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?

Entartete Kunst

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Kelly Hamlin
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Paul Klee ◽  
Traditional Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Third ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Degenerate Art ◽  
The Third Reich

Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) is a term that was used by Nazi authorities to identify, censure, and confiscate art they considered inconsistent with their ideology. It was the cornerstone of an ambitious propaganda campaign that culminated in the exhibition Entartete Kunst, which took place in Munich in 1937. The majority of this so-called degenerate art was Avant-Garde in both form and subject. Abstract Art by German artists, including Max Beckmann, Max Eernst, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, and Franz Marc, was particularly vulnerable to Nazi attack; non-German artists such as Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian were also singled out. As a polarizing concept, Entartete Kunst stems from an essentially anti-modernist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic position. It was designed to legitimize the art of the Third Reich, which was rooted in traditional art forms and characterized by an idealized naturalism that promoted heroic virtues and racial purity.

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.

scholarly journals SPLIT ENDS? LITERATURE AND POLITICS AT THEFIN DE SIECLE

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 697-709
Author(s):  
Jock Macleod
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
The Real ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Split Ends ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Long Course

AS AN UNDERGRADUATE IN THE1970s, my introduction to the 1890s was perfunctory. Squeezed into a couple of weeks in the middle of a year-long course on “Victorian and Modern Literature,” the literature of the decade was reduced to aestheticism and decadence and presented as something of a preliminary to the real business of modernism. Such a focus reflected the scholarship of the time, in which thefin de sièclewas constructed as a moment of transition, one in which the political and socio-ethical dimensions so central to high Victorian literature were evacuated, as arguments for the autonomy of art came to dominate the literary cultural landscape. The organising principle was one of bifurcation: the separating out ofavant gardefrom bourgeois culture, the high from the low and, of particular relevance to this essay, literature from politics.

Problem of Forming of Musical-Performing Competency of Pedagogue- Musicians on the Base of Vanguard Works for Folk Instruments

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 68-75
Author(s):  
N.I. Anufrieva ◽  
◽  
A.P. Efremenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Training Programs ◽  
Traditional Approach ◽  
Teaching Methodology ◽  
Music Pedagogy ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
University Teachers ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Musical Education ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Educational Potential

the article highlights the problems of developing the teacher-musicians’ performing skills on the material of works of avant-garde composers for folk instruments and proposes ways to solve them. Folk instruments and avant-garde music are still perceived as incompatible phenomenaby many contemporaries, and educational programs in the field of training “Pedagogical Education” (profile “Musical Education”) inherit the traditional approach, which implies the mastery of folk instruments by performers, primarily the classical repertoire, closely related to Russian folk culture. As a result, avant-garde compositions for an accordion or guitar remain out of the attention of both university teachers and their pupils, future specialists in the field of music pedagogy and cultural and educational activities. Conclusions of the study: it is necessary to change the attitude towards folk instruments and the educational potential of avant-garde music for folk instruments; training programs require improvement in the content and composition of disciplines, among which the analysis of musical works and the art of interpretation deserve particular attention; in the teaching methodology, preference should be given to the problematic method and the practice-oriented approach.

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

Davis, Stuart (1892–1964)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annika Marie
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Street Life ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Urban Street ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ashcan School

Stuart Davis was a painter, printmaker, muralist, and arts activist who played a prominent role in the development of American modernism in the first half of the 20th century. Visually, he brought the formal and technical experimentation of the European avant-garde to depictions of the modernity of the American metropolis. As a prolific writer and powerful spokesman, Davis was a committed cultural advocate, working to explain and defend modern abstract art, promoting artists’ rights, and arguing for the democratization of culture and art’s formative impact on society. Davis’s early style relates to the Ashcan School, an early 20th-century brand of realism that combines a direct, spontaneous, journalistic naturalism with everyday scenes of urban street life. The turning point for the young Davis was the New York Armory Show of 1913. Through the exhibit Davis was exposed to Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Dada. However, Davis’s embrace of the formal rigor of European abstraction did not lead him to purely non-objective painting. Maintaining that form and content were equally important, he argued that European modernism’s visual fragmentation, instability, and simultaneity provided the visual means by which to express contemporary American urban life.

