DADA

Dada

What is Dada?

The Dada movement began in 1916 as a reaction to the negativity and folly that was WW1. It began in Zurich, Switzerland, which was a popular country for refugees escaping the war because of it's neutrality. In particular, German Born Author, Hugo Ball and performer Emmy Hennings arrived in Zurich and opened Cabaret Voltaire in the back of a tavern called Holländische Meiere on Spiegleglasse, after promising the owner that he would see an increase in the sales of beer and sausages. 

Cabaret Voltaire

Upon opening, Ball sent out a press release saying:

"Cabaret Voltaire. Under this name a group of young artists and writers has formed with the object of becoming a center for artistic entertainment. In principle, the Cabaret will be run by artists, guests artists will come and give musical performances and readings at the daily meetings. Young artists of Zürich, whatever their tendencies, are invited to come along with suggestions and contributions of all kinds."

Present in the beginning aside from Ball and Hennings was Artist Hans Arp, Poet Tristan Tzara, Architect Marcel Janco, and Poet Richard Huelsenbeck.
In July of that year, the first Dada event was held at which Ball read the manifesto. The name Dada came about when Heulsenbeck opened a dictionary at random and stabbed it with a knife.

The word Dada sounded irrational, and had many meanings, such as a brand of Shampoo at the time, A sacred cow's tail, a childs hobby horse, and was a double affirmative for 'Yes' in Russian. the irrational sound of the word enticed the Dadaists, and they took on that trait in their work.

Emmy Henning's was the star attraction of Cabaret Voltaire, and was a regular performer, even appearing in the performance 'Das leben des Menchen' (The life of a man) with Hugo Ball, and also performed pieces written by Ball.

The events at Cabaret Voltaire were often rowdy, with artists experimenting with new forms of performance, such as Sound Poetry and Simultaneous Poetry. The art exhibited was often chaotic and brutal, mirroring the war around it, and on one occasion, the audience attacked the stage. 

Though the Cabaret was the birthplace of the Dadaist movement, it also featured artwork from people outside of the movement, such as Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of the later movement Futurism, Wassily Kandinski and Paul Klee of the Bauhaus, Georgia De Chirico. Sophie Teauber-Arp and Max Ernst were also included, and were both involved in the Dada movement, but later experimented in other movements.

Cabaret Voltaire closed down 6 months after opening because it failed to make rent.

Sound Poetry

Sound poetry is an artistic form that bridges both literary and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values "verse without words". By definition, sound poetry is intended primarily for performance.

The Futurists and Dadaists were pioneers in creating the first sound poetry forms. Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti discovered that onomatopoeia's were useful to describe a battle in Tripoli, where he was a soldier, creating a sound text that became a sort of spoken photograph of the battle. Dadaists were more involved in sound poetry, and they invented different styles.

• Bruitist poem: The phonetic poem
• Simultaneous poem: A peom read in different languages with different rhythm's, tonalities and by different people at the same time (Invented by Tristan Tzara)
•  Movement poem: A poem accompanied by primitive movements.

Elefantenkarawane

"Elefantenkarawane" was a piece of sound poetry performed by Hugo Ball at Cabaret Voltaire. He entered on stage dressed in a "Cubist bishop" Witch Doctors costume. The piece was said to be between a liturgical chant and an angry "articulation of reason".

The liturgical element is important, as Ball was raised a Catholic and died one, and alothough Dadaism was anti-religion, anti-war, anti-philosophy and anti-art, his poetry recalls, in effect if not in sound.

Ball explained that his poetry was based around "the equilibrium of vowels", and the inflections that recall African as well as European languages reflect the Dada movement's interests in privitism and non-Western forms.

It is said that while performing the piece for the first time, Ball fell into a trance that lasted until he was taken back off of stage when the piece had finished. 

