SOURCE: "Schwitters: Dada as Fine Art," in Arts Magazine, Vol. 38, No. 3, December 1963, pp. 54-59.

In the following essay, Tillim explores Schwitters 's relationship to orthodox Dada.

The artistic substance of Dada has rarely, if ever, been treated to purely aesthetic dissection. The works of visual art that came of the movement conceived in a Zurich cabaret in 1916 are invariably regarded as the extension or expression, or both, of a disturbance that went far beyond the limits of art and which gained its artistic context, since music, literature, drama and architecture were also involved, simply because artists happened to be associated with it. Artists, in fact, never ranked high in the Dada bureaucracy. As George Ribemont-Dessaignes explained in 1931, "What has been called the Dada movement was really a movement of the mind . . . and not merely a new artistic school." Dada was in fact Romanticism at its most self-conscious, ironic...