Top 100 - Dadaism
Dadaism: 100 Works and Their Artistic Approaches
From Picabia, Sophie Taeuber and Schwitters to the avant-garde movements around them: one hundred paintings in which machines, words, geometry and mischief seat tradition at a deliberately wobbly table.
Dada emerged during the First World War with a fairly reasonable question: why respect the rules of a culture that had just produced such a disaster? The answer lies in amorous machines, absurd titles, intrusive signatures and an artistic seriousness asked to wait outside.
Art Takes Off Its Tie
Seriousness, Dismantled at the Easel
In Zurich, New York, Berlin and Paris, Dada is neither a single style nor a mere joke. Picabia replaces people with mechanisms, Sophie Taeuber combines abstraction, dance and applied arts, and Schwitters invents Merz from the world’s discarded materials. Around them, Orphism, De Stijl and Expressionism form a landscape of alliances and disagreements that makes the period far more lively than a neatly pressed manifesto.
One hundred paintings, with no readymade hidden beneath the table: Dada retains its insolence, but the ranking finally respects the stated medium.Go to the Images
Works in the Selection
The Works in Pictures
Dada Paints the Machine and Disrupts Words
Picabia, Taeuber and Schwitters turn mechanisms, geometry, signatures and titles into weapons joyfully aimed at the overly well-behaved artwork.
#1
Francis Picabia1. The Cacodylic Eye
In 1921, while suffering from an eye condition, Picabia turned a canvas dominated by a large eye into a collective visitors’ book. Friends, visitors and artists added signatures, drawings and remarks. The Cacodylic Eye thus undermines the idea of an untouched artwork and a single author. Painting becomes a society party that has refused to go home.
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#2
Francis Picabia2. Amorous Parade
Amorous Parade, made in 1917, belongs to Picabia’s mechanomorphic images. Two technical devices replace bodies and replay seduction as a meeting of pistons, dials and belts. The artist repurposes industrial diagrams to mock romantic psychology. The couple may work, but nobody has supplied the manufacturer’s warranty.
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#3
Francis Picabia3. Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic)
Painted in 1913, Edtaonisl combines silhouettes, circles and mechanical fragments under a title that resists any stable translation. Picabia draws on encounters, performances and memories to construct an unrecognisable portrait. This deliberate obscurity predates Dada: the painting already treats explanation as an overly serious guest who can be left at the door.
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#4
Francis Picabia4. New York
New York belongs to the period when Picabia discovered the United States and its industrial imagery. He transforms the city into a symbolic machine rather than a panorama of skyscrapers. Names, wheels and technical signs compose a faceless portrait. The work does not show New York; it gives it an engine, a few dubious connections and excellent self-confidence.
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#5
Sophie Taeuber5. Dada Composition
Sophie Taeuber’s Dada Composition emerged in the Zurich of the Cabaret Voltaire years, where dance, sound poetry, puppets and abstraction interacted. The rectangles and colours seek neither noisy provocation nor gratuitous disorder. Taeuber brings an essential rhythmic precision to Dada. Even rebellion, she seems to remind us, benefits from knowing exactly where to place a square.
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#6
Francis Picabia6. Udnie
Udnie was painted in 1913 after Picabia’s American journey and the impression made on him by the dancer Stacia Napierkowska. Circular planes, fragments of bodies and mechanical rhythms merge in one of his first major abstractions. The painting predates Dada but anticipates its rejection of categories. Portrait, dance and turbine share the stage without introducing themselves.
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#7
Francis Picabia7. Catch as Catch Can
Catch as Catch Can takes its title from the English expression associated with a form of wrestling in which almost every hold is permitted. Picabia applies this freedom to painting: mechanisms, signs and humour replace noble composition. The work contributes to his critique of artistic rules. The title honestly warns the viewer that this painting will not fight by the rulebook.
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#8
Francis Picabia8. The Double World
The Double World belongs to the years when Picabia combined words, diagrams and mechanical figures. The title suggests a reality divided between technical object and human desire, scientific seriousness and private joke. This ambiguity is profoundly Dada: no reading retains authority for long. The world is double, and the instruction manual has unfortunately been printed in a third dimension.
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#9
Francis Picabia9. Spanish Night
Spanish Night, made in the early 1920s, sets two black silhouettes against white targets and signs in a composition resembling a stencil. Picabia draws on Spanish imagery without offering a picturesque scene. The bodies become emblems, almost posters. Night conceals nothing: it reduces the spectacle to a few shapes crisp enough to be even more unsettling.
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#10
Sophie Taeuber10. Composition
This Composition by Sophie Taeuber arranges circles, rectangles and outlines with an economy inherited from textiles and embroidery. The artist places no hierarchy between applied arts and painting, a decisive position in the Dada context. The surface appears simple, but every interval matters. No object is represented; yet everything seems to have a very precisely negotiated function.
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#11
Kurt Schwitters11. Abstraction 26: Delicate Symphony
Abstraction 26, subtitled Delicate Symphony, belongs to Schwitters’s late period. After building Merz from salvaged fragments, the artist pursued a lighter, more musical abstraction in painting. The shapes seem to float rather than accumulate. The collector of tickets and packaging thus proves that he can also travel with surprisingly discreet luggage.
