You’ve like­ly heard a good deal recently—especially if you hang around these parts—about the 100th anniver­sary of Dada, sup­pos­ed­ly begun when poet and Cabaret Voltaire own­er Hugo Ball penned his man­i­festo in 1916 and began dis­sem­i­nat­ing the ideas of the nascent anti-art move­ment. This makes a con­ve­nient ori­gin sto­ry, as they say in the comics, and helps us con­tex­tu­al­ize the avant-garde explo­sion that fol­lowed. But, his­tor­i­cal­ly speak­ing, there is no such thing as cre­ation ex nihi­lo, and the begin­nings of Dada—before Ball coined the name—lie fur­ther back in time. (We might refer to the dis­tinc­tion Edward Said makes between a divine “ori­gin” and a sec­u­lar “begin­ning.”)

We could, as many do, sit­u­ate the begin­nings of Dada in the pre­vi­ous cen­tu­ry, in Alfred Jarry’s bizarre 1896 play Ubu Roi or Erik Satie’s min­i­mal­ist late 19th cen­tu­ry Gymno­pe­dies. We might also refer to an arts mag­a­zine in New York that pre­ced­ed Tris­tan Tzara’s Dada and Ball’s sin­gle issue Cabaret Voltaire. Edit­ed by famed pho­tog­ra­ph­er and art pro­mot­er Alfred Stieglitz, the jour­nal 291 ran for 12 issues between 1915 and 1916 and is known, writes Dada-Companion.com, as “the first expres­sion of the dada esthet­ic in the Unit­ed States; pro­to-dada, actu­al­ly, dada avant la let­tre, before dada had start­ed in Zürich in 1916.” Along with the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa, Ubuweb hosts the entire 12-issue print run, “a finan­cial fias­co” in its day, “fail­ing to sell more than eight sub­scrip­tions on vel­lum and a hun­dred on ordi­nary paper…. In the end Stieglitz sold the entire back­stock to a rag­pick­er for $5.80.”

Despite this inglo­ri­ous end, 291 is notable not only for its pro­to-dada status—and for fea­tur­ing the work of mod­ernists like Georges Braque, Guil­laume Apol­li­naire, and lat­er Dada and Sur­re­al­ist artist Fran­cis Picabia; the mag­a­zine also “occu­pies an inter­est­ing posi­tion among the jour­nals of mod­ernist art” as “the first mag­a­zine to style itself as a work of art in its own right.” You can get a sense of its artistry in the cov­ers you see here, and down­load every issue of the mag­a­zine at Ubuweb or at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa’s Inter­na­tion­al Dada Archive. You’ll also see the magazine’s unusu­al format—from odd lit­tle top­i­cal items of the sort you’d find in a local news­pa­per to fas­ci­nat­ing visu­al poet­ry like “Men­tal Reac­tions,” below, by Agnes Ernst Mey­er. What we can’t get from the dig­i­tal copies, unfor­tu­nate­ly, is the full sense of 291’s “dra­mat­ic form” in its “gigan­tic folio for­mat.”

The mod­ernist jour­nal “took its orig­i­nal inspi­ra­tion from Apollinaire’s Soirées de Paris,” a jour­nal found­ed in 1912 by the French poet and crit­ic and his friends, “empha­siz­ing caligram­mat­ic texts and an abstract­ed kind of satir­i­cal draw­ing.” And though 291 may have had a very lim­it­ed reach dur­ing its mate­r­i­al exis­tence, its influ­ence con­tin­ued into the era of Dada when Fran­cis Picabia styled his own jour­nal, 391, after Steiglitz’s pub­li­ca­tion. “Pub­lished 1917–1924 in Barcelona, New York, Zürich, and Paris in nine­teen issues,” writes Book­tryst, 391 helped Picabia dis­trib­ute his own take on Dada, until he denounced the move­ment in 1921 and “issued a per­son­al attack against [Sur­re­al­ist Andre Bre­ton] in the final issue.” The Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa also hosts dig­i­tal ver­sions of all 19 issues of Picabia’s 391, which you can view and down­load here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load All 8 Issues of Dada, the Arts Jour­nal That Pub­li­cized the Avant-Garde Move­ment a Cen­tu­ry Ago (1917–21)

Three Essen­tial Dadaist Films: Ground­break­ing Works by Hans Richter, Man Ray & Mar­cel Duchamp

The ABCs of Dada Explains the Anar­chic, Irra­tional “Anti-Art” Move­ment of Dadaism

Dada Was Born 100 Years Ago: Cel­e­brate the Avant-Garde Move­ment Launched by Hugo Ball on July 14, 1916

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

Sur­re­al­ism, Dis­cor­dian­ism, Frank Zap­pa, Sit­u­a­tion­ism, punk rock, the Res­i­dents, Devo… the anar­chists of coun­ter­cul­ture in all their var­i­ous guis­es may nev­er have come into being—or into the being they did—were it not for an anti-art move­ment that called itself Dada. And like many of those anar­chist coun­ter­cul­tur­al move­ments and artists, Dada came about not as a play­ful exper­i­ment in “dis­rupt­ing” the art world for fun and profit—to use the cur­rent jargon—but as a polit­i­cal­ly-charged response to ratio­nal­ized vio­lence and com­pla­cent banal­i­ty. In this case, as a response to Euro­pean culture’s descent into the mass-mur­der of World War One, and to the domes­ti­ca­tion of the avant-garde’s many pro­lif­er­at­ing isms.

