Dan Perjovschi

Perjovschi is an artist, writer and cartoonist born in 1961 in Sibiu, Romania.


He lives and works in Bucharest and has transformed the medium of drawing, using it to create an object, a performance, and an installation. In the last decade, Perjovschi has made his drawings spontaneously in museum spaces, allowing global and local affairs to inform the final result.


Educated in the Romanian socialism system, Dan Perjovschi create work that resides at the nexus of art, society and politics; he belong to the first avantgarde movement following the 1989 Romania Revolution. Dan is internationally renowned for large and small scale drawing installations of hundreds of cartoon-like figures that comment on local, national and international cultural and current affairs. He is also the foremost political cartoon satirist in Romania.


For about 10 years Dan Perjovschi has been jumping from one wall to another (some time falling on the floor or floating from the ceiling) story-telling the world around us. As he says, if he draws it, he understands it.


His style is anarchic with no apparent structure. A sort of visual jazz. From international world-affecting decision to the taste of the morning coffee, the distance is measured in centimeters. Drawing after drawing, Perjovschi is knitting the big narrative of the contemporary world. With humor, irony and empathy, needing no one and obeying no rules. Free style.


Dan Perjovschi worked / exposed at Museum of Modern Art New York, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Galerie Michel Rein Paris, KIASMA Helsinki, Ludwig Forum Aachen, Wiels Center for Contemporary Art Brussel, Basel Kunsthalle, Tate Modern London, Vanabbe Museum Eindhoven, Ludwig Museum Koln, Venice Biennial, Lyon Biennial, Moskow Biennial, Sydney Biennial, and many others exhibits, events, museums...


For more infos, visit Dan Perjovschi's site!

Urmuz

Urmuz, pen-name of Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău (March 17, 1883, Curtea de Argeş — November 23, 1923, Bucharest), Romanian writer of absurdist and avant-garde prose. Urmuz’s work has been claimed as a forerunner of Dada, and of Surrealism as well, and shows again the sharp sense of the vitality of the avant-garde amongst Romanian practitioners.


In his early youth, he dreamed of becoming a composer, he read science fiction and travel literature. During his years at the Gheorghe Lazăr High School, he became friends with George Ciprian (who later wrote an affectionate memoir on Urmuz, in which he recorded some of his writings as he had memorized them) and Vasile Voiculescu. He studied law and after he obtained his degree, he became a judge in the Argeş and Tulcea Counties, as well as in Târgovişte. He took part in the Romanian military intervention in Bulgaria, during the Second Balkan War (1913), and afterwards became a court clerk at the High Court of Cassation and Justice in Bucharest.

He began writing only to entertain his brothers and sisters, by mimicking the clichés of contemporary prose. His texts were noticed by Tudor Arghezi, who was also the one to name him Urmuz, and he was published in 1922, in two consecutive issues of the Cugetul românesc magazine - with his Pâlnia şi Stamate ("The Funnel and Stamate"), a short "anti-prose" which has the ironic subtitle "a novel in four-parts". It relied on a series of sophisticated puns using the double meanings of some Romanian language words.

He committed suicide the following year, without giving any reason for his gesture. Apparently, he had intended to die originally, "without any cause". Except, prthaps, anxiety.


Urmuz by Marcel Janco
His writings earned a posthumous glory and had an important influence over subsequent Romanian avantgarde literature. Saşa Pană printed a collection of his works in 1930, and Geo Bogza published a magazine named after him. Eugène Ionesco continued exploring the literature of the absurd, considering Urmuz one of the forerunners of the "tragedy of the language". Urmuz was closer to the spirit of Dada (although apparently he never heard of it), through his taste for the random creation of mechanic characters rather than a Surrealist opposition to lucidity. His work is, thus, an exploration of everyday, but nonetheless grotesque occurrences, having their limits explored through characteristic buffoonery.

Ilarie Voronca

Ilarie Voronca is the pen-name of Eduard Marcus (December 31, 1903, Brăila — April 8, 1946, Paris), Romanian Jewish ethnic avantgarde poet and essayist.


In his early years, he was connected with Eugen Lovinescu's Sburătorul group, making his debut in 1922 in the Sburătorul literar (symbolist pieces inspired by the works of George Bacovia and Camil Baltazar). Voronca's poems of the period, gloomy and passive in tone, are in marked contrast to his later works. Only a year later, Voronca adopted a change in style, adhering to the modernist manifesto published in Contimporanul and contributing to literary magazines such as Punct and Integral. He and Stephan Roll issued a Constructivism-inspired magazine entitled 75 HP, of which only one number was ever printed.


