scholarly journals Tristan Tzara, Cabaret Voltaire and Dada: A Theatrical Avant-Garde, 1916-1924

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-60
Author(s):  
Sue Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Tristan Tzara

Automatism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hazel Donkin
Keyword(s):  
Visual Artists ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Automatic Writing ◽  
Philippe Soupault ◽  
Poetic Imagery ◽  
Psychic Automatism ◽  
Francis Picabia

Both Dada and Surrealist writers and artists experimented with "automatic" creative production. Dadaists including Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, and Kurt Schwitters wrote "automatic" poems from 1918, so called because they were transcribed without delay, serious consideration, or revision. Dada visual artists, including Arp, Sophie Tauber, and Marcel Duchamp also relinquished creative control of their works by employing chance. At the same time a group of writers in France around André Breton experimented with automatic writing as a new method of exploring the unconscious. In 1919 Breton and Philippe Soupault published Les Champs magnétiques, the result of their first experiments with automatic writing that tried to tap new poetic imagery through uncontrolled outbursts of imagination. In the period 1922–4 dream accounts were added to automatism. In the First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) the movement is defined by Breton as "pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought." Surrealist visual artists also explored automatism. Surrealist automatism was influential in the development of modernist visual art. Robert Matta’s (1911–2002) concerns with psychological states in the late 1930s set a precedent for American abstraction. CoBrA (1948–51), an avant-garde collective established in Europe, favored automatic techniques and influenced developments in European abstraction.

Homage to Robert Aron, 1898—1975

1977 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-139
Author(s):  
Annabelle Henkin Melzer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
World War ◽  
Alfred Jarry ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Louis Aragon ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Philippe Soupault ◽  
Young Wife ◽  
French Communist Party

I went to see Robert Aron in the summer of 1972. He was then seventy-four years old, a tall, striking man in an apartment of stuffed furniture overrun by books. In all my meetings that summer with former surrealists, people who had made avant-garde theatre in Paris in the 1920s, there was always a sense of trembling at reaching out to touch cobwebbed memories. Forty-five years had passed since the events we talked about. Tristan Tzara, recalled by Gide as a charming man with a young wife who was ‘even more charming’, had since fought with the French Resistance during World War II and later joined the Communist Party. André Breton, when he died in 1966, was accompanied to his grave by ‘waves of young men and young girls often in couples, with arms entwined’. They had come from all over France to pay him tribute. Philippe Soupault is a respected editor, critic and radio commentator, Louis Aragon is at the forefront of the French Communist Party and dislikes talking about his days as a Surrealist, Roger Vitrac is an acknowledged and produced playwright while Artaud is a cult figure. There are moments when in looking back, the whole Dada-Surrealist performance world looks like some great Dada swindle perpetrated on the only too fallible researcher and critic. Robert Aron does nothing to dispel this feeling. The man who sent a telegram to Breton warning him that he would stop at no measures to keep the fervent Surrealist claque from disturbing the performance of Strindberg's A Dream Play at the Théâtre Alfred Jarry, was elected a member of the French Academy before his death.

Segal, Arthur (1875–1944)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erwin Kessler
Keyword(s):  
Modern Art ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Color Theory ◽  
Van Gogh ◽  
Traditional Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Vincent Van Gogh ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
Art Colony

Arthur Segal was a Romanian artist born as Aron Sigalu to Jewish parents. He shifted his attention away from post-impressionist modernism around 1900 to focus on the radical avant-garde in the early 1920s, and then back to classicizing modernism in the 1940s. His work moved from traditional art-craft (painting, engraving) to modern and avant-garde practices (political engagement, teaching, curatorship, manifestos, theoretical writings, art-therapy). From 1892 to 1900 he studied in Berlin, Paris, and Munich. Segal was a student of Adolf Hölzel (founder of the art colony Neues Dachau), and much of his work was shaped by Hölzel’s color theory, where landscapes were formally structured as decorative grids rather than as phenomenal transcripts of ocular perception. In 1902–1903 he visited Italy and France, where he was influenced by the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Giovanni Segantini, whose naturalism and light-seeking divisionism he sought to appropriate in his own work. He exhibited with the Berliner Secession from 1909 onward, and co-founded the Neue Secession in 1910. Segal remained connected to the Romanian art scene, exhibiting with the TinerimeaArtistica group in 1910–1913. His 1910 Bucharest exhibition was heralded as ‘‘the first exhibition of modern art’’ in Romania (Segal 1974: 133). In 1914 Segal moved to Ascona, Switzerland, where he met Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, and Alexei Jawlensky, who were linked with the Monte Verita community. In 1916 Segal exhibited at Cabaret Voltaire alongside fellow Romanian Dadaists Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco. In 1919 he joined the Novembergruppe, becoming one of its leaders.

