Dada was an elegant and literary movement that began in Europe when World War I was going on. Because of the war, many artists, scholars, and writers, especially those from France and Germany, moved to Switzerland, which was a neutral country. Instead of being happy that they had escaped, the artists, intellectuals, and writers were enraged with modern society. So, they decided to exhibit their demonstration through an artistic medium. They chose to create non-art since art in society anyway had no meaning.
The so-called non-artists turned to design art that had soft curses, dispersed humor, evident puns, and everyday objects. The most notorious painting was created by Marcel Duchamp when he painted a beard on a copy of Mona Lisa and scrawled obscenities under it. He also created his sculpture called Fountain, which was a urinal without the plumbing and it had a fake signature.
The public was repulsed by the Dada movement. However, the Dadaists found this approach inspiring. And, gradually the movement spread from Zurich to other parts of Europe and New York City. Just as many mainstream artists were thinking about this movement seriously, the Dada movement dissolved around the early 1920s.
This art movement was a demonstration, but at the same time, it managed to be agreeable and engaging. It was sarcastic, colorful, quirky, silly, and sometimes immature. If a person at that time had not been conscious of the logic behind the movement, he or she would have been querying what the artist was up to creating pieces like the ones that were created. However, the artist who created the Dada art was very severe about his work. The movement did not favor one medium over another. It used everything from glass to plaster to geometric tapestries to wooden reliefs. Besides, the movement was also responsible for directing many biases in the field of visual art, the most well-known being Surrealism.
