Tristan Tzara

Tristan Tzara by Man Ray

Dada was an artistic movement which started in Zurich, Switzerland. The movement was an after effect of WWI and prided itself on “anti-art”.  Tristan Tzara is an artist/poet from the Dada movement and is one of its founders. He was born in Romania in 1896 and died in Paris, France in 1963. His main goal during the movement was to spread Dada to wide audiences. He accomplished this by publishing manifestos, which were intended to shock its audience. He practiced his art and poetry publicly at a local cafe in Zurich; this included some performances in which he would speak vulgar and illegible language.

To make a Dadaist Poem by Tristan Tzara

“To make a Dadaist poem”, is a poem by Tristan Tzara and is possibly one of his most famous works. He published the poem in 1920. The goal of the piece was to inform audiences of the key concepts in Dada art, specifically Dada writings. The poem is literally directions on how to make a Dada poem. The fact that it is considered a poem is a direct reference to “anti-art”. How is this a poem if all he did was cut out pieces of paper to display directions? Tristan Tzara provoked this type of response. Furthermore, he was informing the viewer that anyone could write a poem (“a work of art”) with these simple steps.

Tristan Tzara should be remembered as a key artist during the Dada movement. He spread the movement and informed audiences through his writings. He was a great example of Dada artists goals and “anti-art”. He revealed a more clear understanding of what Dada was, a question on bourgeois society. He continues to provoke people to ask themselves, what is art? What boundaries determine a work of art and who is the artist?

 

 

References:
http://www.theartstory.org/artist-tzara-tristan.htm
https://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/To_Make_a_Dadaist_Poem
http://www.theartstory.org/movement-dada.htm

Let’s Talk Raoul Hausmann

By the time the late 1800’s started to come to an end, new movements started to evolve for the art world. The Cubist and Dada movements featured many famous artists who made a mark in history. Raoul Hausmann is one man who was known throughout the Dada movement. His style of work helped influence many styles utilized today within our mainstream media. Hausmann was born in Vienna but in 1900 he relocated to Berlin with his parents. Painting was one of the first forms of art Hausmann learned due to his father being a painter. Raoul later began to do publications and poems for many different cultural magazines. This then led him to have Dadaist thinking as well as ideas. By 1918 Hausmann is in his full swing of the Dada movement when he participates in the first Dada soirées. From there is where Raoul developed his photomontage process.

With Hausmann’s development of photomontage it was a great tool he utilized to show satire and political protest within his work. One specific work Hausmann is known for is his ABCD self-portrait photomontage made in 1923. This work was made specifically to announce Hausmanns performance of a phonetic poem. At first glance the piece is all over the place. There are cut outs overlapping each other as well as the play on reality verses imagination. The information the artist wanted know is strategically placed throughout the work. In Raouls clenched teeth was a prototypical poem that said ABCD. Hausmann managed to also give the illusion of the tickets to the Kaiserjubilee in the hat created on his head.

 

Raoul Hausmann, ABCD, 1923

Raoul managed to take viewers into a transformed space when he created his photomontages. The way Hausmann broke the rules of traditional art was one of the key features to artists who produced work during the Dada movement. By the 1950’s the Dada movement attracted renewed interest by the United States. With the revival of the Dada movement, Hausmann began to correspond with many leading American artists. Raoul would discuss the Dada movement as well as the contemporary relevance. Today similar styles of photomontage like what Hausmann used can be seen in mainstream media. Designers may use this style of art in advertisements like nickelodeon used in some of their 90’s Ads.

Sources:

“Raoul Hausmann, ‘The Art Critic’ 1919–20.” Tate. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2016.

“Raoul Hausmann Biography – Infos – Art Market.” Raoul Hausmann Biography – Infos – Art Market. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2016.

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp is known as being one of the most influential figures in modern art. Although his career was rather short, Duchamp is known as the father of conceptual art and a figurehead in the American Dada movement. His early works are said to be heavily influenced by Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism.

Duchamp was raised in Normandy, France and studied art in Paris, where he became well acquainted with modern art movements. In 1912, he submitted his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 to the Salon des Indépendants in Paris where it became the center of much controversy. Inspired by cubism and futurism, the work shows the motion of a nude figure walking down a staircase. The work was not rejected from the show but Duchamp was asked to either withdraw the painting or to paint over the title on the canvas. He refused and a year later submitted the painting to the Armory Show in New York City where the work was a success, yet still considered to be scandalous.

Marcel Duchamp,  Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912

After his experiences surrounding Nude, Duchamp became disillusioned with what he called “retinal art”, or art that was simply made to be pleasing to the eye rather than the mind. Duchamp responded to retinal art with his readymades, which were “ordinary object[s] elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.”  In 1915, Duchamp moved to New York and soon became affiliated with New York Dada, which was considered to have a less serious tone than European Dada. In 1917, he created his most famous work and readymade, Fountain, which was simply a urinal that Duchamp had signed as “R. Mutt.” Duchamp submitted Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit but it was ultimately rejected after much debate concerning that validity of the readymade as an art piece. After this rejection, Duchamp stepped down as the director of the board of the Society of Independent Artists.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

For fear of repetition in his work, Duchamp created a fairly small number of pieces during his career; however, his impact has been long-lasting. While Duchamp was heavily involved with many Dada artists and influenced by modern movements such as cubism and futurism, he himself subscribed to no particular movement. His refusal to create “retinal art” along with his unconventional readymades have influenced artists such as Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenburg and movements ranging from Pop Art to Installation and Conceptual Art.

