100 years of Dada movement in Romania

An exhibition marking the 100th anniversary of the Dada movement in Romania has been opened at ARCUB, the Cultural Center of Bucharest located in the old city center.

Corina Sabău, 11.03.2016, 15:07

An exhibition marking the 100th anniversary of the Dada movement in Romania has been opened at ARCUB, the Cultural Center of Bucharest located in the old city center. The exhibition is called TZARA.DADA.ETC and was mounted by Erwin Kessler, who used works belonging to Emilian Radu’s family collection. It is the most comprehensive retrospective exhibition of Tristan Tzara’s works and publications ever mounted in Romania, also being the first such exhibition at international level displaying a great part of the first printed editions of Tzara’s poetic works, illustrated by some of the world’s greatest artists.

The event also marks the inauguration of Cabaret Voltaire as well as the birth of the Dada movement in Zurich on February 5th, 1916. Among the most familiar of Tristan Tzara’s Dada texts are La Première Aventure céleste de Monsieur Antipyrine and Vingt-cinq poèmes, as well as the manifestos of the Dada movement, including Sept manifestes Dada. Tristan Tzara’s later works include LHomme approximatif, published in 1931, Parler seul, brought out in 1950, La Face intérieure, published in 1951.

Speaking about Tzara’s artistic achievement in Paris, here is the author of the exhibition Erwin Kessler: “It is a most notable feat, the fact that a young man, leaving Bucharest in November 1915 succeeded, on February 5, 1916, to get straight access to the great scene of international art. That is also the main tenet of the exhibition, namely that the Dada movement was created in a whirlpool of inspiration in early 1916, while Tristan Tzara jointly with Marcel Iancu and Arthur Segal, all thee born in Bucharest, Romania, created Dadaism, out of an exceptional urge.

The ARCUB exhibition has around 100 exhibits belonging to Emilian Radu, a collector from Bucharest, who in recent years dedicated himself to a minute and extremely costly undertaking, that of putting together items as part of a comprehensive Tristan Tzara and DADA collection. The items are unique, some of them have never before been exhibited, even at an international level, although they are tremendously valuable, such as the letter Tristan Tzara sent to Andre Breton in July 1919, a seminal letter, written on a sheet of paper tore out of his book ‘Twenty Five Poems’, his debut volume. It is a letter containing the details of his arrival in Paris and the relocation of the DADA movement from Zurich to Paris.”

Shortly after reaching the apex of his career, Tristan Tzara chose to retire from public life. In an interview he gave to his friend, Ilarie Voronca, who was born in Braila, and published in the famous avant-garde magazine Integral, Tristan Tzara confessed: “I write to discover people. And indeed, I have discovered people, but they were people who disappointed me so much, that this urge for writing disappeared completely, just like the dew, from my visual frame, from my interests. The fact that the object of disappointment is even today worthy of attention only deepens my sorrow.

At last, it dawned upon me that the others write, if not to climb up the social ladder, at least to make a deposit in the bank of their connections which someday will open for them the doors of an Academy about which I didn’t care much. I continue to write for myself, even for the moment, and, unable to find other people, I have never ceased searching for myself. Contrary to falsely-spread rumors, whereby Dada perished because a bunch of people simply gave up, I myself I am the one who killed Dada, of my own free will, since I thought a state of individual freedom had eventually become state of an entire community, and that various ’presidents’ began to feel and think the same. Well, there’s nothing I hate more than the pathological idleness annihilating individual actions, bordering madness and going against the common interest”.

Here is the organizer of the TZARA.DADA.ETC exhibition Erwin Kessler once again: ”Indeed, he was very disappointed, and speaking about his disappointment, I can present another extraordinary letter of the collection, and implicitly of the exhibition. It is a piece Tristan Tzara wrote to a small-time servant with the French press office, who was gathering documents about the Dada movement. When the latter sent him a DADA file in 1928, Tristan Tzara bitterly replied he wouldn’t receive anything on DADA and dadaism any longer, he would only accept what referred to himself alone. Because of that disappointment, he had cut himself off from Dadaism, which was his own creation. Dadaism was an undertaking focusing on socializing, communicating, publishing. The endeavor was social as much as it was political, and a unique one actually. And it was through the Dada lens that I actually discovered Tristan Tzara. It took me six years to gather information and read about Tristan Tzara, I published a couple of texts, including in the USA, about his ability to create out of thin air a trend of a tremendously large scale. Right now neo-dadaism is one of the underlying trends of contemporary art.”

The TZARA.DADA.ETC exhibition is open in Bucharest until late April. It includes original graphic art works by famous avant-garde artists, such as André Breton, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Sonia Delaunay, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Yves Tanguy, Jean Arp and Marcel Iancu, books and historical avant-garde publications, posters of inter-war Dada events, as well as an impressive collection of vintage photographs depicting Tristan Tzara at various stages of his life. The exhibition is part of the series of events ARCUB is organizing to mark Bucharest’s candidacy for the European Capital of Culture in 2021.