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#12
Sophie Taeuber12. Aubette Composition
Aubette Composition refers to the Strasbourg leisure complex that Sophie Taeuber designed with Jean Arp and Theo van Doesburg between 1926 and 1928. Colour and geometry were intended to envelop walls, ceilings and the movement of visitors. This painting retains the project’s logic. Abstraction leaves the easel to organise an entire evening, down to the last corner of the dance hall.
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#13
Sophie Taeuber13. Triptych
The Triptych with Reciprocal Triangles shows Taeuber thinking across several panels, like a portable architecture. Verticals, horizontals and triangles establish precise echoes from one section to another. The religious format is stripped of its narrative but retains its ceremonial rhythm. The saints are absent; the highly punctual shapes keep every appointment.
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#14
Francis Picabia14. Egoism
In Egoism, Picabia turns a character trait into a visual device. The word, shape and mechanical allusion reject the traditional psychological portrait. During the Dada years, the artist liked to present human passions as imperfect machines. Egoism therefore gets its own mechanism, which seems logical: it would probably never have agreed to share anyone else’s.
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#15
Francis Picabia15. Animal Trainer
Animal Trainer belongs to Picabia’s late paintings, in which figures, transparencies and printed references overlap. The title introduces a narrative authority that the image immediately complicates. After Dada, Picabia continued to change styles whenever people thought they had classified him. The trainer may control the animals; the artist still refuses the critic’s leash.
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#16
Francis Picabia16. The Adoration of the Calf
The Adoration of the Calf subverts a biblical subject steeped in idolatry. Picabia uses it to target the worship of art, taste and reputations, familiar Dada targets. The figures offer no simple moral: they turn veneration into an ambiguous spectacle. The golden calf has found a museum, but nobody seems to have checked its label.
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#17
Francis Picabia17. Resistance
Resistance belongs to the Picabia of the 1920s, when he alternated silhouettes, signs and deliberately loaded titles. The word can suggest mechanical, political or personal opposition without fixing the image’s meaning. This indeterminacy extends the Dada spirit after the groups dispersed. Above all, the painting resists a single interpretation, and does so with remarkable endurance.
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#18
Francis Picabia18. Mysterious Principal
Mysterious Principal encapsulates Picabia’s art of the title: a phrase that seems to promise an explanation, then immediately closes the door. The figure or mechanism becomes a character without a stable biography. The work reminds us that Dada does more than destroy conventional images; it also disrupts the words that claim to command them. The principal remains mysterious, administration included.
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#19
Kurt Schwitters19. Ancient Grotto C67
Ancient Grotto C67 is a painting by Schwitters in which organic shapes replace the urban accumulation of his Merz collages. Displaced by exile, the artist explores more intimate landscapes and abstractions without abandoning transformation. The grotto is no faithful archaeological site. It looks more like a memory that has decided to reconstruct itself.
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#20
Sophie Taeuber20. Composition with Diagonals and Crosses
Composition with Diagonals and Crosses shows Taeuber introducing livelier directions into her geometric system. The lines do not decorate the surface: they organise encounters, interruptions and resumptions. Her experience as a dancer gives the painting a bodily logic. The crosses signal no danger; they simply indicate that the rhythm is changing feet.
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#21
Kurt Schwitters21. Milk Flower
Milk Flower belongs to Schwitters’s late paintings, its title combining two ordinary realities to produce an impossible poetic image. After the invention of Merz, this verbal freedom remains intact. The painted shapes do not literally translate a flower or milk. They let language germinate something that no botanist would reasonably have ordered.
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#22
Kurt Schwitters22. Untitled
In this Untitled, Schwitters works with colour and form without using the found papers that made Merz famous. Yet the choice of pure painting does not erase his principle of assemblage: the elements retain different visual origins. Untitled here means without instructions, not without a story. The viewer receives freedom, with assembly costs included.
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#23
Sophie Taeuber23. Composition with Two Circles
This second Composition by Taeuber, dominated by two circles and oblique lines, shows her abstraction becoming more supple in the 1930s. The shapes seem mobile without losing their balance. After Zurich and the Aubette, she continued an independent European exploration beyond labels. Two circles are enough to produce a conversation, which remains very economical in its cast.
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#24
Francis Picabia24. Straw-Chopper
Straw-Chopper is one of the titles Picabia composed as verbal collisions. The image combines shapes, mechanisms or figures without resolving their relationship. This Dada logic turns the painting into a faulty but productive linguistic machine. An axe and straw should not make a happy couple; precisely, nobody had invited common sense to this session.
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#25
Francis Picabia25. Physics of Culture
Physics of Culture plays on the vocabulary of the body, science and civilisation. Picabia favours titles that give the viewer a misleading hint of a lecture before confusing the subject. The painting challenges the idea of a disciplined culture. It clearly prefers warming up, stretching and a few exercises forbidden by the official programme.
