The first biography in English of Tristan Tzara, a founder of Dada
and one of the most important figures in the European avant-garde.
Tristan
Tzara, one of the most important figures in the twentieth century's
most famous avant-garde movements, was born Samuel Rosenstock (or
Samueli Rosenștok) 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.