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Tristan Tzara |
| Tristan Tzara Samuel (Samy) Rosenstock |
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 1927 portrait of Tzara, by Lajos Tihanyi |
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| Born | April 4 or April 16, 1896 Moineşti |
| Died | December 25, 1963 (aged 67) Paris |
| Pen name | S. Samyro, Tristan, Tristan Ruia, Tristan Ţara, Tr. Tzara |
| Occupation | poet, essayist, journalist, playwright, performance artist, composer, film director, politician, diplomat |
| Nationality | Romanian, French |
| Writing period | 1912–1963 |
| Genres | lyric poetry, epic poetry, free verse, prose poetry, parody, satire |
| Subjects | art criticism, literary criticism, social criticism |
| Literary movement | Symbolism Avant-garde Dada Surrealism |
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Tristan Tzara (born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; April 4 or April 16, 18961–December 25, 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 was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. A Symbolist influenced by the work of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara co-founded the magazine Simbolul together with Ion Vinea, with whom he also wrote experimental poetry, and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. A main promoter of Dada culture, he represented its nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.
After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the first step in the movement's evolution toward Surrealism. Subsequently, he was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against André Breton and Francis Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclectic modernism of Vinea and Janco. This personal vision on art defined his plays Le Cœur à gaz ("The Gas Heart") and Mouchoir de nuages ("Handkerchief of Clouds"). A forerunner of automatist techniques, Tzara eventually rallied with Breton's Surrealism, and, under its influence, wrote his celebrated utopian poem L'Homme approximatif ("The Approximate Man").
During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascist perspective with a communist vision, joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II, and serving a term in the National Assembly. Having spoken in favor of liberalization in the People's Republic of Hungary just before the Revolution of 1956, he distanced himself from the French Communist Party, of which he was by then a member. In 1960, he was among the intellectuals who protested against French actions in the Algerian War.
Tristan Tzara was an influential author and performer, whose contribution is credited with having created a connection from Cubism and Futurism to the Beat Generation, Situationism and various currents in rock music. The friend and collaborator of many modernist figures, he was the lover of dancer Maja Kruscek in his early youth, and was later married to Swedish artist and poet Greta Knutson.
S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s.2 A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.34
In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915.3 Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Âne Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara").3 This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Ţara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913-1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper).5
In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara himself had explained his chosen name was a pun on the Romanian-language trist în ţară ("sad in one's country"); Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbière or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera.6 Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior.6
Tzara was born in Moineşti, Bacău County, in the historical region of Moldavia. His parents were Jewish Romanians who reportedly spoke Yiddish as their first language;7 his father Filip and grandfather Ilie were entrepreneurs in the forestry business.89 Tzara's mother was Emilia Rosenstock, née Zibalis.9 Owing to the Romanian Kingdom's discrimination laws, the Rosenstocks were not emancipated, and thus Tzara was not a full citizen of the country until after 1918.8
He moved to Bucharest at the age of eleven, and attended the Schemitz-Tierin boarding school.8 It is believed that the young Tzara completed his secondary education at a state-run high school, which is identified as the Saint Sava National College8 or as the Sfântul Gheorghe High School.10 In October 1912, when Tzara was aged sixteen, he joined his friends Vinea and Marcel Janco in editing Simbolul. Reputedly, Janco and Vinea provided the funds.11 Like Vinea, Tzara was also close to their young colleague Jacques G. Costin, who was later his self-declared promoter and admirer.12
Despite their young age, the three editors were able to attract collaborations from established Symbolist authors. Alongside their close friend and mentor Adrian Maniu (an Imagist who had been Vinea's tutor),13 they included N. Davidescu, Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo, Emil Isac, Claudia Millian, Ion Minulescu, I. M. Raşcu, Eugeniu Sperantia, Al. T. Stamatiad, Eugeniu Ştefănescu-Est, Constantin T. Stoika, as well as from journalist and lawyer Poldi Chapier.14 In its inaugural issue, the journal even printed a poem by one of the leading figures in Romanian Symbolism, Alexandru Macedonski.14 Simbolul also featured illustrations by Maniu, Millian and Iosif Iser.15