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Figures, transparencies, Spain, celebrations and late abstractions show how former Dadaists keep changing languages as soon as we begin to understand them.
#26
Francis Picabia26. Idyll
Idyll uses a word traditionally reserved for a gentle love story, then confronts it with Picabia’s unstable language. Depending on his period, the artist overlaps figures, signs and found references, preventing any straightforward sentimentality. The idyll may exist, but it has passed through Dada. It returns with several faces and limited faith in happy endings.
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#27
Francis Picabia27. The Unique Eunuch Ivy
The Unique Eunuch Ivy belongs to Picabia’s most characteristic verbal inventions. Words follow one another as much for their sound as their meaning, then influence how we read the image. Here, Dada turns the title into a performance. The ivy climbs, the eunuch remains unique, and logic politely asks for a seat near the exit.
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#28
Francis Picabia28. Woman with a Monocle
Woman with a Monocle belongs to Picabia’s return to recognisable figures after his mechanomorphic years. The monocle adds a society identity and a slightly theatrical quality, but the artist rejects a stable psychological portrait. The gaze becomes both accessory and subject. A single lens is enough to see; understanding Picabia still requires several angles.
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#29
Francis Picabia29. The Fig Leaf
The Fig Leaf invokes the traditional symbol of modesty, often used to cover nudes. Picabia makes it a title and a device that draws attention precisely to what it claims to conceal. After Dada, his painting continues to mock moral and artistic conventions. The leaf performs its duty with decidedly limited enthusiasm.
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#30
Francis Picabia30. Woman and Idol
Woman and Idol brings a human figure and an object of veneration together without specifying which dominates the other. Picabia enjoys borrowed images, superimposed and made uncertain. The theme extends his critique of artistic worship. The idol gets the title, but the woman retains the gaze: the hierarchy has not been properly approved.
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#31
Francis Picabia31. Women with a Bulldog
Women with a Bulldog belongs to Picabia’s late figurative paintings, often based on photographs or popular images. This use of sources considered vulgar continues Dada’s war against good taste. The dog heightens the scene’s strangeness. The models pose; the bulldog seems responsible for editorial oversight.
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#32
Francis Picabia32. The Spanish Revolution
The Spanish Revolution takes a political and national title that Picabia subjects to his personal imagery. Born in Paris to a Spanish father, the artist maintained a real but never simply documentary relationship with Spain. The painting does not recount a specific event. It turns the word revolution into energy, costume and provocation, without filing a programme at the counter.
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#33
Francis Picabia33. Otaïti
Otaïti uses an old spelling of Tahiti and invokes the European imagination of the exotic. Picabia paints no island reportage: he works from signs, bodies and cultural fantasies. The painting reveals Western desire as much as the place it evokes. The island in the title is real; the travel ticket is considerably less reliable.
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#34
Francis Picabia34. Salicis
Salicis bears a Latin title relating to the willow, but Picabia uses this apparent knowledge as another screen. The figure and transparencies cannot be reduced to botanical illustration. In his later years, the artist readily superimposed classical references and popular images. Latin lends gravity; Picabia immediately removes its chair.
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#35
Francis Picabia35. Veglione, Cannes
Veglione, Cannes evokes a grand masked ball on the French Riviera, a world Picabia knew well in the 1920s. Celebration, bodies and the society setting become material for painting and social satire. Dada has left Zurich, but its taste for masks remains. In Cannes, even provocation arrives dressed for the evening.
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#36
Francis Picabia36. The Bullfight
The Bullfight revives Picabia’s Spanish heritage and his taste for tense spectacles. Rather than faithfully illustrating the arena, the painting condenses signs, colours and confrontation. The subject invites reflection on the audience as much as the fight. The bull and matador risk their positions; the spectator mainly risks aesthetic certainties.
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#37
Francis Picabia37. The Matador in the Arena
The Matador in the Arena continues Picabia’s cycle of Spanish subjects. The heroic figure is subjected to the stylistic changes of an artist who moves from the mechanomorphic to the figurative without asking forgiveness. The matador seems to play his part; the less disciplined painting constantly shifts the boundaries of the arena and of good taste.
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#38
Francis Picabia38. The Red Tree
The Red Tree belongs to a strand of Picabia’s work in which he reintroduces natural motifs after mechanising bodies. Yet his choice of an unrealistic colour prevents any comfortable return to landscape. The tree becomes a sign, a presence and a chromatic provocation. It has roots, but the painting refuses to let them anchor the artist in a single stylistic soil.
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#39
Joseph Stella39. New York Interpreted
New York Interpreted is the great polyptych on which Joseph Stella worked during the 1920s. Skyscrapers, the harbour, Broadway and Brooklyn Bridge become an almost religious vision of the metropolis. Stella was not a Dadaist, but moved within the same New York networks. His city celebrates the machine with a fervour that Picabia would probably have found delightfully suspicious.
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#40
Marsden Hartley40. Portrait of a German Officer
Portrait of a German Officer, painted in 1914, commemorates Karl von Freyburg, Marsden Hartley’s friend who died during the war. Flags, numbers, Iron Crosses and insignia replace the face. Hartley did not belong to Dada, but his coded portrait shows how the avant-garde dismantles official identity. The sitter’s absence makes the memory even more present.
