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Definition: Dada from Philip's Encyclopedia

(Dadaism) Movement in literature and the visual arts, started in Zürich (1915). Contributors included Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Man Ray. The group, repelled by war and bored with cubism, promulgated complete nihilism, espoused satire and ridiculed civilization. Dadaists participated in deliberately irreverent art events designed to shock a complacent public. They stressed the absurd, and the importance of the unconcious. In the early 1920s, conflicts of interest led to the demise of Dadaism. See also surrealism


Dada

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
(dä'dä) or Dadaism (dä'däĭzӘm), international nihilistic movement among European artists and writers that lasted from 1916 to 1922. Born of the widespread disillusionment engendered by World War I, it originated in Zürich with a 1916 party at the Cabaret Voltaire and the recitation of nonsense poetry by the Romanian Tristan Tzara , also the author of the Dada Manifesto. Dada attacked conventional standards of aesthetics and behavior and stressed absurdity and the role of the unpredictable in artistic creation. In Berlin, Dada had political overtones, exemplified by the caricatures of George Grosz and Otto Dix . The French movement was more literary in emphasis; it centered around Tzara, André Breton , Louis Aragon , Jean Arp , Marcel Duchamp , Francis Picabia , and Man Ray . The latter three carried the spirit of Dada to New York City. Typical were the elegant collages devised by Arp, Kurt Schwitters , and Max Ernst from refuse and scraps of paper, and Duchamp's celebrated Mona Lisa…
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Full text Article Dada

From The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Design Since 1900
Was an artistic movement which lasted from about 1916 to 1922. It spread from Zurich to Paris, Hanover, Cologne and New York and was a nihilistic drive against various establishments, including the art world itself. Its exponents used poetry, performance, collage and PHOTOMONTAGE , of which John…
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Full text Article Dadaism

From Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable
An anarchic and iconoclastic art movement, which began at Zurich in 1916 and arose from indignation and despair at the catastrophe of the First World War. Its supporters, writers and painters, sought to free themselves from all artistic conventions and what they considered cultural shams. Dadaism…
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Full text Article Dada

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
(dä'dä) or Dadaism (dä'däĭzӘm), international nihilistic movement among European artists and writers that lasted from 1916 to 1922. Born of the widespread disillusionment engendered by World War I, it originated in Zürich with a 1916 party at the Cabaret Voltaire and the recitation of nonsense…
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Full text Article DADA

From The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
Dada was a literary and artistic movement that emerged during the First World WAR and came to an end around 1922–3. It originated in neutral Switzerland, where a considerable number of writers and artists from various nationalities found refuge and banded together in loosely knit groups, usually…
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Full text Article Dadaism; DaDaism; Dada

From A/V A to Z: An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Media, Entertainment and Other Audiovisual Terms
The artistic movement that began in Zürich in 1916, variously attributed to Hans “Jean” Arp and Tristan Tzara. The movement became particularly strong in Germany, France, and Switzerland where it evolved as a reaction to the effects of World War I. It rejected established institutions and forms, …
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Full text Article Dada.

From The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Stage Actors and Acting
Commonly recognized as an artistic and literary movement, the Dadaists of early twentieth-century Europe frequently used performance in a theatrical or quasi-theatrical setting to showcase their ‘anti-aesthetic’ principles. Since Dada refutes any unity or consistency in narrative, thematic, or…
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Full text Article Dada

From A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes
(1915–24) Dada and SURREALISM are popularly regarded as nearly synonymous movements, or as precursor and successor in the step-by-step history of modern art. Although their memberships overlapped and both espoused two major esthetic positions in common –the irrelevance of 19th-century forms of…
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Full text Article Dada

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Artistic and literary movement founded in 1915 in a spirit of rebellion and disillusionment during World War I and lasting until about 1922. Although the movement had a fairly short life and was concentrated in only a few centres (New York being the only non-European one), Dada was highly…
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Full text Article DADA

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Dada emerged in Zurich in the midst of World War I from the collaboration of a group of refugee artists united by their intense disdain for the Eur. culture that had brought about the war. Centered at the Cabaret Voltaire from 1916 through 1918, the original Dada artists and writers—Hugo Ball, …
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Full text Article Dada

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Nihilistic movement in the arts. It originated in Zürich, Switz., in 1916 and flourished in New York City, Paris, and the German cities of Berlin, Cologne, and Hannover in the early 20th century. The name, French for “hobbyhorse,” was selected by a chance procedure and adopted by a group of artists, …
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