Surrealism
Surrealism grew from a Paris-based movement exploring dreams and the unconscious through unexpected imagery, automatic drawing, and imaginative painting.
Painting Movement
Dada
Dada emerged during World War I as artists rejected artistic conventions through absurd humor, chance, collage, unconventional objects, and performance.
Dada quick facts
Dada artists challenged definitions of art through everyday materials, mechanical imagery, wordplay, and deliberately disruptive techniques across media.
| Origin | Zürich and New York, followed by centers in Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, and Paris |
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| Approximate period | 1916–mid-1920s, varying by city and group |
| Classification | An international, cross-disciplinary avant-garde movement spanning painting and other arts, not a single painting style. |
| Historical context | World War I and disillusionment with conventional politics and artistic authority shaped Dada’s provocations; Cabaret Voltaire, founded in Zürich in 1916 by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, became an early center. The name’s origin remains disputed, and Surrealism later developed partly from Dada circles and experiments. |
| Common subjects | War, urban life, mass culture, and everyday objects appear in work that often uses absurd juxtapositions or satire. |
| Defining characteristics | Irreverence, chance, absurd combinations, satire, and challenges to traditional ideas of art; paintings may use machine-inspired imagery, playful abstraction, deliberate mismatching, and printed material. |
| Paint types | Oil paint, watercolor, gouache, and metallic paint appear in documented works; ink and collage are separate materials. |
| Painting surfaces | Canvas for oil paintings and paper for watercolor, gouache, collage, and photomontage; supports varied by work. |
| Painting methods | Painted works used collage, photomontage, assemblage, and found materials; performance and other experiments extended Dada beyond painting. |
| Famous painters | Francis Picabia, Max Ernst, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, Man Ray, Jean Arp, and Raoul Hausmann |
| Representative works | Man Ray's The Rope Dancer (1916), Taeuber-Arp's Vertical, Horizontal, Square, Rectangular (1917), and Schwitters's Picture with Light Center (1919) |
Sources: MoMA: Dada and MoMA: Dada works and artists, MoMA: Man Ray's oil painting, MoMA: Höch's watercolor and gouache, and MoMA: Taeuber-Arp's gouache and metallic paint.
Paint types in Dada
Dada artists used oil, watercolor, gouache, and metallic paint alongside collage; museum records distinguish paint from cut paper and found objects.
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Oil paint
Man Ray made The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows (1916) entirely in oil on canvas, although he developed its accidental arrangement from discarded colored-paper shapes. Kurt Schwitters used oil with cut-and-pasted papers and pencil on paperboard in Picture with Light Center (1919), a mixed-media Merz work rather than an oil canvas.
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Watercolor paint
Schwitters's N Watercolor 1 (The Heart Goes from Sugar to Coffee) (1919) combines pencil and watercolor on paper mounted to board. Hannah Höch also used watercolor in Study for Man and Machine (1921), alongside gouache and pencil. Both are works on paper, not examples of Dada readymades.
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Gouache paint
Höch's Study for Man and Machine (1921) uses opaque gouache with watercolor and pencil. Francis Picabia used gouache with ink and pencil for the mechanical image Fuel Pump (1922). These documented drawings show painted color in Dada without mistaking collage, typography, or printed matter for paint types.
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Metallic paint
Sophie Taeuber-Arp's Vertical, Horizontal, Square, Rectangular (1917) combines gouache, metallic paint, and pencil on paper. MoMA specifically identifies metallic paint in this geometric work; that evidence should not be extended to Dada artists generally or confused with pieces of metal attached to a collage.
Sources: MoMA: Man Ray's oil-on-canvas Rope Dancer, MoMA: Schwitters's oil-and-paper Picture with Light Center, MoMA: Schwitters's watercolor, MoMA: Höch's watercolor and gouache study, MoMA: Picabia's gouache Fuel Pump, and MoMA: Taeuber-Arp's metallic paint and gouache.
Famous painters from Dada
Dada artists worked across painting, chance collage, photomontage, performance, and found objects, so no single visual style defines the movement.
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Francis Picabia
Picabia's Dada work moved between machine imagery, ironic representation, and deliberately unstable styles. Paintings such as Voilà Haviland use schematic forms and sharp contrasts to unsettle conventional pictures of modern life, while his rapid shifts of approach resist a single recognizable Dada look.
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Max Ernst
Ernst used collage, frottage, and scraped paint to create images that seem to emerge from chance rather than deliberate planning. Works such as The Hat Makes the Man rearrange printed figures into absurd scenes, turning Dada's distrust of rational order into a material painting practice.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Taeuber-Arp brought geometric abstraction and clear color relationships into Dada painting, embroidery, and applied design. Her works treat repeated forms as independent visual elements, connecting the movement's experiments with chance and nontraditional materials to a precise, carefully organized surface.
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Hannah Höch
Höch's photomontages cut and recombine images from illustrated magazines to expose contradictions in gender roles, politics, and mass culture. Though often made with printed photographs rather than paint, her assembled compositions belong to Berlin Dada's attack on conventional images and authority.
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Kurt Schwitters
Schwitters's Merz pictures combine printed scraps, paper, and sometimes paint into densely layered compositions. By treating discarded materials as both subject and surface, he extended Dada collage into a personal practice that blurred the line between painting, relief, and everyday refuse.
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Man Ray
Man Ray's painted compositions and objects use unexpected forms to unsettle ordinary perception, while his photographs and rayographs extend the same experimental approach across media. His Dada practice resists a stable boundary between painting and object-making, turning chance and visual wit into compositional tools.
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Jean Arp
Arp's chance collages arrange torn paper shapes without conventional drawing or perspective, allowing accident to shape the composition. These Dada works replace deliberate representation with an experimental process, while his related reliefs show how the same organic forms could move from paper into painted objects.
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Raoul Hausmann
Hausmann's Berlin Dada photomontages combine photographs, letters, and printed fragments into aggressive critiques of politics and mass media. His experiments with typography and watercolor additions to woodcuts show how the movement treated images and text as material for visual disruption.
Sources: MoMA: Picabia's Dada Movement; MoMA: Ernst's The Hat Makes the Man; MoMA: Dada collection.
Related painting movements
Dada rejected artistic conventions through chance and provocation, while Surrealism later explored dreams and the unconscious in a more sustained movement.
Futurism
Futurism emerged in Italy in 1909, with painters breaking forms into repeated shapes and diagonal lines to convey speed, motion, and modern technology.
Cubism
Cubism emerged in Paris as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque broke objects and figures into angular planes, compressed space, and shifting viewpoints.