In 1916, Zurich was a beacon for refugees. Fleeing the death and destruction of World War I, artists and free-thinkers from all over Europe fled to the neutral Swiss city.
And it was here that the people who would start the art movement Dada came together. In a rare interview from 1959, held in the BBC archive, Richard Huelsenbeck describes how the group of young artists and pacifists shared a despair about the war and a disgust for bourgeois values.
At the Cabaret Voltaire, he and the Romanian-born poet Tristan Tzara, the French sculptor Jean Arp and Romanian-born artist Marcel Janco experimented. Performances were known for their spontaneity, chance and absurdity - a departure from the conventional which confronted audiences. It was the beginning of an aesthetic which would spread across Europe and to New York City, eventually influencing Surrealism and later punk. This episode is produced and presented by Josephine McDermott.
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This episode has been updated since its original broadcast to clarify the national origins of some artists.
(Photo: Scene from the Dadaist film Ballet Mécanique, 1924 from the Collection of Musée national d'art moderne, Paris. Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images via Getty Images.)