In 1927, Voronca published a volume of poetry in Paris. Entitled Colomba after his wife Colomba Voronca, it featured two portraits drawn by Robert Delaunay. Colomba marked Voronca's new change in style: he had become a surrealist. Soon after that, his creations gained a regularity, and he was published frequently - especially after he settled in France (1933) and began writing in the French language. There followed: L'Apprenti fantôme ("The Apprentice Ghost"; 1938), Beauté de ce monde ("This World's Beauty"; 1940), Arbre ("Tree"; 1942). Several of his works were illustrated with drawings by Constantin Brancuşi, Marc Chagall, or Victor Brauner.

A French citizen in 1938, Voronca took part in the French Resistance. He visited Romania in January 1946, and was acclaimed for his writings and Anti-fascist activities. He never finished his Manuel du parfait bonheur ("Manual for Perfect Happiness"), committing suicide later in the same year. An edition of selected poems was published in France in 1956; it was followed ten years later by prints of never-published works. Saşa Pană oversaw a Romanian edition of many of Voronca's poems in 1972.

Victor Brauner

Victor Brauner (June 15, 1903 Piatra Neamţ - March 12, 1966 Paris), Romanian Surrealist painter and sculptor with Jewish roots; his art, obsessed with the real and unreal, and laden with symbolic eroticism, feeds off of ancient mythology as well as popular art.


In 1912 young Victor settled in Vienna with his family for a few years; his father, a passionate devotee of Spiritualism, regularly organized séances and corresponded with the famous mediums of the day. As an observer and participant, young Victor acquired a taste for the fantastic, which his art distinctly reflects. When his family returned to the country in 1914, he continued his studies at the Evangelical school in Brăila, then at the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where he painted Cézannesque landscapes. He exhibited paintings in his subsequent expressionist style at his first solo show at the Galerie Mozart in Bucharest in 1924. He went to Paris in 1925 but returned to Bucharest approximately a year later. Brauner helped found the Dadaist review 75 HP in Bucharest and in 1929 was associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist review UNU.


Composition (1929)

Trio
He moved to Paris in 1930 where, through the sculptor Constatin Brâncuşi (a fellow-Romanian), he met the painter Yves Tanguy, who introduced him to other members of the Surrealist movement. The Surrealists were departing not only from the realism and academicism of nineteenth-century art but also from tendencies toward painterly abstraction of the early modernists. Partly under the influence of contemporary psychology, they sought unexpected juxtapositions of sharply depicted figurative images, often recalling the landscapes of dreams. In 1934, André Breton wrote an enthusiastic introduction to the catalogue for Brauner’s first Parisian solo show at the Galerie Pierre. In 1935 Brauner returned to Bucharest, where he remained until 1938.


Self-portrait with a plucked eye (1931)
That year he moved to Paris and painted a number of works featuring distorted human figures with mutilated eyes. Some of these paintings, dated as early as 1931, proved gruesomely prophetic when he lost his own eye in a scuffle in 1938. At the outset of World War II, Brauner fled to the South of France, where he maintained contact with other Surrealists in Marseilles. Later he sought refuge in Switzerland; unable to obtain suitable materials there, he improvised an encaustic from candle wax and developed a graffito technique. Brauner returned to Paris in 1945. He was included in the Exposition internationale du surréalisme at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1947.


Recto: Sans titre (1945)

L'Archechat (1948)
In 1948, after he broke with the Surrealists, Brauner's work was more inspired by relics of archaic and primitive civilizations. Visitors to his studio in the Montmartre section of Paris often commented on his collection of primitive art, which comprised Oceanic cult objects as well as Native American artifacts. Gradually, his imagery became more heraldic, stark, and simplified, often evoking Egyptian or Pre-Columbian art.


Prelude to a Civilization (1954)
Beginning in the early 1960's Brauner lived and worked in Varengeville, France; he represented France at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and in 1966, the year he died in Paris as a result of a prolonged illness.


Téléventre
The epitaph on his tomb from the Montmartre cemetery is a phrase from his notebooks: "Peindre, c'est la vie, la vraie vie, ma vie" ("Painting is life, the real life, my life"). The painter’s notebooks with private notes, which he handed to Max Pol Fouchet, partly enclose the "key" of his creation: "Each painting that I make is projected from the deepest sources of my anxiety..."

Marcel Janco

Marcel Iancu (May 24, 1895, Bucharest - April 21, 1984, Tel Aviv), Romanian artist with Jewish origins who achieved international fame, one of the founders of Dadaist movement, worked both as a painter and sculptor.


Marcel Janco, born in Romania in 1895, had joined a group of artists at the Cafe Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916 and was among the principal founders of the Dada Movement. Dada was a unique artistic movement which had a major impact on 20th century art. It was established in Cabaret Voltaire, in Zurich, Switzerland, by a group of exiled poets, painters and philosophers who were oppossed to war, agression and the changing world culture. Among the founders were Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Tristan Tzara.


