TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara (The MIT Press) - Softcover

Marius Hentea

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262027542 ISBN 13: 9780262027540

Publisher: MIT Press, 2014

Synopsis

"Tristan Tzara", one of the most important figures in the twentieth century's most famous avant-garde movements, was born Samuel Rosenstock (or Samueli Rosenstok) in a provincial Romanian town, on April 16 (or 17, or 14, or 28) in 1896. Tzara became Tzara twenty years later at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, when he and others (including Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Arp) invented Dada with a series of chaotic performances including multilingual (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 young artists 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 fifty books; he wrote one of the great poems of surrealism; he became a recognized expert on primitive art; he was an active antifascist, a communist, and (after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution) a former communist. Hentea offers a detailed exploration of Tzara's early life in Romania, neglected by other scholars; a scrupulous assessment of the Dada years; and an original examination of Tzara's life and works after Dada. The one thing that remained constant through all of Tzara's artistic and political metamorphoses, Hentea tells us, was a desire to unlock the secrets and mysteries of language.

About this title

Product Description:

[ Tata Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara By ( Author ) Sep-2014 Paperback

Review:

‘thoroughly researched and well told’

– Art Monthly

 

‘TaTa Dada offers a treasure trove of local insights (including the old riddle of the origins of the “Tristan Tzara” monker), but the book comes into its own as a reassessment of the history of Dada itself—of the movement’s origins, as well as of its often contradictory artistic aims. Besides its considerable merits as a biography and an astute historical account of Dadaism, Hentea’s book offers a much-needed re-evaluation of the place of the Central European avant-gardes in the development of what we have come to call, in reductive shorthand, “modernism”.’

 – Benjamin Kohlmann, Modernism/Modernity

 

‘Marius Hentea has gone into a great deal of detail to tell Tzara’s story and his book is well-researched (there are fifty pages of notes) and is a mine of information about Dada and surrealist events, little magazines, small-presses, and a variety of ephemeral publications It’s always readable, too, and avoids academic jargon.’

– Northern Review of Books 

 

‘As well as having acaemic value, [TaTa Dada] is a deeply entertaining book, with great hilarious moments ... Hentea’s biography succeeds in capturing the effervesence of its subject, without being willing to take Tzara invariably at his own word; rarely succeeding, thankfully, in pinning him down, it catches, in flashes, his essence like lightning in a bottle as he speeds by on his celestial adventures.’    

– Bookslut

 

“The first full biography of Dadaism’s co-founder ... provides, among much else about his long career, an absorbing account of the importance of Romanian and Swiss cultures to what’s still thought of as a Parisian phenomenon.

 

[Marius Hentea’s] well-illustrated, sane book is full of insights ...

 

... By focusing on Tzara’s “real life” as well as his “celestial adventures”, Hentea gives a fresh sense of the circumstances in which a bunch of students challenged European high culture.”

– Jeremy Treglown, Times Literary Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0262027542
• ISBN 13: 9780262027540
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 360