85 The name Dada was adopted at the nightclub Cabaret Voltaire in Z rich in 1916 by a group of young artists. When a paper knife inserted into a FrenchGerman dictionary pointed to the French word dada ( hobby-horse ), the term was chosen for their antiaesthetic creations and protest activities. The best-known readymade is the porcelain urinal entitled Fountain (1917). By selecting mass-produced, commonplace objects, Duchamp attempted to destroy the notion of the uniqueness of the art object. The result was a new definition of art as an intellectual rather than a material process. Search the net and find out how important Peggy Guggenheim was for contemporary art and which sculpture by Brancusi she bought. Picasso, Bull's head to cast: forgiare, modellare to chisel: intagliare, cesellare to mock: beffarsi, prendere in giro 196 CreAtive ArtS THE 20TH CENTURY: SCULPTURE Dadaism Dadaism was an avant-garde artistic and cultural movement prompted by the European societal climate after World War I. It was a rejection of modern capitalism, bourgeois culture, and wartime politics. It had a great influence on sculpture. Dada artists shared a profound disillusionment with traditional modes of creating art and often turned instead to experimentation with chance and spontaneity. Like other dada artists, Duchamp established a new relationship to perceived beauty with his ready-mades in 1914. With the idea of mocking and rewriting the concept of conventional art, Duchamp created ready-made objects, packaged , taken out of their context and made into a work of art by the simple selection of them by the artist. Picasso Apart from cubist and surrealistic sculptures, Picasso contributed richly to sculpture with his assemblages. Collecting elements of compositions from waste and debris, he made sculptures of them which he then cast in bronze. That is how the Bull s Head was made of the handlebars and seat of a bicycle. During the post-war years, he created compositions out of different waste: shoes, baskets, doors, etc. These include Little Girl Jumping Rope, Woman with Baby Carriage, and images of animals like Owl, She-Goat, and Pigeon. Other major sculptors After World War II, sculpture expanded, in size and in relationship to humans and the environment. Arp was in line with Dada assumptions in seeking new, experimental art that broke with tradition. For him, however, Dada was not a violent attack, but a kind of recuperation, Moore, Sheep piece a redemption of art from the ruins of the centuries . He often used painted wood. Brancusi s stylised works are reduced to the smallest form, and his favourite elements include simple shapes: the egg, cube, sphere, and materials such as stone, wood, bronze, and marble. Calder, Yellow moon Through Calder s work, engineering is combined with art, helping change the way forms are conceived in space. Man Walking is illustrative of Giacometti s style. The elongated form conveyed a sense of loneliness and absolute separation among individuals to emphasise the fragility of human existence. Unlike many sculptors, Giacometti did not start with a block of material to be worked on and chiselled until he found the desired form. Instead, the artist started with a metal skeleton to which he added material before casting. In the formation of Moore s highly personal language, the influence of pre-Columbian civilisations as well as the influences of contemporary art, in particular Picasso, played a major role.