Although the magazine ceased print in December 1912, it played an important part in shaping Romanian literature of the period. Literary historian Paul Cernat sees Simbolul as a main stage in Romania's modernism, and credits it with having brought about the first changes from Symbolism to the radical avant-garde.16 Also according to Cernat, the collaboration between Samyro, Vinea and Janco was an early instance of literature becoming "an interface between arts", which had for its contemporary equivalent the collaboration between Iser and writers such as Ion Minulescu and Tudor Arghezi.17 Although Maniu parted with the group and sought a change in style which brought him closer to traditionalist tenets, Tzara, Janco and Vinea continued their collaboration. Between 1913 and 1915, they were frequently vacationing together, either on the Black Sea coast or at the Rosenstock family property in Gârceni, Vaslui County; during this time, Vinea and Samyro wrote poems with similar themes and alluding to one another.18
Tzara's career changed course between 1914 and 1916, during a period when the Romanian Kingdom kept out of World War I. In autumn 1915, as founder and editor of the short-lived journal Chemarea, Vinea published two poems by his friend, the first printed works to bear the signature Tristan Tzara.19 At the time, the young poet and many of his friends were adherents of an anti-war and anti-nationalist current, which progressively accommodated anti-establishment messages.20 Chemarea, which was a platform for this agenda and again attracted collaborations from Chapier, may also have been financed by Tzara and Vinea.11 According to Romanian avant-garde writer Claude Sernet, the journal was "totally different from everything that had been printed in Romania before that moment."21 During the period, Tzara's works were sporadically published in Hefter-Hidalgo's Versuri şi Proză, and, in June 1915, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru's Noua Revistă Română published Samyro's known poem Verişoară, fată de pension ("Little Cousin, Boarding School Girl").22
Tzara had enrolled at the University of Bucharest in 1914, studying Mathematics and Philosophy, but did not graduate.823 In autumn 1915, he left Romania for the city of Zürich, in neutral Switzerland. Janco, together with his brother Jules, had settled there a few months before, and was later joined by his other brother Georges.24 Tzara, who may have applied for the Faculty of Philosophy at the local university,825 shared lodging with Marcel Janco, who was a student at the Technische Hochschule, in the Altinger Guest House26 (by 1918, Tzara had moved to the Limmatquai Hotel).27 His departure from Romania, like that of the Janco brothers, may have been in part a pacifist political statement.28 After settling in Switzerland, the young poet almost completely discarded Romanian as his language of expression, writing most of his subsequent works in French.2923 The poems he had written before, which were the result of poetic dialogs between him and his friend, were left in Vinea's care.30 Most of these pieces were first printed only in the interwar period.2331
It was in Zürich that the Romanian group met with the German Hugo Ball, an anarchist poet and pianist, and his young wife Emmy Hennings, a music hall performer. In February 1916, Ball had rented the Cabaret Voltaire from its owner, Jan Ephraim, and intended to use the venue for performance art and exhibits.32 Hugo Ball recorded this period, noting that Tzara and Marcel Janco, like Hans Arp, Arthur Segal, Otto van Rees, Max Oppenheimer, and Marcel Slodki, "readily agreed to take part in the cabaret."33 According to Ball, among the performances of songs mimicking or taking inspiration from various national folklores, "Herr Tristan Tzara recited Rumanian poetry."34 In late March, Ball recounted, the group was joined by German writer and drummer Richard Huelsenbeck.35 He was soon after involved in Tzara's "simultaneist verse" performance, "the first in Zürich and in the world", also including renditions of poems by two promoters of Cubism, Fernand Divoire and Henri Barzun.36
It was in this milieu that Dada was born, at some point before May 1916, when a publication of the same name first saw print. The story of its establishment was the subject of a disagreement between Tzara and his fellow writers. Cernat believes that the first Dadaist performance took place as early as February, when the nineteen-year old Tzara, wearing a monocle, entered the Cabaret Voltaire stage singing sentimental melodies and handing paper wads to his "scandalized spectators", leaving the stage to allow room for masked actors on stilts, and returning in clown attire.37 The same type of performances took place at the Zuntfhaus zür Waag beginning in summer 1916, after the Cabaret Voltaire was forced to close down.38 According to music historian Bernard Gendron, for at long as it lasted, "the Cabaret Voltaire was dada. There was no alternative institution or site that could disentangle 'pure' dada from its mere accompaniment [...] nor was any such site desired."39 Other opinions link Dada's beginnings with much earlier events, including the experiments of Alfred Jarry, André Gide, Christian Morgenstern, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Vaché, Marcel Duchamp or Francis Picabia.40
