Twentieth-Century

Design History

1
 Twentieth-Century
Design History

PAGE 4 Learning in the Bauhaus School

6 What Was the Bauhaus School?
11 Five Lessons for Today’s Digital Designers
17 How the Web is Still Bauhaus

PAGE 23 What on Earth is a Brutalist Website?

24 The Beginnings of Brutalism
36 Brutalist Websites
44 Five Lessons from the Brutalist Movement

PAGE 48 The Dada Movement

49 What is Dada?
56 Three Faces of Dada: Zurich, New York and Berlin
76 Five Dada Anti-Lessons

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Thanks for downloading this Designlab ebook on
20th-century design history. We hope you enjoy
our tour of the Bauhaus, Brutalist, and Dada
movements—three of the most important moments
in the development of contemporary art and design.

Our mission at Designlab is to enable creators to do

the work they love, by offering rigorous, affordable,
and mentor-led design education. If you’d like to
learn more about design, or even build a new career
in the design industry, check out our courses!

You can find more free resources linked at the end of

this document.

Harish Venkatesan
Designlab CEO and Co-Founder

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CHAPTER ONE

Learning in the
Bauhaus School

4
 The news that Harvard University had put over
32,000 digitised Bauhaus School works online set the
creative world buzzing a couple of years ago.

In the 1920s and 30s, a period of increasing

mechanization, Bauhaus teachers and students
challenged the conventions of fine art, architecture
and design by advocating a return to individual
craftsmanship. They also rejected the flowers and
frills that dominated the design language of the early
twentieth century, and instead sought solutions that
were simple, rational, and functional—an approach
that remains dominant in design today.

The Bauhaus School building in

Dessau, where the institution was
based between 1925 and 1932.

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In this chapter, we’ll explore what the movement
was about, outline five lessons the Bauhaus School
can offer to today’s designers, and demonstrate how
contemporary web design continues to show
Bauhaus influences.

What was the Bauhaus School?

The Bauhaus School operated in Germany between

1919 and 1933. As a school of thought, it advocated
a new way of approaching problems in art,
architecture, and design; and as a physical school
in Weimar and Dessau, it hosted a succession of
prominent course leaders. Teachers included avant-
garde artists like Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and
Vassily Kandinsky, while Bauhaus students included
Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer and Gunta Stölzl.

After the rise of the National Socialists, who

effectively shut down the school for its “degenerate”
ideas, many members of the Bauhaus School travelled
to other European countries and the USA to continue
their work independently. As a result, “Bauhaus”
became a twentieth-century movement reaching far
beyond the Weimar Republic.

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What was it like to study there?

Education at the Bauhaus School was diverse and

hands-on, spanning building theory, carpentry,
ceramics, fine art, graphic printing, glass and mural
painting, weaving, geometry, mathematics, business
administration, metal, photography, printing and
advertising, and plastic arts. Even parties and stage
performances were part of the curriculum, with
students encouraged to experiment in costume
and stagecraft.

Whereas a conventional education for an artist

might focus on brush technique and paint mixing, a
Bauhaus teacher would direct the student to study
the fundamentals of colour and form, and encourage

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experimentation across a whole range of materials
and disciplines.

Here is a reproduction of Bauhaus founder Walter

Gropius’ original diagram of the Bauhaus curriculum.
Students entered the preliminary course, covering
“elementary form” and basic “studies of materials”.
Over the next three years, students were encouraged
to experiment in many media, and only after this
formation in the fundamentals were the best
students allowed to enter the core architecture
course (which wasn’t established until 1927).

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A Bauhaus School classroom

What set the Bauhaus school apart, though, wasn't

so much what they studied, but their new ideas
about how to teach and learn. The essence of this
philosophy is set out in a brief manifesto by Gropius
in 1919:

“The art schools [...] must return to the workshop. This

world of mere drawing and painting of draughtsmen
and applied artists must at long last become a world that
builds. When a young person who senses within himself
a love for creative endeavour begins his career, as in
the past, by learning a trade, the unproductive 'artist'
will no longer be condemned to the imperfect practice of
art because his skill is now preserved in craftsmanship,
where he may achieve excellence. Architects, sculptors,
painters—we all must return to craftsmanship!”

In his 1931 “Essay on Typography”, English designer

Eric Gill echoes Gropius’ manifesto, writing about
the loss of craftsmanship that he felt had resulted
from industrialism. He advocated a reunion of the
artist with their craft.

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 Some of the items created by Bauhaus students
during this period have become iconic, and Bauhaus
forms are often found repeated or imitated in
today’s furniture and appliances. For example, here
is Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s original 1923 lamp, created
while he was a student at the Bauhaus, alongside a
reproduction still available through retailers today.

Bauhaus Lamp, Wilhelm

Wagenfeld, 1923

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 Bauhaus Teapot, Marianne
Brandt, ca. 1924.

Five lessons the Bauhaus School

can offer today’s designers

1. Go back to basics

One of the great insights of the Bauhaus movement

is to recognise that creative education is about more
than passing on and refining technical knowledge
or skills.

Google is full of brilliant answers to every “how to”

query. Watching fantastic online content like Aaron
Draplin’s logo design challenge gives us great insight

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into the design process, and inspires us to try for
ourselves. But when it comes to solving our own
design problems, we need more than a how-to guide.

By going back to the fundamentals of color, form,

and meaning in design, we connect with the basic
elements of our craft, and free ourselves to be more
inventive and to respond authentically to the design
problem that we are called to solve.

2. Form follows function

“Form follows function” is now an article of faith

for designers, but that wasn’t always the case. The
Bauhaus School rejected the purely “ornamental”
role that they felt the visual arts had acquired.

