Tristan Tzara

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Tristan Tzara was a Romanian avant-garde artist and poet who co-founded the Dada movement at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. He emigrated to Switzerland in 1916, later settling in Paris, France in 1919, engaging with different poetry and performance art experiments together with Jean Arp, Marcel Iancu, Hugo Ball, André Breton and others. Anti-art and anti-establishment, Dadaism was co-founded by Tzara in response to the atrocities of War World I and to what its participating artists critiqued as a capitalistic rationality that permeated social and aesthetic relations at the time, reclaiming, instead, nonsense and the illogical as ways of artistic protest. In his famous 1918 Dada Manifesto, Tzara writes that Dadaist undertakings meant nothing: “Dada Means Nothing / If you find it futile and don’t want to waste your time on a word that means nothing… ” However, Tzara heralds this futility of the Dadaist spirit, arguing for its artistic and political capacities. In his plays and poetry, Tzara often relied on absurdity, parody and wordplays as literary devices, the famous literary technique of the cut-up being often traced to his early Dada poetic experiments. His practice influenced a wide array of subsequent movements, including Surrealism and Cubism as well as Situationism and the Beat Generation of poets. Tzara often collaborated with artists in producing limited edition volumes of his poetry, which often included lithographs and etchings. Following World War II, he created several important artist books with the likes of Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso and Sonia Delaunay. Works by Tristan Tzara are part of important museum collections, such as MOMA New York or the Centre Pompidou in Paris.