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(b Pirmasens, Feb 22, 1886; d San Abbondio, Switzerland, Sept 14, 1927).

German writer and performer . After studying sociology and philosophy at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg he began working as a stage manager at the theatre in Plauen in 1910. He wrote a number of plays while in Munich in 1912. He also wrote poetry and was charged with obscenity for his poem Der Henker (pubd in Revolution, 15 Oct 1913) but was later exonerated on account of its ‘unintelligibility’. About this time he experimented with Expressionist painting. His plans to form, with Vasily Kandinsky, a new type of experimental Expressionist theatre in Munich were interrupted by the beginnings of World War I. Ball volunteered but was rejected for health reasons. He became a pacifist and published poetry and prose in several journals.

Ball became a leading figure in the development of the Dada movement, and he is credited with inventing the name. In 1915, with Richard Huelsenbeck, he organized Expressionist readings in Berlin. In May of the same year he emigrated with ...

German, 20th century, male.

Born 1921, in Krefeld; died 23 January 1986, in Düsseldorf.

Performance artist, installation artist, assemblage artist, engraver.

Neo-Dadaism, Fluxus, Conceptual Art.

Joseph Beuys spent his youth in Cleves. Relatively little is known about his early years, but he is thought to have begun studying natural sciences when he was mobilised in 1941 as a bomber pilot in the Luftwaffe. In winter 1943, his plane was shot down over the Russian steppes near Sevastopol. According to Beuys, some Tatars found him buried in the cabin wreckage and just managed to save his life by smearing the wounds of his half-frozen body with animal fat and wrapping him in felt. There is some doubt as to the truth of parts of this story, but certainly the metaphorical power of the fat and felt became a recurring theme throughout the rest of his career....

American, 20th century, male.

Born 1935, in Cincinnati.

Painter (gouache), watercolourist, assemblage artist, happenings artist, draughtsman, lithographer, photographer.

Neo-Dadaism, Pop Art.

Jim Dine spent his childhood in his father’s painting and plumbing tool shop. He studied at the University of Cincinnati and then at Ohio University, leaving with a Bachelor of Arts in 1957. He also followed courses at Boston Museum School. In 1958 he settled in New York, participating in the birth of Pop Art and, more especially, Happening Art, participating in avant-garde group exhibitions. However, this allegiance to Pop Art has to be moderated to some extent; even though historically he lived this experience, he always added a somewhat poetic, sentimental nuance and retained an attachment to pictorial problems, something that brought him closer to another artist who found himself isolated during this period: Cy Twombly.

Influenced by Allan Kaprow, he took an interest in the environment, exhibiting in ...

French, 20th century, male.

Active also active in Germany.

Born 1926, in Sauve; died 2 December 1987, in Les Eyzies (Dordogne).

Installation artist, performance artist, video artist. Multimedia.

Neo-Dadaism, Fluxus, Conceptual Art, Mail Art (forerunner).

The French artist Robert Filliou was closely associated with the Fluxus group, his career embracing French, German and American developments. Having moved to the USA in ...

Canadian, 20th century, group.

Installation artists, photographers, performance artists. Multimedia.

Conceptual Art.

General Idea was a group formed in 1968 by three artists with fictitious identities: AA Bronson, born Michael Tims in Vancouver in 1946; Felix Partz, born Ron Gabe in Winnipeg in 1945; and Jorge Zontal, born Slobodan Saia-Levy, in Parma in 1944. The group emerged out of a mail-art counterculture and initially included a large circle of peers, before asserting itself as a trio in 1971. After working collaboratively for almost three decades, General Idea ended with the death of Partz and Zontal from AIDS-related causes in 1994.

The activities of the group covered many different disciplines, such as sculpture, printmaking, publishing, video, photography, film, installation, and performance art, among others. The framework for much of their work was the fictional 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion , which intentionally alluded to a future Orwellian dystopia. The group conceived of their muse, Miss General Idea, in ...

real name Charles Rogers Grooms

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1 June 1937, in Nashville (Tennessee).

Painter, sculptor, draughtsman, performance artist, environmental artist, installation artist, filmmaker.

Neo-Dadaism, Pop Art.