In the first of the movement's manifestos, Ball wrote: "[The booklet] is intended to present to the Public the activities and interests of the Cabaret Voltaire, which has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. The next objective of the artists who are assembled here is to publish a revue internationale [French for "international magazine"]."41 Ball completed his message in French, and the paragraph translates as: "The magazine shall be published in Zürich and shall carry the name 'Dada' ('Dada'). Dada Dada Dada Dada."41 The view according to which Ball had created the movement was notably supported by writer Walter Serner, who directly accused Tzara of having abused Ball's initiative.42
A secondary point of contention between the founders of Dada regarded the paternity for the movement's name, which, according to visual artist and essayist Hans Richter, was first adopted in print in June 1916.43 Ball, who claimed authorship and stated that he picked the word randomly from a dictionary, indicated that it stood for both the French-language equivalent of "hobby horse" and a German-language term reflecting the joy of children being rocked to sleep.44 Tzara himself declined interest in the matter, but Marcel Janco credited him with having coined the term.45 Dada manifestos, written or co-authored by Tzara, record that the name shares its form with various other terms, including a word used in the Kru languages of West Africa to designate the tail of a sacred cow; a toy and the name for "mother" in an unspecified Italian dialect; and the double affirmative in Romanian and in various Slavic languages.46
Before the end of the war, Tzara had assumed a position as Dada's main promoter and manager, helping the Swiss group establish branches in other European countries.4725 This period also saw the first conflict within the group: citing irreconcilable differences with Tzara, Ball left the group.48 With his departure, Gendron argues, Tzara was able to move Dada vaudeville-like performances into more of "an incendiary and yet jocularly provocative theater."49
He is often credited with having inspired many young modernist authors from outside Switzerland to affiliate with the group, in particular the Frenchmen Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Philippe Soupault.504 Richter, who also came into contact with Dada at this stage in its history, notes that these intellectuals often had a "very cool and distant attitude to this new movement" before being approached by the Romanian author.50 In June 1916, he began editing and managing the periodical Dada as a successor of the short-lived magazine Cabaret Voltaire—Richter describes his "energy, passion and talent for the job", which he claims satisfied all Dadaists.51 He was at the time the lover of Maja Kruscek, who was a student of Rudolf Laban; in Richter's account, their relationship was always tottering.52
As early as 1916, Tristan Tzara took distance from the Italian Futurists, rejecting the militarist and proto-fascist stance of their leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.53 Richter notes that, by then, Dada had replaced Futurism as the leader of modernism, while continuing to build on its influence: "we had swallowed Futurism—bones, feathers and all. It is true that in the process of digestion all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated."50 Despite this and the fact that Dada did not make any gains in Italy, Tzara could count poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Alberto Savinio, painters Gino Cantarelli and Aldo Fiozzi, as well as a few other Italian Futurists, among the Dadaists.54 Among the Italian authors supporting Dadaist manifestos and rallying with the Dada group was the poet, painter and in the future a fascist racial theorist Julius Evola, who became a personal friend of Tzara.55
The next year, Tzara and Ball opened the Galerie Dada permanent exhibit, through which they set contacts with the independent Italian visual artist Giorgio de Chirico and with the German Expressionist journal Der Sturm, all of whom were described as "fathers of Dada".56 During the same months, and probably owing to Tzara's intervention, the Dada group organized a performance of Sphinx and Strawman, a puppet play by the Austro-Hungarian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, whom he advertised as an example of "Dada theater".57 He was also in touch with Nord-Sud, the magazine of French poet Pierre Reverdy (who sought to unify all avant-garde trends),4 and contributed articles on African art to both Nord-Sud and Pierre Albert-Birot's SIC magazine.58 In early 1918, through Huelsenbeck, Zürich Dadaists established contacts with their more explicitly left-wing disciples in Berlin—George Grosz, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, Kurt Schwitters, Walter Mehring, Raoul Hausmann, Carl Einstein, Franz Jung, and Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfelde.59 With Breton, Soupault and Aragon, Tzara traveled Cologne, where he became familiarized with the elaborate collage works of Schwitters and Max Ernst, whom he showed to his colleagues in Switzerland.60 Huelsenbeck nonetheless declined to Schwitters membership in Berlin Dada.61
As e result of his campaigning, Tzara created a list of so-called "Dada presidents", who represented various regions of Europe. According to Hans Richter, it included, alongside Tzara himself, figures ranging from Ernst, Arp, Baader, Breton and Aragon to Kruscek, Evola, Rafael Lasso de la Vega, Igor Stravinsky, Vicente Huidobro, Francesco Meriano and Théodore Fraenkel.62 Richter notes: "I'm not sure if all the names who appear here would agree with the description."63
