Dadaglobe Reconstructed

Kunsthaus Zurich

5 February – 1 May 2016

Dadaglobe’ brings together the more than two hundred artworks and texts that were sent to Tristan Tzara in 1921 by artists from all over Europe. This epochal but hitherto unpublished book project is finally being realized to mark the 100th anniversary of Dada’s foundation. After years of research, contributions that have since been dispersed around the globe have been assembled once again for an exhibition that is a milestone in recent Dada research. The presentation comprises self-portraits, photomontages and collages, drawings, book page designs, poems and essays as well as manuscripts, printed matter and revealing historical documents. ‘Dadaglobe’ is an impressive survey of the artistic diversity, socio-political relevance and art-historical impact of Dada. With contributions by Hans Arp, André Breton, Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and some 30 other artists.
The exhibition will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from June 2016.

Also in 2016  (3 June – 25 September 2016 ): Francis Picabia. A Retrospective.
More information on : DADA Zurich 100 2016.

TaTa Dada

The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara       

By Marius Hentea

The MIT Press, 2014

URL: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/tata-dada

 

Overview

Tristan Tzara, one of the most important figures in the twentieth century’s most famous avant-garde movements, was born Samuel Rosenstock (or Samueli Rosenstok) in a provincial Romanian town, on April 16 (or 17, or 14, or 28) in 1896. Tzara became Tzara twenty years later at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, when he and others (including Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Arp) invented Dada with a series of chaotic performances including multilingual (and nonlingual) shouting, music, drumming, and calisthenics. Within a few years, Dada (largely driven by Tzara) became an international artistic movement, a rallying point for young artists in Paris, New York, Barcelona, Berlin, and Buenos Aires. With TaTa Dada, Marius Hentea offers the first English-language biography of this influential artist.

 

As the leader of Dada, Tzara created “the moment art changed forever.” But, Hentea shows, Tzara and Dada were not coterminous. Tzara went on to publish more than fifty books; he wrote one of the great poems of surrealism; he became a recognized expert on primitive art; he was an active antifascist, a communist, and (after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution) a former communist. Hentea offers a detailed exploration of Tzara’s early life in Romania, neglected by other scholars; a scrupulous assessment of the Dada years; and an original examination of Tzara’s life and works after Dada. The one thing that remained constant through all of Tzara’s artistic and political metamorphoses, Hentea tells us, was a desire to unlock the secrets and mysteries of language. [text publisher]