This feeling only became more widespread during

the Bauhaus period: notably, in 1936, the early
critical theorist Walter Benjamin wrote about how
mechanical reproduction could rob art of its
critical power.

Breaking with the widespread ornamentation

and ornateness that characterised art, design,

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1920s Bauhaus costumes

and architecture in the early 1900s, the Bauhaus

movement strove for rational solutions to
design problems.

This meant stripping away the intricate and floral

decorations of the late nineteenth century. In their
place, the Bauhaus School required students to
reflect and enhance an object’s function, without
adding decorative elements for their own sake.

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 We can see this simplicity and rationalism in Josef
Albers’ geometrical nesting tables, pictured below.
Bauhaus redesigns of everyday objects went on to
influence user-centred product design in the later
twentieth century.

Left: Josef Albers’ nesting tables

(ca 1927). Right: “Kilo” nesting
tables, available through UK
retailer Habitat (2016)

3. Break the rules

The Bauhaus-Archiv explains that “one of the

decisive qualities that the Bauhaus possessed was
an ability to see diversions or even unsuccessful

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experiments as potentially necessary lessons and to
derive corrections in its course from them.”

The Bauhaus School’s learning culture encouraged

experimentation at a fundamental level. They stand
to remind us that rules and conventions are there
to be learned, but not always to be observed. Some
design problems call for radical solutions that
nobody but you believes in. (Remember air travel?)

4. Think big even when your work is “small”

The Bauhaus movement set out to change society,

and it succeeded—by designing teapots, table lamps,
and telephones. The Bauhaus-Archiv explains that,
“starting in 1928, the college’s social aims intensified
under Hannes Meyer; the solution was now
summarized as ‘people’s necessities, not luxuries’”.

The Bauhaus movement anticipated a major theme of

twentieth-century design—that the most serious site
of design and transformation is not in grand projects
(like designing an opera house), but in the stuff
of everyday life. We see this in the domestic items
designed by Dieter Rams and Dietrich Lubs for Braun
from the 1950s onwards.

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 Left: Marcel Breuer’s “Bauhaus
Telephone”, ca 1928. Right:
Dietrich Lubs’ ET 66 Calculator
for Braun, 1987.

So when our work as designers is “small”, we should

still think big, even if we’re just doing a logo design
for a friend’s hot dog stand.

5. Get your hands dirty

The Bauhaus School wanted to reunite the artist

with their craft, and encouraged students to immerse
themselves in the full range of materials and
techniques available.

So, next time you need to print some business cards,

before heading to an online print service, why not
buy yourself a home screenprinting kit and do the
job yourself?

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The quickest and most effective way to learn about
the constraints and potential of materials like paper
and ink is to get our hands dirty and work with
them directly.

Five examples of Bauhaus

influence in web design

1. Economy and hierarchy

On the left is Vassily Kandinsky’s “Severe in Sweet”

(1928). This work highlights the relationships
between dark/light, form/space, inside/outside,

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 left/right, and small/large. Compare this to a
contemporary website landing page on the right (this
one is from Danish). It creates visual hierarchy with
similar parameters to Kandinsky’s painting.

Left: Josef Albers’ “Homage to the

Square”, 1951. Right: color palette
for Brandts.com.

2. Color as meaning

In the image above, we can see the affinity between

one of Josef Albers’ color studies, and how digital
designers look at color palettes today. Albers, a
Bauhaus School student, went on to write a seminal
book on color theory entitled Interaction of Color.
Today, the best websites are designed with carefully
chosen palettes that respect their constituent colors’
intrinsic properties, as well as their meanings in
culture and nature.

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 Left: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s 1925
catalogue design. Right: Apple’s
new font San Francisco, which is
applied across all its devices.

3. Rational, legible typography

Building on the development of the Akzidenz Grotesk

typeface in 1896, the Bauhaus School strove to create
typography that was rational, clear, and legible. For
Bauhaus members like Herbert Bayer, this meant
doing away with decorative elements such as serifs,
and imposing hierarchy on printed material using
standalone uppercase and lowercase text.

It’s often said that web design is 95% typography.

Recent innovations in web fonts show that our

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 priorities are still those identified by the Bauhaus —
that type should be functional and must primarily
facilitate good communication.

We’ve recently seen this in Google’s redesign of

their Android font Roboto, and Apple’s introduction
of San Francisco. Both of these fonts are carefully
constructed neo-Grotesks that optimise the user’s
reading experience by incorporating large
x-heights and low stroke contrast for legibility
on small screens.

Left: MoMA Bauhaus exhibition

catalogue, 1938. Right: Website
design, “The Grid System”

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4. The Grid

Rational organisation of a visual field was a theme in

the work of many Bauhaus exponents. Websites are
often designed to a grid system. This allows designers
to lay pages out consistently, organise text logically,
and impose careful visual hierarchy on content.

5. Websites that respond to the user’s needs

By asserting the primacy of function over form, the

Bauhaus School laid the groundwork for user-centred
design, or as web developers call it, user experience
(UX) design. Responsive websites change their size,
appearance and functionality depending on the
device and the user.

Image credits: Bauhaus 100, Icon of Graphics, Topson Lighting, Dwell,

Habitat, Rebrn, Powerhouse Museum, Met Museum, Norton Simon,
Awwwards, Apple, 1stDibs, Muhsashum, John Polacek, Bauhaus Graphics,
The Modern

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The Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin

Learn more about the

Bauhaus School

You will probably be hearing a lot more about the

Bauhaus over the next year or two, as 2019 is the
centenary of the School’s establishment. You can stay
informed via the Bauhaus 100 website.

The website of the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin also has

masses of information about the Bauhaus School and
the movement it inspired. If you’re ever in Berlin,
their museum is well worth a visit!

