Avant-garde is a term thrown around quite a lot in European art, usually referring to something that's innovative or experimental. One school that pushed at the boundaries of the avant-garde was a movement from the early 1900s, simply known as Dada.

Dadaism began around 1916, right in the middle of the First World War and other dramatic changes throughout Europe. The sheer irrationality of war led artists like Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara to conclude that the historical emphasis on logic and rationality was to blame, and so they and several others began to look at art and culture in a deliberately unorganized way. Using the Zurich-based nightclub Cabaret Voltaire as its launch point, the Dada movement spread out to Berlin, Paris, New York, and other cultural strongholds.

However, Dadaism was short-lived. By 1924, the chaotic energy had begun to fade as Surrealism and other movements came into fashion. German Dadaists were denounced as "degenerates" under the Nazi regime and the rest of the movement couldn't survive the optimism of postwar Europe. Its influence, at least, was still felt in new art movements during the Fifties and Sixties, especially in the postmodern art of Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock.

While each artist had their own style and theme, the common thread running through Dada art was to deliberately break apart order and reconstruct it into new, imaginative forms. This led to the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, to collages assembled from paper clippings and photo montages. Even the font and typography of their manifestos and letters were ordinary things to be experimented with, invoking chaos on the printed page. Chance and abstraction were valued above logic and visual clarity.

Although Marcel Duchamp might one of the best-known Dada artists, the Romanian artist Marcel Janco is owed just as much praise. During the Dada period of his career, Janco took an interest in African tribal masks and other forms of primitive art, hoping to break away from the rigid structure of European art and culture. Allegedly, he was also the first of the Dadaists to experiment with using found objects as art. One of his contributions was a wood-engraved cover for the book of a play written by Tristan Tzara entitled La Première aventure céleste de Monsieur Antipyrine. The font of the cover is deliberately warped and cluttered together in a thick column, challenging the reader before they even open the book and read Tzara's acclaimed "anti-play." It's a testament to the focus and energy that fueled the movement, even though it didn't last very long.

To see some of the most famous works in Dadaism, you can visit such museums as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, and the revived Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

Image by Amigomac on Flickr