Tata Dada - 9780262027540

Tristan Tzara, one of the most important figures in the twentieth century's mostfamous avant-garde movements, was born Samuel Rosenstock (or Samueli Rosen?tok) in a provincialRomanian town, on April 16 (or 17, or 14, or 28) in 1896. Tzara became Tzara twenty years later atthe Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, when he and others (including Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, RichardHuelsenbeck, and Hans Arp) invented Dada with a series of chaotic performances includingmultilingual (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 youngartists 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 fiftybooks; he wrote one of the great poems of surrealism; he became a recognized expert on primitiveart; he was an active antifascist, a communist, and (after the Soviet repression of the HungarianRevolution) a former communist. Hentea offers a detailed exploration of Tzara's early life inRomania, neglected by other scholars; a scrupulous assessment of the Dada years; and an originalexamination of Tzara's life and works after Dada. The one thing that remained constant through allof Tzara's artistic and political metamorphoses, Hentea tells us, was a desire to unlock the secretsand mysteries of language.