Zurich Dada

Hugo Ball was born in 1886, Pirmasense, Germany, and was a author and a poet. He studied sociology and philosophy at the Universities of Munich and Heidelberg from 1906 to 1907. He moved to Berlin in 1910 in order to become an actor and collaborated with max Reinhardt.

At the beginning of Word war 1, he tried joining the army, but was denied enlistment for medical issues. He met Emmy Hennings in 1913 in Munich, and moved with her to Zurich in 1915. In 1916 He and Hennings founded Cabaret Voltaire, and he wrote the Dada Manifesto.

His work with Dada lasted approximately 2 years, after which he worked for a short period as a journalist for Die Freie Zeitung in Bern.

He Married Hennings on the 21st of February, 1920, and in July, returned to Catholicism. He retired to the canton of Ticino where he lived a religious and relitively poor life. During this time he contributed to the journal Hochland.

He died in 1927 of stomach cancer in Sant'Abbondio, Switzerland.

Emmy Hennings, born Emily Maria Cordson in 1885, Flensburg, Germany, was a performer and poet. After her first marriage ended in 1906, she was a performer, travelling over much of the European continent. She was a performer at the Cabaret Simplizissimus in Munich, where she met Hugo Ball in 1913. At this time, she was already a published poet, whose work had appeared in a publication called Pan and Die Aktion. She published a short poetry collection called Äthergelslichte. She was also a collaborator to the magazine Revolution, which was founded by Hugo Ball and Hans Leybold.

She moved to Zurich with Ball in 1915, and opened the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. Later on that year, Her and Ball formed their own troupe called Arabella, where she performed under the name Dagny.

She married Ball on the 21st of February, 1920, and while they had no children together, she did have a daughter called Annemarie from her previous marriage. She died in 1948.

Hans Arp was born in 1886, in Strasbourge, Germany. He had a French mother and German Father, durning the period following the Franco-Prussian war when the area was known as Alsace-Lorraine, or Elsass Lothringen in German after france had ceded in to Germany in 1871. Following the return of Alsace to France at the end of WW1, French law determined he was named become Jean.

When speaking in German, he referred to himself as Hans, and as jean when speaking in French.

In 1904, he went to Paris, where he published his poetry for the first time. From 1905 to 1907, he studied at the Académie Julian. 

He was a founder-member of the Moderne Bund in Luceine, participating in their exhibitions from 1911 to 1913.

In 1912 he went to Munich to meet Wassily Kandinski, and was encouraged by him in his researches and exhibited with the der Blaue Reiter group. Later that year, he took part in an exhibition in Zurich alongside Henri Matisse, Delaunay and Kandinski. In 1913, he was taken up by Herwarth Walden, who was at the time, one of the most powerful figures in the European Avante-Garde.

He moved to Switzerland in 1915 to take advantage of the Swiss neutrality, and became a founding member of Dada.

In 1920, he set up the Cologne Dada group with Max Ernst and social activist Alfred Grünwald.

Tristan Tzara born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock (also known as S. Samyro) was born in 1898, Moinesti, Romania. He was a French-Romanian avante-garde poet and performance artist, and was also an active journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, conmposer and film director.

He was known for being a founder of Dada.

Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, he became interested in Symbolism, and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea and painter Marcel Janco.

During WW1, he joined Janco in Switzerland after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea. 

His work at Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfhaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifesto's became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favoured by Hugo Ball.

After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "Presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the first step of the movement's evolution towards Surrealism.

Tzara was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split.

Marcel Janco was born in 1895 in Bucharest, Romania. He was an Israeli-Romanian visual artist, architect and art theorist. He a co-founder of Dadaism and leading exponent of Consrtuctivism in Eastern Europe.

In 1910, he co-edited with Tristan Tzara and Ion Vinea, the Romanian magazine Simbolul.

He was a practitioner of Art Nouvaeu, Futurism and Expressionism before contributing his painting and stage design to Tzara's literary Dadaism.

He parted with Dada in 1919, her he and painter Hans Arp founded a constructivists circle, Das Neue Leben. 

