Art Station

Dada. The dadaists attacked the idea of art or poetry by creating collage constructions from discarded junk, such as Kurt Schwitters’s Painting with Light Center (1919, Museum of Modern Art, New York City). They also would write satirical poems by picking words out of a hat.

Chance and accident were among the dadaists’ most common creative devices. An early and particularly influential dada work is Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), an ordinary, mass-produced urinal that has been transformed into a work of art simply by being exhibited in a gallery and receiving a new title. Duchamp wished to ridicule traditional ideas of art, creativity, and beauty.

The slaughter of World War I affected artists in different ways. Some felt, as Mondrian did, that human betterment lay in the creation of an impersonal, mechanistic way of life, whereas others agreed with Dix that it lay in drawing attention to political problems.

Cubism, a movement in modern art, especially painting, that was primarily concerned with abstract forms rather than lifelike representation. It began in Paris about 1908, reached its height by 1914, and developed further in the 1920s. Cubism was a revolt against the sentimental and realistic traditional painting of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and against the emphasis on light and color effects and the lack of form characteristic of impressionism. It drew inspiration from tribal art, especially that of Africa and Oceania.

The doctrines of the cubist school follow the dictum of the French postimpressionist Paul Cézanne, "Everything in nature takes its form from the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder." The most common type of cubism is an abstract and analytical approach to a subject, in which the artist determines and paints the basic geometric solids of which the subject is composed, in particular the cube or cone, or the basic planes that reveal the underlying geometric forms.

In another type of cubist painting (synthetic cubism), views of an object from different angles, not simultaneously visible in life, are arranged into a unified composition. In neither type of cubism is there any attempt to reproduce in detail the appearance of natural objects. Harlequins and musical instruments figure prominently in cubist portraits and still lifes because they seemed favorable subjects for geometrical dissection.