Post-War and Post-Apollinaire

Georges Auric ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Colin Roust
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Louis Aragon ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Philippe Soupault ◽  
Les Six ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One

After World War I, Auric’s many friendships placed him in a unique position in the Parisian avant-garde. On the one hand, he was alongside Louis Aragon, André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Tristan Tzara for the rise and fall of Paris dada. On the other, he was a member of Les Six, the group of composers led by Jean Cocteau who came to represent Parisian art music in the 1920s. Throughout the feuds between the dadaists and Cocteau, Auric preserved his friendships and functioned as an ambassador of sorts between rival avant-garde groups. In the meantime, his scores for Cocteau’s Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel (with the rest of Les Six) and Molière’s Les fâcheux would lead to bigger and better opportunities in the mid-1920s.

Dadaism in Film

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Lantz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Artistic Quality ◽  
Unconventional Methods

Members of the Dada cultural and artistic movement began to experiment with film as a means to disseminate their stylistic partialities and cultural values through a new medium free of cultural respectability and aesthetic pretension. Founded in Zurich, Switzerland, by Tristan Tzara in 1916, this avant-garde movement would soon spread to France, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere. Much like the surrealists who would follow, the dadaists sought to liberate their audience from the cultural allegiances, prejudices, and norms of thinking that, in their view, had been largely responsible for the catastrophes of World War I. Unlike surrealist film, dadaist film did not seek to lure its viewers into the cinematic illusion. Instead, dadaists employed unconventional methods in order to alienate the audience members and to provide them the distance with which to reflect upon the meta-artistic (and anti-artistic) quality of their productions. Film enabled the dadaists to distort reality, motion, and perspective; it revealed familiar things in radically unfamiliar but persuasive new shapes.

scholarly journals Between Zurich and Romania: A Dada Exchange

2021 ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Amelia Miholca
Keyword(s):  
Abstract Art ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Traditional Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Folk Traditions ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
International Climate ◽  
Bourgeois Culture

In 1916, a group of ambitious artists set out to dismantle traditional art and its accompanied bourgeois culture. Living in Zurich, these artists—among them the Romanians Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara, and the Germans Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball—formulated the new Dada movement that would awaken new artistic and literary forms through a fusion of sound, theater, and abstract art. With absurd performances at Cabaret Voltaire, they mocked rationality, morality, and beauty. Within the Dada movement in Zurich, I would like to focus on the artists whose Romanian and Jewish heritage played a central role in Cabaret Voltaire and other Dada related events. Art historical scholarship on Dada minimized this heritage in order to situate Dada within the Western avant-garde canon. However, I argue that the five young Romanians who were present on the first night of Cabaret Voltaire on February 5, 1916 brought with them from their home country certain Jewish and Romanian folk traditions, which helped form Dada’s acclaimed reputation. The five Romanians—Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and his brothers Georges Janco and Jules Janco, and Arthur Segal—moved to Zurich either to escape military conscription or to continue their college studies. By the start of the twentieth-century, Romania’s intellectual scene was already a transcultural venture, with writers and artists studying and exhibiting in countries like France and Germany. Yet, Zurich’s international climate of émigrés from all over Europe allowed the young Romanians to fully expand beyond nationalistic confines and collaborate together with other exiled intellectuals. Tom Sandqvist’s book Dada East from 2007 is the most recent and most comprehensive study of the Romanian aspect of Dada. Sandqvist traces Janco’s and Tzara’s prolific, pre-Dada time in Bucharest, along with the folk and Jewish sources that Sandqvist claims influenced their Dada performances. For instance, Tzara’s simultaneous poems, which he performed at Cabaret Voltaire, may derive from nineteenth century Jewish theater in Romania and from Hasidic song rituals. Moreover, the Dada performances with grotesque masks created by Janco relate to the colinde festival in Romania’s peasant folk culture. In my paper, I aim to analyze Sandqvist’s claim and answer the following questions: to what extent did Janco and Tzara incorporate the colinde festival and Jewish theater and ritual? Was their Jewish identity more important to them than their Romanian identity? And, lastly, how did they carry Dada back to Romania after the war ended and the Dadaists in Zurich moved on to other cities?

Tzara, Tristan (1896-1963)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Gammel
Keyword(s):  
Fire Extinguisher ◽  
Protest Movement ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Jewish Humor

Born Samuel (Samy or Sami) Rosenstock in Moineşti, Romania, Tristan Tzara was an avant-garde poet, performer, critic, and film director. Together with Hugo Ball, Hans Richter, and Richard Huelsenbeck, Tzara founded Dada in Zurich, Switzerland, as an iconoclastic and fiercely anti-bourgeois protest movement in art, active from February 1916 to 1920. Though introduced by Ball, the word Dada first appeared in print in Tzara’s anti-war Dada novelette The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Fire Extinguisher (1916) (Dickerman 33). The Romanian poet flaunted himself with his adopted name, wearing spats and his trademark monocle, just as he flaunted the word Dada in banners, posters, advertisements, and a journal, presciently branding the nonsensical movement its trademark. Like a modern-day Seinfeld, deeply steeped in Romanian Jewish humor and culture, Tzara’s Dada claimed to be about ‘nothing’, as famously formulated in his 1918 ‘Dada Manifesto’. Thus Tzara’s Dada exhibited a distinctly nihilistic and absurdist dimension, as seen, for example, in his 1920 poem, which offers instructions on how ‘To Make a Dadaist Poem’ from newspaper clippings.

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