The shows Tzara staged in Zürich often turned into scandals or riots, and he was in permanent conflict with the Swiss law enforcers.64 Hans Richter speaks of a "pleasure of letting fly at the bourgeois, which in Tristan Tzara took the form of coldly (or hotly) calculated insolence" (see Épater la bourgeoisie).65 In one instance, as part of a series of events in which Dadaists mocked established authors, Tzara and Arp falsely publicized that they were going to fight a duel in Rehalp, near Zürich, and that they were going to have the popular novelist Jakob Christoph Heer for their witness.66 Richter also reports that his Romanian colleague profited from Swiss neutrality to play the Allies and Central Powers against each other, obtaining art works and funds from both, making use of their need to stimulate their respective propaganda efforts.67 While active as a promoter, Tzara also published his first volume of collected poetry, the 1918 Vingt-cinq poèmes ("Twenty-five poems").68
A major event took place in autumn 1918, when Francis Picabia, who was then publisher of 391 magazine and a distant Dada affiliate, visited Zürich and introduced his colleagues there to his nihilistic views on art and reason.69 In the United States, Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp had earlier set up their own version of Dada. This circle, based in New York City, sought affiliation with Tzara's only in 1921, when they jokingly asked him to grant them permission to use "Dada" as their own name (to which Tzara replied: "Dada belongs to everybody").70 The visit was credited by Richter with boosting the Romanian author's status, but also with making Tzara himself "switch suddenly from a position of balance between art and anti-art into the stratospheric regions of pure and joyful nothingness."71 The movement subsequently organized its last major Swiss show, held at the Saal zur Kaufleutern, with choreography by Susanne Perrottet, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and with the participation of Käthe Wulff, Hans Heusser, Tzara, Hans Richter and Walter Serner.72 It was there that Serner read from his 1918 essay, whose very title advocated Letzte Lockerung ("Final Dissolution"): this part is believed to have caused the subsequent mêlée, during which the public attacked the performers and succeeded in interrupting, but not canceling, the show.73
Following the November 1918 Armistice with Germany, Dada's evolution was marked by political developments. In October 1919, Tzara, Arp and Otto Flake began publishing Der Zeltweg, a journal aimed at further popularizing Dada in a post-war world were the borders were again accessible.74 Richter, who admits that the magazine was "rather tame", also notes that Tzara and his colleagues were dealing with the impact of communist revolutions, in particular the October Revolution and the German revolts of 1918, which "had stirred men's minds, divided men's interests and diverted energies in the direction of political change."75 The same commentator however dismisses those accounts which, he believes, led readers to believe that Der Zeltweg was "an association of revolutionary artists."76 According to one account rendered by historian Robert Levy, Tzara shared company with a group of Romanian communist students, and, as such, may have met with Ana Pauker, who was later one of the Romanian Communist Party's most prominent activists.77
Arp and Janco drifted away from the movement ca. 1919, when they created the Constructivist-inspired workshop Das Neue Leben.78 In Romania, Dada was awarded an ambiguous reception from Tzara's former associate Vinea. Although he was sympathetic to its goals, treasured Hugo Ball and Hennings and promised to adapt his own writings to its requirements, Vinea cautioned Tzara and the Jancos in favor of lucidity.79 When Vinea submitted his poem Doleanţe ("Grievances") to be published by Tzara and his associates, he was turned down, an incident which critics attribute to a contrast between the reserved tone of the piece and the revolutionary tenets of Dada.80
In late 1919, Tristan Tzara left Switzerland to join Breton, Soupault and Claude Rivière in editing the Paris-based magazine Littérature.8125 Already a mentor for the French avant-garde, he was, according to Hans Richter, perceived as an "Anti-Messiah" and a "prophet".82 Reportedly, Dada mythology had it that he entered the French capital in a snow-white or lilac-colored car, passing down Boulevard Raspail through a triumphal arch made from his own pamphlets, being greeted by cheering crowds and a fireworks display.82 Richter dismisses this account, indicating that Tzara actually walked from Gare de l'Est to Picabia's home, without anyone expecting him to arrive.82
He is often described as the main figure in the Littérature circle, and credited with having more firmly set its artistic principles in the line of Dada.8325 When Picabia began publishing a new series of 391 in Paris, Tzara seconded him and, Richter says, produced issues of the magazine "decked out [...] in all the colors of Dada."58 He was also issuing his Dada magazine, printed in Paris but using the same format, renaming it Bulletin Dada and later Dadaphone.84 At around that time, he met American author Gertrude Stein, who wrote about him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,85 and the artist couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay (with whom he worked in tandem for "poem-dresses" and other simultaneist literary pieces).86
