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

It’s easy to think of Expres­sion­ism—the art form that flour­ished in Ger­many dur­ing the ear­ly decades of the 20th century—as a kind of inchoate release of emo­tion onto the can­vas. The name itself sug­gests the com­mon idea of art as a means of “express­ing one­self.” Often intense­ly child­like, such as the work of Paul Klee, or com­plete­ly abstract, such as Wass­i­ly Kandinsky’s many geo­met­ric com­po­si­tions, expres­sion­ist styles influ­enced artists through­out the cen­tu­ry whom we tend to asso­ciate with emo­tion over rea­son, pas­sion over restraint: Willem de Koon­ing and Jack­son Pol­lack, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Fran­cis Bacon.

But let us return to the movement’s roots and we see from its very begin­nings that Expres­sion­ism was high­ly the­o­ret­i­cal in its emo­tion­al­ism. Its high priest, Kandin­sky, pio­neered non-rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al paint­ing, and explained his method in cool­ly ana­lyt­i­cal terms in his trea­tise Con­cern­ing the Spir­i­tu­al in Art. Expressionism—not only in paint­ing, but in dra­ma, sculp­ture, dance, film, and literature—early on com­mu­ni­cat­ed its ideas in a week­ly mag­a­zine, Der Sturm (The Storm), found­ed in 1910 by artist and crit­ic Her­warth Walden and run­ning week­ly until 1914, then quar­ter­ly from 1924 to 1932. In that time, the pub­li­ca­tion amassed quite a few issues, and you can read (in Ger­man) and down­load all 336 of them here.

You can also see some of the inspired cov­er designs Der Sturm used over its decades of pub­li­ca­tion. “The mag­a­zine became well known for the inclu­sion of wood­cuts and linocuts,” writes the Guggen­heim, “includ­ing works by Guggen­heim col­lec­tion artists Marc Cha­gall,Vasi­ly Kandin­sky, Paul Klee, Oscar Kokosch­ka,  Franz Marc, Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy, and oth­ers.” The muse­um site fea­tures sev­er­al of Der Stur­m’s graph­ic designs by Moholy-Nagy, such as the cov­er above, and Mono­skop adds the cov­ers fur­ther up and at the top of the post, by Oscar Ner­linger and Oskar Kokosch­ka, respec­tive­ly. Mono­skop also pro­vides a good deal of his­tor­i­cal con­text for the mag­a­zine and the gallery it fos­tered, Galerie Der Sturm, “start­ed by Walden to cel­e­brate its 100th edi­tion, in 1912.”

The gallery’s many exhi­bi­tions demon­strate how much Expres­sion­ism over­lapped with a host of oth­er mod­ernist –isms of the peri­od. It start­ed “with an exhi­bi­tion of Fauves and Der Blaue Reit­er [a group includ­ing Kandin­sky and Paul Klee that formed the core of first Expres­sion­ist painters], fol­lowed by the intro­duc­tion in Ger­many of the Ital­ian Futur­ists, Cubists and Orphists.” Edvard Munch exhib­it­ed there, as did Georges Braque and Pablo Picas­so. Walden expand­ed the gallery’s activ­i­ties after WWI to include lec­tures and a the­ater, and he began pub­lish­ing books and port­fo­lios by Expres­sion­ist artists. Just above see the cov­er of Walden’s own book Ein­blick in Kun­st, and see sev­er­al more book cov­ers and a bib­li­og­ra­phy at Mono­skop.

A prod­uct of the Weimar Republic’s high cul­ture, the Ger­man Expres­sion­ist move­ment large­ly came to an end, along with Der Sturm and its asso­ci­at­ed work, as the Nazis came to pow­er. But the cur­rent of Expres­sion­ism moved pow­er­ful­ly through the cen­tu­ry, inspir­ing among oth­ers the mid-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can Abstract Expres­sion­ists, who often broke away from detached, the­o­ret­i­cal under­stand­ings of art and engaged in direct and some­times bru­tal ways with paint and can­vas. But one can’t imag­ine these lat­er painters tak­ing the sub­jec­tive license they did with­out the ground­work laid by the tire­less Kandin­sky and his con­tem­po­raries or Walden’s expan­sive Der Sturm move­ment.

You can peruse the entire col­lec­tion of Der Sturm here.

via Mono­skop

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Down­load 2,000 Mag­nif­i­cent Turn-of-the-Cen­tu­ry Art Posters, Cour­tesy of the New York Pub­lic Library

Down­load the Com­plete Archive of Oz, “the Most Con­tro­ver­sial Mag­a­zine of the 60s,” Fea­tur­ing R. Crumb, Ger­maine Greer & More

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