Dadaism

The Dada movement appeared in 1916, with a group of artists led by the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, who were in self-imposed exile in Switzerland, sickened by the killing that had taken place in the First World War.

With painting and sculpture, Dadaists found a stage on which to portray the disorder and unconscious reflexes of artistic thought. This was similar to what would later be done by the Surrealists. Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, and Salvador Dalí himself became members of a cultural movement that arose as a way to criticise the times in which they lived. They expressed their refusal to accept conventional taste for aesthetics, rejected art that was inoffensive, and created their works with the aim of shocking their bourgeois viewers.

Here in the museum, you can see the Surrealist picture Bread, an oil on cardboard painting by American photographer, sculptor and painter Man Ray, whose name was a pseudonym for Emmanuel Rudzitsky. Man Ray is remembered as one of the artists who exported the Dada movement to the United States. Another of the Dada artists was Francis Picabia, whose work we shall be looking at next.

In one of the areas in Room 202, hanging on the wall in a position that forces you look upwards, you can see the sculpture Objects Hanging According to the Law of Chance, by Jean Arp, one of the founders of the Dada movement. The work is made of wood painted with white oil paint, and the objects to which the title refers have no identifiable shapes.

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