Tête Dada

Tête Dada (French for Dada Head) is a polychromed wooden sculpture created by Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp in 1920. It is one of the artist’s most well-known contributions to the Zurich Dada movement and to early geometric abstraction in European 20th-century art. Created during the artist's involvement with Dada at the Cabaret Voltaire, the work synthesizes sculpture, craft traditions, performance culture and abstraction. Since 2003, Tête Dada has been part of the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France.

Scholars have emphasized three interrelated aspects of the work: its transformation of utilitarian craft forms into avant-garde sculpture, its role within Dada’s challenge to artistic hierarchies and authorship and its importance in the development of Concrete and Abstract art in the 20th century. The work has been discussed in monographs, exhibition catalogues and journal articles on Taeuber-Arp, Dada, and Modernist abstraction. Major retrospectives, such as those at the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern, have established Taeuber-Arp as an important figure of women artists in early Modernism.