Dada Movement Timeline

Dada’s principal centres included Zürich from 1916, New York from about 1915 to about 1923, Berlin from about 1918 to 1920, Cologne and Hannover from about 1919 to 1920, and Paris from about 1919 to 1924.

Image source: Dada

With Tristan Tzara at its helm, Zürich Dada published the art and literature review Dada beginning in July 1917. Five editions appeared in Zürich and the final two in Paris.

Richard Huelsenbeck produced a Dada manifesto later in 1918, extending Dada’s program into the politically charged Berlin scene.

Raoul Hausmann published his manifesto Synthethic Cino of Painting in 1918, attacking Expressionism and the art critics who promoted it.

In February 1918, while the Great War was approaching its climax, Richard Huelsenbeck gave his first Dada speech in Berlin.

After the First World War ended in the armistice of November 1918, most Zürich Dadaists returned to their home countries, and some began Dada activities in other cities.

After the war, Berlin artists published short-lived political magazines and held the First International Dada Fair, described as their greatest project, in the summer of 1920.

More than 200 works were exhibited at the First International Dada Fair, surrounded by incendiary slogans. Some of those slogans later appeared on the walls of the Nazi Entartete Kunst exhibition in 1937.

In Cologne, Max Ernst, Johannes Theodor Baargeld, and Hans Arp launched a controversial Dada exhibition in 1920 focused on nonsense and anti-bourgeois sentiments.

Dada surged in Paris in 1920 as many of the movement’s originators converged there.

By 1921, most of Dada’s original players had moved to Paris, where the movement experienced its last major incarnation.

The first introduction of Dada artwork to the Parisian public took place at the Salon des Indépendants in 1921.

When the Dada drama was re-staged in 1923 in a more professional production, it provoked a theatre riot initiated by André Breton and heralded the split that produced Surrealism.

Tristan Tzara’s last attempt at a Dadaist drama was his ironic tragedy Handkerchief of Clouds in 1924.

Image source: Tristan Tzara

Dada coalesced among émigré artists and writers in neutral Switzerland during 1916, amid the political turmoil of the First World War.

Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings founded Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich as a venue for nightly performances, poetry, and manifestos.

Hugo Ball’s Dada Manifesto became the first major written collection of the movement’s principles.

Image source: Dada Manifesto

Dada was active during years of political turmoil while European countries were engaged in the First World War; the war’s conclusion in 1918 helped set the stage for a new political order.

On 14 July 1916, Hugo Ball originated the seminal Dada Manifesto, helping define the movement’s anti-art and anti-bourgeois principles.

Tristan Tzara wrote a second Dada manifesto, published in 1918 and regarded as an important text in Dada reading.

Kurt Schwitters developed what he called sound poems, extending Dada’s experimentation with language, performance, and vocal sound.

Tzara’s 1920 manifesto proposed cutting words from a newspaper and randomly selecting fragments to create poetry, making the synchronous universe an active agent in producing art.

Francis Picabia and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes composed Dada music performed at the Festival Dada in Paris on 26 May 1920.

Dada exerted a pervasive influence on twentieth-century music, especially on mid-century avant-garde composers based in New York, including Edgard Varèse, Stefan Wolpe, John Cage, and Morton Feldman.

By 1924 in Paris, Dada was melding into Surrealism, while artists moved on to Surrealism, social realism, and other forms of modernism.

Image source: Surrealism

Butoh, the Japanese dance form originating in 1959, can be connected to Dada’s spirit because one of its founders, Tatsumi Hijikata, was influenced early in his career by Dadaism.

Image source: Butoh

Tsuburaya Productions’ Ultra Series introduced an alien named Dada in episode 28 of the 1966 tokusatsu series Ultraman. The character was inspired by Dadaism and designed by Toru Narita.

A large Dada retrospective was held in Paris in 1967, reflecting the movement’s growing recognition in art history.

DADA 'Archives du XXe siècle', a 267-minute documentary produced by Jean José Marchand and directed by Philippe Collin and Hubert Knapp, was first broadcast by the RTF on 28 March 1971.

Tom Stoppard used the coincidence of Tristan Tzara, Vladimir Lenin, and James Joyce being in Zürich as a premise for his 1974 play Travesties.

The former Cabaret Voltaire building had fallen into disrepair until it was occupied from January to March 2002 by a group calling itself Neo-Dadaists, led by Mark Divo.

Art-world experts polled by the sponsors of the 2004 Turner Prize, Gordon’s gin, voted Duchamp’s Fountain the most influential work of modern art.

In January 2006, performance artist Pierre Pinoncelli cracked a replica of Fountain with a hammer in an attempt to pay homage to the spirit of Dada. He had also urinated on a replica in 1993.

In 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted a Dada exhibition in partnership with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

On 19 May 2016, during the centenary celebrations of Dadaism in Tokyo, the Ultra Monster Dada was invited to meet Swiss Ambassador Urs Bucher.