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#41
Marsden Hartley41. Berlin Abstraction
Berlin Abstraction emerged during Hartley’s stay in Germany before the war. Military emblems, urban colours and personal signs are condensed into an energetic surface. This Expressionist painting is not Dada, but shares the context that the movement would reject after 1916. The visual parade is brilliant; history would reveal its cost.
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#42
Theo van Doesburg42. Rhythm of a Russian Dance
Van Doesburg painted Rhythm of a Russian Dance around 1918, drawing on the memory of a performance. Vertical and horizontal bars translate bodily movements without depicting the dancer. The work belongs to De Stijl, not Dada. Yet its presence shows how the entire avant-garde was then seeking to make something other than recognisable figures dance.
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#43
Theo van Doesburg43. Composition VIII (The Cow)
Composition VIII, known as The Cow, results from a series of transformations in which van Doesburg progressively simplifies an animal study into geometry. The work demonstrates De Stijl’s method: begin with the visible to reach universal relationships. Dada would happily have kept the cow and discarded the method; this disagreement makes their historical proximity particularly useful.
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#44
Robert Delaunay44. Simultaneous Disc
Delaunay’s Simultaneous Disc, made in 1913, arranges coloured sectors around a centre without representing an object. Contrasts create light and rotation. Delaunay’s Orphism predates Dada and still believes in a modern harmony that Dada would challenge. The disc therefore spins optimistically, before European history seriously scratches the mechanism.
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#45
Robert Delaunay45. Homage to Blériot
Homage to Blériot celebrates, in 1914, the aviator who crossed the English Channel. Propellers, towers, discs and simultaneous colours bring city and sky together in a great modern surge. Delaunay was not a Dadaist, but his technological enthusiasm forms one of the backgrounds that Dadaists would turn into irony after the war. The aircraft takes off; confidence would soon make a brutal landing.
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#46
Theo van Doesburg46. Counter-Composition V
Counter-Composition V belongs to van Doesburg’s Elementarism of the mid-1920s. Diagonals break with Mondrian’s strict orthogonality and prepare the way for his interior architecture projects. This is not a Dada work, despite van Doesburg’s personal ties to the movement. The painting retains its discipline, but its diagonal has clearly begun the rebellion.
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#47
Robert Delaunay47. Simultaneous Open Windows (First Part, Third Motif)
Simultaneous Open Windows belongs to the series Delaunay painted in 1912. The Eiffel Tower and the city dissolve into planes of colour that function like modern stained glass. Apollinaire saw an Orphic art in them. Dada would later disturb this lyrical confidence, but would inherit a world in which the traditional window had already lost its hinges.
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#48
Joseph Stella48. Battle of Lights, Coney Island
Battle of Lights, Coney Island, painted by Stella between 1913 and 1914, transforms the amusement park into a Futurist explosion. Electric lights, crowds and rides compress into a decorative whirl. The work is not Dada, but belongs to the New York that would welcome Picabia and Duchamp. Modernity flashes here before it has even read the safety instructions.
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#49
Marsden Hartley49. Abstraction
Hartley’s Abstraction brings together signs, flat areas of colour and rhythms inherited from his Berlin experience. The American painter develops a personal language more symbolic than strictly geometric. His work crosses avant-garde networks without joining Dada. This position on the sidelines is valuable: not every modernity proclaimed the same manifesto, and some preferred painting to shouting.
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#50
Otto Freundlich50. Composition
Otto Freundlich’s Composition constructs a mosaic of coloured shapes aiming at social and spiritual harmony. Persecuted by Nazism and murdered in 1943, Freundlich saw his work branded ‘degenerate art’. He was not a Dadaist, but shared its rejection of authoritarian values. Here, colour unites what politics would tragically seek to divide.
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New York, Berlin, Paris and Zurich share artists, journals and ideas, even when Hartley, Stella or Delaunay follow paths distinct from the movement.
#51
Robert Delaunay51. Simultaneous Windows No. 2
Simultaneous Windows No. 2 continues Delaunay’s exploration of light as an autonomous material. Transparent planes overlap, allowing the city to appear and disappear. The series widely influenced the European abstraction that Dada would encounter in Zurich and Paris. The window no longer frames the world: it mixes it together, seriously complicating the task of cleaning the glass.
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#52
Robert Delaunay52. Simultaneous Windows on the City
Simultaneous Windows on the City combines tower, rooftops and colours in a space without a single depth. Delaunay transforms Paris into a luminous phenomenon rather than a topographical subject. This confidence in colour distinguishes Orphism from Dada nihilism. Yet both reject the old perspective: they simply disagree about what to build after evicting it.
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#53
Robert Delaunay53. Circular Forms
Circular Forms, sometimes associated with the sun and moon, develops Delaunay’s cosmic vocabulary of coloured discs. The work emerged before the First World War, in a climate of abstract optimism. Dada would soon respond to catastrophe with absurdity. Here, the celestial bodies keep turning with a regularity that Europe failed to imitate.