Theo van Doesburg

Born in August 1883, Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg, is the founder of the artistic movement called De Stijl. It is the process of simplifying the visual composition into a pure abstraction using geometric shapes. He was an artist with a wide range of talents; he is a painter, an architect, a designer, a poet, and an art theorist. Piet Modrian and Wassily Kandinsky inspired van Doesburg to paint geometric abstractions of subjects based on nature. His paintings are simplistic consisting of plain vertical and horizontal shapes and primary colors. From painting, he began to focus on the promotion of De Stijl movement and formed a group of artists in Germany and France. In reaction to his unreciprocated hope of joining the faculty of the Bauhaus art school, he established his own studio directly next to the Bauhaus and attracted many students to join the development of his ideas based on Constructivism, Dadaism, and De Stijl.

Two popular early abstraction works from van Doesburg are the paintings Dancers and Composition VIII (The Cow). Dancers is an abstract oil painting in the style of Constructivism. The painting consists of neutral-colored geometric shapes assembled to form two human figures. The figures represent the Hindu deity, Krishna, who is seen dancing while playing a flute. Van Doesburg created this work to express spiritual perspectives. Another work where he incorporated figure study is the painting Composition VIII, also called The Cow. Van Doesburg used figurative sketches to analyze the form of a cow and slowly create a simplified composition to justify his practice, De Stijl. The cow figure is transformed into a group of colorful, flat rectangles and squares placed in the center of a plain white canvas.

 

Dancers. c. 1916

Composition VIII (The Cow). c. 1918

A series of figurative sketches and transformation of the cow figure. c. 1918

Van Doesburg has been influential in different fields of contemporary art. He has a big impact in architecture. A German-born American architect, Ludwig Lies Van der Role, incorporated van Doesburg’s idea of using bold-colored geometry to help define modern architecture. Van der Role is an architect and educator who exemplifies International Style of architecture and is acknowledged as one of the 20th century’s greatest architects. Van Doesburg also wrote numerous theories and journals on geometric abstraction which influenced not only Modernist architects but also many graphic designers.

Resources:

“Theo Van Doesburg Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works …” The Art Story. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2016. 

“Theo Van Doesberg.” Design Is History. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2016.

“Theo Van Doesburg.” Britannica. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2016.

“Mies Van Der Rohe Society – Legacy.” Mies Society. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2016.

Hannah Höch

 

Hannah Höch (1889-1978) was a photomontage artist most distinguished for her role in the Berlin Dada movement and her innovative techniques with photomontage. Her politically charged satirical collages ridiculed the failings of the Weimar government, but also fed into the early feminist movement, opposing stereotypical gender roles, promoting women’s suffrage and empowering women to explore their own creativity in the applied arts. Hannah herself faced adversity and was marginalized as the only woman within the Dada movement, and was not treated as an equal contributor by her peers.

Born Anna Therése Johanne Höch in Gotha, Germany, Höch moved to Berlin and attended the School of Applied Arts in 1912. The school was closed at the onslaught of World War I, but in 1915 she was able to rejoin her education, and studied graphic arts at the School of the Royal Museum of Applied Arts. It was also here where she met Raoul Hausmann, fellow member of the Dada movement, and for a period of time, her lover. Höch and Hausmann both experimented and helped extend the technique of photomontage by appropriating popular press images into fine art. Höch’s pieces utilize metaphorical imagery to illustrate her message and satirical jabs at the hypocrisy of mainstream European society, whose bourgeois leadership and middle class led the country to disaster in WWI.

Her most famous piece, Cut With the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919-1920) was featured at the First International Dada Fair in 1920, and was favorably received. The piece is a dynamic collage of images cut out and pasted from newspapers and magazines, as well as some personal inclusions, such as the small image of Hausmann, and Lenin and Stalin, showing her inclinations toward communist parties at the time. The nonsensical fragmentation of images within the collage makes this piece quintessentially Dada, and the fragmentation itself acts as a microcosm for the breakdown of society and the government post-WWI. Cogs, wheels and various machinery eclipse around the image, symbolic of the government as “the machine,” as well as calling light to the industrialization and militarization that was transforming the European landscape.

The upper right corner is labeled “Die anti dada,” mocking prominent political figures that represent the corruption and bourgeois powers that sent Germany to war. The bottom right, labeled “DADA,” includes images from her inner circle of fellow Dadaists, including John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann. Höch included a small picture of herself overlain on a map illustrating the advancement of women’s suffrage throughout Europe, expressing her commitment to the feminist movement. The left side of the image is dedicated to the absurd, with rhetorical “dada propaganda” encouraging you to “Join Dada!”

Hannah Höch’s process isolated the print images from their original context, allowing her to formulate her own cutting message. Höch’s innovative technique of using appropriated images from popular print publications and photographs has coined her and Hausmann as pioneers in the proliferation of photomontage in the arts. Photomontage was a radically new process, unique to the Berlin Dada movement, but has since inspired countless artists.

Works Cited:

Boucher, Madeleine. “Art or Craft?: Hannah Höch’s Collages Embraced the Conflict Between Art and Craft, Dada and Commercialism.” Artsy. Artsy, 14 Oct. 2014. Web. 23 Oct. 2016.
<https://www.artsy.net/article/madeleineb-art-or-craft-hannah-hochs-collages-embraced&gt;.

Smarthistoryvideos. “Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 1919-20.” YouTube. YouTube, 02 Oct. 2011. Web. 23 Oct. 2016.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E1cA3j_xY8&gt;.

Souter, Anna. “Hannah Höch Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works.” The Art Story. The Art Story Contributors, 2016. Web. 23 Oct. 2016.
<http://www.theartstory.org/artist-hoch-hannah.htm&gt;.