The beginning ofdadaism: Arp and van Rees in Zürich 1915

H. Henkels

The dada-movement has never been a school of art with clear characteristics, like futurism and cubism.l The only thing which made dada look like it (and still makes) is the fact that the word dada, from the very first beginn• ing of its use, has got a kind of magical appeal which causes all sorts of loose events to get a more general and outstanding character. The charac• teristics of this movement - collages, soirées, phonetic poems, the so-called automatism and others - were not new; the most important artists who joined the movement from its very first beginning or shortly after, were Hugo BalI, Hans Arp, Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara and Richard Hülsenbeck. All of them had picked up some knowledge of the attainments of futurism, cubism and expressionism before their stay at Zürich.2 Although the Zürich group existed only for a short time (hardly a year), its activities became well-known all the same; on the contrary, when the most important mem• bers left Zürich, everywhere movements rise, that did fake over the magical word 'dada', but that are totally different in character: Berlin, Cologne, Budapest and Paris. The name remains in use in the twenties, although we may consider the real movement finished after the departure from Zürich of the last original member (1918). Although memoires, characterizations and revaluations of the movement by some of the group, were published predominantly after World War 11, the historical and art-historical investigations have not got much further than the above-mentioned summary: objective studies into the activities and into the importance of the movement for the personal development of the mem• ber writers, poets and especially artists, and a critical bibliography aiming at perfection, of the dada-editions which are hard to come by, are still largely lacking.3 The aim of this article is to give some elucidation on some events that took place a few months before the dada-movement started and to be able to give an idea of the part the movement played in their own development as ar• tists. The artists, we are here dealing with, were directly linked to the rising of dadaism: Hans Arp (1886-1966) played the most important part as a poet and as an artist in all dada-activities, the part Otto van Rees (1884• 1957) and his wife A. C. van Rees-Dutilh (1876-1959) played, was con• siderably less important. The latter are no more than only names in the mo• nographs on dadaism: a general view of their work is completely lacking. 4

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1 O. van Rees, Farmers in the field, 1916. Agnuzzo, coll. Corray.

2 O. van Rees, Adam and Eve, 1910. Present whereabouts unknown.

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