Cabaret Voltaire — Wo der Dadaismus Entstand & Zürichs Kulturelles Underground
Cabaret Voltaire (Spiegelgasse 1, Niederdorf, Zurich — the bar and performance space where the Dada movement was founded on February 5, 1916, by Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Jean Arp, Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Sophie Taeuber): the founding of Dada in neutral Zurich in 1916 — by a group of artists and writers who had fled the madness of World War I — was one of the defining moments in 20th-century cultural history; Dada's anti-art, anti-logic, and anti-war stance, expressed through nonsense poetry, collage, performance art, and the deliberate rejection of conventional aesthetics, directly influenced Surrealism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Punk, and virtually every subsequent avant-garde movement in the 20th century.
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Cabaret Voltaire — The Birthplace of Dada
Cabaret Voltaire (Spiegelgasse 1, Niederdorf, the bar where Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp founded the Dada movement on February 5, 1916, the performance art and anti-war art movement that was the predecessor of Surrealism and postwar conceptual art, the venue now functioning as a gallery, bar, and cultural center, ¥0 to enter, Tuesday–Sunday noon–midnight) is across the alley (Spiegelgasse) from the building where Vladimir Lenin lived in 1916–1917 before returning to Russia for the October Revolution — Lenin at Spiegelgasse 14, Dada at Spiegelgasse 1, the coincidence that amuses historians; the Cabaret Voltaire programming (readings, performances, exhibitions, parties) maintains the Dada spirit.
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The Kunsthaus Dada Collection — Tzara, Ball, and the Zurich Legacy
The Kunsthaus Zurich (Heimplatz 1, the extension building's Level 2, the Dada and Surrealism collection) holds the most significant Dada works in any Swiss public collection — Sophie Taeuber-Arp's geometric abstractions (the co-founder of Dada who was simultaneously the most formally rigorous of the original group), Jean Arp's biomorphic reliefs (the Dada founder whose work moved through Dada into the more commercially successful Surrealist biomorphic vocabulary), and the archival material (the first Dada Manifesto, 1916, the program of the Cabaret Voltaire opening night) represent the Zurich Dada legacy; the Kunsthaus's broader avant-garde collection (Ernst, Braque, Léger) provides the international context.
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Niederdorf — Zurich's Old Town Bar Quarter
Niederdorf (the right-bank old town neighbourhood north of the Grossmünster, the Zurich district of bars, restaurants, and the Cabaret Voltaire, bounded by the Limmat on the west and the Hirschengraben on the east) is Zurich's most consistently lively neighbourhood after dark — the Niederdorfstrasse (the main pedestrian alley, 500m, the highest concentration of restaurants and bars per metre in Zurich) and the intersecting alleys (Spiegelgasse with the Cabaret Voltaire, Münstergasse with the second-hand bookshops, Napfgasse with the Lindenzunft guild restaurant) give the character of the medieval merchant city overlaid with contemporary bar culture; the Kronenhalle bar (the Kunstbar, the cocktail bar of the famous restaurant, original Picasso and Giacometti on the walls) is the premium Niederdorf experience.
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James Joyce in Zurich — The Exile's Grave and the Pub
James Joyce (the Irish novelist who lived in Zurich 1904–1906, 1915–1919 — during which period he wrote most of Ulysses, published 1922 — and returned to die in Zurich January 13, 1941) is commemorated at the Fluntern Cemetery (the grave of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, Fluntern, accessible by tram 6 to Zoo, 5 minutes walk, the grave site with the seated bronze Joyce sculpture by Milton Hebald) and the James Joyce Pub (Pelikanstrasse 8, the Irish bar in Zurich that claims to serve Guinness as Joyce himself drank it, the Joyce artifacts on the walls, the Bloomsday celebration June 16 is the annual event); the Zurich connection to Ulysses (the novel set entirely in Dublin on June 16, 1904, written largely in Zurich) is the literary pilgrimage draw.
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Zurich West — The Industrial District's Creative Transformation
Zurich West (the former industrial district west of the railway tracks, the Zurich equivalent of Berlin's Kreuzberg or London's Shoreditch, the neighbourhood that converted 1995–2015 from steelworks and manufacturing to the creative industry hub of the city) is the best example of urban industrial conversion in German-speaking Switzerland — the Schiffbau (the 1895 ship hall, now the Schauspielhaus theatre's main stage, the largest industrial heritage theatre space in Switzerland), the Viadukt (the 1847 railway viaduct repurposed with shops and restaurants under the arches, 2010–2012, the finest retail-under-infrastructure project in Switzerland), and the Langstrasse (the street where Zurich's most diverse restaurant culture — Vietnamese, Kurdish, Brazilian, Portuguese — coexists with the red-light district in 2 city blocks) define Zurich West's character.
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Swiss Expressionism and the Art Collection — Hodler and Giacometti
Ferdinand Hodler (the Swiss national painter, 1853–1918, the monumental Alpine landscapes and the Symbolist figure paintings that are as close to a Swiss national visual style as the country has) is best represented in the Kunsthaus Zurich — the large-scale compositions (The Woodcutter, The Night, Lake Geneva from Chexbres — the 3-metre panorama that defines Swiss landscape painting) and the Giacometti family connection (Augusto Giacometti the elder, the stained-glass artist, and Alberto Giacometti, whose elongated bronze figures are the Kunsthaus's most recognized international works, the Kunsthaus holding more Giacometti bronzes than any other institution) represent the Swiss modernist tradition; the Kunsthaus café (the ground floor, the lunch menu served from noon, the terrace in Heimplatz square) is the best museum lunch in Zurich.