Dada and Surrealism

Surrealist art is most often a political statement. The artists were responding to the world they lived in and expressed their horror and discomfort with the current state of social and political .affairs. Surrealists see reality as so outrageous, mind-boggling, and contentious it must be portrayed as a fictionalized reflection of itself—a fantasy that forces the viewer to concede the absurdity of the world. There have been many different surrealist art movements and each movement was based upon the principals of social revolution and moral or intellectual unrest, but Dadaism may be one of the most dramatic and unique surrealist movements in the history of the development of art.

As is the case with most surrealistic art movements, the Dadaist movements developed out of political unrest, class struggle, and confusion over social roles and resource allocation. . The Dadaist was a political and social activist committed to revealing the inescapable doom of the bourgeois society and the anarchy it was destined to create. A movement that began at the end of World War I, Dadaists were shaped by the pain and destruction of war, the political manipulation of the masses, and the polarization of resources in the name of false ideologies. . The Dadaists wanted to prove the pointlessness of war to society and reveal a painful truth--the common citizen was trapped in the death throes of society.

Dada was christened in Zurich in 1916, but the circumstances and the actual meaning of the name are still disputed. Richard Huelsenbeck claimed that he and a friend found the word in an old French-German dictionary and coined the term for this artistic movement because the term "hobby horse" proved that art was as primitive as this child's toy. The name, whatever it actual, was adopted by many artists and poets in a literary nightclub in 1916 and is still associated with the artistic movement of the time.

            The Zurich Dadaists included Hugo Ball, who stated that the artists,"...aspired for a new order that might restore the balance between heaven and hell…[but instead of being able to restore the balance between heaven and hell this art was so extreme and the artists so outlandish that one of them is quoted as saying]....even the bandits couldn't understand us" ( Dawn Ades. Dada and Surrealism. New York: Woodbury, 1974: 16).

            For its first years the Dadaist movement was seen as an offering to the possibilities of a new art form. There was a desire to restore the magic to language, but when Picabia arrived in Zurich in 1918 there was a radical change in the movement. Some have described meeting this man as shaking hands with death.  This man's ideas were so emotionally and intellectually powerful the movement became one of enlightenment and fruitless efforts to seek knowledge in a world seen as archaic and purposeless.

            The Dada movement also dominated the Paris of the early 20^th Century Tzara's Dada Manifesto drew Andre Breton and other contemporary Parisian artists  into the movement and the movement continued with a flair until the onset of Great Depression in 1929.  The end of the Parisian Dadaist movement was also based upon crisis, but this crisis was economic instead of political. The Parisian artists wanted to reveal an  upside down world and unveil people’s values as irrelevant.  

            After the end of World War I Germany was also ripe for the Dadaist movement. Germany was the one nation where the potential for political fulfillment in the Dadaist movement came closest to fruition. In the Berlin of the early 20^th Century, people were hungry, angry, alienated, and receptive to anything that illustrated the futility of their existences and the questions about their future. This climate soon gave birth to a Dada club and the first International Dada Fair was held there in 1920 as a salute to the changing art movement in Russia. Still, Dada had a problem with identity in Berlin. The artistic movement was competing with literary expressionists. The Dadaists felt that they were the  enemy of the expressionists, but within a short period of time members of both movements were acting in concert promoting  many of the post-war upheavals that questioned rising power of the Nazi movement.

            Dadaism was short-lived. In Paris the movement came apart in 1922 and slipped into silence because of conflicting values and goals among the members of the movement. Not long after the movement also began to wane in Germany and Switzerland, but surrealism followed with a flair that differed little from the original Dadaist movement. Artists still expressed anger at society and the artists and literary dramatists began to believe that the best way to show society it was lost and destined to failure was to take reality and show it at its most outlandish extremes.

            The Dadaist and Surrealist movements existed through the 1960s and resurfaced during times of political and social upheaval. Dadaism sowed its earliest roots in 1913 and  the subsequent surrealist movement was an integral part of art and literature until the mid 1960s.. By this time the

movement had many books, periodicals published on a regular
basis and had become associated with Trotsky and other political innovators and writers of social commentary  individuals who were consistently making strong political statements in an effort to bring fundamental change to the social systems of the nations of Europe and the United States.