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#54
Robert Delaunay54. Endless Rhythm
Endless Rhythm belongs to Delaunay’s large late paintings, in which discs become decorative architecture. The motif has no clearly assigned beginning or end. Appearing here among the movement’s neighbours, it shows the survival of an affirmative abstraction after Dada. The rhythm never stops, even when artistic movements change their names and cafés.
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#55
Theo van Doesburg55. Counter-Composition VI
Counter-Composition VI continues van Doesburg’s diagonal revolution. The coloured planes seem to slide beyond the frame, as though they were about to invade a wall or room. De Stijl shares Dada’s desire to transform life, but chooses order rather than sabotage. The same doorway to modernity, with very different house rules.
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#56
Theo van Doesburg56. Counter-Composition VII
In Counter-Composition VII, van Doesburg balances several diagonals without a stable centre. The work belongs to the period when he sought a more dynamic and architectural painting. His activities under the Dada pseudonym I. K. Bonset complicate the boundaries: the orderly theorist also led a decidedly less well-behaved second life. Geometry has an excellent alibi here.
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#57
Robert Delaunay57. The City of Paris
The City of Paris, painted between 1910 and 1912, is one of Delaunay’s major compositions. Three female figures, the Eiffel Tower and urban fragments connect monumental tradition with Cubism. The work predates Dada but anticipates the international circulation of the avant-garde. Paris remains recognisable, despite a reconstruction whose paperwork city hall certainly never received.
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#58
Theo van Doesburg58. Counter-Composition XII
Counter-Composition XII arranges colours along a diagonal that seems to shift the entire surface. Van Doesburg wanted to apply this principle to painting, furniture and architecture. His proximity to Dada comes through his journals and pseudonyms, not through this work’s style. The painting is methodical; its author nevertheless knew perfectly well how to keep company with disorder.
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#59
Theo van Doesburg59. Counter-Composition X
Counter-Composition X reduces shapes and colours to a tense relationship characteristic of van Doesburg’s explorations. The title, sometimes translated in different ways, recalls the international circulation of his works. De Stijl seeks a universal language where Dada distrusts languages too sure of themselves. The composition remains clear, but its critical passport bears several stamps.
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#60
Theo van Doesburg60. Counter-Composition of Dissonances XVI
Counter-Composition of Dissonances XVI introduces music into van Doesburg’s geometric vocabulary. Dissonance is not a mistake: it prevents balance from becoming inertia. This idea momentarily brings De Stijl closer to Dada’s provocations. The painting breaks no chairs, but introduces enough tension to keep the living room awake.
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#61
Robert Delaunay61. Simultaneous Circles
Delaunay’s Simultaneous Circles transforms the perception of colour into rotation. The rings and sectors do not describe particular wheels; they experiment with how one colour changes its neighbour. Dada does not adopt this programme, but inherits its visual freedom. The circles cooperate remarkably well, almost suspicious behaviour in a story devoted to sabotage.
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#62
Robert Delaunay62. Discs
In Discs, Delaunay repeats and varies a motif that became emblematic of his abstraction. Painting proceeds through contrast and expansion, without narrative. This autonomy of colour opens a territory that Dada artists could repurpose, reject or use. The disc remains a perfect shape; the era is considerably less perfect, which may explain its enduring success.
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#63
Marsden Hartley63. Movement No. 5, Provincetown Houses
Movement No. 5, Provincetown Houses belongs to the series Hartley painted after returning to the United States. Coastal façades are transformed into abstract masses and rhythms. The work moves away from Dada, but extends the modern decomposition of landscape. Provincetown keeps its houses; Hartley reserves the right to shift their balance.
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#64
Theo van Doesburg64. Composition
This Composition by van Doesburg belongs to his explorations before or alongside De Stijl. The visible is reduced to planes to achieve a more general organisation. Van Doesburg would encounter Dada through the journal Mécano and his alter ego I. K. Bonset. The painting retains its seriousness while its author quietly prepares the typographic confetti.
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#65
Marsden Hartley65. Movement No. 6, Provincetown
Movement No. 6, Provincetown continues Hartley’s transformation of maritime architecture into pictorial energy. Each version changes weight, colours and direction rather than repeating a landscape. The number emphasises the experimental nature of the series. The town poses several times, but the painter refuses to give it exactly the same portrait.
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#66
Theo van Doesburg66. Composition 1923–1924
Composition 1923–1924 clearly places van Doesburg’s work at the moment of his diagonal turn. The planes leave frontal balance behind to produce an active expansion. The date also coincides with his European exchanges with Dada and Constructivism. The movements meet in journals and cafés, then return home to paint pictures that continue to disagree.
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#67
Marsden Hartley67. Movement, Bermuda
In Movement, Bermuda, Hartley translates the island’s light and landscape into simplified shapes. The word movement avoids the postcard and emphasises perception. This American abstraction remains outside Dada, but reflects the same crisis of the traditional subject. Bermuda keeps its sunshine; the painting politely removes its horizon.