Born Charles Rogers Grooms, the red-headed Red Grooms studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1955), the New School for Social Research in New York (1956), and under Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts (1957). He was one of the first performance artists amongst others such as Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Robert Whitman. Grooms introduced his ‘happenings’ in New York City as early as 1957, the most famous being The Burning Building at the Delancey Street Museum. Grooms’ style of performance art, non-verbal yet with its theatrical narrative flow and comedic elements, quickly transferred into filmmaking, and he produced Shoot the Moon (1962), after A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès....

American, 20th century, male.

Born 1927; died 21 June 1995, in Cologne.

Performance artist.

Neo-Dadaism, Fluxus.

Al Hansen was born in Queens, New York. He joined the US Air Force and served his country during World War II. While in Frankfurt with the Army of Occupation, he pushed a piano off the top of a five-storey building, an act he was to repeat many times elsewhere. He took part in the first demonstration of the Fluxus group in Wiesbaden in ...

[Herzfeld, Helmut]

(b Berlin, June 19, 1891; d Berlin, April 26, 1968).

German photomontagist, draughtsman, typographer, stage designer, and film director. After a difficult childhood owing to the persecution of his father for his political beliefs, he studied art at the Königliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich from 1907 to 1911, specializing in advertising art. In 1912 he took his first job in a paper packaging company (for which he completed graphic design work) in Mannheim, moving to Berlin in 1913, where he and his brother Wieland Herzfeld made contact with avant-garde circles. (Wieland changed his surname to Herzfelde in early 1914.) Heartfield’s experiences in World War I led him to conclude that the only worthy art was that which took account of social realities (see Eclipse of the Sun on the Rhine, 1957). He destroyed all his early work.

From 1916 Heartfield collaborated closely with George Grosz and in the summer of 1917, like Grosz, anglicized his name, although he did not adopt this form officially until after the war. His earnest criticism of bourgeois society found its expression in his commitment to the ...

British, 20th century, male.

Born 1931.

Performance artist, sculptor of assemblages, painter (mixed media).

Neo-Dadaism, Fluxus.

Geoffrey Hendricks joined Fluxus in 1966. In 1971, together with Bici Forbes Hendricks and George Maciunas, he created Flux Divorce, the movement's principal manifestation. He was also involved in several avant-garde festivals and, in ...

German, 20th century, male.

Born 23 April 1892, in Frankenau; died 20 April 1974, in Muralto, Switzerland.

Performance artist, poet, writer, painter.

Dada. Cabaret Voltaire.

As a medical student in Munich in 1912, Huelsenbeck met the poet and actor Hugo Ball. That winter he went to study philosophy at the Sorbonne and, as the Paris correspondent, contributed to Ball and Hans Leybold’s short-lived leftist periodical, ...

American, 20th century, male.

Born 1927, in Atlantic City (New Jersey); died 5 April 2006, in Encinitas near San Diego (California).

Happenings artist, environmental artist. Multimedia.

Neo-Dadaism.

Allan Kaprow studied under Hans Hofmann in 1947–1948. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Mondrian, under the supervision de Meyer Schapiro. In 1956–1958, he attended John Cage’s course at the New College for Social Research in New York. That period was witnessing a resurgence of interest in Dada and the advent of a belated, and quite unexpected wave of successors to Marcel Duchamp. Dada’s subversive response to art, its readiness to turn things on their head released Kaprow’s energies. He had a chair in art history, was involved in the creation of two galleries in New York, and pursued the activities which befitted a conceptual artist. He taught Visual Arts at the University of San Diego (California)....

Czechoslovak, 20th century, male.

Born 1940, in Plzen.

Painter, draughtsman, performance artist, video artist. Multimedia.

Neo-Dadaism, Fluxus.

Between 1948 and 1956, Milan Knizak studied at the Mariánské Lázne school of music, at the academy of fine arts, and at the faculty of mathematics and physics in Prague. He taught at several American universities and art colleges in Germany and Austria. He was appointed rector of the academy of fine arts in Prague in ...

Croat, 20th century, male.

Born 1921, in Petrinja.

Sculptor, draughtsman, installation artist, performance artist. Multimedia.

Neo-Dadaism, Conceptual Art.

Gorgona Group.

Ivan Kozaric trained at the school of fine art in Zagreb and after an initial stay in Paris where he frequently returned, he started producing work in ...

(b Paris, Oct 31, 1883; d Paris, June 8, 1956).