The explic­it tenets of Dada, in their inten­tion­al­ly scram­bled way, were ecu­meni­cal, inter­na­tion­al, anti-elit­ist, and con­cerned with ques­tions of craft. “The hos­pi­tal­i­ty of the Swiss is some­thing to be pro­found­ly appre­ci­at­ed,” wrote poet Hugo Ball in his 1916 Dada man­i­festo, “And in ques­tions of aes­thet­ics the key is qual­i­ty.” Ball con­ceived Dada as a means of reach­ing back toward pri­mal ori­gins, “to show how artic­u­lat­ed lan­guage comes into being…. I shall be read­ing poems that are meant to dis­pense with con­ven­tion­al lan­guage, no less, and to have done with it.” Risk­ing a lapse into solip­sism, Ball sneered at “The word, the word, the word out­side your domain, your stuffi­ness, this laugh­able impo­tence, your stu­pen­dous smug­ness, out­side all the par­rotry of your self-evi­dent lim­it­ed­ness.” And yet, he con­clud­ed, “The word, gen­tle­men, is a pub­lic con­cern of the first impor­tance.”

Two years lat­er, artist Tris­tan Tzara issued a more bil­ious Dada man­i­festo with sim­i­lar intent: “a need for inde­pen­dence… a dis­trust toward uni­ty.” At once intense­ly polit­i­cal and anti-the­o­ret­i­cal, he wrote, “Those who are with us pre­serve their free­dom…. Here we are drop­ping our anchor in fer­tile ground.” How right he was, we can say 100 years lat­er. “How­ev­er short-lived,” writes Corin­na da Fon­se­ca-Woll­heim in a New York Times cel­e­bra­tion of Dada’s 100th anniver­sary, “Dada con­sti­tutes some­thing like the Big Bang of Mod­ernism.” Both Ball and Tzara posi­tioned Dada as a col­lec­tive, inter­na­tion­al move­ment. As such, it need­ed a pub­li­ca­tion to both cen­tral­ize and spread its anti-estab­lish­ment mes­sages: thus Dada, the arts jour­nal, first pub­lished in 1917 and print­ing 8 issues in Zurich and Paris until 1921.

Edit­ed by Tzara and includ­ing his man­i­festo in issue 3, the mag­a­zine “served to dis­tin­guish and define Dada in the many cities it infil­trat­ed,” writes the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go, “and allowed its major fig­ures to assert their pow­er and posi­tion.” Dada suc­ceed­ed a pre­vi­ous attempt by Ball at a jour­nal called Cabaret Voltaire—named for his Zurich theater—which sur­vived for one issue in 1917 before fold­ing, along with the first ver­sion of the cabaret. That year, Tzara, “an ambi­tious and skilled pro­mot­er… began a relent­less cam­paign to spread the ideas of Dada…. As Dada gained momen­tum, Tzara took on the role of a prophet by bom­bard­ing French and Ital­ian artists and writ­ers with let­ters about Dada’s activ­i­ties.” What­ev­er Dada was, it wasn’t shy about pro­mot­ing itself.

The first issue (cov­er at the top), con­tained com­men­tary and poet­ry in French and Ital­ian, and art­work like that above by impor­tant Roman­ian Dada artist, archi­tect, and the­o­rist Mar­cel Jan­co. Issues 4 and 5 were pub­lished togeth­er as an anthol­o­gy, then World War I end­ed, and with trav­el again pos­si­ble, Tzara, sev­er­al Dada com­pa­tri­ots, and the jour­nal moved to Paris. The final issue, Num­ber 8, appeared in a trun­cat­ed form. You can down­load each issue as a PDF from Mono­skop or from Prince­ton University’s Blue Moun­tain Project, which also has an online view­er that allows you to pre­view each page before down­load­ing.

Ball and Tzara were not the only assertive dis­sem­i­na­tors of Dada’s art and aims. The Art Insti­tute of Chica­go notes that in Berlin a “high­ly aggres­sive and polit­i­cal­ly involved Dada group” pub­lished its own short-lived jour­nal, Der Dada, from 1919–1920. Down­load all three issues of that pub­li­ca­tion from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dada Was Born 100 Years Ago: Cel­e­brate the Avant-Garde Move­ment Launched by Hugo Ball on July 14, 1916      

Hear the Exper­i­men­tal Music of the Dada Move­ment: Avant-Garde Sounds from a Cen­tu­ry Ago

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

Down­load 336 Issues of the Avant-Garde Mag­a­zine The Storm (1910–1932), Fea­tur­ing the Work of Kandin­sky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness