Was Dada ever really a movement? Of all the Dadaists, Tristan Tzara was keenest on the idea. He even had stationery made up, befitting his self-ordained role as director of the international Dada movement. But then, growing up in Rumania, far from the center of things, his goal was to get to Paris, lodestar of isms, where everything seemed destined for the avant-garde.
Ironically, of course, it was in Paris that Dada foundered on the shoals of conflicting ambitions, finally going belly up in 1923 in the melee spawned at the “Soirée of the Bearded Heart.” Only a bona fide movement could collapse with such verve. Yet even as it flared out in this final incendiary event in Paris, something else called Dada persisted—a state of mind, an attitude, a posture donned for an occasion. Some of these occasions—ranging from exhibitions to soirees, performances, and publications—were meant to herald Dada, or benefit from its name. There were also urban legends, reports in the press of events that may or may not have happened, eventually labeled Dada, like graffiti sprayed on an overpass. Dada could be like a magician’s conjuring routine, deliberately misleading beholders. Its founders often preferred it that way: they didn’t try to straighten anyone out on the subject and dispensed misinformation whenever possible. If you were spooked and needed to call your startled twitch Dada, go right ahead.
Artists around the world did take up the mantle of Dada in this way, especially in Eastern Europe, as word of Dada trickled into countries adrift after their long sojourn in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as it collapsed after the Great War. Case in point: the delicate assimilation of Dada with the emergence of Constructivism in the exiled Hungarian circle around Lajos Kassák’s Ma in Vienna.
Prague, for its part, might have emerged as an eastern capital of Dada, given the periodic visits and performances by Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, Johannes Baader, and Kurt Schwitters. But the Czechs never got around to “Dada’s destructive work” when the time was ripe, a circumstance that Bedřich Václavek, contemplating it in 1925, rued. By then, it was too late. Yet Prague, like Holland, had not been passed over by Dada completely. If not a bastion of Dada, the Czech city could still serve as an incubator.
It wasn’t Czechs at all who made a splash with Dada in Prague; rather, it was two young Serbian residents. Dragan Aleksić and Branko Ve Poljanski (the latter a pseudonym for Branislave Virgilije Micić) mounted a large Dada soirée on Štěpánská Street in 1921, drawing over a thousand people. After the usual programmatic declarations, poems were read. Aleksić made a spectacular impression reading from a scroll he claimed was twenty-five meters long. One of his pieces is like a literary adaptation of a mechanomorphic drawing by Francis Picabia.
Two car batteries
Stop my flickering brothers,
Two-three converters.
Salicium calcii pulveri
oxygenium, baxi pulveri,
cantharides, nitrocarbonati
pulvus mixtus genui Malveri.
Titled “Pharmocopeia of Love,” this poem set off a riot in the audience. Revolvers were brandished in the melee, and the event collapsed in on itself. The occasion inspired Hausmann to pledge to raise a monument to commemorate Aleksić if he should perish in the cause of Dada. Aleksić planned a follow-up, but he was knifed in a bar the evening before it was scheduled to take place. The authorities then banned such events altogether.
Returning to his Serbian homeland, Aleksić found “a dough pliable enough for the dada rolling pin” in the journal Zenit, edited by Poljanski’s brother, Ljubomir Micić. For Micić, Dada was a lot of hot air, but he was willing for the time being to tolerate a bit of it in Zenit.
Zenit was modeled in part on Kassák’s Ma as an organ of the international avant-garde, though Micić’s journal included more works in original languages. Its first few issues prominently featured Yvan Goll, the Alsatian poet who was negotiating a postwar turn from German to French. His long poem Paris Burns (versions exist in both languages) was first issued in a Serbian translation under the Zenit imprint. The Zenitist Manifesto (1921) included proclamations by Goll, Micić, and Boško Tokin. Micić extolled “The Naked Man Barbarogenius” of the Balkans, recalling various proclamations of Dadaists as naked babes. Micić specifically promoted a Balkan-Slavic antidote to the decadent West. Goll, playing another card from the Dada deck, insisted, “We need modern NEGRO SONGS,” and declared the New Poet “always INTERNATIONAL.” Tokin identified Zenitism as a transcendent assimilation of Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism. “One needs to be a barbarian,” he wrote, without however making any reference to Dada.
Micić gave Aleksić space in Zenit to promote Dada, but the journal also distanced itself from the movement. An anonymous article (by “a Zenitist”) in the second issue surveyed Dada only to end on a dismissive note. Declaring Dada old hat, “already a fashion passe-temps,” the author admitted, “It’s fun, but not a religion, a conviction, and a new art.” As an art, this Zenitist surmised, Dada was already familiar by way of abstract art. As for literature, a famous and much reprinted poem by Louis Aragon was quoted. Originally in Picabia’s journal Cannibale in April 1920, for obvious reasons it became a universally accessible specimen of Dada:
A b c d e f
g h i j k l
m n o p q r
s t u v w
x y z
In the next issue of Zenit, Aleksić published the participatory appraisal of Dada he’d read to the thousandfold crowd in Prague, just before whipping it into a frenzy with “Pharmocopeia of Love.” In the article, he followed a lead from Huelsenbeck, whose essays and manifestos had been translated into Czech, Hungarian, and Ukrainian—and soon into Serbian by Aleksić himself. “Art is what the nerves express,” Aleksić wrote. “Nerves are primitive”—and sounding a note that brings Dada into the orbit of the “barbarogenius” of Zenitism, “Nerves are primeval, unspoiled.” Dada carried a torch for the spirit of carpe diem, since “we live in minutes, seconds, not years.”
Aleksić saw Dada as the natural cry of youth howling at the moon. Simply put, “DADA is a term for getting happy,” and “DADA is looking for 300,000 circuses to popularize art—(why work?).” He followed up this piece a few months later with a high-spirited profile of Schwitters, concluding that he “isn’t merely a quiver of a DADA network, he is the very lasso that will drag the world into Pandadayamic neofuturism.” A similar blend of references occurs in the 1930 Ukrainian Avantguarde Almanac, where a “panfuturist system” is said to combine destructive and constructive tendencies in art, a clear nod to lingering traces of Dada.
Aleksić was a regular contributor to Zenit for another year, as a representative of Yougo-Dada (Yugoslavian Dada), but Micić finally got fed up when Aleksić’s poem “Taba Ciklon II” appeared in a Dada-themed issue of Ma in Vienna. Pointedly positioned above a photo of a modernist apartment block from De Stijl, the poem is an unabashed performance text in Schwitters’ vein:
tAbA
TaBu tabu mimemamo tabu
tAbA
Tabu ABU TaBu aBu TabU
bu tAbbbu
Tabu
aBu taBu /popokatepetl/
aBu/popopo/TaBu/kakakaka/
abua abuU abuE abuI
aBuKiabu abukiabu
TaBa ubata tabu
TaBau TaBau /riskant/
tabu u tabau ubuata
abU TABUATA TUBATAUBA
taba
re re re RE RE
Rn Rn Rn Rn
Reb en en Rn
Ren RN ReN ErNReN
abu tabu abua u tabu abuaaa
aba tabu abaata
babaata tabu tabauuuta
taba RN
tabaren
tabarararan/rentabil/
tabaren ENEN tabarerenn/parlevufranse/
That cheeky little French twist at the end may have gotten under Micić’s skin, or maybe it was just the objectionable indulgence in Dada bruitism; to the Serb it probably seemed like infantile babbling. In any case, Micić disavowed both Aleksić and Mihailo S. Petrov, a fellow Dadaist artist, in a formal excommunication published in Zenit 14 in May 1922.