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CHAPTER TWO

What On Earth Is A
Brutalist Website?

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Back in 2016, the Washington Post reported that “the
hottest trend in Web design is making intentionally
ugly, difficult sites”, an approach which they called
“web brutalism”. Since 2014, the site Brutalist
Websites has been collecting examples. But is this
what Brutalism, a twentieth-century architectural
movement, was really about? In this chapter, we’re
going to take a look at the history of Brutalism,
examine the principles behind the movement’s
architectural designs, and see how those compare. To
round up, we’ll set out five key lessons that Brutalism
could offer to today’s designers.

The Beginnings of Brutalism

Contrary to what we might think, the term

“Brutalism” doesn’t actually come from the English
adjective “brutal”. Rather, it derives from the French
term “béton brut”, meaning “raw concrete”. The
Brutalist label is applied to the work of a number
of architects working in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s –
amongst the most prominent were British couple
Alison and Peter Smithson, Swiss-French architect
Le Corbusier, and Miles Warren from New Zealand,
who created the “Christchurch School” of Brutalism.

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Secondary Modern, Hunstanton,
England, 1954, designed by Alison
and Peter Smithson

Histories of Brutalism tend to begin with Smithdon

Secondary Modern in Hunstanton, England, which
was designed by the Smithsons and completed in
1954. Ironically, given the materials that would soon
be associated with the “Brutalist” label, this high
school campus was in fact built from brick and glass
rather than concrete. However, its geometrical,
repeating forms, and its honest use of those building
materials, marked the start of what Rayner Banham
described in 1955 as the “New Brutalism”.

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Secondary Modern, Hunstanton,
England, 1954—interior

Around the same time over in continental Europe, Le

Corbusier was building the famous Unité d’Habitation
in Marseille, France. In fact, it was completed in
1952, a little earlier than the Smithsons’ Hunstanton
project. The Unité was grand and ambitious, housing
337 separate apartments within a single structure.
Le Corbusier went on to build a number of similar
residences, including an Unité in Berlin.

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So, why did this approach to architecture emerge
in the late 1940s and early 1950s? Above all, we
should note the social and political conditions
of the time. Europe had just emerged from the
most destructive war in history, with widespread
devastation to housing stock, commercial buildings,
and civic halls. In these circumstances, there was an
attraction to architecture that could be designed and
executed quickly and efficiently, with a minimum of
unnecessary decoration. Brutalist structures could
also rise high, minimising costs and
maximising capacity.

Drawing of the original Unité

d’Habitation block in
Marseille, France

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Added to this, there must have been a widespread
desire to make a fresh start aesthetically after
the destruction of war. Brutalism left behind
the perceived stuffiness of the beaux-arts, the
uptightness of modernism, and the comfortableness
of art deco styles. The movement’s preoccupation
with concrete also reflects a period when energy
conservation was not yet at issue. Although the
manufacture of concrete is highly energy-intensive,
these costs were insignificant given an abundance of
cheap coal, coupled with the arrival of nuclear power
in the mid-1950s.

Characteristics and Critics

Aside from the movement’s primary material,

concrete, there are a number of other features that
distinguish Brutalist architectural designs.

Repeating patterns

Brutalist buildings often include repeating shapes

or patterns, used in a modular or grid-based way.
Rectilinear examples of these patterns are evident
in the Hunstanton and Marseille buildings pictured

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 above. However, a number of Brutalist structures
incorporate curved lines and more complex patterns.
Take, for example, Preston Bus Station, which was
recently listed following a long campaign against its
feared demolition.

Preston Bus Station, England

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Ever since Brutalist buildings were first introduced
to the urban skyline, this kind of uncompromising
geometric repetition has attracted passionate
criticism—even anger—from those who find the
style ugly and offensive. The phrase “concrete
monstrosity” is still heard frequently in Britain.
However, it’s worth noticing that, while many think
of Brutalist buildings as little more than “concrete
boxes”, beyond their shared concrete construction,
Brutalism spans quite a wide range of styles
and shapes.

Honesty about their materials

Another feature of Brutalist buildings is that they

tend to bring their construction materials to the
surface, rather than attempting to conceal or beautify
them. Look closely at the concrete surfaces of many
Brutalist buildings, and you will see the unique
patterns left by the grain of the wood frames used to
mould each concrete block.

In this photo of the chapel at College House,

Christchurch, New Zealand, the materials used are
all visible: there is no plasterwork concealing the

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 Chapel, College House,
Christchurch, NZ. Photo taken in
2009, prior to earthquake damage.

blockwork walls; there is no ceiling covering up the

exposed wooden roof structure; and the exposed
concrete blocks retain parallel lines from their
wooden moulds.

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This chapel is the most striking part of a complete
Brutalist campus at College House, which was
completed in 1964. The architects, Warren and
Mahoney, describe the chapel as “one of the most
memorable spaces the practice has produced, a
seemingly effortless display of scale, materials and
treatment of light, all achieved within a unique and
dramatic formal composition.”

Sadly the campus suffered structural damage in

the Christchurch earthquake of 2011. The main
block has since been demolished and rebuilt, and is
cosmetically identical to the original structure, but
is now structurally stronger and able to withstand
future earthquakes. The chapel, however, has been
out of use since 2011; the College is fundraising for
its repair.

Social vision

Brutalist buildings tend to be associated with

some kind of social or communitarian vision.
Residential structures like Le Corbusier’s Unités
embody a social egalitarianism, expressed not only
through the uniformity of space and layout between

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 apartments, but also in the shared spaces the building
incorporated, and even in the similarity of all the
Unité structures he designed around Europe.

