No one succeeded in this more than Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters. Arp produced two types of image during the years 1916–20. There were his simple woodcuts, toylike jigsaws; like children he loved to paint clouds and leaves in straightforward, bright, immediate colours. At the same time he was open to chance, tearing off strips of paper that he dropped and fixed wherever they fell, creating random collages. Nonetheless, the work which Arp allowed into the public domain has a meditative quality, simple and stable.100 Tristan Tzara did the same thing with poetry, where, allegedly, words were drawn at random from a bag and then tumbled into ‘sentences.’101 Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) made collages too, but his approach was deceptively unrandom. Just as Marcel Duchamp converted ordinary objects like urinals and bicycle wheels into art by renaming them and exhibiting them in galleries, Schwitters found poetry in rubbish. A cubist at heart, he scavenged his native Hanover for anything dirty, peeling, stained, half-burnt, or torn. When these objects were put together by him, they were transformed into something else entirely that told a story and was beautiful.102 Although his collages may appear to have been thrown together at random, the colors match, the edges of one piece of material align perfectly with another, the stain in a newspaper echoes a form elsewhere in the composition. For Schwitters these were ‘Merz’ paintings, the name forming part of a newspaper advertisement for the Kommerz- und Privat-Bank, which he had used in an early collage. The detritus and flotsam in Schwitters’s collages were for him a comment, both on the culture that leads to war, creating carnage, waste, and filth, and on the cities that were the powerhouse of that culture and yet the home of so much misery. If Edouard Manet, Charles Baudelaire, and the impressionists had celebrated the fleeting, teeming beauty of late-nineteenth-century cities, the environment that gave rise to modernism, Schwitters’s collages were uncomfortable elegies to the end of an era, a new form of art that was simultaneously a form of relic, a condemnation of that world, and a memorial. It was this kind of ambiguity, or paradox, that the Dadaists embraced with relish.103
Towards the end of the war, Hugo Ball left Zurich for the Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, and the centre of gravity of Dada shifted to Germany. Hans Arp and Max Ernst, another collagist, went to Cologne, and Schwitters was in Hanover. But it was in Berlin that Dada changed, becoming far more political. Berlin, amid defeat, was a brutal place, ravaged by shortages, despoiled by misery everywhere, with politics bitterly divided, and with revolution in the wake of Russian events a very real possibility. In November 1918 there was a general socialist uprising, which failed, its leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg murdered. The uprising was a defining moment for, among others, Adolf Hitler, but also for the Dadaists.104
It was Richard Hülsenbeck who transported ‘the Dada virus’ to Berlin.105 He published his Dada manifesto in April 1918, and a Dada club was established. Early members included Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Hannah Hoch, who replaced collage with photomontage to attack the Prussian society that they all loathed. Dadaists were still being controversial and causing scandals: Johannes Baader invaded the Weimar Assembly, where he bombarded the delegates with leaflets and declared himself president of the state.106 Dada was more collectivist in Berlin than in Zurich, and a more long-term campaign was that waged by the Dadaists against the German expressionists, such as Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde, who, they claimed, were no more than bourgeois German romantics.107 George Grosz and Otto Dix were the fiercest critics among the painters, their most striking image being the wretched half-human forms of the war cripple. These deformed, grotesque individuals were painful reminders for those at home of the brutal madness of the war. Grosz, Dix, Hoch and Heartfield were no less brutal in their depiction of figures with prostheses, who looked half-human and half-machine. These mutilated figures were gross metaphors for what would become the Weimar culture: corrupt, disfigured, with an element of the puppet, the old order still in command behind the scenes – but above all, a casualty of war.
No one excoriated this society more than Grosz in his masterpiece Republican Automatons (1920), where the landscape is forbidding, with skyscrapers that are bleak in a way that Giorgio de Chirico, before long, would make menacing. In the foreground the deformed figures, propped up by prostheses of absurd complexity and yet at the same time atavistically dressed in traditional bowler hat, stiff high collar, boiled shirt, and sporting their war medals, wave the German flag. It is, like all Grosz’s pictures, a mordant image of virulent loathing, not just of the Prussians but also of the bourgeoisie for accepting an odious situation so glibly.108 For Grosz, the evil had not ended with the war; indeed the fact that so little had changed, despite the horror and the mutilation, was what he railed against. ‘In Grosz’s Germany, everything and everybody is for sale [prostitutes were a favourite subject]…. The world is owned by four breeds of pig: the capitalist, the officer, the priest and the hooker, whose other form is the socialite wife. It was no use objecting … that there were some decent officers, or cultivated bankers. The rage and pain of Grosz’s images simply swept such qualifications aside.’109
Tristan Tzara took the idea of Dada to Paris in 1920. André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault, who together edited the modernist review Littérature, were sympathetic, being already influenced by Alfred Jarry’s brand of symbolism and its love of absurdity.110 They also enjoyed a tendency to shock. But unlike in Berlin, Dada in Paris took a particularly literary form, and by the end of 1920 there were at least six Dada magazines in existence and as many books, including Francis Picabia’s Pensées sans langage (Thoughts without Language) and Paul Eluard’s Les Nécessités de la vie et les conséquences des rêves (The Necessities of Life and the Consequences of Dreams). The magazines and books were reinforced by salons and soirées in which the main aim was to promise the public something scandalous and then disappoint them, forcing the bourgeoisie to confront its own futility, ‘to look over into an abyss of nothing.’111 It was this assault on the public, this fascination with risk, this ‘surefootedness on the brink of chaos,’ that linked Paris, Berlin, and Zurich Dada.112
Unique to Paris Dada was automatic writing, a psychoanalytic technique where the writer allowed himself to become ‘a recording machine,’ listening for the ‘unconscious murmur.’ André Breton thought that a deeper level of reality could be realised through automatic writing, ‘that analogical sequences of thought’ were released in this way, and he published a short essay in 1924 about the deeper meaning of our conscious thoughts.113 Called Manifeste du Surréalisme, it had an enormous influence on artistic/cultural life in the 1920s and 1930s. Even though surrealism did not flower until the mid-1920s, Breton maintained that it was ‘a function of war.’114
Across from the Austrian front line, where Wittgenstein was writing and rewriting the Tractatus, on the Russian side several artists were recording hostilities. Marc Chagall drew wounded soldiers. Natalya Goncharova published a series of lithographs, Mystical Images of War, in which ancient Russian icons appeared under attack from enemy aircraft. Kasimir Malevich produced a series of propaganda posters ridiculing German forces. But the immediate and crude intellectual consequence of the war for Russia was that it cut off the Russian art community from Paris.