Nightingales, nightmares, Freud and WWI — Max Ernst and Dada
Dada
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 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
Collage was in many ways a perfect medium for Dada iconoclasm and social protest.
Dada Collage
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.
Francis Picabia, Ideal
The avant-garde reached new heights by looking to “low” culture; after all, the whole thing started with a urinal!
Introduction to Dada
As the European public grew increasingly hard to scandalize, Duchamp crossed the Atlantic to stir up more trouble.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No ...
Love, sex, science, broken glass, a coffee grinder, a bride from another dimension—this one really has it all.
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare ...
Duchamp’s wife spent hours gluing prints of her husband’s work onto cardboard for this “portable retrospective.”
Marcel Duchamp, Boite-en-valise, Series F
This is one of the most important objects of twentieth-century Euro-American visual culture. But… is it art?
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain
For this snow shovel, the road from the garage to the gallery was paved with the ruins of art as we knew it.
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