The upshot of the Dada-induced falling out between Micić and Aleksić was a flurry of punch and counterpunch publications, one-off journals that sent the sulfurous flare of Dada into the sky once more. Accompanying the Zenit excommunication was the announcement of a new periodical called Dada-Jok (jok meaning “no”), edited by Micić’s now compliantly ex-Dadaist brother, Poljanski. On one page, under the slogan “Happy New Year 1922,” is a clutch of nonsense words in different fonts arranged by Micić, from which a cartoon rendering of Chaplin juts out. Above him a cathedral hangs upside down, its double towers forming a menacing stiletto. As a retort to Aleksić, Dada-Jok presents the Zenit editor as
The great master of all Dadaists
first great Antidada
Contradada
Zenitist
Contrapseudozenitist
GOD OF DADAISTS
Hard on the heels of Dada-Jok came two little periodicals edited by Aleksić, Dada-Tank and Dada-Jazz. The former included work by Schwitters and Tzara and excerpts from Aleksić’s translation of Huelsenbeck’s preface to the Dada Almanac. The second reprinted Aleksić’s piece on Dada from Zenit (a kind of et tu, Brute? aimed at Micić) and a translation of Tzara’s “Manifesto of Mr. Aa the Antiphilosopher.” Both publications would cement Dada’s place in the Serbian art scene.
Befitting its title, Dada-Jazz ran ads for jazz bars in Zagreb where “modern and eccentric dancing” could be indulged. The journal’s address was listed as the central office for a Dada club. Dada matinees ensued in Novi Sad at the Bar Americaine, where Aleksić appeared in boxing gear, and in movie theaters in Osijek and Subotic. Access to film screens made it possible to project images of artwork by Hausmann, Picabia, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, and others. Aleksić included Zenitist literary works on the programs, until a defiant telegram from Micić forbade further use. (As a reward for his labors, Aleksić was known by the nickname “Dada” to the end of his life.)
Although he genuinely despised Dada, Micić’s disavowal was part of a widely shared sense in Eastern European countries that Dada was someone else’s movement, and the new political circumstances (whether cause for optimism or despair) entitled them at least to their own and not a derivative avant-garde. The Czechs were busy cultivating an optimistic, free-spirited enterprise they called Poetism, for instance, and it took them a while to realize that Dada shared their enthusiasm for Charlot, the European moniker for Charlie Chaplin. Prominent Poetist Karel Teige’s book On Humor, Clowns, and Dadaists was published in 1924, after he reluctantly came around to the view that Dada had something to offer.
Teige’s friend and ally in Poetism, Vítězslav Nezval, acknowledged the destructive efficacy of Dada: “Dadas are furniture movers. They have thoroughly dismantled the modern bourgeois’ living room.” As a consequence, “We are now standing in the demolished room. It is necessary to make a new order.” “The modern spirit is a spirit of construction. It is a spirit of wisdom,” Teige wrote, realizing, however, that “it is healthy to add a grain of folly to every wisdom.” When Schwitters performed in Prague in May 1926, it was in this spirit that he was appreciated. Noting the laugher and applause he provoked, journalist and editor Arthur Černík reflected that “Dada is only the foam of life. It wants to provoke us in our everyday content and make us laugh—remove us from our ordinary problems for a few moments.” This diminished interpretation of Dada as agreeable froth is reflected in an invitation Nezval sent to friends before he took a trip to Paris in 1924 for a farewell party, anticipating its high spirits as “Poetism in the praxis of DADA.”
There was one earnest engagement with Dada in Prague by way of Tam Tam, a journal presented as a “musical handbill,” edited by composer and theatrical producer Emil Burian in 1925. The title itself echoes Dada as well as the smack of a tambourine. “Aesthetics, formerly the Science of Ugly Beauty, Now the Science of Beautiful Ugliness” was Burian’s opening provocation. He was among the earliest to welcome jazz in Prague, but behind it he discerned the spirit of Dada. “Through Dadaism we got truly enriched in beautiful corporeality and optimism,” he wrote.
Dada showed us street melodies and squeaking orchestrations, brought us jazz and pianolas, the lewd melancholy of bar girls, introduced our sensibility to the finest vibrations of absolute sound beauty. After Dada we appreciate ugliness and chance—these unquestionable advantages of admirable eccentricity, of a noisy, foolish fox-trot and a drunken hottentot.
In 1927 Burian premiered his Voiceband under the Dada auspices of the Frejka Theatre. The Voiceband was a multivoiced group drawing on jazz syncopation spiced with the sort of vocalizing Burian may have picked up from the performances of Schwitters and Hausmann. But by the mid-twenties when Burian published Tam Tam, jazz was spreading at a frenetic pace, while Dada increasingly seemed a diminishing relic. The same seemed true to the east of Prague, as well.
Dada never made much headway in Russia or Poland. In addition to politics, which thwarted Dada’s development, a lively manifestation of Futurism had preceded Dada in both countries. Futurism presaged many of the characteristics associated with Dada and therefore robbed Dada of much of its power when it did arrive in these locales.
In Poland, the Futurist surge was postwar, but Futurists were still dutifully aware of their debt to preceding isms. “Manifesto of Polish Futurism” published in Kraków in 1921 observed, “Cubism, expressionism, primitivism, dadaism outbid all other ‘isms,’” puckishly adding, “The only remaining unexploited energy in art is onanism.” Like the Dada rebuke of Expressionist soul-mongering, Futurist Bruno Jasieński declared: “We are breaking off once and for all from the pathos of eternity in relation to works of art.”
Kraków was a hotbed of Futurism and exhibited many aesthetic parallels with Dadaist stomping grounds like Paris and Berlin. Jasieński organized soirées at which the actress Helena Buczyńska indulged in a “word-plasticity” the Dadaists would have recognized. Jan Nepomucen Miller unsuccessfully tried to integrate Dada into a new movement he called Dadanaizm, after the term dadana, a phonetic refrain in Polish folk poetry. His poems consisting solely of punctuation marks, on the other hand, moved closer to Dada.
The same spirit could be seen in Warsaw, where two younger writers who would become major figures in Polish letters, Alexander Wat and Anatol Stern, cavorted in public—Stern parading the naked Wat around the city in a wheelbarrow—advertising a “subtropical soirée organized by white negroes.” Stern’s illustrated book-length poem Europa (1928) is festooned with images of black prizefighters and opens with the familiar figure of Charlie Chaplin as emcee of the book. As if literally swallowing the “virgin microbe” of Tzara, Europa concludes with a vision of the proletariat as a cellular uprising: “this throng of raging bacchantes / is one centimeter of my skin.” The most curious, if sidelong, glimpse of Dada in Poland is not a manifesto but a “Festo-Mani” issued by that singular artist and playwright Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz with its provocative answer to the question “How can one outstrip Futurism and Dadaism? BY PURE HOAXING.” Witkiewicz’s own hoax was to sign the document Marceli Duchański-Hoax.
Russia, like Poland, exhibited artistic strains that were certainly compatible with Dada. Futurism was again an important part of this story. Before the war there were energetic collaborations between poets and painters in various Russian Futurist groups. In Moscow in 1912, the Hylaea group, one of these collaborations, published an almanac whose very title, Slap in the Face of Public Taste, anticipates Dada aggression. Promenading in city streets with painted faces, the Hylaeans issued a manifesto in 1913, “Why We Paint Our Faces.” “We have joined art to life,” they declared, anticipating both Dada and Constructivism. “We have loudly summoned life and life has invaded art, it is time for art to invade life. The painting of our faces is the beginning of the invasion.” Also, presaging the development of sound poetry in Zurich, the poets Alexei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, members of Hylaea, were intent on what they called zaum, a “transrational” or “beyonsense” poetic practice that emancipated the word from the sentence and the letter from the word.