Tzara became involved in a number of Dada experiments, on which he collaborated with Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Picabia or Paul Éluard.8714 Other authors who came into contact with Dada at that stage were Jean Cocteau, Paul Dermée and Raymond Radiguet.88 The performances staged by Dada were often meant to popularize its principles, and Dada continued to draw attention on itself by hoaxes and false advertising, announcing that the Hollywood film star Charlie Chaplin was going to appear on stage at its show,49 or that its members were going to have their heads shaved or their hair cut off on stage.89 In another instance, Tzara and his associates lectured at the Université populaire in front of industrial workers, who were reportedly less than impressed.90 Richter believes that, ideologically, Tzara was still in tribute to Picabia's nihilistic and anarchic views (which made the Dadaists attack all political and cultural ideologies), but that it had a measure of sympathy for the working class.91
Dada activities in Paris culminated in the March 1920 variety show at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, which featured readings from Breton, Picabia, Dermée and Tzara's earlier work, La Première aventure céleste de M. Antipyrine ("The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine").92 Tzara's melody, Vaseline symphonique ("Symphonic Vaseline"), which required ten or twenty people to shout "cra" and "cri" on a rising scale, was also performed.93 A scandal erupted when Breton read Picabia's Manifeste cannibale ("Cannibal Manifesto"), lashing out at the audience and mocking them, to which they answered by aiming rotten fruit at the stage.94
The Dada phenomenon was only noticed in Romania beginning in 1920, and its overall reception was negative. Traditionalist historian Nicolae Iorga, Symbolist promoter Ovid Densusianu, the more reserved modernists Camil Petrescu and Benjamin Fondane all refused to accept it as a valid artistic manifestation.95 Although he rallied with tradition, Vinea defended the subversive current in front of more serious criticism, and rejected the widespread rumor that Tzara had acted as an agent of influence for the Central Powers during the war.96 Eugen Lovinescu, editor of Sburătorul and one of Vinea's rivals on the modernist scene, acknowledged the influence exercised by Tzara on the younger avant-garde authors, but analyzed his work only briefly, using as an example one of his pre-Dada poems, and depicting him as an advocate of literary "extremism".97
By 1921, Tzara was by then involved in conflicts with other figures in the movement, whom he claimed had parted with spirit of Dada.98 He was targeted by the Berlin-based Dadaists, in particular by Huelsenbeck and Serner, the former of whom was also involved in a conflict with Raoul Hausmann over leadership status.42 According to Richter, tensions between Breton and Tzara had surfaced in 1920, when Breton first made known his wish to do away with musical performances altogether, and alleged that the Romanian was merely repeating himself.99 The Dada shows themselves were by then such common occurrences that audiences expected to be insulted by the performers.68
In April 1921, through a booklet proclaiming the "new interpretation of nature applied this time not to art, but to life",4 Dada called on the Parisian public join them on a trip to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre church. As they distributed copies of the document, the authors shouted insulting or provocative slogans to passers-by.4 This "Dada excursion", conceived as a manner of avoiding stagnation, failed to gain needed attention, and other members of the Parisian group came to share Breton's feelings.100
A more serious crisis occurred in May, when Dada organized a mock trial of Maurice Barrès, whose early affiliation with the Symbolists had been shadowed by his antisemitism and reactionary stance: Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes was the prosecutor, Aragon and Soupault the defense attorneys, with Tzara, Ungaretti, Benjamin Péret and others as witnesses (a mannequin stood in for Barrès).101 Péret immediately upset Picabia and Tzara by refusing to make the trial an absurd one, and by introducing a political subtext with which Breton nevertheless agreed.102 In June, Tzara and Picabia clashed with each other, after Tzara expressed an opinion that his former mentor was becoming too radical.103 During the same season, Breton, Arp, Ernst, Maja Kruschek and Tzara were in Austria, at Imst, where they published their last manifesto as a group, Dada au grand air ("Dada in the Open Air") or Der Sängerkrieg in Tirol ("The Battle of the Singers in Tyrol").104 Tzara also visited Czechoslovakia, where he reportedly hoped to gain adherents to his cause.105
Also in 1921, Ion Vinea wrote an article for the Romanian newspaper Adevărul, arguing that the movement had exhausted itself (although, in his letters to Tzara, he continued to ask his friend to return home and spread his message there).106 After July 1922, Marcel Janco rallied with Vinea in editing Contimporanul, which published some of Tzara's earliest poems but never offered space to any Dadaist manifesto.107 Reportedly, the conflict between Tzara and Janco had a personal note: Janco later mentioned "some dramatic quarrels" between his colleague and him.108 They avoided each other for the rest of their lives, and Tzara even struck out the dedications to Janco from his early poems.109 Julius Evola also grew disappointed by the movement's total rejection of tradition, and began his personal search for an alternative, pursuing a path which later led him to esotericism and fascism.55