Janco was credited to have created Hugo Ball's Elefantenkarawane costume.

Richard Hüelsenbeck, born Carl Wilhelm Richard Hüelsenbeck, was born in Frankenau, Germany. He was a Psychoanalyst, poet, writer and drummer.

In 1912 he moved to Munich, where he pursued medicine for a year before beginning his study of German literature and art history. Here he met Hugo Ball, who would become a decisive influence on his intellectual development. He went to study philosophy at the Sorbenne from 1912 to 1913, durich which he contributed as a Paris correspondent to Revolution, a periodical begun by Ball and his friend Hans Leyborn.

He followed Ball to Berlin in 1914, where he continued to study German literature, and began to publish poems, essays and book reviews in Die Aktion.

He and Ball became increasingly opposed to the war, and to the intensity of German Nationalist sentiment. In the spring of 1915, he and Ball organised several gatherings to protest the war effort and to commemorate fallen poets, however the audience who arrived expecting a solemn memorial for the poets were shocked when Hüelsenbeck began reciting "Negro" poems.

In 1916, he went to Zurich at Ball's request, and joined the Cabaret Voltaire. Upon arrival, he recorded in his diary:

"He pleads for stronger rhythm. He would prefer to drum literature into the ground."

His poetry attacked the church, the fatherland and the canon of German literature.

In 1917, he moved to Berlin and introduced Dada idea's from Zurich, and in 1918, he delivered Dada-rede in Deutschland and read a Dada manifesto. By 1920, he had begun to chronical the history of Dada, and edited and published Dada Almanach, the first Dada anthology, and in that same year, published En avent Dada, subtitled "The history of Dada", indicating the extent to which he considered the movement to be at its end.

Berlin Dada

Dada had begun to move. The Zurich Dadaists had attacked language, and the Berlin Dadaists were attacking politics.

The Berlin movement's originality stemmed from its political militant-ism. it was involved in the social upheaval and the Spartacist revolution, which broke out at the end of the war in the German capital.

The Spartacist Revolution, or Upring, also known as the Januaraufstand (January Uprising) was a general strike in Germany from the 4th to the 15th of January 1919. The uprising was a power struggle between the Sozialdemokratische Parei Deutschland, (The social democratic party of Germany) led by Friedrich Ebert, and the more radical communists of the Kommunistische Parei Deutschland, (Communist Party of Germany) led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who had previously founded the Spartakusband (Spartacist League)

Richard Hüelsenbeck introduced Dada in Berlin a year after his arrival. It began when he made a speech in the art gallery of the Israel Ber Neumann at the Kurfürstendamm. He announced that art should be timeless and universal, and claimed that Dadaism was against theories, the press and advertisement, and that one should oppose the manifesto the be a Dadaist.

The speech and manifesto were a huge success, and motivated artists and writers to join the founded Club Dada.

Besides Hüelsenbeck, the most active Dadaists in Berlin were George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, and Hannah Höch. Johannes Baader was also a Dadaist, however the others in the movement denied him as being one of them.

After trying to sell the manifesto, it was made illegal, and Raoul Hausmann was imprisoned.

In the Weimar republic, artists had politicized the movement explicitly, and opposed the Weimar government, the military, conservative lobbies and the bureaucracy.

The Weimar republic was an unofficial designation for the state between 1919 and 1933. The name derives from the city of Weimar, where the constitutional assembly first took place. The official name for the state was Deutsches Reich, and continued the name from the pre-1918 German Empire.

They developed the Dadaistischen Zentralrat der Werltrevolution. (Dadaist central union for the world's revolution)

Although Dada had no ties with any political party, George Grosz and John Heartfield became members of both the KPD and Club Dada. 