If zaum seems to approach an absolute limit, another poet from a rival Futurist group outdid even these wordless sound poems. In Death to Art (1913), Vasilisk Gnedov included “Poem of the End.” Culminating a collection in which several poems were just a single line or even a single syllable, this particular item consisted solely of a title atop a blank page. At public readings, Gnedov performed this piece with aplomb. Formally dressed, he would fiddle with his glasses, adjust the book on the lectern, brush a speck of dust from his jacket, consult his watch, and make a series of hand gestures over his head, raising his eyes heavenward and displaying the acute expressivity of a poet in the throes of passionate exhortation—persisting in this silent pantomime until the restive audience would be driven to voice its impatience.
After the war, and during the early years of the revolution, one Russian group knowingly modeled itself after Dada, but refrained from using the word because it would be heard as an affirmative, da, da, meaning “yes, yes” in Russian. These were the Nothingists, after all, who declared, “In poetry there is nothing, only the nothingists.”
When Tzara and his fellows in Zurich claimed that Dada was encircling the globe, and when Huelsenbeck reiterated these claims in the Dada Almanac in 1920, they knew that so simple and supple a word couldn’t help but find these international niches as it migrated beyond their control and their expectations. Virgin microbe indeed: infection without intention, but accomplished like a destiny foretold.
Japan, for instance, heard about Dada but—like Poland and Russia—managed to subsume the virgin microbe into its own artistic anatomy without so much as a sniffle. News of Dada in Japan tended to fit readily into a cultural outlook prepared by Buddhism and Taoism. Dada in Japanese means “childish willfulness,” and the book Poems of Shinkichi the Dadaist (1923) evoked this association. Takahashi Shinkichi himself seized on the term when he read a newspaper account of Dada in 1922, in which the author explained that Dada was a Western term for nothingness.
Closer to Europe, Tiblisi in Georgia emits a whiff of what Dada might have been like as a purely Slavic manifestation by a group naming itself after the formula for sulfuric acid, H2SO4. Its members promenaded city streets with a muzzled bear. Another Tiblisi group known as 41° shared many points of orientation and activities with Dada, but was ignorant of it until 1921. One member of the group, Ilya Zdanevich, who published under the name Iliazd, moved to Paris in time to participate in the final stages of Dada’s run. It was he who helped Tzara organize his “Soirée of the Bearded Heart,” in part because it was an agreeable venue for the performance of Russian poems, but also because Dada had used up all the available goodwill of theatrical agents, and nobody would rent a space to a known Dadaist. Iliazd remained in Paris for the rest of his life and in 1949 produced one of the glories of avant-garde book publishing. Les mots inconnus (Unknown Words) is an international compendium of sound poetry, zaum, and similar exercises in burrowing beneath the familiar surface of language to unearth jubilation right from the presemantic source. Iliazd designed each page as a visual template to showcase his entrancing specimens, many of which are from the annals of Dada.
Bucharest, Rumania, was also a site for Dada shenanigans of a sort. Tzara’s Rumanian countrymen knew about him, of course, but the Bucharest vanguard was primarily receptive to Constructivism, like most other Eastern European capitals. Still, a bit of Dada irreverence spiced up the proceedings from time to time, like the “Activist Manifesto for Young People” published in the journal Contimpuranul in 1924.
Down with Art
For it’s prostituted itself!
Poetry is merely a press to squeeze the lacrimatory glands of young girls of every age;
Theatre, a recipe for the merchants of canned goods;
Literature, a leaky enemy syringe;
Drama, a jar of berouged fetuses;
Painting, a diapered nature, extended through displaced salons;
Music, a means of locomotion in heaven;
Sculpture, the science of massaged spines;
Politics, the employment of gravediggers and brokers;
Architecture, an enterprise of tarted-up mausoleums
This litany concludes with the spirited cry, “Let’s kill our own dead.”
High spirits and cunning invective come naturally to youth, but for Tzara Dada transcended juvenile euphoria. He had been the youngest Dadaist, but the avid participation and influence of older men like Hugo Ball and Picabia had matured Tzara and fortified his sense of mission. Conversely, it was a point of honor with him that he’d somehow been innately Dada even before moving from Bucharest to Zurich. When Rumanian poet and writer Saşa Pană proposed publishing Tzara’s Rumanian poems under the title “Poems Before Dada,” he objected, insisting his development had been continuous. Writing to French couturier and avid collector of Dada ephemera Jacques Doucet, he claimed, “Already in 1914 I had tried to take away from words their meaning, and to use them in order to give a new global sense of the verse by the tonality and the auditory contrast.”
Getting away, overcoming, release: these were the terms in which Tzara thought. Despite all the fervor of destruction associated with Dada, and all the havoc he meticulously pioneered, he was in search of something most Dadaists sought: clarity and equilibrium. He made this explicit in a statement, “End of Dada,” printed as an insert for a limited number of copies of Seven Dada Manifestos in 1924—inconveniently timed, since that’s when the whole enterprise came crashing down. Speaking surreptitiously, out of the ruins, what he has to say is confidential, not a manifesto. Making an appeal to the strong and the weak, the healthy and the sick, he tells them that if they read his book, they’ll be cured. Everybody’s nuts, so logic has to go by the wayside: there’s neither good nor evil; everything is permitted. One can only strive for the zero point. “Indifference is the sole legal and effective drug, indifference without effort, without consequence.”
The indifference of which Tzara wrote in “End of Dada” was a touchstone for Hausmann and others in Berlin, who’d found it persuasively elaborated in the concept of “creative indifference” extolled by Mynona—that is, Salomo Friedländer, Hausmann’s personal friend. He had even spent a long vacation with him in 1916, fervently working through the concept. Hausmann’s term Presentism owes an obvious debt to Friedländer, who’d published “Presentism: The Earth-Emperor’s Address to Humanity” in Der Sturm in 1913. In the piece, the primal earth spirit of the title avows itself to be extrahuman: “not a person, I am nobody and everyone, indifferentist.” Situating himself at a central point of nullity—“I am the imperial nothing”—the earth emperor breathes an inspirational sort of nihilism with his claim, “I have expunged all the opposites within me, gaining power thereby.”
Even if they didn’t know Mynona’s philosophy, Dadaists intuitively carried around the nugget of insight he propounded, where the neutral point in which opposites dissolve makes peace with the ever-propagating stuff of the universe, leaving in its wake a kind of Buddhist tolerance for ungovernable profusion. There have always been writers, thinkers, creative spirits whose imaginations soar beyond, into a realm where the wisecrack cavorts with the gem of wisdom. Dada added an element previously unexplored: it was collective. Dada was simultaneously composed of a hundred-headed Hydra, in which one of the heads was always “Anonymous.” How convenient, then, that creative indifference would be the brainchild of a man who forged his nom de plume by spelling anonymous backward.
Collectives are hard to sustain, especially when the inspirational germ is as free spirited as Dada. Dada thrived for all of five months in Zurich, then kept fitfully sparking back into life over the next two-plus years. The momentum it picked up in Berlin kept it going there for two and a half years. In Cologne, by contrast, it barely got off the ground, managing two exhibitions and a sputter of one-off periodicals. In Paris, to the increasing annoyance of all involved, it motored on for two years before the wheels started to come off the vehicle. In Holland, it was an “invasion” lasting less than a month. In New York, it was an afterthought, while in the Balkans and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, it was more like a slow burn in a roadside culvert, sparked by a discarded cigarette.
Given the volatile temperaments of the personalities who created and were faced with sustaining Dada, it’s a marvel it lasted longer than a wild weekend. But Dada wasn’t something you could become or join (despite the hawking ads of Club Dada in Berlin). Dada was just something you were.