Tzara was openly attacked by Breton in a February 1922 article for Le Journal de Peuple, where the Romanian writer was denounced as "an impostor" avid for "publicity".110 In March, Breton initiated the Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit. The French writer used the occasion to strike out Tzara's name from among the Dadaists, citing in his support Dada's Huelsenbeck, Serner, and Christian Schad.111 Basing his statement on a note supposedly authored by Huelsenbeck, Breton also accused Tzara of opportunism, claiming that he had planned wartime editions of Dada works in such a manner as not to upset actors on the political stage, making sure that German Dadaists were not made available to the public in countries subject to the Supreme War Council's control.111 Tzara, who attended the Congress only as a means to subvert it,112 responded to the accusations the same month, arguing that Huelsenbeck's note was fabricated and that Schad had not been one of the original Dadaists.111 Rumors reported much later by American writer Brion Gysin had it that Breton's claims also depicted Tzara as an informer for the Prefecture of Police.113
In parallel, Dada came to terms with its impending dissolution, and, in May 1922, staged its own funeral.114 According to Hans Richter, the main part of this took place in Weimar, where the Dadaists attended a festival of the Bauhaus art school, during which Tzara proclaimed the elusive nature of his art: "Dada is useless, like everything else in life. [...] Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions."115
With Le Cœur à barbe ("The Bearded Heart"), a manifesto and public performance, a large group of modernists signed in favor of marginalizing Breton and supporting Tzara. Alongside Cocteau, Arp, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Éluard, the pro-Tzara faction included Erik Satie, Theo van Doesburg, Serge Charchoune, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Duchamp, Ossip Zadkine, Jean Metzinger, Ilia Zdanevich, and Man Ray.116 It was during the group's soirée of July 1923 that Tristan Tzara first presented to the public his play Le Cœur à gaz (with costumes designed by Sonia Delaunay),86 but the show was just then interrupted by an angry Breton, who reportedly fought with several of his former associates and broke furniture, causing a riot that was only stopped by the intervention of authorities.117 The scandal involving Breton and Tzara meant that Dada's vaudeville declined in importance, and disappeared altogether after that date.118
Picabia took Breton's side against Tzara,119 and replaced the staff of his 391, enlisting collaborations from Clément Pansaers and Ezra Pound.120 Breton marked the end of Dada in 1924, when he issued the first Surrealist Manifesto. Richter indicates: "Surrealism devoured and digested Dada."121 Tzara took distance from new trend, disagreeing with its methods and, progressively, with its politics.68122125 In 1923, he and a few other former Dadaists were collaborators of Richter and the Constructivist artist El Lissitzky on the magazine G,123 and, the following year, he wrote pieces for the Yugoslav-Slovenian magazine Tank (edited by Ferdinand Delak).124
Tzara continued to write, becoming more seriously interested in the theater. In 1924, he published and staged the play Mouchoir de nuages, which was soon after included as an additional piece in the repertoire of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.125 He also collected his earlier Dada texts as Sept manifestes Dada ("Seven Dada Manifestos"). They were positively reviewed by Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre, who later became one of the author's friends.126
In Romania, Tzara's work was partly recuperated by Contimporanul, which notably staged public readings of his works during the international art exhibit it organized in 1924, and again during the "new art demonstration" of 1925.127 In parallel, the short-lived magazine Integral, where Ilarie Voronca and Ion Călugăru were the main animators, took significant interest in Tzara's work.128 In a 1927 interview with the publication, he voiced his opposition to the Surrealist group's adoption of communism, indicating that such politics could only result in a "new bourgeoisie" being created, and explaining that he had opted for a personal "permanent revolution", which would preserve "the holiness of the ego".129
In 1925, Tristan Tzara was in Stockholm, where he married Greta Knutson, with whom he had a son, Christophe (born 1927).4 A former student of painter André Lhote, she was known for her interest in phenomenology and abstract art.130 Around the same period, with funds from Knutson's inheritance, Tzara commissioned Austrian architect Adolf Loos, a former representative of the Vienna Secession whom he had met in Zürich, to build him a house in Paris.4 The rigidly functionalist Maison Tristan Tzara, built in Montmartre, was designed following Tzara's specific requirements and decorated with samples of African art.4 It was Loos' only major contribution in his Parisian years.4
