A Century in Motion – Part 5: The Automobile and Dadaism, the Definitive Break with the Past

Sometimes extremes do meet: if the aristocratic elegance of Deco had marked an entire era, already during the War — in 1916, in Zurich — an artistic and cultural movement had been born whose very soul resided in extravagance and in a total disregard for everything that was homologated, standardised, tamed. Its name was Dada, and from the immediate postwar years onward it inspired cinema, literature, and the arts, graphic design above all.
Dadaism by Dietmar Elger, published by Taschen, recounts the irreverent artistic revolution that defied every rule. A visual journey through the absolute creative freedom of Dada.
To give some measure of its disruptive force, it is enough to recall that art — thanks to Marcel Duchamp — went beyond all rules, legitimising the concept of "ready-made." Duchamp's provocation rested on the assumption that any ordinary existing object can be seen as art: even a porcelain urinal, signed and dated. What more violent severing of the mannered rules of the past could one imagine?
Fountain by Marcel Duchamp — a simple industrial urinal rebaptised and signed "R. Mutt" — is the act that challenges every traditional notion of art, shifting attention from the object itself to the artist's conceptual choice.
Cinema, too, became a showcase for innovation, carrying the automobile into a distant future: in Fritz Lang's famous film Metropolis, the extraordinary Tropfenwagen of Edmund Rumpler make their appearance — cars that anticipated the necessity of a style attentive to aerodynamics, so neglected at the time, and to functional habitability. The few Tropfenwagen that were actually produced — a premonition of the minivans of the 1980s that no one ever bought — were destroyed in the film's most staggering scene. What a shame.
The poster of Metropolis, Fritz Lang's visionary film, embodies the Expressionist aesthetic with its futuristic city. For 1927 it was a work ahead of its time — revolutionary in its special effects and in its dystopian representation of industrial modernity.
The film also prefigured, through architectures of astonishing contemporaneity, the world we live in today.
Hollywood — its directors, its stars — began to spread across the world the image of America, a way of life in which the automobile held a central and defining place. Perfect for a world hovering between reality and dream, the Ruxton Model C, with its extravagant horizontal striped paintwork fading into white, marked a deep cultural difference.
The Ruxton Model C is celebrated for its low, streamlined design — surprisingly modern for the 1920s. Its daring paintwork makes it a natural icon of glamour on a Hollywood set of the era.