French painter, stage designer and illustrator. After studying porcelain painting at the Sèvres factory (1901) and drawing in Paris under the French flower painter Madelaine Lemaire (1845–1928), in 1903–4 she studied at the Académie Humbert in Paris, where she met Georges Braque and Francis Picabia. In 1907 she first exhibited paintings at the Salon des Indépendants, met Picasso at Clovis Sagot’s gallery and through Picasso was introduced to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Laurencin and Apollinaire were soon on intimate terms, their relationship lasting until 1912.

Laurencin became a regular associate of the painters and poets associated with the Bateau-Lavoir, who included Picasso, Braque, Gris, Max Jacob and André Salmon. She was present at the banquet given by Picasso in honour of Henri Rousseau in 1908 and produced the first version of Apollinaire and his Friends (1908; Baltimore, MD, Mus. A.) in a highly simplified style, in which she pictured herself and the poet with Picasso and his companion Fernande Olivier. Both this and a larger version with additional figures (...

French, 20th century, male.

Born 30 June 1936, in Neuilly-sur-Seine.

Painter, draughtsman, poet, sculptor, assemblage artist, installation artist, performance artist.

Neo-Dadaism, Visual Poetry.

Surrealist group.

At the age of 15, Jean-Jacques Lebel, whose father was an art specialist, was exchanging letters with André Breton and mixing with the Surrealists (he was later excluded, with Alain Jouffroy, in ...

Lithuanian, 20th century, male.

Active and naturalised in the USA.

Born 1931, in Kaunas; died 9 April 1978, in New York.

Happenings artist, performance artist, photographer, mixed media. Artists' books.

Neo-Dadaism, Fluxus.

George Maciunas was initially an architect and designer, and he opened a gallery in New York....

(b Brussels, Nov 27, 1903; d Brussels, May 13, 1971).

Belgian writer, exhibition organizer, collagist and composer. As a young composer he was influenced by Erik Satie. He collaborated on Dadaist-inspired journals and published, with René Magritte, Œsophage (1925), the only issue of which, containing the poems of Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, remained faithful to the Dada spirit. In 1926 Marie, a ‘journal bi-mensuel pour la belle jeunesse’, published under his direction, pursued the same vein; it only had two issues. Mesens was involved in the establishment of a Surrealist movement (see Surrealism), which was strongly permeated with Dadaism in Belgium. In 1927 he became Director of the Galerie L’Epoque and in 1931 of the Galerie Mesens, both in Brussels. Miró, Magritte and Max Ernst all exhibited with him. He founded the Editions Nicolas Flamel, which published the Surrealists’ collective homage to a parricide, Violette Nozières (Brussels, 1933), André Breton’s lecture ‘Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme’, held on the occasion of the first international Surrealist exhibition organized in Brussels by Mesens under the auspices of ...

Swedish, 20th century, male.

Active in the United States.

Born 1929, in Stockholm.

Sculptor, painter, mixed media, watercolourist, lithographer, draughtsman, performance artist.

Neo-Dadaism, Pop Art.

The son of a Swedish consular official, Claes Oldenburg arrived in the United States with his family in 1929. From 1946 to 1950, he studied art and literature at Yale. After working as a reporter and illustrator, he abandoned journalism in 1952 and attended the Art Institute in Chicago until 1954, exhibiting thereafter in local galleries. In 1956, he settled in New York, where he survived on odd jobs, through which he became familiar with the New York street scene. He met Allan Kaprow, the American artist, art theorist, and main creator of ...

Japanese, 20th century, female.

Active in the USA.

Born 1933, in Tokyo.

Painter, sculptor, performance artist.

Neo-Dadaism, Fluxus.

After settling in New York, Yoko Ono initially took an active role in the Fluxus group, organising concerts (particularly of La Monte Young) and putting up artists from the group (George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, George Segal). After marrying the singer John Lennon of the Beatles, she broke off from her own activities as an artist and took part in demonstrations for peace and for the emancipation of women. Following the assassination of her husband, she returned to her work as an artist....

British, 20th century, male.

Active in Germany.

Born 1913, in London; died 12 May 2015.

Sculptor, Happenings artist.

Dadaism, Fluxus.

Robin Page attended Vancouver School of Art in Canada between 1952 and 1954. Back in England in 1959, he then went to Paris in 1960...