
Dada + Surrealism: c. 1913 – 1920

In 1938, a group of 37 artists, writers and thinkers in Cairo signed a manifesto titled ‘Long Live Degenerate Art’. This marked the start of the group known as ‘Art and Liberty’, and the birth of a distinctly Egyptian style of Surrealism.

This furry tea service was a touchstone for Surrealism, but the artist was a victim of her own success.
Meret Oppenheim, Object (Fur-covered cup, saucer, and ...

Exploring how Duchamp's art challenges viewers is essential to understanding his creativity and much of the art of the last century.
Marcel Duchamp and the Viewer

What initially might seem like random images is actually Hannah Höch’s comment on Weimar Germany’s culture and politics.
Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife ...

This mask is a rare document of the Dada movement and an embodiment of the so-called “approximate man.”
Dada’s “Approximate Man”: A Portrait of Tristan ...

“Every word that is spoken and sung here says at least one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.”
Dada Performance

The Surrealists saw collage as a means to enact what they considered to be the fundamental poetic activity of the unconscious mind.
Surrealist Techniques: Collage

Photographs were used by the Surrealists to call into question the nature of reality.
Surrealist Photography

Surrealist exhibitions broke down conventional distinctions between art and non-art.
Surrealist Exhibitions

Everything is, in the end, a question of representation (in words or images) in which we choose to believe, or not.
Surrealist Techniques: Subversive Realism

Surrealism both infantilized and empowered women.
Surrealism and Women

Automatism was a group of techniques used by the Surrealists to facilitate the direct and uncontrolled outpouring of unconscious thought.
Surrealist Techniques: Automatism

The Surrealists were interested in the unconscious as a creative source.
Surrealism and Psychoanalysis

The goal of Surrealist writings and art was to “ruin” the logical, practical, and moral reasoning that structures human understanding of reality.
Surrealism: Origins and Precursors

The purpose of the readymade is fundamentally conceptual. Any objection that the object is not beautiful, or did not require any skill to make, misses the point.
Dada Readymades

The Dadaists were effective in creating devastating social and political criticism in postwar Germany.
Dada Politics

Science and technology made dysfunctional or absurd.
Dada Pataphysics

Dada is nonsense, but very carefully produced nonsense.
Dada Manifesto

A century before democracy was tested by social media gone rogue, Hausmann understood the dark side of technology.
Raoul Hausmann, Spirit of the Age: Mechanical ...

Though Picabia borrows from the popular machine aesthetic, nothing about his apparatus is functional.