Dada

Dada emerged in 1916 during the war as a response to the horrors of the First World War. Hugo Ball founded this movement because he wished to make a declaration about the horrendous state of their society.

Their art translated the chaos and negativity that the war possessed.

Dada was influenced by

• Cubism which focused on abolishing traditional perspective

• Suprematism which made use of geometric forms

Futurism which employed technology and violence. Also was in favour of avant garde. Dada borrowed a lot of styles, techniques and aesthetics from this movement such as their art of typography. Only difference is that Futuristic typography was favoured for being more useful while Dada had a tendency of being rebellious. This should explain why Dada started to become more noticeable when compared.

Ironically, this movement sought to destroy art and is referred to as ‘anti-art’ by challenging the natural order of society but was still considered an art form. Its name had no association whatsoever, it was only gibberish.

Dada art

• experimented with letter and line spacing

• altered and shifted the direction of the typefaces :diagonal, horizontal or vertical.

• Incorporated thick, bold typeface which was in contrast with aggressive illustrations.

In many of Dada’s publications, it reveals that it was crucial to have Graphic design as it was a necessity for promoting the movement’s identity in the first place.

John Heartfield was renown for his photomontage posters, and as a political and dada artist he constantly targeted Hitler and the war.

Photomontage was already invented during the 1800’s, Dadaists only started incorporating ad giving it much more significance. Basically a new image was created by combining a number of negative and positive images which were taken out of different sources.

If we look at his most famous poster of Hitler, 'Superman' his chest and belly’s entrails have been substituted for a spine made of gold coins, and his belly filled with gold coins. The image he used to combine to create this montage was taken from and AIZ Magazine Cover which was widely popular magazine. He overlayed a chest X-ray and added captions which read ‘Adolf, the superman, swallows gold and spouts tin’ The meaning behind this piece is that Adolf Hitler purposely stirred disorder onto the people in order to gain their financial donations.

Dada inspired various concepts even though their aim was never to encourage this, such as photomontage and inspired movements that came along after such as Surrealism and Pop Art.