Expressionists or the Cubists, or the Futurists, but by the generation which
followed on after the war.
Though the war was an interruption to development, it liberated, at the
same time, the forces of renewal. The general disillusion at first gave birth
to Dadaism• In Germany this took on a political and radical aspect (Grosz.
Huelsenbeck, Heartfield); in Switzerland and in France it was more lyrical
(Arp, Tzara). It was the prelude to the creation of abstract art.
By its total denial of the past, Dadaism cleared the way for what was to
come. This was achieved by fooling the greedy Philistines and their world,
and destroying them morally; and the Philistines actually took the cynical
fun of the Dadaists for art (which it was never intended to be) and were
violently outraged. Dada's uncompromising shapes had a far-reaching
influence in almost all fields, particularly in advertising.
The disillusionment which followed the war and whose expression Dadaism
was, at least brought with it a clear awareness of the chaos then existing in
all creative fields. The extravagant individualism of the pre-war years ended
in total negation. In isolated fields came the realization that in all this con
fusion the only thing that really belonged to the present was the work of
the engineers and the technicians. industrial architecture and machines.
So a group of individual painters then attempted to take over from these
things the true and mathematical logic of their construction, and make art
subject to laws from elementary principles.
Cubism had freed painting from literature and destroyed the subject. The
movements which followed denied the subject completely and built a new
- The name IS arbitrarily denved from dada (French) =little wooden horse.
FRANZ MARC:
Horses
(Verlag der Photograph.
Gesellschaft,
Berl1n-Charlottenburg 9)