Surveying the post-Dada activities of the principals, it’s hard not to conclude that their involvement with the movement put them in a league unto themselves. Dada left them invigorated for life, as if they’d been to the grail temple and tasted the elixir. For most of them, that elixir included the magic potion of longevity. Philippe Soupault lived to the ripe old age of 93, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes made it to 90. Both Hannah Höch and Marcel Janco reached 89, Hans Richter 88, Man Ray 86. Takahashi Shinkichi, self-proclaimed Dada of Japan, also lived to 86. Despite enduring exile in middle age, Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Raoul Hausmann, and Walter Mehring all lived to be 85. Richard Huelsenbeck, Johannes Baader, and Marcel Duchamp lived beyond 80. Beatrice Wood, sweetheart of New York Dada, takes the cake, reaching 105. For a generation in which only 5 percent achieved that age, you’d have to say of Dada it was something in the water.
By comparison, John Heartfield, Francis Picabia, and André Breton, who lived to be 70 or more, died relatively young. Tristan Tzara passed away at 67, as did George Grosz. In a few cases mortality was impacted by circumstance, historical or medical, with Kurt Schwitters gone at 61, Sophie Taeuber at 54, the Baroness Elsa at 52, Theo van Doesburg at 48—and youngest of all, the founder of Cabaret Voltaire, Hugo Ball taken at 41. He was survived by his beloved Emmy Hennings, who only made it to her early sixties.
None of the founders were Dada for life, at least in the sense of continuing to play that particular card. Soon enough, those who’d been the ringleaders and creative mojos were on to other things. But most of them still kept a flame lit in a private sanctuary of memory and imagination. Few could divest themselves of Dada as cleanly as Picabia, who tossed off a parting bon mot: “When I’ve finished a cigarette I’m not one for keeping the butt.”
Given the timing of Dada, and the relative youth of those involved, it meant they were destined for a harrowing ride through the midcentury calamities that pulled the avant-garde and everything else into a maelstrom. For those who made a Beatrice of Dada’s destruction, what lay ahead were a series of bumps, rough landings, and, to a surprising degree, happy endings—all ahead of the curve of more woeful destructions that lay ahead on the world stage.
When Ball finally wrenched himself free from Dada in 1917, he plunged into an alternate life. He was burning with projects, which he pursued with singular zeal. At first he devoted himself to political causes, joining the radical newspaper Die Freie Zeitung in Bern, while back in Zurich Dada played out its final act. In 1919 he published a substantial book, A Critique of German Intelligence, in which he diagnosed the authoritarian streak in his native land with unflinching probity.
Soon, however, Ball would turn from politics back to his lifelong lodestar: religion. Ball and Hennings finally married in 1920, and he eventually reaffirmed the Catholic faith of his upbringing, embarking on a study of the early church fathers and publishing a well-received scholarly tome, Byzantine Christianity, in 1923. He became close to the writer Hermann Hesse, author of the wildly popular Demian and Siddhartha. Ball did not live to read Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1929), but shortly before he died of stomach cancer in 1927, his book Hermann Hesse: His Life and Work appeared in time to celebrate his friend’s fiftieth birthday.
That same year Ball’s Flight Out of Time, a compendium of his Dada diaries, was published, one of the most thoughtful and revealing books of its era and almost the only record of what went on at Cabaret Voltaire. Ball was regarded as a local saint by the mountain folk in the canton of Ticino, Switzerland, where he lived out his final years. “Death is the one credible condition of perfect indifference,” he wrote, “and this is the prerequisite of all philosophizing.” In the end, he left philosophizing behind, choosing instead the devotional path, but the terms of his devotion were inscribed in the heart of the Dada he helped define in the first place: “One must be astonished totally, yet more and more softly. This is how eternity wonders at the times and changes them. One must wonder at the wonders. And also at the wounds, the deepest and last wounds, and elevate them to the wondrous.”
Arp cherished the memory of Zurich’s “Dadaland” and regarded Ball as one of the great German writers. He credited his friend with revealing the “magic treasure” that “connects man with the life of light and darkness, with real life, the real collectivity.” Over the years, Arp penned tributes to his companions like epigrammatic fairy tales. “The stars write at an infinitely slow pace and never read what they have written.”
Arp claimed to have learned how to read all over again as an adult. His own oneiric poems christened the good ship Surrealism before it was launched. With the Surrealists he had a special fondness for puns and the untranslatable slippage inside a language, like the title of his book of poems Weisst du schwarzt du. It plays on the words for black and white while seizing on the fact that the verb “to know” (wissen) takes the second-person form weisst (weiss means “white”), matching it by making a verb of the word black (schwarzt): “Do you know do you black” doesn’t begin to translate this nimble title. Arp indulged his inimitable spirit of linguistic play equally in German and French, and when he and Taeuber moved to France in 1926, he switched Hans for Jean.
It’s a testament to Arp’s seemingly guileless character that he was able to straddle incompatible artistic tendencies. During the twenties and thirties, he was a member of the Surrealists, while at the same time participating in a group of abstract artists, the Abstraction-Création. Jean Hélion, one of its organizers, recalled with awe: “Arp left our group of strict abstractionists, who had very nasty things to say about Surrealism, and joined Breton and his cronies at the Cyrano, a café near the Place Pigalle. He managed this very smoothly, without a clash and without so much as a thought that it might be considered treasonous.”
No doubt Arp’s unpretentiousness helped him navigate between competing artistic shoals like these. But amidst the rivalries of artistic schools, his constant pledge was to nature, to simplification. “Sometimes we learn to ‘understand’ better by observing the motion of a leaf, the evolution of a line, a word in a poem, the shriek of an animal, or by creating a piece of sculpture.” Increasingly, the sculptures he created aspired to be anonymously and unobtrusively deposited into the world. Carola Giedion-Welcker—a Swiss friend and champion of Arp, Max Ernst, James Joyce, and others—tellingly juxtaposed a photo of snow on a creek bed with his sculpture Human Concretion to make the point. His is simply the part that won’t melt.
Giedion-Welcker, a devoted chronicler of advanced art and literature, also commemorated the unique interior design of a renovation project that brought Arp and Taeuber together with van Doesburg. This was the Aubette, a historical building on Place Kléber, the grandest square in Strasbourg, in which “surely those who had the good fortune to dance in this modern prehistoric cavern moved not merely to the sounds of jazz, but were also inspired by the visual vitality and rhythm of Arp’s creations,” she recalled, “reaching out like monumental tentacles.” Emmy Hennings compared the effect to that of “the lamp with which Aladdin lighted the marvelous cave.”
The renovation project came about because of Taeuber. She was still an instructor at the Zurich School of Applied Arts, a post she’d held since 1916 when Cabaret Voltaire was just getting started. Her own art developed slowly but surely, and by 1925 she was on the jury of the monumental International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts in Paris, famous for consolidating Art Deco as a reigning design style. Everything in Taeuber’s work—ranging from puppets and textiles to drawings, reliefs, gouaches, and interior design—reflected her magnanimous personality, which resonates in the advice she gave her goddaughter. “I think I have spoken enough to you about serious things,” she wrote, “which is why I speak of something to which I attribute great value, still too little appreciated—gaiety. It is gaiety, basically, that allows us to have no fear before the problems of life and to find a natural solution to them.”
Taeuber’s upbeat sensibility infused the Aubette renovation from the beginning. The owners had asked her to remodel the building. The job was lucrative enough to enable her and Arp to move to Paris afterward, where she designed and oversaw the decor of their own house with his and her studios. For the Aubette, Arp decked out the café with biomorphic “toadstool trees” on the walls; Taeuber derived colors and shapes from the wall paintings of Pompeii for the tearoom and foyer bar.