This social vision has also been a factor in the poor

reputation of Brutalist housing in countries like
Britain, where tower blocks soon became associated
with poverty, crime, and social division. They tend
to be better regarded in less economically unequal
societies, such as Germany: Berlin’s Unité d’Habitation

University of Illinois, Chicago

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is indeed a desirable place to live, sought after by
affluent families.

Brutalist structures are particularly evident

on university campuses. In the postwar years,
universities across the United States and Europe
were in a period of expansion, and Brutalism offered
cost efficiency as well as an opportunity to make a
progressive social and cultural statement.

Integrity of function

Brutalist buildings tend to prioritize clear core

functions. The absence of arbitrary decoration—
something that Brutalism inherited from the earlier
Bauhaus School—allows Brutalist designs to focus on
the building’s lived purpose.

The costs of failing to respect the integrity of

Brutalist designs has been tragically evident in
the recent Grenfell Tower fire in London. Partly
to improve insulation, but also to “improve” the
outward appearance of the tower for the wealthier
neighborhoods nearby, cladding was retrofitted in
order to soften its harsh edges, brighten its grays, and
conceal its honest textures.

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Grenfell Tower, West London,
following a fire on 14 June 2017

Sadly these modifications seem to have compromised

the integrity of the original building design: the
cladding allowed fire to engulf the structure from
the outside. Had the original structure not been
modified, the blaze may have been contained for
much longer within the apartment where it started. A
program is now underway to remove similar cladding
from tower blocks across the country.

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Brutalist Websites

Brutalism declined in popularity after the 1970s,

and indeed for decades there was so little affection
for concrete that many serviceable buildings
were demolished for purely ideological reasons.
Particularly following the fall of communism,
Brutalist residences came to represent an outdated
Statism; and, combined with the widespread
unpopularity of identikit low-grade residential tower
blocks across Europe, the Brutalist movement itself
seemed to be destined for the scrapheap.

However, over the past decade or so, affection

for Brutalism has been on the rise. In some cases,
campaigns against demolition have generated
greater public awareness that there are many high-
quality Brutalist structures out there. There is even a
Facebook group, The Brutalism Appreciation Society,
which currently boasts over 59,000 members. A
number of mainstream books on Brutalism have
also been published in the past decade (see “Further
reading” below).

Another, unexpected, source of Brutalist renaissance

is in web design. Brutalist Websites collects examples

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 that fit the Washington Post’s description of
“intentionally ugly, difficult sites”, stating that “in its
ruggedness and lack of concern to look comfortable
or easy, Brutalism can be seen as a reaction by a
younger generation to the lightness, optimism, and
frivolity of today’s web design”.

Allan Yu’s site: brutal, perhaps;

grunge, maybe; but is it Brutalist?

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 Are these sites really “Brutalist”?

The arrival of Brutalism in web design raises a

number of questions. First, do these sites have any
meaningful affinity with Brutalism in architecture?
We identified some key Brutalist features earlier
in this chapter: repetitive, geometrical patterns;
honesty about materials; social vision; and integrity
of function. Certainly, some of the websites listed on
Brutalist Websites have little about them that meet
these criteria; in many cases, the aesthetic would
better be described as postmodern, minimalist
or grunge.

Willem Van Lancker’s site: more

Minimalist than Brutalist?

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Internet: A Retrospective–
postmodern, ironic, funny–
but not Brutalist

There are a number of sites listed, though, that strive

for a kind of honesty in their materials. In essence,
a website is a vehicle for communication using text
and images. Bloomberg, for example, has stripped
back to these basic elements of communication,
foregrounding information and eschewing
decoration. Their site also uses a combination of
black, white and “hyperlink” blue, which evokes the
early days of the web, and in this sense uses one of
the web’s “raw” materials. Other sites, such as Fuse
and Athanor, employ repeating patterns that channel
the geometry of Brutalist architecture.

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Bloomberg: Brutalist in blue

40
Fuse and Athanor, featured on
the Brutalist Websites directory

41
Some unfortunate misconceptions about Brutalism
have found their way into some of the sites featured
on Brutalist Websites. These include on the one hand
an idea that Brutalism is intentionally “ugly”, or at
least indifferent to its outward appearance; and on
the other hand an idea that Brutalism is either all
about concrete-gray, or about a random, anaesthetic
use of color. As we can see from the harmonious
colored panels used by Le Corbusier in his Unité in
Marseille, neither of these things are true.

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Why are people making Brutalist websites?

More important than how Brutalist websites relate to

Brutalist architecture is perhaps this question: why
has this trend in web design emerged at all?

As the introduction to the Brutalist Websites site

suggests, the production of “ugly”, jarring, or
unpredictable designs may express disillusionment
with the growing homogeneity of commercial
websites and social media platforms. Such
homogeneity has developed, on the whole, for good
reasons: providing people with a simple interface
that adheres to conventional interaction patterns,
enhancing usability.

And, of course, the more widely these conventions

are observed, the more difficult it becomes for
individual sites to deviate from them, for fear of
frustrating users’ expectations and driving away
business. It’s fair to say, though, that some of the
web’s early richness has gradually been getting lost in
a sea of landing pages, hero images, sans-serifs, and
calls-to-action. “Web brutalism” is a valid reminder
that there is still a world of possibilities out there, if
we are bold enough to break free of our UI kits and
stock photos.

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Importantly, we are also at a political moment
where there is widespread suspicion of corporate
interests, and particularly of how much data is being
collected about us by tech and social media giants
like Google and Facebook. Some user groups—
particularly younger ones—are wary of the high
finish of mainstream commercial sites, fearing that
it conceals less attractive inner workings, both
ethically and aesthetically. The Brutalist web design
trend may also express a desire for greater online
transparency from the organisations that demand our
personal information—for the underlying structure
and motivations of websites to be made visible, just
as Brutalist building exposed their own raw materials
and social vision.

