see also:

Dadaism

3 Sachplakat, The First World War, and Dada

 

France

French posters during the First World War tended toward a higher level of aesthetic accomplishment than those produced in Britain or the United States. One of the reasons for this high level of achievement was that the French were generally more apprecia­tive of the poster than their British and American counterparts, so that the art of the poster was more closely allied with the art of painting. For this reason, French images were sometimes designed not by commercial illustrators, printshop workers, or an school students, but rather by top painters with established credentials. Additionally, the close relationship between graphic design and the fine arts led to a greater use of traditional allegorical imagery as well as sophisticated compositional references to the fine art of the past. Still, the French government did not rely on painters or graphic designers with edgy, abstract styles, but turned instead to masters of academic style.

Lucien Jonas (1880-1947) was one of the excellent graphic designers responsible for a number of fine French posters. Mobilized in 1914, by 1915 he had been appointed to the post of  "military painter seconded to the Musee de 1'Armee." Because of this role, Jonas produced literally thousands of drawings and sketches based on his experiences at the front. His works were featured in books and magazines throughout the war. His poster publicizing a national war loan (fig. 3.29) shows three workers hoisting the French Tricolor atop the spire of a Gothic cathedral. This triumphal scene references the territory won by France in the Alsace region.

His poster publicizing France's sixth War Loan shows a winged "Marianne," the personification of France, flying above the heads of a charging group of soldiers (fig. 3.28). The soldiers appear rather rugged and dirty amid a stressful battle, a semblance of the actual conditions at the front that was rarely displayed on posters. The vast majority of wartime publications studiously ignored any imagery that was at all suggestive of the horrors of a conflict in which on a bad day 50,000 men would die in the face of machine guns and artillery barrages. The poses of the soldiers reference the noteworthy Eugene Delacroix painting Liberty Leading the People (1830), which shows a powerful figure of Marianne charging into the battle for liberty at the head of a ragtag group of citizens. In the poster, a more graceful and confident Marianne holds a cornucopia in her left hand. Also called the "horn of plenty," the cornucopia is a symbol of an abundant harvest because in Greek mythology it would constantly be refilled with food. Here, Marianne pours out the bounty of the cornucopia on to the French troops. Note how the text at the top of the poster invokes the French revolutionary ideal of "Liberty," as it suggests one should subscribe to the "Loan of the Liberation." An important part of wartime propaganda late in the conflict was the message that the war would indeed end, usually with the additional abstract promise of liberty, freedom, or some other ideal goal.

Another leading graphic artist, Abel Faivre (1867-1945), designed a remarkably inventive image of the symbolic coq d'or, or "golden rooster," attacking a hapless German soldier (fig. 3.30). The rooster, used on military escutcheons, symbolized the fighting spirit of France. In this image the rooster has detached itself from a contemporary gold coin that itself depicts the revolutioary slogan "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." The poster asks that citizens "pour forth their gold" in order to assist the war effort. During World War I, it was highly unusual for enemy combatants to be portrayed in posters—Faivre is quite daring in depicting such an un-demonized German soldier.

3.30 Abel Faivre, Pour la France Versez Votre Or
(For France Pour Forth your Gold), 1915.
Lithograph on paper. Imperial War Museum, London.

The Central Powers

In contrast to the changing conventions among the Allies, the German government did not demand that its poster designers turn away from modern abstract styles. For this reason, the Sachplakfit manner introduced at the beginning of this chapter, with its startlingly abstract simplifications of form, became a staple of German propaganda. Sachplakat artists such as Lucian Bernhard, who reigned at the top of the advertising profession, remained prominent in the creation of war posters.

Bernhard produced a number of compelling designs, including a notable poster publicizing a war loan (fig. 3.31). Some elements of the Sacbpiakat style remain, as the armored fist here stands in for the product—German military might. As was the case with the advertising posters, the "product" and its associated text are displayed without any further ornamentation. In addition, the armored fist has been rendered in the simplified form that Bernhard had made famous.

