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. After 1922, however, Dada faded and many Dadaists grew interested in surrealism.

A few DADA ARTISTS included: Breton, André  Duchamp, Marcel  Ernst, Max   Hausmann,Raoul  Heartfield, John  Picabia, Francis
(Leianne Henry)

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Dada Painting Examples
by Ernst Max