(b Moineşti, April 16, 1896; d Paris, Dec 24, 1963).
French writer of Romanian birth. His first poems were influenced by Symbolism. He went to Zurich in 1915 to study philosophy, and he founded the Dada movement with his friends Marcel Janco, Hans Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck and Hugo Ball. He edited the review Dada (1917–22), which served as an interchange and a melting-pot for the different artistic avant-gardes (Futurism, Expressionism, Cubism) isolated in Europe during World War I. It welcomed poets and visual artists with similar views. As early as issue 3, the ‘manifeste dada 1918’ laid the foundations of a revolutionary art, advocating chaos and the mixing of genres. The page exploded: typography itself was exploited as art. Influenced by the visual discoveries of his friends, including Arp, Janco and Viking Eggeling, Tzara composed poems that are their verbal equivalents, treating the word as sonorous material and attempting to produce an ideographic alphabet. The soirées nègres...