5 things today’s designers can

learn from Brutalism

1. The user’s needs come first

Although the user experience of living in blocks

of flats was widely derided at the time, we should
recognise that these structures sought to improve

44
lives. In late 1940s Britain, whole communities at the
bottom of society were subsisting in overcrowded
slums. From the affluence of our 21st-century
perspective, we mainly interpret Brutalism in
aesthetic terms; but 70 years ago, its motivation was
more ethical than aesthetic, bringing with it a vision
of the good life, and a way to serve the interests of
society’s forgotten.

2. People like beautiful things

Designing something that fulfils a function, but

does not add color and joy to the experience, will
inevitably divide opinion and drive away a lot of
users. Humans have a hardwired attraction to curves
and bright colors, and, as we saw in the examples
above, many Brutalist buildings successfully
incorporate both. Moreover, it was mainly low-end
Brutalist structures—“concrete boxes”—that gave
the movement a bad name, by failing to include these
humanizing touches.

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3. Simplicity often equals efficiency

Brutalist buildings met the need to rapidly and

inexpensively rebuild after a devastating world war.
Its principles of simplicity and functionality apply
readily to web design and development. For example,
a website formed of a single scrollable webpage with
anchors is likely to be cheaper and easier to maintain
and redesign than an elaborate multi-page site, and
may even have usability benefits.

4. Strive to produce designs of integrity

A great strength of the Brutalist movement was its

production of thought-through, holistic structures
that were designed to meet specified core needs.
They didn’t simply cover the basics, like plumbing,
heating, and sewage, but also shaped blocks to foster
community through shared spaces, both inside and
outside the building structure.

46
5. If you’re going to build it, you have
to maintain it

One of the reasons that Brutalist buildings acquired

a bad reputation, particularly in temperate climates,
was the inadequacy of their upkeep. Tower blocks
became weather-beaten and rust-stained, only adding
to their interpretation as symbols of social decay. It’s
not enough for us simply to design something: we
have to invest in maintaining that design, ensuring it
remains functional, up-to-date, and fit for purpose.

Learn more about Brutalism

We hope you’ve enjoyed this brief look at some of

the history of the Brutalist movement, and how it
relates both to web brutalism and to our practices as
designers today. If you’re looking to learn more, we
recommend these fantastic books:

• Barnabas Calder, Raw Concrete

• Phaidon, Concrete
• Simon Henley, Redefining Brutalism

47
CHAPTER THREE

The Dada
Movement

48
Picking up where we left off with chapters on the
Bauhaus and Brutalist movements, we’re going
to wrap up this ebook with a look at the Dada
phenomenon that emerged during the first world war,
and consider what lessons we might (or might not)
take from it.

What is Dada?

“For us, art is not an end in itself, but an opportunity for

the true perception and criticism of the times we live in.”
—Hugo Ball

Perhaps the most significant challenge when talking

or writing about Dada is to settle on a definition,
and in trying to define it we probably impose more
coherence on the movement than its short and
fragmentary existence really warrants.

Although this problem applies to all history to an

extent, it’s particularly true of Dada, since generally
its members wanted to evade the definition of a
unified movement. The art historian Marc Dachy
describes Dada as “a crisis in art, a leap outside the
ranks of the ‘isms,’ a complete insurrection”. Its
leaders wanted to turn things upside-down—and not

49
 just in the rarefied art world, but in wider social and
political life, too.

Although the movement is usually said to have begun

in Zürich in 1916, its beginnings are not quite that
clear, since another group of artists who came to be
identified with Dada were already doing Dada-esque
work in New York in the years before that. There
were also centers of Dada activity in Berlin, Cologne,
and beyond, though these clearly took their cue from
the Zürich group.

Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and

Sophie Taeuber-Arp

Each of the places where the movement took root

seemed to conjure a distinctive vision of what
Dada meant. In Zürich, artists including Hugo
Ball, Tristan Tzara, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp took a
performative approach, staging absurd cabaret shows

50
and outlanding readings of nonsense poetry at the
famous Cabaret Voltaire, a satirical Dada night club.
(The Cabaret Voltaire, though it closed for a time, is
still in business.)

Meanwhile, in Berlin, figures including George Grosz,

Max Ernst, and Hannah Hoch built a more overtly
political Dada movement, explicitly aligned with
communist politics. And in New York, avant-garde
artists including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia,
and Man Ray focused their energies on subverting
the sensibilities and securities of the world of
high art.

War and Dada’s lost confidence

in culture

A significant factor in Dada’s genesis was clearly the

ongoing world war, which by 1916 was well on its way
to killing 18 million people (1% of the world’s entire
human population at the time).

As the Dadaists saw things—particularly from the

vantage point of neutral Switzerland—an entire
generation was being sent to the slaughter by the

51
political principles, rational values, and strategic
calculations of their rulers. Looking back on those
days, the artist Hans Arp, also known as Jean Arp,
commented in the 1940s:

“Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in

Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While guns rumbled
in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and
wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an
art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the
age, and find a new order of things that would restore

52
the balance between heaven and hell. We had a dim
premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day
use art itself as a way of deadening men’s minds.”

The Romanian artist Marcel Janco described the

disillusionment that members of the Dada movement
felt at the time—he conveys a perception of cultural
atrophy, to which the only response they saw was to
throw everything out and start again:

“We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had

to be demolished. We would begin again after the tabula
rasa. At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shocking
common sense, public opinion, education, institutions,
museums, good taste, in short, the whole
prevailing order.”

Explaining his vision for that satirical club, Hugo Ball

wrote that:

“Our cabaret ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ is a gesture. Every word

that is spoken and sung here says at least this one thing:
that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning
our respect.”

