990 Ch. 24 • The Elusive Search for Stability in the 1920s
Hooded hordes swarming...
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
UnrealThe Dadaists, a group of artists and writers who had gathered in Zurich
in 1916, were the first to rebel against the absurdity of the slaughter of
1914—1918 by rejecting all artistic convention. They penned and painted
nonsense; some wrote poems that consisted of words gathered from news
papers. It was all nonsense, but no more, they argued, than the war itself.
The artists and writers of the post-war generation stressed the primacy
of subjectivism. Like soldiers emerging from the ghastly trenches, they
looked into themselves in their quest to comprehend what seemed incom
prehensible. Their subjectivism unleashed an imaginativeness that defined
much of the new art.
The painters Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Paul Klee (1870-1940), and
Max Beckmann (1884-1950), among others, thumbed their noses at classi
cal rules about painting, and even about what constituted art. Mondrian, a
French Dadaist painter
Francis Picabia sitting on
his “Dada”—or horse—