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#68
Robert Delaunay68. Coloured Discs
Delaunay’s Coloured Discs belongs to the maturity of his simultaneous language. Neighbouring colours respond to one another, creating a sense of depth and movement without perspective. In a history of Dada, the work plays the role of an optimistic neighbour. It sabotages nothing, but proves that painting had already learned to operate without an official subject.
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#69
Robert Delaunay69. Window with Orange Curtains
Window with Orange Curtains retains a domestic motif while subjecting it to simultaneous contrasts. Delaunay lets the interior, window and city interpenetrate through colour. The canvas predates Dada interventions involving everyday objects, but shares their rejection of a stable separation. The curtains no longer close off the view: they become the event themselves.
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#70
Theo van Doesburg70. Decentralised Composition
Decentralised Composition removes any dominant centre from the surface. Van Doesburg distributes planes towards the edges, as though the work continued into architecture. This ambition to invade everyday life intersects with Dada without resembling it. The centre has not been forgotten; it was removed during a reorganisation that nobody thought worth challenging.
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#71
Robert Delaunay71. Window on the City No. 3
Window on the City No. 3 belongs to a sequence in which Delaunay varies the presence of Paris behind transparent planes. The number makes each canvas an experiment in light. This serial method interests the entire avant-garde. Dada would often prefer a single rupture, but Delaunay’s window demonstrates that a revolution can also proceed through successive versions.
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#72
Robert Delaunay72. Three-Panel Windows
Three-Panel Windows expands Delaunay’s simultaneous explorations by dividing the view like an architectural device. The panels force the eye to reconstruct continuity. The work is not Dada, but shares its questioning of the unified painting. Three windows offer more light and, above all, three times as many opportunities to lose perspective.
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#73
Marsden Hartley73. Movements
Hartley’s Movements brings several directions together in a composition that abandons the stable landscape. The plural emphasises the coexistence of forces rather than a single trajectory. Hartley follows a personal modernity between Symbolism and abstraction. His painting signs no Dada manifesto; it prefers to keep several options open, a reasonable strategy in an era that quickly closes them.
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#74
Robert Delaunay74. Windows on the City
Windows on the City turns Paris into overlapping colours rather than measurable depth. Delaunay uses transparency as a pictorial device, without actual glass. This luminous city predates Dada collages and montages. It shows that modern space had already been dismantled, even if its pieces were still carefully painted by hand.
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#75
Robert Delaunay75. The Window
The Window reduces the motif to a few colour relationships, making the boundary between inside and outside uncertain. Delaunay continues his Orphic project of autonomous painting. To Dada, this autonomy may seem too harmonious, but it frees the surface from old obligations. A window always looks onto something; here, mainly onto colour itself.
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Van Doesburg and Delaunay remind us that Dada developed amid avant-garde movements that were sometimes allies, sometimes opponents, and always busy rewriting the rules.
#76
Theo van Doesburg76. Composition of Proportions
Composition of Proportions reveals van Doesburg’s ambition to base art on measurable relationships. The planes are distributed like the elements of an ideal architecture. Dada distrusts precisely this kind of certainty, despite the artist’s double life. The painting measures everything carefully; the history of the avant-garde takes care of warping the ruler.
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#77
Robert Delaunay77. The Three Windows, the Tower and the Wheel
The Three Windows, the Tower and the Wheel brings together several of Delaunay’s emblems of modernity. The Eiffel Tower, the Ferris wheel and window frames respond to one another in a coloured construction. The work shares Dada’s taste for the contemporary city, without its irony. Paris becomes an enthusiastic machine, still convinced that all its gears will cooperate.
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#78
Robert Delaunay78. Simultaneous Tower
Simultaneous Tower transforms the Eiffel Tower into a luminous axis caught within coloured planes. Delaunay painted the monument repeatedly from 1909 onwards, making it lean, vibrate and almost take flight. Dada would inherit this modern icon but reverse its triumphalism. The tower is still standing; perspective left the construction site long ago.
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#79
Theo van Doesburg79. Composition in Half-Tones
Composition in Half-Tones shows van Doesburg limiting contrasts to study subtler differences. The painting appears less spectacular than his counter-compositions, but reveals De Stijl’s experimental method. Dada is present here only through the artist’s intellectual proximity, not in the style. Even a provocateur must sometimes carefully adjust his greys.
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#80
Theo van Doesburg80. Composition in Dissonances
Composition in Dissonances turns disagreement into structure. Van Doesburg borrows from music the idea that tensions can produce a more active form than perfect harmony. This notion resonates with Dada, which prefers collision to consensus. The painting remains geometric and tidy; dissonance has simply wiped its shoes before entering.
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#81
Theo van Doesburg81. Composition in Grey (Ragtime)
Composition in Grey (Ragtime) combines a restrained palette with a popular American rhythm. Van Doesburg translates musical syncopation into alternating planes. Ragtime connects modernity, dance and urban culture, concerns shared by Dada evenings. Here, music makes no sound, but disrupts the beat enough to deserve its title.