53
Hugo Ball reciting his Dada poem,
Karawane

The German artist George Grosz, who was based in

Berlin, explained his personal perspective:

“art for art’s sake always seemed nonsense to me

[...] I wanted to protest against this world of mutual
destruction [...] everything in me was darkly protesting.”

54
These reflections on Dada as a cultural insurrection
with a serious message are reinforced by remarks
made by Tristan Tzara shortly before his death
in 1963:

“Dada had a human purpose, an extremely strong ethical

purpose! The writer made no concessions to the situation,
to opinion, to money. We were given a rough ride by the
press and by society, which proved that we had not made
any compromise with them. [...] What we wanted was to
make a clean sweep of existing values, but also, in fact, to
replace them with the highest of human values.”

With this historical background in view, let’s take

a closer look at what the Dada movement actually
involved. To help us understand the different visions
of Dada, we’ll focus on those three early centers of
the movement in Switzerland, Germany, and
the USA.

55
Three Faces of Dada

Zürich, Switzerland

Key people: Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara,

Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Marcel Janco,
Hans Richter

The Dadaists had not one but many manifestos, and

even then they are really more like anti-manifestos—
declarations of the absurdity of having a manifesto
at all.

The first Dada manifesto was created on the spur of

the moment by Hugo Ball—a writer by profession,
and the person often recognised as Dada’s founder.
It was composed on July 14th 1916, and Ball read it
out the same evening during the first “Dada party” at
the Waag Hall in Zürich.

Ball’s manifesto is not so much a statement of

principles and values as it is a rejection of them. Here
are some excerpts; you can read the whole
document here.

56
“Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from
the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it,
and tomorrow everyone in Zürich will be talking about
it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple.
In French it means “hobby horse”. In German it means
“good-bye”, “get off my back”, “be seeing you sometime.”
In Romanian: “Yes, indeed, you are right, that’s it. But of
course, yes, definitely, right”. And so forth. [...]

“How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How

does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble
gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till
one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything
that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and
right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By
saying dada. [...]

“Each thing has its word, but the word has become a
thing by itself. Why shouldn’t I find it? Why can’t a tree
be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been
raining? 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. The word, gentlemen, is a public
concern of the first importance.”

57
 The disunity generated by this vision, or anti-vision
of Dada was immediately apparent. Ball’s manifesto
didn’t go down well with his friend Tristan Tzara,
who, like Ball, was a writer and performance artist.
This controversy remains unclear today, but it was
probably born of a philosophical disagreement
over the manifesto’s content, and perhaps also of
a squabble over who should be credited as Dada’s
“founder”.

Tzara later created no fewer than seven of his

own Dada manifestos. A brilliant writer, Tzara’s
manifestos effectively destroyed the coherence
or self-consistency that we might expect of a
“movement”, and that might have been created by the
1916 manifesto. Instead, Tzara’s multiple documents
simultaneously form and break down Dada’s
symbolic unity as a movement.

In his influential 1918 Dada Manifesto, Tzara declares

that “I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet
I say certain things, and in principle I am against
manifestos, as I am also against principles.” Writing
under the satirical pseudonym “Monsieur Antipyrine”
(antipyrine meaning “painkiller” in French), he
expresses this ambition for Dada:

58
Tzara’s 1918 Manifesto

59
“Thus DADA was born, out of a need for independence,
out of mistrust for the community. People who join
us keep their freedom. We don’t accept any theories.
We’ve had enough of the cubist and futurist academies:
laboratories of formal ideas.”

From these texts we get a sense of what Ball

and Tzara had in mind: a movement that isn’t
a movement, not driven by unifying aesthetic
ideals, perhaps rejecting aesthetics themselves, a
revolt against language as a means of persuasion
or recruitment, a revolt or spasm against war,
rationality, and formality.

Tzara’s mention of art movements here draws us

back to what was happening in the visual art world.
Hans Richter, a painter and visual artist who was
part of the Dada movement in Zürich, stated that
“We in Zurich remained unaware until 1917 or 1918
of a development which was taking place, quite
independently, in New York.”

60
Man Ray’s Transmutation

New York, USA

Key people: Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia,

Man Ray, Beatrice Wood

The work of the “New York Dadaists” is often

portrayed as secondary to the main movement in
Zürich. Indeed, in Marc Dachy’s book Dada: The

61
Revolt of Art, the New York movement is covered
as part of the “Dada diaspora”. However, as Hans
Richter reflected, the developments in the USA were
happening “quite independently”.

It is certainly true that this group of avant-garde

artists in New York did not take up the label “Dada”
until later—the word itself does, indeed, emanate
from the Zürich movement. But, as Tzara says at the
opening of the 1918 Dada Manifesto, “The magic of a
word—Dada—which has brought journalists to the
gates of a world unforeseen, is of no
importance to us”.

The work produced by the New York Dadaists,

though, reveals significantly similar philosophical
preoccupations. Marcel Duchamp moved from
France to New York in August 1915, having been
found unfit for French military service.

Duchamp had been creating “anti-art” works prior

to 1916. Duchamp’s Prelude to a Broken Arm was
exhibited in 1915, and is an early example of the
use of “readymades” as Dada artworks. (The image
below is a reproduction from 1964 of the original 1915
artwork, which is lost.) We’ll look in more detail at
readymades later in this chapter.

62
Duchamp’s Prelude to a
Broken Arm

63
Another artist producing clearly proto-Dada work at
in New York at the time was Man Ray. His work The
Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows
uses collage and chance in its composition; the work
was partly formed by dropping constituent pieces
of paper on the floor and accepting the resulting
arrangement. The introduction of chance is a clear
rejection of the formalism and rationality that the
Zürich Dadaists took aim at. Indeed, a 1917 work by
Hans Arp in Zürich incorporated similar elements
of chance.