The poster's typography is a far cry from the plain block letter style made popular by the Sachplakfit movement. First of all, Sachplakat lettering is roman and often features small serifs, while Bernhard is here embracing the blackletter tradition. At the time of the outbreak of the First World War, this question of type as a marker of national identity had become an even more inflamma­tory topic. The outbreak of war with France, Germany's major European rival and a country that had played a large role in the creation of the classic roman tradition, temporarily tilted the bal­ance for German designers in favor of blackletter. During this era it could be identified as a unique national tradition, untainted by "foreign" French aesthetics. This is not to say that all or even most German war posters used blackletter, only that it achieved a resurgence because of militant feelings on the part of designers and the public at large. In Bernhard's poster, the image's reference to medieval German knights and its strident slogan "This is the way to peace—the enemies want it so!" combines with the blackletter script to create a rousing sense of nationalist sentiment.

Other posters designed by Sachplakat artists remained closer to the original style. Hans Rudi Erdt's UBoote Heraus!, which promoted a government film celebrating submarine warfare, shows a German officer using a periscope to view the sinking of an Allied surface ship (Jig. 3.32). In this poster, the abstract simplification of the Sachplakat style serves to distance the viewer from the grim details of the war, in the same manner that Allied designers avoided undue scenes of carnage. The hand and face of the officer are shown with stylish detachment, his features rendered without any tonal gradation but with the flat planes of the Japanese style. The typography is typical of the Sachplakat artists, featuring expanded, bold block letters. The giant "U" encompasses both the U-boat commander and his victim, and appears both as a letter and as a pan of the image, its solid form invoking the mass of a submarine itself.

The Austrian designer Julius Klinger (1876-1942), who had returned to Vienna at the onset of war, produced a stunningly original poster publicizing the eighth war loan (fig. 3.33). Displaying a close allegiance to Sachplakat principles, the poster features a dying serpent, representing the Allies, riddled with eight arrows and entangled in the number itself. The death throes of the serpent and its irregular shape come across as unkempt and uncivilized when compared to the cleanly delineated number 8 and the simple text, "war loan." It is clear that the public financing is strangling the serpent, its head in a noose formed by the top of the eight. The key element that separates this poster aesthetically from most of the Allied images is the sophisticated way in which Klinger uses the "8" as both a textual and graphical element. Additionally, there is a slight touch of red where the serpent's tongue hangs out that adroitly reinforces the ties between the red text and image. Of course, Klinger is using a palette of complementary colors. This stylish abstraction is a far cry from the literal rendering typical of most Allied war posters.
 

Realism versus Abstraction

 

Ludwig Hohlwein's poster shown here features a wounded soldier on crutches, examining tools that could help him rejoin the civil­ian workforce (Jig. 3.34). Hohlwein's Sachplakat style is still in place, although the simplified forms have been rendered with something of a painterly flair. Still, the central figure and straight­forward text look like part of the familiar advertising style. What is unusual about Hohlwein's work is the way in which he is trying to invest a Beggarstaff-like flattened figure with human pathos. The image is straining to create an emotional impact that is perhaps beyond the means of this type of abstraction. Looking back over the posters surveyed in this chapter, it is easy to find figures done in a realistic style that appear more compelling. Hohlwein's poster suggests that there are limits to the effectiveness of abstraction as a vehicle of emotional manipulation.

While by no means all German propaganda posters were rendered in an abstract, Sachplakat style, a large number of the most high-profile designers worked in that manner, and their posters were among the most wellknown. An interesting parallel circumstance arose in Britain and Germany after the war; in both countries, there was condemnation of the posters that had been produced. In Britain, much of the criticism focused on the bald-faced emotional manipulation of many of the posters, such as Savile Lumley's Daddy, What did you do in the Great War?

In Germany, the inverse of this criticism came to the fore, as later governments criticized the avantgarde stylishness of posters by Bernhard or Hohlwein, which they felt failed to communicate an effective message to a large swath of the population. This idea was particularly attractive to militant German nationalists, many of whom felt that the civilian population had "stabbed them in the back," and hypothesized that better propaganda at home could have won the war. Famously, the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) rhapsodized about the quality of British emotional manipulation in his book Mein Kampf. Referring to British "atrocity" posters, Hitler lauded the posters' ability to connect with "the primitive sentiments of the broad masses." Asserting that British propaganda was "as ruthless as it was brilliant," Hitler's beliefs helped to mold Nazi propaganda of the 1930s. Of course, the two sides would get a chance to revisit wartime propaganda after only two decades, when Europe again embarked on a world war.