Van Doesburg, meanwhile, seized on the project as the perfect forum in which to implement the De Stijl aesthetic he’d been promoting for years in his journal. Intent as he was on architecture, he’d had few opportunities to undertake a major project. After the redesigned Aubette was opened in 1928, he lost no time in devoting an entire lavishly illustrated issue of De Stijl to it. Soon after the Aubette’s reopening, however, he was distressed to find that its clean geometrical design met with resistance. The waiters were sprucing up the place with colored lights and artificial flowers to make it seem cozy: “The public is not ready to leave its ‘brown’ world,” he lamented, “and stubbornly rejects the new ‘white world.’”
Van Doesburg impetuously—and unfairly—took the lion’s share of the credit for the redesigned Aubette. The popping colors and the overall look have an unmistakable feel of De Stijl, for sure, but Arp and Taeuber had been steadfastly working in a similar vein before De Stijl was under way. The blending of their styles was seamlessly achieved in the Aubette, van Doesburg’s claims of credit to the contrary.
Taeuber chafed under van Doesburg’s use of the Aubette to promote his own career, neglecting to mention the preponderant role she and Arp played. It must have been challenging for Arp and Taeuber, in light of all this, to end up building their house in Meudon outside Paris, just up the street from Theo and Nelly van Doesburg. Initially, it had been planned as a duplex for both couples, but the Aubette project put an end to that prospect.
As Taeuber noted, van Doesburg was desperate for the kind of attention the Aubette began to garner for him; during a trip to Barcelona, he was received with standing ovations as a pioneer of modern design. But it was not to last. He died in March 1931 of a heart attack brought on by a bout of asthmatic bronchitis. He was only forty-eight.
The final issue of De Stijl commemorated van Doesburg’s life and work. In it, Schwitters recalled the striking impression made by his friend during the Holland Dada tour: “Standing on the stage in his tuxedo, with an elegant black dicky and a white bow tie, wearing his white powder and monocle, his features maintaining an imperturbable seriousness, Doesburg already seemed every inch the Dadaist, illustrating his own maxim, ‘Life is an extraordinary invention.’”
As fate would have it, Taeuber, too, died an early death, though not before an absorbing, productive, and happy decade with Arp in Meudon, where they were active in several organizations devoted to abstract art. The cause of abstraction was becoming increasingly politicized during those years. Unlikely as it may seem, the simple act of distributing rectangles and triangles and circles and squares over a canvas could be regarded in some quarters as an assault on civilization. In his introduction to the catalogue of the 1936 exhibit, Cubism and Abstract Art, at the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr dedicated the event “to those painters of squares and circles (and the architects influenced by them) who have suffered at the hands of philistines with political power”—adding, in a sobering footnote: “As this volume goes to press the United States Customs has refused to permit the Museum of Modern Art to enter as works of art nineteen pieces of more or less abstract sculpture under a ruling which requires that sculpture must represent an animal or human form.”
It was a fraught moment. Art thought to deviate from mimetic norms was persecuted simultaneously in the United States (as nonart), in the USSR (as an “infantile disorder of Leftism”), and in Nazi Germany (as artistic Bolshevism). No wonder French painter Fernand Léger regarded abstraction as “a dangerous game that must be played.”
It was not their pursuit of elementary purification that got Arp and Taeuber into trouble, though, but rather global warfare. The outbreak of World War II made them refugees, like so many other artists. They hoped to come to America, but couldn’t get visas. Luckily Picabia’s former wife Gabrielle took them in, then Peggy Guggenheim, before they made their way to the safety of Switzerland, reestablishing their lives in a setting that at least was familiar, unlike the fate of so many others.
The war was not what ultimately cut short Taeuber’s life, however. On a January night in 1943—with the war raging all around the Alpine nation once again, as it had in 1916 when Ball compared it to a cage of canaries—Taeuber was staying in Zurich at the home of her artist friend Max Bill, signing lithographs. Tired at the end of the day, she opted to stay overnight, where an inadequately ventilated bedroom led to her asphyxiation from a leaking gas stove.
Taeuber’s death was a debilitating blow to Arp, who poured out his grief in poems for years to come, somehow retaining his innate sense of wonder in the face of tragic loss. “You painted the clarity that makes the heart beat,” he wrote, “the sweetness that stirs the lips.” The unforeseen end made itself felt as part of the composition:
Near you, life was so sweet.
Your final painting was done.
Your brushes neatly arranged.
Arp lived on for decades in a perpetual swoon of artistic ripeness. A late photo shows him in his studio, surrounded by sculptural dollops, “concretions” he called them, as if they were figments of a buoyant imagination compelled by the twinkle of a divine eye to settle on earth as large smooth chunks of marble, merging anonymously into a world of glacial effluvia pouring down as if detached from passing clouds into Alpine meadows, settling into the mossy turf to prove that some lumps take only a spring to be worked back into the sum, while others require millennia.
The resolute simplicity and purity of Arp’s art stands in sharp contrast to that of Schwitters—at least as far as what meets the eye. Both men were simple souls at heart, fond of laughter, devoted to the natural world. They had been cosigners (with Moholy-Nagy and Ivan Puni) of a “Call for Elementary Art” in 1921. Arp was astonished, and tickled, by the nonchalance of his friend. On one occasion Arp tossed aside a collage in frustration. With this dismissive gesture, the collage passed from art to trash, Schwitters promptly claimed the trash, as he was wont to do. With Arp’s permission, he turned it upside down, pasted “a little bit of Merz in one corner,” and signed his name to it, converting it from trash back to art. On another occasion Arp observed Schwitters struggling with a piece of glass that wouldn’t quite attach to a construction. Asked what he was going to do, Schwitters responded: “Put up the price.”
Schwitters persisted with his ever-expanding Merzbau, in which there was naturally a grotto dedicated to Arp and another to Taeuber. Even so, there was no falling off in his production of portable artworks and writing. Fairy tales especially rustled up into the light of day with their unmistakable Schwitters touch. One of them filled a whole issue of Merz in 1925, a typographic tour de force done in collaboration with van Doesburg and Kate Steinitz. It was a simple tale about a scarecrow, composed like a cartoon in which letters provide visual animation. Most of Schwitters’ fairy tales were written texts without any ostentatious visual dimension, but they swell in the imagination like the main character of “He,” a tale published in Der Sturm in 1927. The story begins in medias res: “In the meantime he had become a fully grown man.” The crucial word is grown (ein ausgewachsener Mensch), and that’s what he does incessantly for eight or nine pages. He is conscripted into the military where his unceasing growth becomes a tactical liability, so he’s jailed until his expansion bursts the prison asunder and in the process crushes the entire army. Court-martialed, he gets the death sentence, “guilty because he had refused to reduce himself.” His magnitude, however, makes it impossible to procure adequate means to execute him, and in the end he obeys the order to drown himself.
“He” is a parable reflecting the unchecked inflation of the Deutschmark during the early years of the Weimar Republic, but it’s also a dark premonition of the remilitarization in the Third Reich. “He’s a little too tall to order about,” an officer grimly observes. Schwitters was apolitical by nature—that’s what kept hard-line Berlin Dadaists like Grosz and Heartfield from welcoming him into their ranks—but that didn’t mean he had no opinions. Quite the opposite. In “National Art” (1925), published in the Flemish journal Het Overzicht, he squarely addressed the issue of art in the service of, and in opposition to, the state. “There’s art, and also nations and proletariat, but no national or proletarian art,” he argued. “Unfortunately there are nations. The consequence of nations is war. National art should serve the feeling of human togetherness, known as a nation. National art helps the preparation for war,” he soberly concluded.
