Dadaglobe

Dadaglobe was an ambitious anthology of the Dada movement slated for publication in 1921, but abandoned for financial and other reasons and never published. At 160 pages with over a hundred reproductions of artworks and over a hundred texts by some fifty artists in ten countries, Dadaglobe was to have documented Dada's apotheosis as an artistic and literary movement of international breadth. Edited by Dada co-founder Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) in Paris, Dadaglobe was not conceived of as a summary of the movement since its founding in 1916, but rather meant to be a snapshot of its expanded incarnation at war's end. Not merely a vehicle for existing works, the project functioned as one of Dada's most generative catalysts for the production of new works.

The Dadaglobe solicitation letter, sent from Paris in early November 1920, requested four types of visual submissions—photographic portraits (which could be manipulated, but should "retain clarity"); original drawings; photographs of artworks; and designs for book pages—along with prose, poetry, or other verbal "inventions." Contributors included Jean (Hans) Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, and Sophie Taeuber among others (see full list of contributors below).

Some of Dada's most iconic artworks were created in direct response to the Dadaglobe solicitation letter: Ernst's self-portrait montage commonly known as Dadamax (The Punching Ball or the Immortality of Buonarroti) and his Chinese Nightingale, Taeuber's Dada Head, and Baargeld's Typical Vertical Mess as Depiction of the Dada Baargeld are just a few examples. These works were conceived by the artists with their presentation in reproduction foremost in mind. Dadaglobe was to have been a manifesto on the revised status of the artwork in reproduction.

The volume was advertised in Duchamp's and Man Ray's journal New York Dada in 1921: "Order from the publishing house 'La Sirène' 7 rue Pasquier, Paris, DADAGLOBE, the work of dadas from all over the world […] The incalculable number of pages of reproductions and of text is a guarantee of the success of the book." When André Breton, later founder of Surrealism, saw the intended contents of the book, he remarked: "The grand album 'Dadaglobe' […] will soon appear. […] After the publication of this volume it will be impossible to contest Dada's artistic value."

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