Hohlwein's poster of a severely injured soldier is particularly poignant in that the millions of badly wounded men who came home after the war ended were often shunned by their fellow citizens. Because of their injuries, these wounded men served as a grim reminder of the slaughter that had taken place between 1914 and 1918, a debacle that their compatriots would sooner forget. Even before the war ended, as early as 1916, a group of artists had joined together to protest a conflict that to them bordered on the absurd.
 

3.34 Ludwig Hohlwein, Ludendorff-Spende fur Kriegsbeschadigte
(The Ludendorff Appeal for the War-Disabled),
1918. Poster. Lithograph on paper. Imperial War Museum, London.

see also:

Dadaism

Dada

 

A small community of young people opposed to the war gathered in neutral Zurich, Switzerland, from 1914. It was there that German pacifist Hugo Ball (1886-1927) decided to create a gadiering place for like-minded artists and activists. Ball had joined the German army after a rush of patriotic feeling (perhaps heightened by war posters) when the war began in 1914, but he soon became disillusioned and fled Germany for Switzerland. His Dada effons began in February 1916, when he organized the now famous meeting place he called the Cabaret Voltaire, which, despite its exalted name, was essentially the back room of a restau­rant at No. 1 Spiegelgasse, in a seedy area of Zurich. Partly inspired by the Futurist movement, Ball named his establishment in order to honor the French thinker who had attacked the norms of European society in the eighteenth century. Like Voltaire, the members of Zurich Dada (the name of the city is appended to distinguish it from other subsequent incarnations of the Dada spirit) were iconoclasts, or "breakers of icons," mean­ing that they rejected the ideas and values that other Europeans treasured the most.

The artists who gathered at the Cabaret Voltaire had all come to the conclusion that a collapse of Western culture had occurred amid the barbarism of the First World War. They came from many countries: Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck (1892-1972), and Emmy Hcnnings (1885-1948) from Germany, Jean Arp (1886-1966) from France, Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) and Marcel Janco (1895-1984) from Romania, all committed to using their creativity in order to protest the war and to draw attention to what they saw as the impoverishment of European middle-class life. They questioned how Europeans could claim to be rational, enlightened, and civilized when they were sending millions to their deaths at the front. For this reason, the Dadaists sought to use irony, satire, and improvisation in their performances in order to shock the public into recognizing the contradictions of European culture. The name itself, Dada, exemplifies the group's iconoclastic spirit, because the word is essentially meaningless. Over the years the members of Dada offered numerous stories about the name's origin, deliberately adding to the confusion while resisting attempts to clarify the origins of a group that had as one of its founding beliefs the negation of clear explanations.

Of the numerous artistic and political strategies pursued by members of the Zurich Dada movement, the most innovative were the chaotic evenings they arranged at the Cabaret Voltaire (fig. 3.35). Using random chance while embracing the incoherent effects caused by simultaneous, overlapping elements, Dada evenings featured dance, music, poetry readings, and other hybrid types of performances. Odd costumes, acerbic attacks on traditional culture overlaid with "noise performances," and, of course, inebriated performers and audience members, worked together to create a confounding spectacle. For example, L'Amiral Cbercbe une Maison a Louer ("The admiral looks for a house to rent") by Tzara, Huelsenbeck, and Janco, was performed at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. With all three artists speaking at once, and many of their words made up of gibberish and singsong, the final effect depended on the simultaneous contrasts of speech and noise. Much of the ironic strength of the poem lies in its style, but the absurd and incongruous nature of its imagery complemented the drama of its performance. In addition to the programmed "evenings," art projects by the Dadaists and by people they admired adorned the walls at the Cabaret Voltaire. Jean Arp later recalled:

Disgusted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an an based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age. and a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell.

The Cabaret Voltaire was only open for about five months, after which the Dadaists continued their activities at a variety of venues, including theaters and an galleries across Zurich.