Before long, Schwitters’ ideas earned him some very dangerous enemies. In 1934 he was visiting Moholy-Nagy in Berlin, when the formidable Futurist F. T. Marinetti was in town. Both men were invited to a celebratory banquet for the Italian. Moholy didn’t want to go, being under threat of possible arrest, but, out of friendship, he went with Schwitters.
The fête was grand and grotesque, filled with Nazi high command. Hitler wasn’t there, but Göring and Goebbels were. Seated between the director of the National Socialist Organization for Folk Culture and the leader of the “Strength Through Joy” movement, the artists’ discomfort could only be relieved by the plentiful liquid spirits on hand. Moholy began to be alarmed when Schwitters, lit up by the alcohol, began declaring to their tablemates that he, too, had something to offer in the spirit of strength through joy. Worse, he played the race card: “I’m Aryan—the great Aryan MERZ. I can think Aryan, paint Aryan, spit Aryan.” It was a desperate, drunken impulse that could only escalate suspicion about his Dada affiliations. Not that there was any reason to single out Dada from all the rest of modern art isms. In the eyes of the Nazis, it was all unredeemable filth.
Schwitters was a marked man, and he sensed it. Nevertheless, in 1935 he smuggled microfilm photos of Hitler posters in Hanover defaced by resisters to Tzara in Paris, who saw to their publication. Had Schwitters been identified as the source, of course, the Gestapo would have dealt with him summarily.
Schwitters took annual vacations in Norway through the decade, alerted to the uniqueness of the country by Höch. Each summer he traveled the fjords, paying for the trip by painting conventional (that is, marketable) landscapes and portraits. On the day after Christmas, 1936, he finally fled his homeland as signs of impending danger became all too clear. Apart from his prominence as a “degenerate” artist, Schwitters was an epileptic, and the Nazis had placed the malady high on their list of “hereditary diseases” to be exterminated by exterminating those afflicted. Schwitters was accompanied by his son Ernst, taking up residence in Norway as political refugees—and not a moment too soon. Only days after their departure, the Gestapo came knocking with a warrant for his arrest. He heard about it from wife, Helma, who’d stayed behind to care for her elderly parents. He and Ernst were never to see her again. Learning of her death in 1945, Schwitters would reflect, “That was my best friend for all time gone.”
The Norwegian exile lasted until spring 1940. Ernst described their subsequent flight from the invading German army. Twice they were arrested, and twice escaped. “In spite of these setbacks,” wrote his son, “his sense of humor never left him. For two unforgettable months he had travelled through Norway by land and water, often across the ever-advancing front lines, carrying in one pocket a small piece of sculpture in birch wood and, in another, two white mice.”
Eventually Schwitters and his son made their way to England, and after some time in an internment camp on the Isle of Wight, they were released. A small cadre of artists in London welcomed Schwitters, but he was impoverished and life was miserable anyway in the city during the blitz. He ended up in Ambleside in the Lake District, just a few miles south of William Wordsworth’s cottage outside Grasmere, fabled center of English Romanticism. In Norway he’d spent three years working on a new Merzbau, and now here in England a third arose in a stone barn. The original in Hanover, alas, was obliterated in an Allied bombing raid on the night of October 8, 1943.
After the war, in June 1946, Schwitters was astonished to receive a letter from his old friend Raoul Hausmann. He fired back a reply, detailing the plight of his exile, and signing it, “Love, MERZ.” They struck up a correspondence that’s both touching and chastening to read, not least because they communicated in English—a passable if sometimes odd English. Both men felt German to be compromised, and both had been in exile long enough to feel as comfortable, if not more so, using another language. “I think that you are like me in a state,” he wrote Hausmann, “that you can no more speak propper German, but do not really propper speak any language.”
The friends reflected on their time in and out of Dada. Hausmann revealed the constraints he felt working within that rubric. “I am absolutely conform with you, that we have to go far off from early dada, but you shall retain, that in my means were many things, dada never understood.” Schwitters, ever focused on art, came up with a wonderful and concise epigram: “A play with serious problems. That is art”—and, one could add, that is Dada. As the friends warmed to mutual admiration, Schwitters courteously suggested Hausmann was “an important member of the avantgarde. You are much consequenter than I myself.”
Early in his exchange with Schwitters, Hausmann detailed his penury (“I had no farthing for living”) and his physical woes (“I am nailed in bed”). Schwitters responded with sympathy and disclosures of his own. “I am 59. But I cannot run, I have high bloodpressure. In the moment I am allmost without teeth, because they had to come out, otherwise I would have died.” On October 10 he described how, the previous year, “I had to lie [in bed] first 5 weeks, then 3 weeks for falling on my leg. After that I had to lie in bed for 5 weeks with a flu. But I was blind 2 weeks and needed 3 months recovering.”
Things got worse for Schwitters. Two days after composing his October 10 letter, he broke his leg and was bedridden again. Despondent, he backed out of a project he and Hausmann had hatched to make a magazine called Pin, and a paranoid Hausmann suspected scoundrels in Paris had set Schwitters against him. It took some effort to get their exchange back on track.
The end came far too swiftly. On November 22, 1946, Schwitters wrote sadly to Walter Gropius, former Bauhaus director now at Harvard, “I would like to see once USA. Who would invite an old lad, who cannot walk, as I?” Barely able to drag himself around, he nonetheless kept working away in the freezing Merzbau barn until he collapsed. Bedridden for the last time, he wasted away through December, finally dying in his sleep on January 8, 1948. Ironically, the previous day he had been awarded British citizenship.
Despite the maladies he had enumerated to Schwitters, Hausmann lived on for several more decades following the death of his friend. The long interval between the end of Dada in Berlin and the time he got in touch with Schwitters was varied and productive. His ill-fated affair with Hannah Höch finally sputtered out in 1922. “He needed constant encouragement in order to be able to carry out his ideas and achieve anything at all lasting,” she recalled decades later. “If I hadn’t devoted much of my time to looking after him and encouraging him, I might have achieved more myself.”
After he and Höch broke it off, Hausmann’s need for female support seems only to have escalated. In addition to his wife, he had another constant female companion through the twenties, and when the Hausmanns ended up in exile during the Third Reich, a young Frenchwoman named Marthe Prévot rounded out the trio for the last thirty years of his life. “I see in him only the artist, the friend of animals and nature,” she told Hans Richter after Hausmann’s death, “an extraordinarily sensitive being of the greatest tenderness.” Richter was amazed that his old Dada companion could “set up house with two women within a monogamous society (and often without any financial means).”
For a few years after Dada, Höch and Hausmann were both close to Schwitters, and both were in and out of the Berlin studios of Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, Richter, and others. On her own, Höch took periodic vacations on the coast with the Schwitters family, where Schwitters introduced her to a Dutch artist, Till Brugmann, with whom she developed a lesbian relationship that lasted many years. The couple lived for a time in Holland, where they could often be found in high spirits with Theo and Nelly van Doesburg, at least until the van Doesburgs moved to Paris in 1924. But Brugmann proved to be as overbearing as Hausmann had been, Höch found, and they split up after a decade.
Höch lived the rest of her long life in Berlin. Everything was different under the Nazis, and she had to be vigilant not to reveal anything to her neighbors about her Dada past. Dada was vilified most triumphantly at the 1937 exhibition of so-called degenerate art, which opened in Munich then traveled around the country, parading a vast corpus of modern masterpieces. Twice Höch attended this slanderous show in Munich, where she observed the whole panorama of modern art, past which crowds filed speechless, astonished, and “disciplined” as she put it. The exhibit was arranged to taunt and besmirch, with Dada a prominent target, yet she saw no indication that those attending were anything but reverent.
