Dada, international anti-art movement which flourished between 1916 and 1923. It began in Zurich during the war years with the collaboration of a group of artists seeking refuge from the First World War, and included the Romanian poet tristan Tzara, the French artist Hans Arp and the German writer Hugo Ball. In 1916 Ball founded the Cabaret Voltaire, where Dada `manifestations' took place, backed up by the publication of manifestos, pamphlets and magazines (whose anarchic graphics later became very influential in avant-garde circles).

In 1917 Dada spread to the rest of Europe and beyond. Tzara and Ball opened the Galerie Dadain Zurich, Francis Picabia published the magazine 391 in Barcelona, and Duchamp the magazines The Blind Man and Wrong-Wrong in New York. After the War Dada became influential in Germany around Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp and Max Ernst and in France where Paris Dada was animated by Andr‚ eBreton and Aragon.

The name `Dada', reputedly selected at random from a dictionary and meaning in French hobby-horse or `gee-gee', was adopted to symbolize the anti-rational, anarchic and anti-traditionalist stance of its members. The Dadaists printed nonsense poetry set in a randon selection of typefaces, exhibited the >found object, such as Duchamp's Fountain of 1917 (a urinal inscribed with the name R. Mutt) or a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool. These tactics of shock and unreason challenged accepted values in art (such as the cult of beauty) which the group regarded as hypocritical or false and out of keeping with a militaristic and industrial Europe.

After 1919 Dada's nihilistic principles were moderated under the dual influence of a nascent institutionalization of their work (Dada was incorporated into the Paris Salon des Ind‚pendents in 1920) and by a replacement of the shock of disjuction with an interest in juxtaposition as an aesthetic principle, feeding, after 1923, into >Surrealism. In the politically and economically unstable Germany of the 1920s Dada was influential in the social comment of the "Neue Sachlichkeit" artists such as George Grosz, Otto Dix and John Heartfield.

Rubin, W. Dada and Surrealist Art (1969); Ades, D. Dada and Surrealism Reviewed

(1978); Ades, D. et al. In the Mind's Eye: Dada and Surrealism edited by T.A.R. Nef