Robert Delaunay · Public domain

Born Samuel Rosenstock in Romania, he co-founded Dada in Zurich in 1916, reciting nonsense poems at the Cabaret Voltaire as a deliberate assault on the art and reason he blamed for a world at war. He carried the movement to Paris in 1919, then fought its founders over what came next, breaking with André Breton as Dada curdled into Surrealism — a split he lost, though the plays he kept writing, like The Gas Heart, stayed true to Dada's nihilism to the end.