Dadaism

Dada was an art movement in Europe developed in the early 20th Century; first beginning in Switzerland then spreading to Berlin shortly after - Dada depicts the the horrors of WWI.  It is a negative reaction which created a vast and international movement, created by a group of artists and poets in Zurich, Dada promotes nonsense and irrationality rejecting reason and logic - this is even depicted in the name itself - Dada simply has no meaning.  It is contemplated that the name came from the frequent use of da, da by Romanian artists Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco meaning yes.  The movement concentrated it's anti-war politics through a rejection of prevailing standards in art/ art works - the use of visual arts, literature, poetry, art manifestos, art theory, theatre, and graphic design mirrored these views. 

 

A prelude to postmodernism and an influence to pop-art; Dadaists tended to believe that reasoning and logic were the cause of war, bourgeois capitalist society were to blame.  Therefore they expressed this rejection through irrationality and chaos; perhaps Dada intended to offend any sensibilities appealed by art.  With Dadaists rejecting traditional culture and aesthetics, they hoped to destroy this.  Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a saviour, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path... a systematic work of destruction and demoralisation... In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege."

Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities, it's works feature elements of surprise and unexpected juxtopositions.  Freud's work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination.