The senseless violence and seemingly random destruction of World War led to the creation of art that emphasized randomness and chance. The first post-war art movement was Dadaism and began among a group of artists in Zurich. Jan Arp was a member of this Zurich group and created the distinctive early Dada work, The Entombment of Birds and Butterflies. Arp created this work by cutting up pieces of paper and dropping them on the ground. Arp then took the arrangement of the pieces of paper as they randomly fell on top of each other and hired a carpenter to cut these shapes into wood. The title comes from the fact that Arp could slightly make out the abstract shapes of birds and butterflies, but otherwise, the work is entirely abstract. Arp is beginning to explore making art which was more about ideas than purely appearance.
The French artist Marcel Duchamp furthers the concept of art being about ideas with his ready-made. Ready-made where sculptures were made out of mass-produced objects that could be bought at a store. The artist elevates an object from an everyday item to art, simply because they deem it to be so. Fountain was Duchamp’s first ready-made, technically an assisted ready-made because he made some changes to the original object. The work is made from a urinal, which Duchamp rotated and signed with the fictional name “R. Mutt”. The title of Fountain is meant to be a satire on fountains traditionally being grand, ornate decorations for city centers in Europe, but here being something painfully mundane.