Actually born in Strasbourg in Alsace (he referred to himself as Hans in German but as Jean in French), he was a founding member of the Dada movement in Zürich in 1916, and in 1920 set up the Cologne Dada group with Ernst. However, in 1925 his work also appeared in the first exhibition of the Surrealist group in Paris. In 1931, he broke with the Surrealist movement to found Abstraction-Création.