Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centers in Zurich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (in 1916) . The movement emerged from a period of artistic and literary movements like Futurism, Cubism, and Expressionism, centered mainly in Italy, France, and Germany respectively, in those years. However, unlike the earlier movements, Dada was able to establish a broad base of support, giving rise to a movement that was international in scope. The Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works.

Dada artists felt that the war called into question every aspect of a society capable of starting and then prolonging it – including its art. Their aim was to destroy traditional values in art and to create a new art to replace the old. The movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests, which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity—in art and more broadly in society—that corresponded to the war.

Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The art of the movement began primarily as performance art, but eventually spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture. Dadas aesthetic, marked by its mockery of materialistic and nationalistic attitudes, proved a powerful influence on artists in many cities, including Berlin, Hanover, Paris, New York, and Cologne, all of which generated their own groups.

Some key ideas and accomplishments of the Dada movement include:

• Dada was the direct antecedent to the Conceptual Art movement, where the focus of the artists was not on crafting aesthetically pleasing objects but on making works that often upended bourgeois sensibilities and that generated difficult questions about society, the role of the artist, and the purpose of art.
• Dadaists were asking a very serious question about the role of art in the modern age. This question became even more pertinent as the reach of Dada art spread – by 1915, its ideals had been adopted by artists in New York, Paris, and beyond – and as the world was plunged into the atrocities of World War I.
• Dadaists both embraced and critiqued modernity, imbuing their works with references to the technologies, newspapers, films, and advertisements that increasingly defined contemporary life.

Leading artists associated with the Dada movement include Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Kurt Schwitters. The movement has brought many famous artworks, including Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), Man Ray’s Ingres’s Violin (1924), and Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (1919) .