote: "With (Spanish painter Francis) Picabia, we tried to open a corridor of humor that led into a dream world and ultimately led to Surrealism."

The movement gradually emptied out until its eventual demise, expressed in Tzara's slogan: "Dada means nothing." The year 1924 is marked as the year of the decline of Dadaism when one of its former participants, André Breton, published the Surrealist Manifesto. Most Dadaists then transitioned to Surrealism with its concept of conscious and subconscious imagination and automatic writing.

Dadaism did not take hold much in the Czech lands; however, it influenced the group around the magazine Devětsil, the beginnings of Poetism, poet František Halas, or the theatrical work of Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich.

Max Ernst once said: "It is a virtue of Dadaism that it died young." And one of the founding fathers, Richard Huelsenbeck, added: "The best thing about Dadaism is that you can't understand it."