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#82
Theo van Doesburg82. Composition I
Composition I belongs to the early stages of van Doesburg’s systematic numbering. The title removes anecdote to focus attention on colours and proportions. This rigour contrasts with the absurd poems he published under a pseudonym. The artist thus maintains two offices: one organises planes, the other conscientiously disrupts language.
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#83
Theo van Doesburg83. Composition II
Composition II continues van Doesburg’s development of an elementary vocabulary. Each new canvas changes the relationship between surfaces rather than adding a subject. The series builds De Stijl through successive experiments. Dada appears in the margins, in the author’s ability to contradict his own seriousness whenever he changes his signature.
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#84
Theo van Doesburg84. Composition IV
Composition IV shows van Doesburg testing a new distribution of masses and colours within the grid. The number signals ongoing exploration rather than a hierarchy of quality. This methodical practice seems far removed from Dada. Yet the two movements share an obsession: starting art again from its elements, even if they never agree on the assembly order.
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#85
Theo van Doesburg85. Simultaneous Composition XXIV
Simultaneous Composition XXIV adopts a term widely disseminated by Delaunay to describe the reciprocal action of colours. Van Doesburg incorporates it into his own geometry. The canvas reflects the rapid circulation of ideas before and after Dada. Artists borrow words, correct them and republish them, managing copyright in a delightfully avant-garde manner.
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#86
Theo van Doesburg86. Composition VI (on a Black Background)
Composition VI on a Black Background reverses De Stijl’s usual luminosity. Coloured shapes emerge from a dark field, accentuating their weight. Van Doesburg shows that his system can vary without dissolving. Dada does not intervene directly, but the black background is enough to remind us that a universal rule sometimes benefits from a change of scenery.
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#87
Theo van Doesburg87. Composition VII
Composition VII belongs to van Doesburg’s numbered progression towards total abstraction. The planes no longer describe a cow, a dance or a particular architecture. The painting affirms the system’s autonomy. This confidence distinguishes De Stijl from Dada, which would probably have asked whether the number seven was really indispensable before overturning it.
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#88
Theo van Doesburg88. Composition X
Composition X continues the reduction of the image to relationships between lines and colours. Van Doesburg seeks a language transferable to painting and architecture alike. Yet his Dada activities under the name Bonset prove that he also knows how to speak in riddles. The canvas chooses clarity; its author saves absurdity for his correspondence.
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#89
Theo van Doesburg89. Composition XI
Composition XI once again changes the series’ balance, showing that van Doesburg’s geometry is never an automatic recipe. The surfaces change in size and visual pressure. Dada is not the work’s subject, but constitutes its restless historical neighbour. The grid remains calm because someone has to keep an eye on the corridor.
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#90
Theo van Doesburg90. Composition XII in Black and White
Composition XII in Black and White removes colour to examine only value, direction and proportion. This spareness brings the canvas closer to an architectural diagram. Dada often works with the black and white of print, but with a more chaotic aim. The same palette, opposing philosophies: an excellent reminder that form alone can never define a movement.
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#91
Theo van Doesburg91. Composition XIII
Composition XIII continues van Doesburg’s serial explorations with a new balance of planes. Numbering offers the viewer little narrative assistance, a choice shared by many European abstractions. Dada often prefers Picabia’s absurd titles, but the result is similar: the label stops kindly explaining the image on our behalf.
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#92
Theo van Doesburg92. Composition XVII
Composition XVII belongs to a phase when the grid begins to experience greater internal tensions. Van Doesburg prepares the diagonal breaks of Elementarism. The work is not Dada, but its development shows a discipline capable of producing its own opposition. Even the tidiest systems eventually move a piece of furniture without warning.
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#93
Theo van Doesburg93. Composition XVIII in Three Parts
Composition XVIII in Three Parts extends geometry across several units, turning painting into an almost architectural ensemble. The traditional triptych loses its religious narrative in favour of relationships of form. This secularisation connects with the entire avant-garde. Dada might have laughed at the solemn format; van Doesburg prefers to give it three problems of proportion to solve.
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#94
Theo van Doesburg94. Composition XX
Composition XX reflects the persistence with which van Doesburg explores a limited vocabulary. The high number does not mean empty repetition: intervals and weights change. This methodical patience contrasts with Dada’s provocative instant. The painting proceeds through adjustments, like a machine its designer refuses to deliver before the final turn of the screw.
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#95
Theo van Doesburg95. Composition XXI
Composition XXI continues De Stijl’s experimental approach, each canvas serving as a controlled variation. Van Doesburg is already thinking about the transition between surface, furniture and space. Dada also wants to leave painting behind, but takes less regulation-compliant doors. The two projects intersect here without sharing the same evacuation plan.
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#96
Theo van Doesburg96. Composition XXII
Composition XXII concludes a long sequence of van Doesburg works in this selection. Geometry remains rigorous, but the accumulation of variations reveals an art in motion rather than a fixed dogma. His dual identity as De Stijl theorist and Dada poet explains this tension. After twenty-two compositions, even order begins to suspect it has an unconscious.
