Online Study Guide

Revolution and World War :: Expressionism in Early 20th-Century Europe :: Embracing Abstraction :: Challenging Artistic Conventions :: Transatlantic Artistic Dialogues :: European Art in the Wake of World War I :: New Art for A New Society-Utopian Ideals :: Emphasizing the Organic :: Art As Political Statement in the 1930s :: Émigrés and Exiles: Energizing American Art at Midcentury

Images courtesy of
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CHALLENGING ARTISTIC CONVENTIONS

The mass destruction and chaos of World War I horrified most artists. World War I was a devastating psychological, as well as physical, experience for a generation brought up with the doctrine of progress and a belief in the fundamental values of civilization.

Dada

In reaction to the war, the movement known as Dada emerged. The Dadaists believed reason and logic had been responsible for the disaster of world war, and they promoted instead political anarchy, the irrational, and the intuitive. They also rejected convention or tradition, and sought to undermine cherished notions and assumptions about art.

The anarchy of chance:

In his Collage Arranged according to the Laws of Chance, Jean (Hans) Arp renounced artistic control and used "chance" in composing the image.

33-22: JEAN ARP, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-1917. Torn and pasted paper, 1' 7 1/8" x 1' 1 5/8". Museum of Modern Art, New York (purchase).

High-spirited Dada performances:

Among the manifestations of Dada that matured in 1916 in Zurich was performance. Much of this performance activity was presented at the Cabaret Voltaire, founded by Dadaist Hugo Ball, a poet, musician, and theatrical producer.

Freeing art from convention:

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain is a "ready-made" sculpture.

33-23: MARCEL DUCHAMP, Fountain, (second version), 1950. Ready-made glazed sanitary china with black paint, 12" high. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (purchased with proceeds from the sale of deaccessioned works of art).

Mechanistic men and women:

Among the most visually and conceptually challenging of Duchamp's works is The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. This is a simultaneously playful and serious examination of human as machine.

33-24: MARCEL DUCHAMP, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23. Oil, lead, wire, foil, dust, and varnish on glass, 9' 1 1/2" x 5' 9 1/8". Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (Katherine S. Dreier Bequest).

A view of the Great Dada World":

Hannah Höch's Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany is a photomontage of cutout photographs (and some cutout lettering) carefully arranged into a composition that comments on contemporary issues and also serves as a manifesto of Dadaist beliefs.

33-25: HANNAH HÖCH, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919-1920. Photomontage, 3' 9" x 2' 11 1/2". Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

The visual poetry of rubbish:

In Merz 19, Kurt Schwitters uses the cast-off junk and trash of modern society to compose a nonobjective design in which "meaning" resides in the various fragmented found objects.

33-26: KURT SCHWITTERS, Merz 19, 1920. Paper collage, approx. 7 1/4" x 5 7/8". Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, (gift of Collection Société Anonyme).