Theo van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters, Kleine Dada Soirée, 1922. Lithographic Poster, 11 7/8” x 11 7/8” National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Collection.
A collaboration between Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg and German artist Kurt Schwitters, this graphic red and black work employs a multitude of striking fonts and varied text sizes- capital letters and lower case - in different languages interspersed with pictograms, in an overlapping, multi-directional arrangement.
Is your eye is having trouble focusing? That’s not surprising since this extremely crowded poster for a Dada Soirée seems to go against every design convention used for legibility, clarity, hierarchy and emphasis . But then again, that’s exactly the point (no pun intended, well maybe a little punning on the pointing fingers)! The poster was produced to advertise a program of radical performances, including the music of composer Erik Satie, abstract poetry by Schwitters, and a humorous lecture on “Dadasophie” (or the so-called philosophy of Dada) by Van Doesburg. Incorporated into it are a number of explicitly contradictory slogans - such as: “Dada is dead,” “Dada is against the future,”" and “Long Live Dada.”
The short-lived Dada movement (often seen as the precursor to the Fluxus of the 1960s and the Punk ethos of the 1970s) emerged shortly after the outbreak of WWI as a set of artistic strategies intended to disrupt nationalism, rationalism, and tradition, and was frequently characterized by interdisciplinary collaboration, absurd gestures, and cheeky, even outlandish stunts - in other words the unexpected. Given all of this, Van Doesburg’s and Schwitters’ cacophonous typographic collage seems the perfect expression of what Dutch audiences (for whom it was intended) might expect from an evening of Dada!