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#97
Joseph Stella97. Brooklyn Bridge
Joseph Stella painted Brooklyn Bridge as a cathedral of cables, steel and light. An Italian immigrant fascinated by New York, he transforms infrastructure into a spiritual symbol of modernity. The work is not Dada, but shares the American milieu that welcomed Duchamp and Picabia. The bridge connects two shores and several avant-garde movements without asking for membership cards.
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#98
Robert Delaunay98. Champs de Mars: The Red Tower
Champs de Mars: The Red Tower shows Delaunay making the Eiffel Tower vibrate above Paris. Red pushes the monument towards the viewer while the buildings fragment. This faith in the modern city predates the Dada rupture. The tower becomes a pictorial icon; Dada would soon test whether icons could withstand irony.
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#99
Marsden Hartley99. Arrangement
Hartley’s Arrangement organises signs and colours like personal hieroglyphs. The title avoids promising an identifiable subject and emphasises the act of placing. This symbolic abstraction develops alongside Dada networks without belonging to them. Every emblem seems to have a meaning, but the dictionary has been entrusted to someone who no longer answers the telephone.
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#100
Robert Delaunay100. Political Drama
Delaunay’s Political Drama combines simultaneous colour and current events, a field rarely central to his work. The title transforms public tensions into pictorial movement rather than a legible caricature. Dada would make politics a more aggressive material, notably in Berlin. Here, the drama remains luminous, as though parliament had replaced its speeches with coloured discs.
Order a Reproduction of This Painting →What the Works Reveal
One Hundred Paintings, Three Provisional Certainties
Dada doubts everything, including the previous sentence. On canvas, this freedom becomes very tangible: displacing signs, disrupting composition and turning the machine into a curious mirror.
The Sign Becomes the Subject
An eye, number, word or gear can carry a painting without telling a traditional story.
Absurdity Can Be Precise
Beneath the joke, Dada constructs a clear critique of cultural and political habits.
Colour Keeps Control
Even provocative painting holds together through balances, contrasts and a carefully calculated rhythm.
A Fragmented Chronology
Five Dates That Refuse to March in Step
The Cabaret Voltaire brings together sound poetry, performance, music and images.
Selected objects and journals shift the boundary between artwork and gesture.
Dada takes on a political tone and turns photomontage into a critical weapon.
The First International Dada Fair exhibits the movement in all its organised insolence.
Parisian quarrels hasten the group’s end and the spread of its methods.
The Movement in Depth
Why Does Dada Still Make Noise?
Dada emerged from a refusal: of war, grand speeches and perfectly pressed official taste. Even when they paint, its artists do not seek to politely put the world back in order. They displace signs, short-circuit narratives and let the image ask questions for which the frame had prepared no answer.
Francis Picabia gives this painting a delightfully insolent mechanism. In The Cacodylic Eye, Udnie, Amorous Parade or Edtaonisl, body, machine, signature and enigma intermingle. A gear can become a portrait, an eye can welcome an entire salon, and the canvas often seems to know a joke that it politely refuses to explain.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp brings a luminous rigour. Her geometric compositions prove that the Dada spirit does not need to be messy to be radical. Rectangles, diagonals and colours advance with very calm precision, as though absurdity had, exceptionally, tidied its desk before beginning.
Theo van Doesburg connects Dada with De Stijl and European abstraction. His rhythms, compositions and counter-compositions are not all strictly Dadaist, but illuminate the circulation of ideas around the movement. This kinship is identified along the way rather than disguised as a convenient birth certificate.
Robert Delaunay, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Otto Freundlich and Louis Marcoussis also occupy this neighbouring territory. Their paintings share with Dada a fragmented, mechanical, symbolic or deliberately unstable modernity. They appear after the Picabia–Taeuber core, so that the ranking remains a readable history rather than a party where nobody can find their coat.
In a room, these paintings bring rhythm, irony and contrast without slipping a photograph or object into the sequence. Picabia’s machines wake up an office, the geometries structure a living room, and the neighbouring abstractions give the wall a more interesting conversation than the weather.
Finally, the selection applies four checks: painting as the medium, an appropriate artist, a single image and a verifiable historical rationale. Standalone collages, reliefs, photographs, posters, sculptures and readymades remain essential to Dada, but not to this ranking of paintings. Even provocation sometimes benefits from reading the page title.
Four Keys to Understanding
Look Without Searching for Instructions Beneath the Frame
Dada prefers a question to a decorative answer. Machine, sign, colour and irony show how each painting shifts familiar habits.
Follow the Gears
Observe how mechanical shapes become bodies, portraits or visual jokes.
Read Without Instructions
Numbers, letters and symbols contribute to the composition as much as painted shapes.
Measure the Tension
Flat areas of colour, contrasts and geometric rhythms prevent the image from becoming a mere joke.
Find the Target
Behind the scandal often lies a precise critique of art, war or authority.
Archives of Indiscipline
Continue Beyond the Last Painting
The Cabaret Voltaire, journals, exhibitions and correspondence extend the history of these paintings. Dada travels fast, changes pseudonyms and associates with movements that do not always share its methods, but gladly offer it a page, a stage or an argument.
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