Eduard Wasow - Sophie Taeuber-Arp as odalisque - 1914
You must remember the place where punk began. The most subversive, dissident and revolutionary centre of modern art. The planet Ziggy Stardust came from. That’s right – Switzerland. Sophie Taeuber-Arp was Swiss through and through. That gave her an entree to an extraordinary moment when the most dangerous artists and poets in Europe came together in a nightclub in Zurich. Trained as an artist and designer, she played a founding part in the movement that blew conventional notions of art, craft, and culture itself to smithereens – and which still influences the most subversive pop culture today: dada. The first world war destroyed European civilisation. A continent that thought itself the most enlightened on Earth sent its young to die in a bloodbath of psychotic squander. Some young people rebelled. They walked away from the slaughter. Their natural destination was neutral Switzerland. So it was that in Zurich in 1916 the nonsense poet Hugo Ball and the maverick writer and drummer Richard Huelsenbeck – both Germans – led a raggle-taggle band of artists in wild, strange evening performances at the dada cabaret. Dada – a deliberately nonsensical word suggesting both infantilism and the dadada beat of an angry drum – rejected the very idea of aesthetic beauty. Civilisation had been terminally poisoned by the great war. What could artists do? They decided to destroy art’s last pathetic falsehoods. All the pretensions of Europe’s high culture had to go. Dada was a new kind of creativity to blow away the ghosts: jagged, savage, primal, cynical, hilarious and mad - Jonathan Jones
Size: 4395px × 4960px
Location: Switzerland
Photo credit: © photo-fox / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
Keywords: abstract, alamy, arp, artist, artsy, background, black, bygone, creative, cultural, culture, dancer, days, designer, exhibition, figure, gallery, heritage, historic, historical, image, interior, lives, memories, nostalgia, nostalgic, odalisque, photo, photo-art, photo-portrait, photograph, photographic, photography, picture, portrait, poster, print, retro, sophie, swiss, taeuber-arp, textile, times, vintage, white, äuber