As the malignancy of the Third Reich expanded, the whole configuration of Europe began to fracture, from East to West, sending people everywhere into exile, internal and external. Even before France was invaded in 1940, the flight from Paris was under way. For the Surrealists led by André Breton, there was a wholesale relocation to New York, transforming it into a capital of the avant-garde.
Max Ernst was among those who made it to New York, but not without harrowing detours. After the complexities of the ménage à trois with Paul and Gala Éluard, he had settled into Paris just in time to ride the wave from Dada into Surrealism, becoming for much of the twenties the Surrealist artist, especially through the medium of his collage books. Breton, ruling the group with a capriciously iron hand, was always in danger of alienating allies and friends, so maybe it’s a testament to the thick hides of former Dadaists that so many of them appear in a group portrait of Surrealists from 1932. Arp, Tzara, Ernst, Éluard, and Man Ray—along with Breton—make up all but three of the men in the picture. Dalí is there in the middle, at the time a wunderkind of the movement, while behind him is the painter Yves Tanguy and writer René Crevel. Ten years after the torments of the second Dada Season in Paris, here was the aging but still youthful face of Dada.
Degenerate Art Exhibition, Munich, 1937. The Nazis took an original Dada slogan, “Take Dada seriously,” and splashed it mockingly across the wall.
bpk, Berlin / Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Art Resource, New York.
The 1930s had been a productive decade for Ernst. Vacationing in the Swiss Alps with Alberto Giacometti in 1935, Ernst wrote that the two men were “afflicted with sculpture-fever” while extracting granite blocks from a glacial moraine. “Wonderfully polished by time, frost and weather, they are in themselves fantastically beautiful,” he observed. “Why not, therefore, leave the spadework to the elements and confine ourselves to scratching on them the runes of our own mystery?” It sounds like he was channeling the voice of Arp. A year earlier Tzara wrote, “No one better than Max Ernst has understood how to turn the pockets of things inside out.” He, like Arp, Ernst, and Schwitters, maintained a fidelity to whatever the world itself tossed up. If there are pockets, where art is concerned, why not pick them? Let nature do the work. The artist only needs eyes, and as a famous Surrealist montage suggests (to say nothing of Duchamp’s “anti-retinal” conviction), not even eyes. Imagination suffices for seeing into the heart of things. Seeing into the heart of things, regrettably, doesn’t correlate with the way political winds blow. Before long, Max Ernst would be caught in the crosshairs of his native homeland.
The thirties was a decade of expansion for Surrealism, with outposts established in Prague, Brussels, and London. In the English capital, Ernst met a young writer named Leonora Carrington. As with Gala, it was a classic head-over-heels plunge into erotic enthrallment.
Ernst’s relationship with Carrington blossomed as Breton took aim at Paul Éluard and demanded that the Surrealists, one and all, renounce him. This was more than Ernst could bear after all they’d been through together. Splitting with Surrealism, he and Carrington moved to the south of France, buying a dilapidated farmhouse north of Avignon in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, where they undertook a wholesale sculptural renovation of the exterior, a kind of three-dimensional update of the frescoes he’d applied to the interior of the Éluard household long ago. But this was 1938, and time was running out.
As soon as hostilities were declared in September 1939, Ernst was interned as an enemy alien. Only in December, through the intervention of Éluard, was he released. But soon the German invasion was at hand, leading to further arrests.
Despite all odds, Ernst survived. Twenty years later, the still-astonished voice of friend and early biographer John Russell reflected on the ignominy of his plight and his fortitude:
In May 1940 Max Ernst was taken away in handcuffs, like a common malefactor. For the rest of the year, he was to live through adventures as labyrinthine as anything in Candide—but with the different that the governing forces behind them were in no way Voltairean. How he was interned, managed to escape, got back to Saint-Martin, was denounced and re-arrested, and escaped again only to find that his petition for release had been accepted and he was legally free—all this can be presented as a story of ingenuity and self-command: but what it amounted to in fact was the harrying of someone who, as his friend Joë Bosquet said, had for many years “borne the terrible burden of walking ahead of a whole generation.” It would be an act of inhumanity to play up the hairbreadth escapes of that period, when the real drama lay in the artist’s return to Saint-Martin to find that before leaving the region Leonora Carrington had been crazed by his departure to the point of selling his house for a bottle of brandy, so that in the winter of 1940–41 he was alone and homeless in a countryside where nearly everyone had turned against him.
Miraculously, Ernst would survive the war in spite of his many trials and losses. Not all of his fellow Dadaists would have such harrowing adventures, but history weighed on them nonetheless.
As Ernst underwent these potentially lethal ordeals, Tzara was in the same region in the south of France, active in the French resistance movement along with Éluard. Tzara, after all, had more to lose than either of them, adding the category of Jew to the stigma of vanguard artist and Communist.
Tzara’s adherence to the party was shared with Wieland Herzfelde and brother John Heartfield, who would live out the rest of their lives behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany while Tzara remained in Western Europe. Arp may have had Tzara in mind when, after the Second World War, he observed: “Some old friends from the days of the Dada campaign, who always fought for dreams and freedom, are now disgustingly preoccupied with class aims and busy making over the Hegelian dialectic into a hurdy-gurdy tune. Conscientiously, they mix poetry and the Five Year Plan in one pot; but this attempt to lie down while standing up will not succeed. Man will not allow himself to be turned into a scrubbed, hygienic numeral.” From the perennial viewpoint of pacifist Switzerland, it would always be hard for Arp to come to terms with the demands of political commitment.
Tzara’s political commitment—an extension of the irascible determination with which he led the Dada charge—would be sustained after the war, though he continued to write poetry that could hardly pass as “committed” in the conventional sense, and he nurtured, with devotional zeal, his growing collection of African art, which gave resolve to the anti-colonialist position he held for decades. His collection was housed in the striking modernist house built for him (with the financial means of his wealthy Swedish wife) by Viennese architect Adolf Loos, who’d famously declared ornament a crime and extolled a theme dear to Tzara’s heart: “If human work consists only of destruction, it is truly human, natural, noble work.”
It was in this house, in Montmartre, where Tzara met his end in 1963, younger than most of his colleagues in Dada, but full of years in terms of lived experience. What he wrote in a eulogy to Schwitters could apply as well to him: “He is among those who have decapitated the haloed capital A from the word art and have placed this word again on the level of human manifestations.”
From the outset, Tzara had been a fastidious documentarian of the Dada movement, but he was a junior member, generationally speaking, and by the time he was thirty, Dada was far behind him. By the time of his death from lung cancer, Tzara had been in and out of the Surrealist movement headed by Breton; the French Dadaists could be described as Surrealists who didn’t know it yet. Indeed, an unfortunate aftereffect of the rise and long reign of Surrealism is that Dada got haplessly appended to it, as if it were little more than a staging ground for the main event. (This phrasal tic was perpetuated in numerous exhibitions, starting with “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936, and revisited at MoMA in 1968 with “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage.” As late as 2009 there was a large “Dada e Surrealismo” exhibition in Rome. In 1971 the journal Dada/Surrealism made its debut. Although it subsided in 1990, it was resurrected under the same title in 2013. So the afterlife of that two-headed calf continues.)
Tzara’s rival, Huelsenbeck, likewise issued a veritable gusher of documents, compendia, manifestos, and historical overviews of Dada, beginning soon after he carried the sacred word like a delicate robin’s egg into the cauldron of Berlin in 1917. And life overtook Huelsenbeck, too, as he was drawn into the professional roles of physician, novelist, and foreign correspondent. The popular paper Berlin Illustrirte Zeitung sent him to China in 1928, providing material for his travel book Der Sprung nach Osten (The Leap to the East) and a novel, China frisst Menschen (China Devours People). Further assignments sent him to Haiti, Cuba, and the United States. He was expelled from the Writer’s Union in 1933 when Hitler came to power and spent several anxious years trying to emigrate.
