A Dada cell in a defeated city

In Cologne in 1920, the First World War has been over for two years, and Germany lost it. The old empire has collapsed into the shaky new Weimar Republic (the democratic German state set up in 1919, named for the town where its constitution was written), the economy is sliding toward ruin, and a generation of young men has come home from the trenches convinced that the respectable bourgeois world that marched them off to die was a fraud from top to bottom. One of those men is a painter named Max Ernst(1891–1976), born near Cologne, trained loosely in philosophy and art, and back from four years in the German artillery with no patience left for the culture that produced the slaughter.

Ernst’s answer was Dada, the international anti-art movement that had begun in neutral Zurich in 1916, in a nightclub called the Cabaret Voltaire, among artists and poets sitting out the war. Dada’s whole program was refusal. If the civilized order had produced the trenches, then reason, good taste, beauty, and the very idea of a serious work of art were all suspect, and the right response was nonsense, provocation, and mockery. (The name itself is nonsense: depending on who you ask, “dada” is French baby-talk for a hobbyhorse, or just two syllables picked at random from a dictionary. The pointlessness was the point.) By 1919–1920 Dada had spread to Berlin, to Paris, to New York, and to Cologne, where Ernst founded the local cell with his friend Johannes Theodor Baargeld and, in close dialogue, the Alsatian artist Jean (Hans) Arp.

Cologne Dada shared the general project (ridicule the bourgeoisie, ridicule the war, ridicule the idea of modern man as an obedient, off-the-peg conformist), but Ernst’s branch had a private tilt the others didn’t. Where Berlin Dada was loud and political and Zurich Dada was performance, Ernst was quietly fascinated by chance, by accident, and by the strange logic of dreams. That fascination is why he is counted, a few years later, as a founder of Surrealism, the movement of the dreaming unconscious that grows directly out of work like this one. He is, in the standard telling, the first major visual artist to carry Dada over into the dream.

And the work that shows the crossing most clearly is almost too small and too modest to bear the weight: a sheet of paper about the size of a place mat, covered with hats clipped out of a mail-order catalogue.