The Dadaists published many magazines and manifestos, and organized many exhibitions. The magazines and manifesto's were short lived, such as Jedermann sein eigerner Fußball, (Everyman his own football) which was released only once in February of 1919. The Dadaists were motivated to write the heavily illustrated magazine after the suppression of the Spartacist uprising in January of the same year and following the deaths of KPS's prominent figures, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The SPD felt it was too heavily attacked by Jedermann Sein eigerner Fußball, and made the publication illegal.

All Dadaist magazines and manifesto's were published by the Malik-Verlag, which was founded in 1916 by John Heartfield's brother, Weiland Herzfield. From April 1920 until December the same year, the Malik-Verlag even had it's own Dada department. 

George Grosz was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1893. He was born Georg Ehrnfried Groß. He was known for his caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920's, and was a prominent member of the Berlin Dadaists and New Objectivity group during the Weimar republic.

At the Urging of his cousin, the young Grosz attended a weekly drawing class taught by a local painter. He developed his skills further by drawing meticulous copies of the drinking scenes by Eduard Von Grützner, and by drawing imaginary battle scenes. From 1909 to 1911, he studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where his teachers were Richard Müller, Robert Sterl, Raphael Wente and Osmar Schindler, and subsequently studied at Berlin College of Arts and Crafts under Emil Orlik.

In 1914, he volunteered for the Army, in the hope that by preempting conscription he could avoid being sent to the front. He was discharged after hospitalization for Sinusitis in 1915.

In 1916, he changed his name in protest of German Nationalism.

After observing the horrors of war, Grosz focused his art on social critique, and became deeply involved in left wing pacifist activity, publishing drawings in many satirical and critical periodicals and participating in social upheavals. His drawings from the Weimar era sharply criticize what he viewed as the decay of German society.

Raoul Hausmann was born in 1886 in Vienna, Austria. He was an artist and writer, and one of the key figures of Berlin Dada. He experimented with photographic collages, sound poetry and institutional critiques, and would have a profound influence on European avante-garde in the aftermath of WW1.

At the age of 14, in 1901, he moved to Berlin with his parents. His earliest training was from his father, who was a conservator and painter.

He met future Dada artist, Johannes Baader in 1905, and married his wife, Elfride Schaeffer, a violinist, in 1908, a year after the birth of their daughter, Vera. That year, he enrolled in a private school in Berlin, and studied there until 1911. He started to produce Expressionist prints in 1912 after seeing like paintings in Herwarth Waldens gallery, Der Sturm.

He became a staff member for Walden's magazine, also called Der Sturm, which provided him with a platform for his earlier writings against the art establishment.

He initially welcomed the war, believing it would be a necessary cleansing of a calcified society, although being an Austrian citizen living in Germany he was spared the draft.

Hausmann met Hannah Höch in 1915, and embarked upon an extramarital affair that produced an "artistically productive but turbulent bond" that would last until 1922.

Upon Hüelsenbeck's arrival, Hausmann became on of a group of young disaffected artists that began to form the nucleus of Berlin Dada around him.

Hausmann and Höch went on holiday to the Baltic sea and stayed in a room with a generic portrait of soldiers, onto which the patron had glued photographic portraits of his son five times.

"It was like a thunderbolt: one could- I saw it instantaneously- make pictures, assembled entirely from cut up photographs. Back in Berlin that September, I began to realize this new vision, and I made use of the press and the cinema" - Hausmann, 1958.

Photomontage became a technique most associated with Berlin Dada, used extensively by Hausmann, Höch, Heartfield, Baader and Grosz, and would prove a crucial influence on Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitsky and Russian Constructivism.

Grosz, Baader and Heartfield all laid claim to inventing the technique in later memoirs, although there was no evidence found to support their claim. At the same time, Hausmann started to experiment with sound poems he called phonemes, or poster poems, originaly created by the chance lining up of letters by a printer without Haumann's direct intervention.

Hannah Höck, born Anna Therese Johanne Höch, was born in Gotha, Germany in 1889, and was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work produced during the Weimar era, and is one of the originators of Photomontage. Her work existed to dismantle the fable of dichotomy that existed in the concept of the "New Woman": an energetic, professional and androgynous woman, who is ready to take their place as man's equal.

