Dada Artists (updated)

Marcel Duchamp

Frenchman Marcel Duchamp was a Surrealist artist. Duchamp had an enormous impact on western art after the First World War. Duchamp’s early art work lines up with post-impressionist styles. His experiments with cubism and fauvism are well known.  His obsession with absolute and unfettered freedom led him to develop a new artistic style which was nonother that a cry of protest. This led him to present a series of ready made sculptures which were intended to shock the public, which indeed happened. Such sculptures included the bicycle wheel mounted on a small wooden stool and the urinal which he very appropriately and sarcastically named “The Fountain”

The public was outraged when Duchamp painted the moustache on the reproduction of the Mona Lisa, it was an assault to the public and the tradition, it also had lost the humanistic spirit of the Renaissance.  

The Dada artist had claimed that they have invented the photomontage technique of manipulating found photographs to creating jarring juxtapositions.

Roul Hausmann

Raoul Hausmann was an Austrian artist and writer who was another key figure of the Dada Movement, He experimented photographic collages, sound poetry and industrial critiques would have a profound influence on the European Avant-grade in the after myth of World War one Hausmann was one of the young disaffected artists that began to form the nucleus of Berlin Dada around him.

The photomontage became the technique most associated with the Berlin Dada, which was used extensively by Hausmann. Hausmann started to experiment with sound poems which he called “Phonemes”. The poster Poems originally created by lining up letters by a printer without Hausmann’s direct invention. Later Poems used words were reserved, shopped up and strung out, than either typed out using a full range of typographical strategies, or preformed with basterous exuberance.

In ABCD, Hausmann created a self-portrait.When first looking at the piece, you immediately notice the its intensity. Hausmann’s mouth is open and clenched on the letters, “ABCD”, as if he is screaming and experiencing some sort of discomfort. Also found in the image is information about one of Hausmann’s upcoming poetry readings. This serves as a reference to the literary side of the Dada art movement. The movement was represented through visual and literary forms of art. Ticket stubs are cut up and scattered in various places. Hands, money, a fire extinguisher, and different words are hidden throughout the image. The value of these items could be interpreted in many different ways, but overall, Hausmann seems to be using these symbols to encourage the audience to challenge accepted beliefs and create individual opinions, and use art as means to do so.

Hannah Hoch 

Hannah Hoch’s art is very particular. Her constant experimentation with various artistic styles resulted in her pieces. Hoch experimented through collaging paintings, collages, photography and graphics. She organised and put these various styles together and eventually created her own particular style which is known as photomontage.

Pieces of “the new women” were in many of her photomontages these were German media’s admiration of the modern independent female

These women were depicted in the act of doing things which were quite socially unaccepted during that era, these included of smoking, wearing sexy clothes, voting, and working.

Hannah Hoch’s made it a point to compare women as they were expressed in the media,  and how they looked in actual life. She often would form women in her pieces from dolls, mannequins, brides, or children which were often thought of as not so important in her society. This type of art represented feminism in a unique way, relating women in the media to actual women in society.

Da-Dandy is a photomontage piece that was done in 1919. This piece includes women dressed up in different kinds of fashionable clothing that overlap each other in the piece. By looking at the photomontage, one can see that these are all different women, although their style of black and darker colours makes them all look similar.Hannah Hoch | Feminist Art Archive. 2014. Hannah Hoch | Feminist Art Archive. [ONLINE] Available at:http://courses.washington.edu/femart/final_project/wordpress/test-taylor-k/. [Accessed 25January 2014]

Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters created an offshoot of Dada that he named Merz which coined form the word Kommerz in one of his collages. Schwitters gave Merz meaning as the title of a one men art movement. Schwatters collage compositions were made up of rubbish, and found materials to compose colour against colour, form against form, and texture against texture. His designs combined Dada’s elements of nonsense, surprise and chance with strong design properties.Philip B. meggs. and Alston W. Purvis.eds., 2012. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design. Fifth Edition. Hoboken Canada: John Wiley & Sons,Inc.pg 265

References

Hannah Hoch | Feminist Art Archive. 2014. Hannah Hoch | Feminist Art Archive. [ONLINE] Available at:http://courses.washington.edu/femart/final_project/wordpress/test-taylor-k/. [Accessed 25January 2014]

Philip B. meggs. and Alston W. Purvis.eds., 2012. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design. Fifth Edition. Hoboken Canada: John Wiley & Sons,Inc.