DADAISM
The Movement

•	DADAISM:PART OF MODERNISM
•	Dada or Dadaism [French, from dada, child's word for a horse] Nihilistic movement in the arts that flourished chiefly in France, Switzerland, and Germany from about 1916 to about 1920 [and later -ed.] and that was based on the principles of deliberate irrationality, anarchy, and cynicism and the rejection of laws of beauty and social organization.

•	The most widely accepted account of the movement's naming concerns a meeting held in 1916 at Hugo Ball's Cabaret (Café) Voltaire in Zürich, during which a paper knife inserted into a French-German dictionary pointed to the word dada; this word was seized upon by the group as appropriate for their anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities, which were engendered by disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I.

•	In the United States the movement was centered in New York.
•	 Dada-like activities paralleling those in Zürich, were engaged in by such chiefly visual artists as Man Ray 
•	the artists attempted to demolish current aesthetic standards. 
•	In 1917 the Dada movement was transmitted to Berlin, where it took on a more political character. Dada publications: Jedermann sein eigner Fussball ("Everyman His Own Football")

•	In Paris Dada took on a literary emphasis under one of its founders
•	After 1922, however, Dada faded and many Dadaists grew interested in surrealism.