In 1912, she began taking classes at the Berlin School of Applied Arts in Berlin under the guidance of glass designer Harold Bergen. She chose the curriculum of glass design and graphic arts to please her father, but returned home at the beginning of WW1 to Gotha to work with the red cross. In 1915, she returned to school, entering the graphics class of Emil Orlik at the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts.

She met Hausmann in 1915.

Her work with the Berlin Dadaists started in earnest in 1917. While the Dadaists, including Georg Schrimpf, Franz Jung, and Johannes Baader "Paid lip service to women's emancipation", they were clearly reluctant to include a woman in their ranks. Hans Richter described her contribution to the Dada movement as "Sandwiches, beer and coffee she managed somehow to conjure up despite the sortage of money". Hausmann even suggested she get a job to support him financially.

Höch was the lone woman in the Belrin Dada group.

Höch references to hypocrisy of the Berlin Dada group and German society as a whole in her Photomontage Da-dandy. She also wrote about the hypocrisy of men in the Dada movement in her short essay The Painter, published in 1920.

John Heartfield, born Helmut Herzfield, was born in 1891 in Berlin, Germany. He was an artist and pioneer of using art as a political weapon. Some of his photomontages were anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist statements. 

While living in Berlin in 1917, he changed his name to Jon Heartfield to protest against the anti-British fervour sweeping Germany (In 1916, crowds in the streets were shouting "Gott strafe England!" (God punish England). In the same year as when he changed his name, Heartfield became a member of Club Dada, and later became active in the Dada movement, helping organize the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe, (First International Dada Fair) in Berlin in 1920.

In 1918, he joined the newly formed KPD, but was forbidden by the party to call himself a Communist because of his activities with Dada.

Johannes Baader was born in 1875 in Stuttgart, Germany. He was originally trained as an architect, and was also a writer and an artist.
His education began at the Stuttgart trade school, from 1892 to 1895, and continued at the technical college. His first job was as a Stonemason in Dresden, cutting gravestones.
In 1905, he met Raoul Hausmann after moving to Berlin, and in 1906, he designed a world temple, a Utopian vision of interdenominational harmony. It took numerous forms as inspiration, such as Greek and Indian archetypes. It was 1500 meters in height, but remained unbuilt.
In 1914, Baader's written output began to increase. He published a treatize, Vierzehn Briefe Christi (Fourteen Letters of Christ) concerning Monism, and over the course of the next four years wrote articles for the journals Die Friei Straße (The free street) and Der Dada.
In 1917, during the first World War, he was certified legally insane due to manic depression.
In November of 1918, he gave a performance in Berlin Cathedral called Christus ist euch Wurst (You don't give a damn about Christ) which widely mocked the clergy, laity and politicians, and resulted in his brief arrest. That same year, he claimed he had been resurrected as the Oberdada- The president of the universe, really a Dadaist parody of a high-ranking military figure. 

Kurt Schwitters, who's full name was Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters, was born in 1887, in Hanover, Germany. He was a Dadaist, Surrealist, and Constructivist, and worked in poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what later became known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages called Merz pictures

Merz

Merz was a nonsense word invented by Schwitters to describe his collages and assemblage words based on scavanged scrap and materials

Schwitter's father was co-proprietor of a ladies clothing store, which was sold in 1898. The money was used to buy properties in Hanover, which they rented out, allowing the family to live off of the income for the rest of Schwitters' time in Germany. 

In 1901, Schwitters suffered from his first epileptic seizure, a condition that would exempt him from military service in in WW1 until the last stages of the conflicts when conscription began to be applied to a far wider section of the population.

He studied alongside Otto Dix and George Grosz as Dresden Academy. In late 1918 to early 1919, Schwitters asked to join the Berlin Dada group. Hausmann claimed that Hüelsenbeck had rejected Schwitters because of his links to Der Sturm and Expressionism in general, which were seen by the Dadaists as hoplessly romantic and obsessed with aesthetics.

