Composition with Red Arrow

In 1915 Marcel Janco joined fellow artists Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Tristan Tzara in Zurich, Switzerland, to respond to World War I and an emerging modern media and machine aesthetic. United in this "anti-art" movement, Dada artists led a creative revolution that profoundly shaped the course of subsequent art. Their performances and assemblages—works made with the stuff of modern life, including newspapers, ticket stubs, mechanical parts, food wrappers, advertisements, and hat racks—were intended to provoke awareness of the conventions of life that had led to the disasters of war. Born in neutral Zurich and New York, two cities that served as independent points of origin for the movement, Dada rapidly spread to Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, Paris, and beyond.