Combining an iconoclastic outlook with a love of improvisa­tion and chance, Dada artists sought to pursue social and artistic change through anarchic aesthetic projects. The members of Zurich Dada displayed a range of attitudes toward the visual arts, some seeking mainly the nihilism of the ephemeral transgressivc gesture, while others, such as Jean Arp, devoted their efforts to the creation of art works. A central tenet of Zurich Dada was the rejection of antiquated aesthetic rules that Arp and other artists found to be stifling. Dada art works are therefore often called "anti-art," because of the Dadaists' contempt for the established order. In place of traditional artistic techniques, the Dadaists displayed a penchant for new media and new stylistic strategies. For example, Arp's witty Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance was created when the artist dropped small pieces of paper on to a larger sheet of paper and then attached them where they had fallen (fig. 3.36). The resulting work embraces chance occur­rence not only as an aesthetic itself, but also as a mocking rebuttal to the controlled professionalism of traditional artists. Arp is attempting to enhance his creativity by allowing for a type of free association, rejecting dogmatic techniques in the hope of finding something new and more original. This type of strategy reflects the political strategies of the group, who hoped to use anarchic behavior to open up a route to a new spirit in European society. The Dada thinkers rarely specified, and likely would not have agreed on, the parameters of a new European culture, but they could agree that it would reject the catastrophic destruction of the war.

In terms of graphic design and typography, Dadaists maintained the same contemptuous attitude toward traditional practices, and sought to free the fields from stultifying past standards. The Dadaists eventually had both a direct and an indirect impact on graphic design: direct, in that works by Dada designers created a new visual vocabulary as well as innovative compositional strategies; and indirect, in that the Dadaists" call for freedom from convention diffused into contemporary culture and led designers to have a more open attitude toward non-traditional work. However, it is important to remember that a large pan, even the majority, of Dada's impact came to the fore many decades after the movement had ended, when designers in a more progressive age, the 1960s, rediscovered the work of Dada pioneers.

    The members of Zurich Dada, like those of many cultural groups, often turned to publishing in order to promulgate their views to a larger audience than could fit in the Cabaret Voltaire. As early as 1916, an early project overseen by Ball, the journal called Cabaret Voltaire, was published in Zurich (fig. 3.37). In terms of typography and design, Cabaret Voltaire was unremark­able, its mission "to clarify the intentions of this cabaret. It is its aim to remind the world that there are people of independent minds—beyond war and nationalism—who live for different ideals." Ball, who wrote the preceding words, broke with other Dada publications in his desire for "clarity" in form and subject, a rational concept that was not a guiding idea Dadaists routinely embraced. The first place in which the word "Dada" appeared in print, only one issue of Cabaret Voltaire appeared but the journal set the stage for a flood of publications still to come.

 

3.35 Hugo Ball reciting "Verse ohne Worte" (Song without Words),
Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916. Photographic enlargement of a postcard.
Kunsthaus, Zurich.

3.36 Jean Arp. Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17

3.37 Hugo Ball, Cabaret Voltaire, 1916.

Tristan Tzara

 

In 1917, Tristan Tzara, whose name was a pseudonym—he was born Sami Rosenstok—began editing and publishing the journal Dada, which was intended to spread word of the movement to like-minded people in Zurich and other European cities. The first issue appeared in July 1917, with a table of contents listing an assortment of poems and articles from a cross section of the European avant-garde. Conventional in format and typography, the first issue, subtitled Miscellany of Art and Literature, was suc­cessful in promulgating news of the Dada movement to an international audience. While the second issue of Dada main­tained this commitment to clarity and informative content, the third issue marked a dramatic break from both the style and sub­stance of earlier Dada periodicals (figs. 3.38, 3.39). Consistent with the transgressive spirit of the movement, the third issue rejected every convention of readable typography and logical composition. A chaotic collection of types often overprinted on one another seemed in some pages to have been scattered across the page without rhyme or reason. Centered, slanted, upside down—words ran up and down and across the page with a spirit of anarchic freedom. It looked as if the designer had sought to fill up the available space, while ignoring the established standards of maga­zine layouts. This radical design was not, however, merely a puerile joke or nihilist gesture; rather, it sought to disrupt the reader's expectations in a way that signified the revolutionary character of Dada thought—especially its attempt to undermine the rationalist beliefs that underlay European society. Published in both French and German versions on cheap newspaper stock, Dada #3 helped to bring international attention to the move­ment, while solidifying Tzara's leadership role.