Otto Dix, born Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix in 1891, Gera, Germany, was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and the brutality of war,
Along with George Grosz, he is considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.
Dix was exposed to art from an early age. The hours spent in the studio of his cousin, Fritz Amann, who was a painter, were decisive in forming young Otto's ambition to be an artist, and he received additional encouragement from his primary school teacher.
Between 1906 to 1910, he served an apprenticeship with painter, Carl Schneff, and began painting his first landscapes. In 1910, he entered the Kunstgewerbschule (Academy of applied arts) in Dresden, where Richard Guhr was among his teachers.
Dix enthusiastically volunteered for military service with the German Army at the beginning of World War 1, and was assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden. In 1915, he was assigned as a non-commision officer of a machine gun unit on the Western Front, and took part in the Battle of the Somme. In 1917, his unit was transferred back to the Eastern front until the end of the hostilities with Russia. In 1918, he was stationed in Flanders. Back on the Western Front, he fought in the German Spring Offensive, and earned the Iron Cross and reached the rank of Vizfeldweber. In August of that year, he was wounded in the neck, and shortly after receiving pilot training, he was discharged from service in 1918.
Dix was profoundly affected by the sights of war, and described a reoccurring nightmare in which he crawled through destroyed houses. He represented his traumatic experiences in many works, including a portfolio of 50 etchings called Der Krieg, published in 1924.
After his discharge, he returned home to Gera, but left a year later and moved to Dresden where he studied at the Hochschule für Buldende Küsnte. He became a founding member of the Dresden Secession group in 1919.
He met George Grosz in 1920, and influenced by Dada, began incorporating college elements into his work, some of which he exhibited in the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe in Berlin.

Cologne Dada

Dada in Cologne emerged in 1919 when the terms of the Treaty of Versailles placed the city under British military control. The movements defiant tactics befit a public disillusioned by the continuation of military authority and censorship in the post-war period. 

Cologne Dadaists experimented with many Dada techniques, including photomontage, use of everyday objects as artistic materials, and reliance on absurd or even incoherent juxtaposition. They exploited the Dada fascination with the unconscious, producing images that reveal traumatized psyches.

The central figure to Cologne Dada was Max Ernst. His own work reflected his university studies of art history and psychology, as well as his World War 1 battle experience, conjuring up fantastical dream worlds with disparate parts. 

Calling himself 'Dada Ernst', a play on his last name, which in German meant 'serious', the artist believed that, beneath the absurdity, the was an earnest point to the movement. 

Max Ernst, born in 1891 in Brühl, Germany, was a painter, sculptor, graphic artist and poet. He was a key figure to Dada and Surrealism. 

He was the third of nine children in a Catholic family. His father was a teacher of the deaf, an amateur painter, a devout Christian and a strict disciplinarian. It was he who inspired Ernst a penchant for defying authority, and his paintings and sketched inspired Ernst to take up painting himself. 

in 1909, he enrolled in the University of Bonn, studying philosophy, art history, literature, psychology and psychiatry. He visited asylums and became fascinated with the artwork of the mentally ill. That year, he began painting and producing sketches in the garden of Brühl Castle, and made portraits of his sister and himself.

In 1911, he befriended August Macke and joined his Die Rheinschen Expressionisten group of artists, deciding to become an artist. In 1912, he visited the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, where works by Pablo Picasso and post-impressionists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin profoundly influences his approach to art. 

In 1914, he met Hans Arp in Cologne. 

After finishing his studies, his life was interrupted by the beginning of World War 1. He was drafted and served on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. Such was the devastating affect of war on the artist that in his autobiography he referred to his time in the army thus:

"On the first of August, 1914, M.E died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of Novermber, 1918."

For a brief period on the Western Front, Ernst was assigned to chart maps, which alloed him to continue painting.