In 1929, he reconciled with Breton, and sporadically attended the Surrealists' meetings in Paris.681 The same year, he issued the poetry book De nos oiseaux ("Of Our Birds").68 This period saw the publication of L'Homme approximatif (1931), alongside the volumes L'Arbre des voyageurs ("The Travelers' Tree", 1930), Oú boivent les loups ("Where Wolves Drink", 1932), L'Antitête ("The Antihead", 1933) and Grains et issues ("Seed and Bran", 1935).1 By then, it was also announced that Tzara had started work on a screenplay.131 In 1930, he directed and produced a cinematic version of Le Cœur à barbe, starring Breton and other leading Surrealists.132 Five years later, he signed his name to The Testimony against Gertrude Stein, published by Eugene Jolas' magazine transition in reply to Stein's memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which he accused his former friend of being a megalomaniac.133
The poet became involved in further developing Surrealist techniques, and, together with Breton and Valentine Hugo, drew one of the better-known examples of "exquisite corpses".134 Tzara also prefaced a 1934 collection of Surrealist poems by his friend René Char, and the following year he and Greta Knutson visited Char in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue.135 Tzara's wife was also affiliated with the Surrealist group at around the same time.1304 This association ended when she parted with Tzara late in the 1930s.4130
At home, Tzara's works were collected and edited by the Surrealist promoter Saşa Pană, who corresponded with him over several years.136 The first such edition saw print in 1934, and featured the 1913-1915 poems Tzara had left in Vinea's care.30 In 1928-1929, Tzara exchanged letters with his friend Jacques G. Costin, a Contimporanul affiliate who did not share all of Vinea's views on literature, who offered to organize his visit to Romania and asked him to translate his work into French.137
Alarmed by the establishment of Adolf Hitler's Nazi German regime, which also signified the end of Berlin's avant-garde, he merged his activities as an art promoter with the cause of anti-fascism, and was close to the French Communist Party (PCF). In 1936, Richter recalled, he published a series of photographs secretly taken by Kurt Schwitters in Hanover, works which documented the destruction of Nazi propaganda by the locals, ration stamp with reduced quantities of food, and other hidden aspects of Hitler's rule.138 After the outbreak of the Civil War in Spain, he briefly left France and joined the Republican forces.1391 Alongside Soviet reporter Ilya Ehrenburg, Tzara visited Madrid, which was besieged by the Nationalists (see Siege of Madrid).140 Upon his return, he published the collection of poems Midis gagnés ("Conquered Southern Regions").1 Some of them had previously been printed in the brochure Les poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol ("The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People", 1937), which was edited by two prominent authors and activists, Nancy Cunard and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.141 Tzara had also signed Cunard's June 1937 call to intervention against Francisco Franco.142 Reportedly, he and Nancy Cunard were romantically involved.143
Although the poet was moving away from Surrealism,68 his adherence to strict Marxism-Leninism was reportedly questioned by both the PCF and the Soviet Union.144 Semiotician Philip Beitchman places their attitude in connection with Tzara's own vision of Utopia, which combined communist messages with Freudo-Marxist psychoanalysis and made use of particularly violent imagery.145 Reportedly, Tzara refused to be enlisted in supporting the party line, maintaining his independence and refusing to take the forefront at public rallies.146
However, others note that the former Dadaist leader would often show himself a follower of political guidelines. As early as 1934, Tzara, together with Breton, Éluard and communist writer René Crevel, organized an informal trial of independent-minded Surrealist Salvador Dalí, who was at the time a confessed admirer of Hitler, and whose portrait of William Tell had alarmed them because it shared likeness with Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.147 Historian Irina Livezeanu notes that Tzara, who agreed with Stalinism and shunned Trotskyism, submitted to the PCF cultural demands during the writers' congress of 1935, even when his friend Crevel committed suicide to protest the adoption of socialist realism.148 At a later stage, Livezeanu remarks, Tzara reinterpreted Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary currents, and presented them as such to the public.149 This stance she contrasts with that of Breton, who was more reserved in his attitudes.148
During World War II, Tzara took refuge from the German occupation forces, moving to the southern areas, controlled by the Vichy regime.14 On one occasion, the antisemitic and collaborationist publication Je Suis Partout made his whereabouts known to the Gestapo.150
He was in Marseille in late 1940-early 1941, joining the group of anti-fascist and Jewish refugees who, protected by American diplomat Varian Fry, were seeking to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. Among the people present there were the anti-totalitarian socialist Victor Serge, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, playwright Arthur Adamov, philosopher and poet René Daumal, and several prominent Surrealists: Breton, Char, and Benjamin Péret, as well as artists Max Ernst, André Masson, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Hérold, Victor Brauner and Óscar Domínguez.151 During the months spent together, and before some of them received permission to leave for America, they invented a new card game, on which traditional card imagery was replaced with Surrealist symbols.151
