Dada

He collected rubbish, bus tickets, scraps of posters and so on, which he used instead of painting materials to produce abstract compositions. In one of them, a scrap of the word “KomMERZbank” turned up, and he started to call his creative work “Merz”, which was not less absurd a name than Dada itself. The spontaneous method of work on the Merz compositions, together with the results of the method – the abstract “colours without form” – positioned Schwitters in the first rank of those artists from Dada who became the founders of Surrealism.

n 1918, Dada’s own manifesto was published in Berlin. Its author was someone from Zürich, Huelsenbeck, but it was also signed by Tzara, Janko and Dadaism’s Berlin adherents – the writer Franz Jung, the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, the poet Raoul Hausman and Gerhard Preiss. It was aimed against Futurism and German Expressionism, and advocated the renewal of poetic forms

Georg Gross and the committed Marxist Johann Hartzfeld.

Kurt Schwitters, who lived and worked in Hanover, was one of the most brilliant representatives of Dada, embodying its individualistic, anarchistic character

Ernst, Arp and Baargeld – worked in the field of collage. Ernst used images he had cut out of didactic works. Arp chaotically distributed the configurations that he had arbitrarily cut out over cardboard. Baargeld made extremely varied Dadaist compositions. Together they created anonymous works which, as a joke, they called “Fatagaga” – “Fabrication de tableaux garantis gazométriques”. The three artists called their collective “Centrale W/3

Ernst lived in Cologne. Drafted into the army for the duration of the war, Ernst returned to his native Westphalia in 1919. Hans Arp came to him in Cologne, bringing with him his experience of the Zürich Dadaists.

organized a provocative exhibition, and Jean Cocteau

Elena Diakonova, whom he married in 1917. Elena entered the world of the Dadaists, and later, by which time she was known as Gala, “the muse of the Surrealists”.

Unable to resign himself to the death of Dada, Tristan Tzara tried in July 1923 to organize a performance at the Michel Théâtre in Paris entitled “Evening of the Bearded Heart”.

In this way, according to Aragon, by the end of 1922 “an epidemic of sleeping hit the Surrealists... Seven or eight of them came to live only for those instances of forgetfulness when, once the lights were out, they spoke unconsciously, like drowned people in the open air...”After that there arose a fashion for “speaking one’s dreams”, even though for this there was actually no need to sleep. This period in the history of Surrealism was later called “the era of rest”.