He was demobilized in 1918, and returned to Cologne. In 1919, He visited Paul Klee in Munich and studied paintings by Georgio De Chirico, which deeply impressed him. That same year, inspired partly by De Chirico and partly by studying mail-order catalogs, teaching-aide manuals, and similar sources, he produced his first collages, Notable Fiat Modes, a portfolio of lithographs. This technique would come to dominate his artistic pursuits in the years to come. 

In 1919 and 1920, he and social activist Johannes Theodor Baargeld, and several other colleagues of the Cologne Dada group published various short-lived magazines, such as Der Strom and Die Schammate, and organized many Dada exhibitions. 

New York Dada

New York was the primary center for Dadaism in the United States. The movement has had its continuous reverberations in New York art culture and in the art world ever since its inception, and it was a major influence on the New York school and Pop Art. 

New York Dada refers in general to the actions and principles of a group of loosely affiliated people, primarily led by Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Man Ray and Beatrice Wood, amongst others, involved in the production, display, distribution, and criticism of art being produced between 1915 and 1923 in New York city. 

Because of the groups philosophical orientation, being anti-war, anti-nationalistic, and anti-bourgeois, techniques of art production, critiques to prior forms of art, self pronounced allegiances, and relations to other similar groups in Europe, they were referred to as Dada. 

The New York Dadaists attacked art itself, by challenging what art really was, could be, and by challenging the convention of presenting art. 

Marcel Duchamp was born in Blainville, Normandy, in 1887, and was the son of a notary and younger brother to the painter Jacques Villon, and cubist sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, He studied at the Academie Julian from 1904 to 1905.

His earlier paintings were inspired by Matisse and Fauvism, and in 1911, he made his own brand of Cubism, in which he took earthy colours, mechanical and automatic forms, and a depiction of movement. He made his first 'Readymades' starting in 1913, most notably "Fountain", which he made in 1917.

He created 'Readymades' and 'Found objects' from industrial and natural objects, which he then elevated to artwork by adding an inscription or by including them in exhibitions. His idea was to question the notion of art and the accepted canon, and the adoration of art, which he found "unnecessary".

Mann Ray, born Emmanual Radnitzky, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States in 1890. He was a significant contributor to Dadaism and Surrealism. He produced works in a variety of media, but considered himself a painter. He was best known for his photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer, and was noted for his works with Photograms, which he called 'Rayograms' in reference to himself.
Man Ray was the eldest child of Jewish-Russian immigrants. In the early 1912, the Radnitzky's changed their family name to Ray, at the suggestion of his brother, who chose the surname as a reaction to the ethnic discrimination and anti-Semetism prevalent at the time.
Emmanuel's nickname was 'Manny', and so he eventually changed his first name to Man.
His parents owned a small tailoring store, and enlisted the help of their children. Man Ray wished to disassociate himself from his family, however their tailoring left an enduring mark on his artwork.
He displayed artistic and mechanical abilities from a young age, and his education at the Brooklyn Boy's high school provided him with solid grounding in drafting and basic artistic techniques. While attending school, he educated himself with frequent visits to the local art museums, and studied the work of the Old Masters. After graduation, Ray was offered a scholarship in architecture, but chose to pursue a career as an artist. His parents where disappointed, but supported him anyway.
Ray remained at the family home for four years. During this time, he earned money as a commercial artist and was a technical artist at several Manhattan companies.
Ray met Duchamp in 1913, and abandoned conventional painting in order to involve himself in Dadaism. He started making objects and developed unique mechanical and technical photographic methods of making imagery. Like Duchamp, he did 'Readymades'.
In 1920, he helped Duchamp make the Rotary Glass Plates, one of the earliest examples of Kinetic art. In that same year, he teamed up with Duchamp to publish one issue of New York Dada, in which he wrote "Dada cannot live in New York. All New York is Dada, and it will not tolorate a rival."