    Amid the chaotic combination of essays, poems, and adver­tisements in Dada #3 appeared Tzara's own essay explicating the Dada spirit. This "Dada Manifesto" is characteristically obtuse, yet the reader can get a general sense of the group's priorities. Tzara wrote: "Dada: the abolition of logic, the dance of the impotents of creation; Dada: abolition of all the social hierarchies and equations set up by our valets to preserve values ... Dada: abolition of memory; Dada: abolition of archaeology; Dada: abolition of the prophets; Dada: abolition of the future." Of course, Tzara and other Dadaists would go on to write a series of manifestos and explanations of Dada, often with the deliberate intent of contradicting earlier statements in the hope of keeping the movement forever undefined. Among the admirers of Dada #3 was the French artist Francis Picabia (1879-1959), who would later join Tzara as a publisher of Dada periodicals. Picabia offered the magazine high praise in his own cynical fashion when he declared that Dada #3 "is not absolutely stupid." It is important to recognize how expertly the typography and layout of Dada #3 visually reinforced the underlying message of the essays printed therein.

    Another publication overseen by Tzara was a book of his own work called 25 Poetries, which was illustrated with ten woodcuts by Jean Arp (fig. 3.40). Arp's woodcuts feature what would become his trademark style, one that he reiterated throughout the rest of his career. It is an abstract idiom that consists of organic, fluid forms in an indeterminate space. Arp's forms are suggestive of the improvisational tenets of his work, looking as if he had casually poured pigment on to the page. Still, the elegance of the finished work suggests that Arp never surrendered himself completely to random chance.
 

3.38 Tristan Tzara, Contents, Dads 3, July 1917. Periodical.

see also:

Dadaism

Dada in Paris

 

see also:

Jean Arp

Francis Picabia

John Heartfield

Raoul Hausmann

Kurt Schwitters

In 1919, with the First World War recently over, Tzara and Arp moved to France, where they had a formative influence on the establishment of a new branch of Dada in Paris. This move served to raise the profile of the group even more because Paris was arguably the cultural capital of Europe. In Paris, Tzara continued to associate with Dadaists from Zurich while at the same time inspiring a new generation of French writers including Andre Breton (1896-1966), who later went on to create the Surrealist movement after Paris Dada had run its course.

Tzara's influence was partly maintained by Dada, the journal that he had begun in Zurich and kept publishing in Paris until 1922. Issue no. 6, called Bulletin Dada, was published in February 1920 (fig. 3.41). The cover of this issue, the first one published in Paris, features the familiar use of a bewildering range of typography laid out on several different axes, a jumble of upper- and lowercase letters, and with deliberate overprinting "mistakes" whereby the different blocks of text run into and across one another. The sense of improvisation is boosted by the tremendous use of overlapping text. Still, there is enough clarity to get the message across: in this case, the journal introduced a whole new roster of Dadists who were scheduling a number of new public performances.

Francis Picabia, who had met Tzara in Zurich after sitting out the war in the United States and elsewhere, published his own idiosyncratic Dada journal in Paris in 1920. Called 391, the title originated in Barcelona, where the first run of the magazine was created by Picabia in 1917. The name 391 gently mocked Picabia's friend Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), whose New York City modern art gallery was located at 291 Fifth Avenue, and was nicknamed 291. The cover of issue no. 14 of 391 demonstrates some of the most dynamic Dada graphic design ever produced (fig. 3.42). A cacophonous mix of type styles and weights, com­bined with a dizzying layout that keeps the reader's head spinning in order to view successive blocks of text, makes for a compelling, it disorientating, viewing experience. The text of the cover con­veys a suitably ironic message, "A copy of an autograph of Ingres by Francis Picabia." Below this heading there is a copy of a letter written by the famous French academic artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), except that Picabia has overwritten the artist's first initials with his own name, Francis. The resulting "Francis Ingres" is gently satirical in that Picabia exalts himself to a status that he neither seeks nor admires.