Finally, in 1936, Huelsenbeck and family were admitted into the United States. He’d been preceded by George Grosz, and both men fervently made themselves over into their own versions of the typical American. Grosz’s fierce satires were replaced by bucolic nature studies, and in his revisionary autobiography—A Little Yes and a Big No—Dada was demoted to a relatively minor episode. Huelsenbeck became Richard Hulbeck, practicing existentialist psychotherapy. In the 1950s he was determined to remake Dada in the image of existentialism, then all the rage. After retirement he spent his remaining years in Switzerland, like a homing pigeon returning to the foundational experience of his life in the land of Dada.
Tzara and Huelsenbeck may have ended their lives far apart, but distance didn’t heal their relationship. The two had been sniping away at each other practically from the beginning of Dada. Their rivalry was exacerbated by the fact that the German’s Dada Almanac made Huelsenbeck a prominent archivist and authority on the movement, while Tzara was increasingly caught up in the turmoil of the Parisian scene.
Hostility between Tzara and Huelsenbeck came to a head when, a quarter century later, American artist Robert Motherwell thought it would be useful to assemble a dossier of primary Dada documents for the English language market. Max Ernst suggested that Tzara might contribute an overview of the subject, and the next year while Arp was visiting New York, a scheme was set in motion to produce a collective “Dada Manifesto 1949” to be signed by a half dozen or more of the living Dadaists.
The problem began when Huelsenbeck was asked to produce a text for “Dada Manifesto 1949.” Upon seeing it, the others dropped out one by one, and then Tzara dropped the bombshell: if it were included, he would refuse permission for his own contribution—“Introduction to Dada”—to share the pages of the collection. Huelsenbeck was likewise distressed by the refusal of the others to sign his manifesto.
It took considerable diplomacy behind the scenes for Motherwell to arrive at a solution. The book would include neither Huelsenbeck’s “Dada Manifesto 1949” nor Tzara’s “Introduction to Dada.” Instead, they would be printed as twenty-five-cent pamphlets to be sold separately. (Only when The Dada Painters and Poets was reprinted by Harvard University Press thirty years later, in 1981, were these two contentious texts included in the book itself, where they remain to this day, consigned to the back of the bus, seated side by side between the bibliography and the index.)
Since Tzara and Huelsenbeck composed their essays independently, there’s no formal give and take, no evident point of contention between the two. Both men assume the high ground. “Dada was born of a moral need,” wrote Tzara, the need of a particular generation to extricate itself from the unfolding calamity of “notions emptied of all human substance, over dead objects and ill-gotten gains.” Huelsenbeck made the same point from a slightly different angle: “The misunderstanding from which Dadaism suffered is a chronic disease that still poisons the world. In its essence it can be defined as the inability of a rationalized epoch and of rationalized men to see the positive side of an irrational movement.”
So what led to the fuss, what raised the ruckus? It didn’t help that way back in 1920 Huelsenbeck had publically dismissed Tzara in his Dada Almanac, saying he “had himself enthroned, anointed and elected pope of the world Dada movement.” As for Tzara, he persisted in his narrow understanding of Dada as a literary affair (“a brief explosion in the history of literature”), one that was moreover inseparable from the Surrealism that succeeded it.
The trouble arose from Huelsenbeck’s presumptuousness in speaking on behalf of others (though admittedly asked to do so). “Dada Manifesto 1949” makes repeated references to its “signers” and “the undersigned,” though of course no signature but his own remained by the time it was published in 1951. Near the end, he writes: “Previous Dada manifestoes have been documents of accusation. This last Dada manifesto is a document of transcendence.” Bravo for the thought, but it turned out to be prelude to a parting shot. There followed a seemingly neutral “Note”: “For reasons of historical accuracy, the undersigned consider it necessary to state that Dadaism was not founded by Tristan Tzara at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.” Ouch.
To have passed so swiftly from the claim that this manifesto transcended previously accusatory tactics, to unscrupulous insistence on “historical accuracy,” contravened the whole spirit of Dada, which had always been cavalier about facts. And then there was the unresolved business of patrimony, which already by 1922 had grown so fraught that Hans Arp came up with the deliriously Dadaist solution of proclaiming Tzara’s priority because he, Arp, could attest to having been there with his dozen children (“only imbeciles and Spanish teachers bother about dates,” he added). What it came down to was this: Do you want the truth? Or do you want the myth? It’s the old tale that continues to haunt every human endeavor. It later became immortalized in the film Who Shot Liberty Valance? Replace James Stewart and John Wayne with a pint-sized Rumanian and a sneering German, and John Ford’s classic Western is a parable of Dada.
Dada’s history was up for grabs, but calling it “history” was compromised by the backstory of Motherwell’s anthology. Living Dadaists, it seemed, were too invested in their own versions of Dada to compromise. But as time went on, the snarl of contentions receded, and in any case the chronicle awaited another teller.
Hans Richter was up next as participant-historian of Dada. Because his participation was transitory if vital, his investment in tending the flame savors friendship over rivalry. Already in Zurich, as soon as he met Viking Eggeling, he was off in pursuit of the “ground bass,” the master figure or signature of universal validity. That led him into explorations of new media, and as the twenties went on he became a filmmaker. He had a hand in organizing a seminal cinema festival, “The Absolute Film,” in Berlin in 1925, and he was tapped to organize the film section of the large and innovative “Film and Photo” exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929, leading to his book Enemies of Film Today—Friends of Film Tomorrow.
Before he was forced to flee Germany, Richter made about two dozen films, among them Ghosts Before Breakfast, in which a world of inanimate objects becomes animated, thanks to trick photography. He also made topical documentaries, like The New Dwelling and Russia and Us. Resettled in the United States, he found a community of aging fellow Dadaists and other exiles from Europe on hand, willing to dress up for episodic forays into Dadaland in films like Dreams That Money Can Buy, 8 × 8: A Chess Sonata, and Dadascope. During this time he was writing Dada: Art and Anti-Art, published in Germany in 1964 and the following year in English translation. It was a commissioned work, and he was encouraged to think of it in part as a showcase of texts and images. In the end the publisher insisted on cutting about sixty pages, some of which provided the basis for an exhibition he prepared for the Goethe Institute in Munich two years later.
Enlivened by Richter’s personal acquaintance with most of the key figures, Dada: Art and Anti-Art remains in print to this day. Much of its value reflects the geographical and historical distance that, at the time of writing (almost fifty years later), gives his account an air of impartiality. His subtitle (not used) for the original German version reflects his outlook: “Contributions to the Cultural Development of the Twentieth Century.” He had few axes to grind, no pony in the race, just a store of memories seasoned by long friendship, revisited with a discerning eye. He felt obliged to end with a chapter on Neo-Dada, a phrase and an outlook that had recently come into vogue to refer to happenings and Pop art. He was curious but skeptical. “It is pointless to employ a shock effect that no longer shocks,” he observed, even as he conceded that each generation must have its own avant-garde.
The past was another story. As one of the original participants, Richter knew that that story would always be dominated by personal memory. Yet he was gentle with the memories, knowing that memory is never infallible, but the stories that emerge tell their own kind of truth. “From the beginning,” he wrote, Dada was “replaced by a thoroughly blurred mirror image of itself. Since then even the mirror has broken. Anyone who finds a fragment of it can now read into it his own image of Dada,” reflecting the personal viewpoint of the beholder. “Thus Dada has become a myth.” Myth, legend, history, memory: How do we find the trail of crumbs through the forest that would lead us back to Dada? To reprise a refrain, only the Oberdada knows—and he’s not telling.