Roses

A day full of inconsequential but time-consuming tasks, enough to keep me from a walk on the last warm day for a while.

The subversive Dada movement was started in Zurich in 1916 by a group of poets, dramatists and artists. They chose the name at random from a French/German dictionary: it is the French word for "hobby horse."

They rejected old artistic structures and traditions and set out to scandalise and outrage their audience.  They used everyday objects as art, often in political collages.

Francis Picabia was a painter influenced by Fauvism and Cubism, who joined the Dada movement. He painted Girl Born without a Mother (1917) over a drawing of a steam engine, to create an ironic metaphor for human life.

Marcel Duchamp was another accomplished Cubist painter who turned to attempts at Dadist shock creation.  His Fountain (1917) presented an upturned urinal as a work, in the name of R Mutt, to a New York exhibition.  Despite the fact that the exhibition had a rule of non-selection, it was rejected.

John Heartfield was adept at photomontage.  He was a German Communist and many of his mass-produced works were highly political.  In his 1931 work On the Crisis Party Congress of the SPD, the party in question were portrayed as literally a toothless tiger.