In June 1921, Tzara organized an exhibition at the Montaigne gallery. The show consisted of a disparate collection of irreverent projects produced by two dozen artists from across Europe. Tzara designed a poster advertising the exhibition, which he called "Salon Dada" (fig. 3.43). The poster features the relevant factual information about the show at the top, including the name of the gallery, its address, and the dates and times of the exhibi­tion. The name and address of the Montaigne gallery are even centered on the page in a gesture toward clear visual communica­tion. The foot of the poster displays a corresponding hand-drawn sans serif display type, with the words "international exhibition" centered. However, the middle of the poster demonstrates the Dada love of chaos and absurdity. A number of ambiguous, even incomprehensible phrases, including "Nobody is supposed to ignore Dada" and "one looks for athletes," have the appearance of having been pasted helter-skelter on the poster, their variable let­tering suggestive of a selection of "cuts," reusable stock that any printshop would have in plentiful variety. This is disingenuous, however, as the images refer to Dada and were drawn by Tzara for the lithograph. The largest lettering on the poster forms the words "Salon Dada." The words are presented to the viewer as a jumble of mixed type, the scale and forms of the letters appearing to have been picked out at random. Some seriffed, some sans, some heavy, some light, the nine letters look to be in motion, as if they are rattling against each other, spinning and turning back and forth in a kinetic frenzy.

In October 1924, Picabia published the 16th issue of his journal 391. The list of the issue's contributors is indicative of the fact that Picabia had become close to the group of French authors centered around the poet Andre Breton. Between 1920 and 1924, Breton had emerged as a rival of Tzara for leadership of the Dadaists in Paris. Breton and his followers had grown increasingly disillusioned with the extreme konoclasm of Tzara's work, and wanted to redirect their energies toward more organized political activism. As Tzara and his Zurich circle became increasingly marginalized, partly because they were mainly foreigners competing with a native French group, Breton asserted his intellectual control over the movement he named "Surrealism," which eventually replaced Dada as the leading artist-activist group in Europe

 

see also:

Dadaism

Dada in Berlin

 

see also:

Jean Arp

Francis Picabia

John Heartfield

Raoul Hausmann

Kurt Schwitters

In 1917, Richard Huelsenbeck returned to his native Berlin, where he initiated a new round of Dada provocations with a new group that he called "Club Dada." Huelsenbeck was joined by members of the German avant-garde including Johannes Baader (1875-1955), Helmut Herzfelde, George Grosz, and Raoul Hausmann. With "Club Dada," Huelsenbeck set out to reinvent the Dada movement with a more serious political commitment. Unlike the broadly drawn politics of Zurich Dada, which had located itself against the European bourgeoisie in general, the Berlin Dadaists sought to engage more closely with the specific political situation in Germany. German society at the end of the war had in some ways come close to collapse, as competing groups of extremists vied for power. New political groups included fervent communists hoping for a revolution like the one that had occurred in Russia, as well as reactionary fascists seeking a militant imperial government. This polarized and fragmented society proved to be fertile ground for the satirical jabs of the Dadaists.

Typical of Berlin Dada activities was the "Erste Internationale Dada-Messe," or "First International Dada Fair," which Huelsenbeck opened in Berlin in June 1920. Underwritten by a collector of Chinese ceramics named Dr Otto Burchard, who was thereafter christened "Dadafinanz," the exhibition featured over 200 Dada items, most of which were offered for sale to anyone who paid the hefty entrance fee. The most notorious work at the show was made anonymously; it consisted of a dummy with a pig's head dressed in a German military uniform. The dummy can be seen hanging from the ceiling in a photograph of the show (fig. 3.44).

Helmut Herzfelde (1891-1968), who had changed his name to the quintessentially English-sounding "John Heartfield" in 1916 as a protest against the German military slogan "May God Punish England," designed the photomontage called Life and Activity in Universal City at 12:05 in the Afternoon printed on the cover of the fair's catalog (fig. 3.45). Heartfield had served in the German military until 1915, when he had faked a nervous col­lapse in order to be released from service. In 1920 he joined both Club Dada and the German Communist Party, whose plan for revolutionary social change in Germany represented the main political goal of most Berlin Dadaists. The catalog cover demon­strates Heartfield's mastery of this new type of design, through which fragments of text and image combine to create a new whole. The catalog itself was mainly designed and published by a small firm, Malik-Verlag, run by Wieland Herzfelde (1896-1988), Heartfield's brother. The folio-sized cover featured Heartfield's photomontage, reproduced as a photolithograph, as the background. The image was then itself overprinted with a typically confounding mix of black and red letterforms of various sizes. The "First International Dada Fair" and its catalog were successful in promoting the Berlin movement's visibility across Europe, yet they also resulted in a major financial loss for the group, as two members were fined 900 German Marks for "denigrating the German military."

