Tristan tzara dadaist poem

Hentea's biography succeeds in capturing the effervescence of its subject, without being willing to take Tzara invariably at his own word; rarely succeeding, thankfully, in pinning him down, it does catch, in flashes, his essence like lightning in a bottle as he speeds by on his celestial adventures. ~Bookslut

It is rather shocking that it took almost a 100 years after the ’official’ 1916 start of Dada in Zurich for a first comprehensive biography to be published in English on its main instigator Tristan Tzara. Beautifully designed and with a title worthy of this poet that points to his first ever published book La Première Aventure céleste de Monsieur Antipyrine, it makes for a truly enticing read. ~Edith Doove, Leonardo Reviews

The antics of the Dadaists, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916 and after the war in various European cities, are notorious. What they actually signified is more problematic, and there is much to be learnt from this carefully documented and extensively illustrated biography of the Rumanian-born Tristan Tzara,

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Tristan Tzara

Portrait of Tristan Tzara, 1920. Gelatin silver print. 11.4 × 18.6 cm.
Born	April 16, 1896(1896-04-16) Moinești, Romania
Died	December 25, 1963(1963-12-25) (aged 67) Paris, France
Web	UbuWeb Sound, Dada Companion, Wikipedia

Tristan Tzara, c.1917. [1]

Tristan Tzara, c.1959. Photo: Pablo Volta. [2]

Tristan Tzara (born Samuel Rosenstock, 1896–1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he is known as one of the founders and central figures of the Dada movement.

Life and work

Poet and tirelessly energetic propagandist for Dada, Tristan Tzara, whose given name was Samuel Rosenstock, was born into a well-off Jewish family in Romania. He attended a French private school in Bucharest as a youth and while in high school met Ion Vinea and Marcel Janco, both of whom shared his interest in French poetry. Together they founded the literary magazine Simbolul, in which Tzara, under the pseudonym S. Samy

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Summary of Tristan Tzara

Tzara is considered the founder of Dada, a nihilistic, anti-art movement formed in Zurich during World War I. Although also producing artwork, his primary contribution was publishing manifestos outlining the goals of Dada and circulating them to as wide an audience as he could solicit and arranging vulgar and shocking performances at a local Café featuring deconstructed language and outrageous acts purposefully intended to shock his audience and upset all preconceived expectation. Tzara worked hard to spread Dada, formulating the Dadaglobe project intended to catalogue Dada output across the world and introducing his own brand of chaotic spectacle to the Parisian avant-garde in the mid-1920s. By 1930 he began to break away from the destructive side of Dada and began to explore Surrealism, a movement propagated by his friend André Breton, with its combination of juxtaposition and chance. Throughout his career he strove to overcome what he felt were the evils of bourgeois society and to offer, in their place, an antidote based on a distinct lack of histor