Some time after his stay in Marseille, Tzara joined the French Resistance, rallying with the Maquis. A contributor to magazines published by the Resistance, Tzara also took charge of the cultural broadcast for the Free French Forces clandestine radio station.14 He lived in Aix-en-Provence, then in Souillac, and ultimately in Toulouse.4 His son Cristophe was at the time a Resistant in northern France, having joined the Franc Tireurs Partisans.150 In Axis-allied and antisemitic Romania, the regime of Ion Antonescu ordered bookstores not to sell works by Tzara and 44 other Jewish-Romanian authors (see Romania during World War II).152
In December 1944, five months after the Liberation of Paris, he was contributing to L'Éternelle Revue, a pro-communist newspaper edited by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, through which Sartre was publicizing the heroic image of a France united in resistance, as opposed to the perception that it had passively accepted German control.153 Other contributors included writers Aragon, Char, Éluard, Elsa Triolet, Eugène Guillevic, Raymond Queneau, Francis Ponge, Jacques Prévert and painter Pablo Picasso.153
Upon the end of the war and the restoration of French independence, Tzara was naturalized a French citizen.1 During 1945, under the Provisional Government of the French Republic, he was a representative of the Sud-Ouest region to the National Assembly.140 According to Livezeanu, he "helped reclaim the South from the cultural figures who had associated themselves to Vichy [France]."148 In April 1946, his early poems, alongside similar pieces by Breton, Éluard, Aragon and Dalí, were the subject of a midnight broadcast on Parisian Radio.154 In 1947, he became a full member of the PCF68 (according to some sources, he had been one since 1934).1
Over the following decade, Tzara lend his support to political causes. Pursuing his interest in primitivism, he became a critic of the Fourth Republic's colonial policy, and joined his voice to those who supported decolonization.146 Nevertheless, he was appointed cultural ambassador of the Republic by the Paul Ramadier cabinet.155 He also participated in the PCF-organized Congress of Writers, but, unlike Éluard and Aragon, again avoided adapting his style to socialist realism.150
He returned to Romania on an official visit in late 1946-early 1947,156157 as part of a tour of the emerging Eastern Bloc during which he also stopped in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia.157 The speeches he and Saşa Pană gave on the occasion, published by Orizont journal, were noted for condoning official positions of the PCF and the Romanian Communist Party, and are credited by Irina Livezeanu with causing a rift between Tzara and young Romanian avant-gardists such as Victor Brauner and Gherasim Luca (who rejected communism and were alarmed by the Iron Curtain having fallen over Europe).158 In September of the same year, he was present at the conference of the pro-communist International Union of Students (where he was a guest of the French-based Union of Communist Students, and met with similar organizations from Romania and other countries).159
In 1949-1950, Tzara answered Aragon's call and become active in the international campaign to liberate Nazım Hikmet, a Turkish poet whose 1938 arrest for communist activities had created a cause célèbre for the pro-Soviet public opinion.160161 Tzara chaired the Committee for the Liberation of Nazım Hikmet, which issued petitions to national governments162161 and commissioned works in honor of Hikmet (including musical pieces by Louis Durey and Serge Nigg).161 Hikmet was eventually released in July 1950, and publicly thanked Tzara during his subsequent visit to Paris.163
His works of the period include, among others: Le Signe de vie ("Sign of Life", 1946), Terre sur terre ("Earth on Earth", 1946), Sans coup férir ("Without a Need to Fight", 1949), De mémoire d'homme ("From a Man's Memory", 1950), Parler seul ("Speaking Alone", 1950), and La Face intérieure ("The Inner Face", 1953), followed in 1955 by À haute flamme ("Flame out Loud") and Le Temps naissant ("The Nascent Time"), and the 1956 Le Fruit permis ("The Permitted Fruit").1164 Tzara continued to be an active promoter of modernist culture. Around 1949, having read Irish author Samuel Beckett's manuscript of Waiting for Godot, Tzara facilitated the play's staging by approaching producer Roger Blin.165 He also translated into French some poems by Hikmet166 and the Hungarian author József Attila.157 In 1949, he introduced Picasso to art dealer Heinz Berggruen (thus helping start their lifelong partnership),167 and, in 1951, wrote the catalog for an exhibit of works by his friend Max Ernst; the text celebrated the artist's "free use of stimuli" and "his discovery of a new kind of humor."168
In October 1956, Tzara went visited the People's Republic of Hungary, where the government of Imre Nagy was coming into conflict with the Soviet Union.150157 This followed an invitation on the part of Hungarian writer Gyula Illyés, who wanted his colleague to be present at ceremonies marking the rehabilitation of László Rajk (a local communist leader whose prosecution had been ordered by Joseph Stalin).157 Tzara was receptive of the Hungarians' demand for liberalization,150157 contacted the anti-Stalinist and former Dadaist Lajos Kassák, and deemed the anti-Soviet movement "revolutionary".157 However, unlike much of Hungarian public opinion, the poet did not recommend emancipation from Soviet control, and described the independence demanded by local writers as "an abstract notion".157 The statement he issued, wi