A German artist recruited for the Berlin movement by Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971), became the most important publisher of German Dada texts when he founded the journal Der Dada in 1919. This publication featured the same sorts of "free" typography and layout that characterized other Dada journals. However, where Tzara and Picabia's publications tended toward the whimsical, the fiery politics of the Berlin

Dadaists comes across through the aggressive nature of Der Dada's design. The cover of the third issue, published in April of 1920, featured a collage of text and image by Hcartfield (fig. 3.46). While Heartfield's collage contains the same sort of random, incongruous juxtapositions produced by other Dada artists, it is dominated by a photo of a snarling man on the lower left. This image, a portrait of Hausmann, overwhelms the rest of the collage in that it sets up an aggressive confrontation with the viewer. Heartfield continued to pursue political activism through collages well into the 1930s (his later work is surveyed in Chapter 7). Through Der Dada, Hausmann attempted to maintain a connec­tion with other far-flung Dadaists, and the journal at times included contributions from Tzara and Picabia, as well as reports on Dada activity in other European cities. Despite these efforts, the Berlin Dada group began to lose its cohesion as early as 1920, and had faded away completely by 1923, as the artists involved each pursued their own interests.

4.44 First International Dada Fair, Berlin, June 1920. From left to right:
Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Hoch, Dr. Burchara, Johannes Baader. Wieland HefzfekJe.
Mrs. Herzfelde, Otto Schmalhausen (Dadaoz), George Grosz, John Heartfield.
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz.

3.45 John Heartfield, Erste
Internationale Dada-Messe (First International Dads Fair), Berlin, June 1920.
Catalog cover. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz.

3.46 Raoul Hausmann, Der Dada 3, 1920. Collage.
University College London, Special Collections.

Kurt Schwitters and Merz

 

see also:

Jean Arp

Francis Picabia

John Heartfield

Raoul Hausmann

Kurt Schwitters

The artist and graphic designer Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) was loosely associated with the Berlin Dadaists during the postwar years, although he remained something of an independent spirit, partly because he lived off the beaten track in the small German city of Hanover. Schwitters had trained at both the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hanover and at a fine art school, and he served in the German military during the First World War. He first appeared on the avantgarde art scene in 1918, when the Der Sturm gallery established by Hcrwarth Walden (1878-1941) presented a solo show of his abstract paintings. Walden, who was instrumental in promoting the art of the European avant-garde to the Berlin public, also played a central role in publicizing the work of German Expressionist artists. Schwitters also published a series of essays and poems in the journal Der Sturm, including poems that first referenced his imaginary lover, Anna Blume.

For Schwitters, the word fragment "Merz" functioned as a proprietary umbrella label for his work, and its nonsensical rela­tionship to his art was clearly inspired by the Dada spirit. Schwitters came up with the label while making a collage of text in 1919, adopting the term from a fragment of the German word Kommerz ("commerce"). While "Merz" is generally associated with Schwitters's Dada-like art, even his commercial design practice used the term, as he called the shop Merz Werbezentrale, which translates loosely as "Merz Advertising Center." The early work Merzbild 5B (Picture-Red-Heart-Church), April 26, 1919, a combination of collage scraps of paper, tempera paints, and

crayon on a piece of cardboard, is typical of Schwitters's "junk art," a Dadacsque use of the refuse of modern society (fig. 3.47). It is hard today to recognize the daring nature of Schwitters's use of bits of paper found on the street to make a work of fine art. A slight reference to contemporary political turmoil, the slaughter of socialist partisans in Bremen by their fascist rivals, is indicated by Schwitter's inclusion of a scrap from a Hanover newspaper that describes the conflict. However, Schwitters's political statements were never as strident as those of the Berlin Dadaists, and he seemed at times to immerse himself in the aesthetic freedom of Merz.

Between 1923 and 1932, Schwitters edited a journal also called Merz while maintaining a commercial graphic design prac­tice in Hanover. While most of Schwitters's design work during this decade was guided by his commitment to the Constructivist aesthetic , as indicated by the journal's title, some aspects of Dada aesthetics appeared in the journal too. For example, Merz issue no. 11, while using predominantly Constructivist principles, displays text that runs directly across a vertical bar—a framing device usually considered inviolate (fig. 3.48). Schwitters's work, like Dada graphic design in general, had relatively little impact at the time of its creation. However, to future generations Dada graphics would prove to be a valuable repository of innovative design ideas.