Dada emerged in the middle of a barbaric war, hard on the heels of the 20th century's first revolutionary art movement - Picasso and Braque's Cubism. Both the nihilism engendered by the war, and the revolutionary spirit released by Cubist art, were key factors behind the movement's growth and appeal. In fact, the first controversial work, "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2" (1912) by Marcel Duchamp, was a Cubist/Futurist work depicting the descent of a mechanistic nude, similar to a series of photo-stills.