Another 1916 work by Man Ray is Transmutation,

which uses newspaper and Dadaesque typography
in collage; again, the affinity with the nascent
movement in Zürich is clear.

Berlin, Germany

Key people: Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Hoch, Richard

Hülsenbeck, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst,
John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, Otto Dix

If the movement in Zürich was focused on using

literature and absurd pageantry to upend the cultural
values of the day, and if New York Dadaism was about

64
pulling the rug from under the feet of the respectable
art world with unfathomable readymades, then
Dada’s political expression par excellence was to be
found in Berlin.

A simple reason for this, perhaps, is that Germany

was the epicentre of the war as it engulfed the world,
whereas Zürich remained neutral for the entire war,
and the USA didn’t enter it as an active force until
April 1917. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the following
year, in April 1918, that the first Dada Party took place
in Berlin.

As was by now becoming traditional amongst

Dada leaders, Richard Hülsenbeck published the
first “Berlin” Dada Manifesto. He railed against
expressionism, but also included clear signals of the
Berlin movement’s political alignment with
far-left idealism:

“Dada is a CLUB, founded here in Berlin, which one may

join without any obligation. Here everyone is chairman
and anyone can have his say on artistic matters. Dada
is not a pretext for the ambitions of a handful of literati
(as our enemies would have you believe). Dada is a
state of mind which can reveal itself in each and every

65
Hausmann’s Mechanical Head

66
conversation, so that one is compelled to say: this man is
a DADAIST, but that man is not.”

Raoul Hausmann began creating “photomontages”—

collages formed of chopped up photographic,
typographic, and other graphic elements. Hausmann
was aligned with left-wing anarchist politics, and the
political content in many of his photomontages is
fairly overt; for example, the use of currency in The
Art Critic (1919-1920) implies the complicity of high
art with capitalism.

Photomontage became the most distinctive aesthetic

of Berlin Dada, and was practised by Hausmann
as well as by Hannah Höch, Grosz, Heartfield
and Baader. Dada photomontages tend to be
characterized by arresting, emotive use of faces and
juxtaposition of graphic and typographic elements,
sometimes to disturbing effect.

Hausmann’s polemical ambitions are similarly clear

in his Mechanical Head (The Spirit Of Our Time),
which stands as a critique of the effects of technology
and industrial mechanization on the mind of man.

67
Raoul Hausmann’s ABCD

68
Dada works/anti-works

There were, of course, many more centers of Dada

activity around the world, as well as many other
prominent Dada artists. We’ve only space to look at
a couple of artworks here, but if you want to learn
more about all the people involved in the movement,
check out the International Dada Archive hosted by
the University of Iowa.

Like many early-20th century art movements, Dada

was short-lived. The short lifespan of art movements
around this time is an indication not that they
lacked substance, but rather that society was being
rapidly and repeatedly transformed by regular socio-
economic, technological, and military upheavals—
a context that required fresh artistic responses.

Dada was active as a collective enterprise only

between (approximately) 1916 and 1920. In Zürich
particularly, from 1919 onwards, the war being over,
many artists moved back to their home countries.

The Dada label—or anti-label—continued to be

used by artists in the following decades, but with
the passing of the war and the prevailing cultural

69
optimism of the Roaring Twenties, there was a sense
that its historical and cultural moment had passed.

It is telling that, in spite of its short life, Dada has

lived on and is recorded in art history as something
of significance. To understand why, let’s take a closer
look at some of the works (or anti-works) that were
produced in its name.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)

Perhaps the most famous of these is Marcel

Duchamp’s Fountain (1917). Duchamp had been
involved in the early Dada movement, before
moving to New York, where he created Fountain by
purchasing a porcelain urinal, and signing it with a
made-up name (“R Mutt, 1917”).

Fountain is an example of the use of “readymades” in

Dada—taking an object that already exists, usually
a mass-produced or commonplace item—and
presenting it “as” art. This approach was not only
an act of rebellion in its own right, upending the
exclusivity and pretension of high culture; it also
made a philosophical point about the cultural

70
practice of art exhibition. By foregrounding the act of
presentation, Duchamp showed that the act of seeing
or looking was something that brought the work of
art into existence.

Duchamp presented the art world with two basic

options by way of response: to accept the work, and
comment on its merits, and risk seeming ridiculous
and unprincipled; or to reject the work, inadvertently
becoming conservatives and reactionaries. Adding
to the work’s absurdity, Duchamp commissioned 17
replicas of the piece in the 1960s, diluting its aura

71
as “the” work through the process of mechanical
reproduction (about which Walter Benjamin had
written in 1936). The “original” was lost shortly after
its initial exhibition in 1917, probably disposed of
as rubbish.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Marionettes, 1918

Taeuber-Arp made some of the most inventive

contributions to the Dada fray in Zürich, one of
which was her use of puppetry and costume. Indeed,
her prolific creation of these pieces seems to bring
together many of Dada’s thematic preoccupations.

Her work brings our attention to the human and

social focus of many Dada artworks. As the Dadaists
saw things, while the Expressionist movement
obsessed over the inner psychodramas of the
individual, and Futurism uncritically promoted the
technological age, Dada drew art back to social and
political reality—the anonymization and degradation
of humanity in a theater of total war.

Accordingly, in these pieces Taeuber-Arp drew from

the historic symbolism of the puppet, both as a
metaphor a being under the control of another (the

72
puppet-master, or, perhaps, the ruling class), and as
a form populist entertainment. Moreover, the crude
abstraction of these forms seems to reference the
inhumanity that Dada made it its mission to bear
witness to.

