Dada City: New York’s Contribution to a European Movement

Zurich, Hannover, Berlin, Cologne, Paris, Tblisi, Mantua, Prague . . . New York. On the atlas of Dada’s international spread in the mid-1910s and early 1920s sits just one outlier across the Atlantic. “We in Zurich,” writes Hans Richter in his celebrated history Dada: Art and Anti-Art, “remained unaware until 1917 or 1918 of a development which was taking place, quite independently, in New York. Its origins were different, but its participants were playing essentially the