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.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ka-ming Wu
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Cultural Tourism ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Heritage Preservation ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
Folk Traditions ◽  
The Government

This book explores the role of folk cultural discourse and practices in the cultural politics of post-Mao China by focusing on Yan'an, headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1937 to 1947. It examines the relation between the government and local communities for heritage preservation and cultural tourism in the age of runaway urbanization by focusing on the moments of mobilizing and representing folk traditions in both socialist and late socialist Yan'an. It articulates the cultural logic of the late socialist Chinese society that corresponds to a new form of political economy through an analysis of three rural cultural practices in Yan'an and their entanglement with political, capital, and local forces: folk storytelling, folk paper-cuts, and spirit cult practices. This introduction discusses historical events and narratives that contribute to the development and modern meanings of folk culture and Yan'an. It also provides an overview of the author's fieldwork and research methodology as well as the chapters that follow.

Electronic Library “Pskoviana” (structure, content, prospects of development)

2013 ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Natalia Bolshakova
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Web Site ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
Structural Basis ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Resource Base ◽  
Folk Traditions ◽  
Pskov Region ◽  
State Registration ◽  
The Military

The aim of work is generalization of experience of introduction of innovative forms of storage, scientific treatment and publication of expeditionary materials of the Pskov dialectal and folklore- ethnographic archive that is a resource base for many research and educational projects. Formed during the field inspection for many decades and constantly executable archive contains a rich both language and culturological information generator about folk traditions, about the features of way of life, management, perception of the world, traditional and new values of carriers of folk culture of the Pskov region. The funds indicated till recently were unevenly used in scientifically-educational aims. If a dialectal archive during a few decades is a source lexicographic and areal researches, on his base ten of research works is written, including dissertations, then rich potential of folklore part of archive on a row of objective reasons was not exposed. Meantime an audiofund contains the records of works of verbal folk work of different genres: songs (ceremonial and calendar), fairy-tales, fables, legends, descriptions of ceremonies (wedding, baptismal, funeral- mention) etc. In addition, present records also are a base for a study and Pskov folk colloquial speech, as traditional folklore, especially in the verbal genres, is created and exists on dialectal basis. The artistic, historical and cultural value of various in a genre, stylish relation works of folklore does not cause doubts, but also their dialectal independence was not once marked by researchers and collectors. The search of NT used on archived business resulted in creation of e-library of texts of "Pskoviana", the source of that is not published before the archived exclusive. Unlike a traditional e-library, that, as a rule, is a mediator between a user and informative resource, the e-library of texts formed by us is such resource. Structural basis of library is made by the electronic databases created on the genre-thematic founding. Created and in 2012 got testifying to state registration electronic databases on themes: the "Verbal recitals of Great Patriotic war", "Traditional child's folklore", "Fairy-tales of the Pskov area". All three bases are placed on the specialized web-site (http://nocpskoviana.pskgu.ru/index.php). The prospects of development of e-library of texts of regional character of "Pskoviana" are set in next directions. Addition and correction of the formed fragments of library. So, for example, the base sanctified to the military theme, where verbal stories are while presented only, is complemented due to genre expansion: a selection is already executed from the archive of texts of songs and chastushkas on a military theme. Introduction of voice files (wherein they are while absent) supporting the "deciphered" texts. Presently in a state of preparation there is forming of collection of fairy-tales in the format of CD, after the publication of that all voice files containing the Pskov fairy-tales will be placed on a web-site. Thematic expansion enclosures databases, primarily in the development of the themes. Creation of databases, based on areal principle. Presently in the stage of forming there is a local base on one of south districts of the Pskov area – Sebeže, located on a border with Latvia and Belorussia. Decision of complex of the research and practice tasks related to informatization of the archived work, the row of the theoretical questions, related to the area of textual criticism, communicative dialectology, folklore, philological regional science, requires working. Thus, experience showed that for positioning of regional specific of traditional folk culture in her speech forms an e-library of texts is most representative. The form of library, structured and at the same time allowing a high degree of variability, allows you to optimally organize archival data. The applied methodologies showed perspective of select direction in-process with the archived material of high-cube. The complex of works carried out during the row of years in final analysis must result in creation of single accessible electronic archive to the users. But already the e-library of "Pskoviana" formed and now on the basis of the Pskov dialectal and folklore-ethnographic archive executes the functions of reliable storage and presentation of folk speech culture and language of Pskov earth.

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