The legacy of Dada

One of the paradoxes of the Dada movement is

that, in historical view, it couldn’t help but create
an aesthetic. Even a movement based on rejecting

73
aesthetic values inadvertently creates a set of rules;
without a perception of rules, conflict—such as
that between Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara over
their manifestos, or between Dada and the art
establishment—would have been an impossibility.
In spite of its ambitions, Dada failed to completely
evade aesthetics.

History itself is a synthesising and rationalizing

discipline, and Dada’s absurdist, anti-intellectual
ambitions ultimately failed, since they have been re-
absorbed by the rationalism of art history, becoming
the subject of books and articles (like this one)—
a cultural specimen that could be placed alongside
other movements, examined, and evaluated.

Far from undermining Dada’s aims, though, this

historical fact simply shows that the phenomena
that Dada aimed at—rationalism, formalism,
representation—were indeed real ones.

From an artistic perspective, Dada’s legacy was

to transform the act of seeing into a constitutive
part of the artwork. This insight, most evident in
Duchamp’s work, is in many ways the entire basis of

74
Picasso’s Guernica, 1937

performance, conceptual, and postmodern art that

came to characterize the later 20th century.

In social and cultural terms, Dada asserted a social

and political voice for art, rejecting its implicit
status as an apolitical, aesthetic pursuit, that at its
worst was a medium not of dissent but of alternative
economic and cultural currency amongst a
social elite.

Arguably, though, there was a dark side to the

movement’s emphasis on absurdity and nonsense,
which at times bordered on the nihilistic. From
our perspective as citizens today, in the same
breath that Dada liberated art from elitism, it
initiated a stream of intellectual relativism that
ultimately connects to the rise of the alt-right and
other forms of contemporary political populism.

75
Dada hyperbolically rejected rationality and logic
as bourgeois illusions, but in so doing allowed
alternative facts and fake news to assert themselves
as the equals of truth.

Lessons for designers

1. Cultures atrophy without self-criticism

Designers are usually well versed in the creative

power of critique—every effective process requires
the critical appraisal of design solutions.

But much of our work as designers today is in the

service of digital products that intentionally exploit
human psychology and corrode social bonds. As well
as being a reminder to seek out and act upon critique
of our own work, Dada stands as a call from history
for designers to find their voice as critical friends to
the industries in which they work.

76
2. There is value in revolt, even when you
don’t have a better answer

The Dada movement was in many ways a cultural

spasm, a moment of revolt and protest against a
world gone mad. 100 years since the Dada manifestos,
we are in a very different historical and technological
moment, but face political and cultural challenges of
our own.

Sometimes we are aware of there being “something

wrong” without having clear answers, or even a clear
picture of the problem. In this context, revolt is
valuable—rebelling, or simply trying to do something
differently, can contribute to a culture’s ability to
reflect and self-evaluate.

Simply observing conventions—including design

conventions—will never take us beyond what is
currently possible. Perhaps the role of designers is to
explore the adjacent possible, which Steven Johnson
defines as “a kind of shadow future, hovering on the
edges of the present state of things, a map of all the
ways in which the present can reinvent itself”.

77
3. Don’t pay (too much) attention to what
people think

The late art historian Mark Dachy states that “the

Dadaists were not aiming to win over the critics,
but to mock them”. If the Dadaists had been
interested in the acclaim or adulation of the cultural
establishment, they would not have been Dadaists.

Those involved in the movement were not only

ridiculed by mainstream culture, but even perceived
as dangerous degenerates—a reviewer in American
Art News at the time remarked that “Dada philosophy
is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive
thing that has ever originated from the brain of man”.

Disrupting dysfunctional cultures is rarely the way

to make or keep influential friends, and it’s only
in historical perspective that we recognise the
significance of the Dada years and the movement’s
long creative legacy. In essence, true creativity often
makes for disruption and unpopularity.

In the words of George Bernard Shaw, “The

reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the
unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the

78
world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on
the unreasonable man.”

4. Learn from your teachers, and then

ignore them

As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi shows in Creativity: Flow

and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, creative
breakthroughs do not come from nowhere. Dada’s
moment was created not only by historical and
political circumstances, but also by the educational
and cultural backgrounds and, indeed, the personal
liberties, that those involved with the
movement enjoyed.

Nevertheless, rebellions like the Dada movement also

require a self-conscious rejection of good sense and
received wisdom. Much design education is, rightly,
education in what has been learned from history—
a masterclass in what we know from experience to
be effective.

But what has been possible previously doesn’t

have to be the limit of what the future holds—and
discovering new ways of doing things at some point

79
means ignoring our teachers and design forbears, and
finding out what is right for our times. As Dada artist
Francis Picabia wrote, “One must be a nomad, pass
through ideas like one passes through countries
and cities”.

5. Wit is empowering

People’s first response to Duchamp’s Fountain is

often laughter. But, just as with human relationships,
opening with a joke can create a connection that

A still from the titles of

Monty Python’s Flying Circus

80
eventually leads to deeper understanding. Duchamp’s
work had serious and powerful things to say, but
initially presented itself to the audience with
self-effacing wit.

Similarly, Dada tended to present itself as witty,

outlandish, and ridiculous—the titles to Monty
Python’s Flying Circus clearly owe something to Dada
collages. Creative wit is uniquely double-edged, in
that it is simultaneously “light”, and yet subversive of
established cultural order.

By harnessing humor and absurdity, Dada ended

up attaining a serious historic status. On the
movement’s opening night, Hugo Ball satirically
predicted that “tomorrow everyone in Zürich will be
talking about [Dada]”. As it turns out, he was right.

Learn more about the

Dada movement

If you’re keen to keep learning about Dada, arguably

the most radical of movements in twentieth-century
art and design, a great place to start is the University
of Iowa’s International Dada Archive!

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