An anarchic, artistic and intellectual movement originating in Switzerland during the Great War (1914-18). Its anti-war, anti-bourgeois, and absurdist positions espoused by disaffected artists, influenced by the poet Tristan Tzara, as well as their mocking condemnation of art that they felt sought only to slavishly imitate nature, parallelled the sympathies of several immigrant artists in New York, including Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp.  The Dadaists rebelled against traditional values, seeing them as morally bankrupt and used irony, cynicism and nihilisdm to shock the bourgoisie out of their cultural complacency.