Janco, Tzara and Ball
Dada soirées featured spontaneous poetry, avant-garde music, and mask wearing dancers in elaborate shows. The Dadaists teased and enraged the audience through their bold defiance of Western culture and art, which they considered obsolete in view of the destruction and carnage of World War I. The Dadaists objected to the aesthetics of Western contemporary painting, sculpture, language, literature and music. The group published articles and periodicals, and mounted exhibitions. The seeds sown in Zurich spread throughout the world, resulting in new Dada organizations in Paris, New York, Berlin, Hannover, and more. Janco designed masks and costumes for the famous Dada balls, and created abstract reliefs in cardboard and plaster. He had an ecletic style in which he brilliantly combined abstract and figurative elements, expressionistic in nature.


In 1922 Marcel Janco returned to his native Romania, where he made his mark as a painter, theoretician and architect. In 1941 he moved to the land, which was to become the nation of Israel in 1948. It was here that Janco was one of the founders of the New Horizons Group, organized in 1948. In Israel, Janco painted idyllic watercolor and oil depictions of Safed and Tiberias and was captivated by the exotic sights of the Orient.


In 1953 on the ruins of an abandoned Arab village, Marcel Janco established the artists’ village known as Ein Hod, which now boasts the Janco Dada Museum. In 1967 he was awarded the Israel Prize for Painting. In the last years of his life he worked together with his friends to erect the Janco Dada Museum. Janco died ten months after the inauguration of the museum in 1984.

Tristan Tzara

Tristan Tzara (Samuel Rosenstock/Rosenstein, April 4 or April 16, 1896 - December 25, 1963) Romanian avantgarde poet, essayist and performance artist, also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, known mainly as a founder of Dada - a nihilistic revolutionary movement in the arts.


Tzara was born in Moineşti, Bacău County. His parents were Jewish Romanians who reportedly spoke Yiddish as their first language; 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. He moved to Bucharest at the age of eleven, and attended in October 1912, when Tzara was aged sixteen, he joined his friends Vinea and Marcel Janco (Marcel Iancu) in editing Simbolul, a publication of the Symbolist movement.


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 (The Call), Ion Vinea published two poems by his friend, the first printed works to bear the signature Tristan Tzara. 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. Tzara had enrolled at the University of Bucharest in 1914, studying Mathematics and Philosophy, but did not graduate. In autumn 1915, he left Romania for the city of Zürich, in neutral Switzerland, where Janco had settled there a few months before. Tzara, who may have applied for the Faculty of Philosophy at the local university, shared lodging with Marcel Janco, who was a student at the Technische Hochschule. His departure from Romania, like that of the Janco brothers, may have been in part a pacifist political statement. After settling in Switzerland, the young poet almost completely discarded Romanian as his language of expression, writing most of his subsequent works in French. The poems he had written before, which were the result of poetic dialogs between him and his friend, were left in Ion Vinea's care. Most of these pieces were first printed only in the interwar period.


It was in Zürich that the Romanian group met with the German Hugo Ball, an anarchist poet and pianist. In February 1916, Ball had rented the Cabaret Voltaire from its owner, and intended to use the venue for performance art and exhibits. Hugo Ball recorded this period, noting that Tzara and Marcel Janco, like Hans Arp, Arthur Segal, Otto van Rees, Max Oppenheimer, and Marcel Słodki, "readily agreed to take part in the cabaret". In late March, Ball recounted, the group was joined by German writer and drummer Richard Huelsenbeck. 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. 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. Tzara wrote the first Dada texts, La Première Aventure céleste de Monsieur Antipyrine (The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine) (1916), Vingt-cinq poèmes (Twenty-Five Poems) (1918) [1], and the movement's manifestos, Sept manifestes Dada (Seven Dada Manifestos) (1924).


Tzara heft Switzerland for Paris in 1919, where he engaged in tumultuous activities with Dadaists André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon to shock the public and to disintegrate the structures of language. In late 1929, weary of nihilism and destruction, he joined his friends in the more constructive activities of Surrealism. He devoted much of his time to the reconciliation of Surrealism and Marxism and joined the French Communist Party in 1937, joined the Republican forces in Spain and was active in the French Resistance movement during World War II. He left the Communist Party in 1956, in protest against the Soviet quelling of the Hungarian Revolution.

His political commitments brought him closer to his fellow human beings, and he gradually matured into a lyrical poet. His poems revealed the anguish of his soul, caught between revolt and wonderment at the daily tragedy of the human condition. His mature works started with L'Homme approximatif (The Approximate Man) (1931), and continued with Parler seul (Speaking Alone) (1950), and La Face intérieure (The Inner Face) (1953). In these, the anarchically scrambled words of Dada were replaced with a difficult but humanized language. He died in Paris and was interred there in the Cimetière du Montparnasse.