Tristan Tzara - Problematic Captain and Occasional Ethnographic Collector Tristan Tzara By Philippe Bourgoin Poet, writer and art critic Tristan Tzara’s name remains immutably associated with the Dada movement, of which he was the founder and leader. But his immense body of work goes far beyond those boisterous Zurich years, and Tzara was not just a witness to his own time but a major force in it. Tristan Tzara in front of a Maori prow from his collection, rue de Lille, in Paris. Vintage silver print c.1950, 24 x 18 cm. © Hôtel des vente de Lausanne, lot 76A, June 02, 2021. Photo by A. Scarnati. Born Samuel Rosenstock into a relatively well to do family in Moineşti, Romania, the young man chose writing to express opposition to the dominant aesthetic canons and the absurdity of a world on the brink of chaos in the pre-war period. It was with his friends painter and architect Marcel Iancu, better known as Marcel Janco, (1895-1984), and Ion Lovanachi, who would become a writer under the pen name Ion Vinea (1895-1964), that he founded the symbolist magazine Simbolul (The Symbol) in 1912. He published his first poems in it, under the pseudonym Samuel Samyro. As Switzerland was neutral during the First World War, many European artists took refuge there. In autumn 1915, the man who now chose to call himself Tristan Tzara left Bucharest for Zurich, initially to study literature and philosophy. It was on February 5, 1916, in a Zurich tavern transformed into a literary and artistic café called the Cabaret Voltaire, founded by writer and poet Hugo Ball (1886-1927), and his companion, dancer and poet Emmy Hennings (1885-1948), that Dada was born. It was at this venue that Tzara pursued his goal of exalting spontaneous speech and gesture alongside his compatriot Janco, the painter and sculptor Jean Arp (1886-1966) - who would remain his lifelong friend - his wife, the Swiss dancer and painter Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943), and the writer Richard Huelsenbeck (1892-1974). Success was immediate. It was from Zurich that Dada sowed the seeds of a joyous chaos that appeared as a sudden jolt in a Europe that was in the throes of̀ a conflict that appeared to have no end. Tzara was an active participant at soirées in which languages and disciplines (poetry, visual arts, dance, music, song, and theater) crossed paths and blended together, often leaving audiences flabbergasted or furious. He read his poetry, chanted African or Maori songs and often had several voices reading poems simultaneously. For him, in the barbaric European context of the First World War, Africa and all the art forms associated with it had a particular resonance and provided a means for wiping the slate clean of Western culture. Hannah Höch's (1889-1978) dolls and collages, or Taeuber-Arp’s beaded objects and wooden puppets, bore witness to a process of fusion with these non-Western cultures. Tristan Tzara face to face of some African and Oceanic sculptures from his collection, rue de Lille, in Paris. Vintage silver print c.1950, 24 x 18 cm. © Hôtel des vente de Lausanne, lot 76C, June 02, 2021. Photo by A. Scarnati. From his base in Zurich, Tzara corresponded with a host of artists, art dealers, poets and intellectuals. In January 1920, he moved to Paris, and stayed with Francis Picabia (1879-1953). There he met young people who would eventually be, but were not yet, called Surrealists - André Breton (1896-1966), Paul Éluard (1895-1952) and Philippe Soupault (1897-1990). He was actively involved in the often rowdy and provocative events they organized, and the years that followed were intense, and peppered with readings, lectures, exhibitions, publications and manifestos. In 1925, in the course of one of his many trips around Europe, Tzara married the Swedish writer and painter Greta Knutson (1899-1983) in Stockholm, and they had a son in 1927. In 1926, he commissioned Austrian architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933) to build a house for the family at 15 avenue Junot in Paris. The building featured clean modern lines and contained many works by Tzara’s artist friends, African and Oceanic objects, as well as Pre-Columbian, Japanese, art brut and folk art pieces. The walls of a small living room were covered with Kuba textiles (Democratic Republic of Congo) and its shelves filled with exclusively African works, while his office housed sculptures from various places in Oceania, including the Marquesas Islands, Papua New Guinea, Easter Island, and New Caledonia. The objects in his collection were thus divided up according to their location of origin, and not mixed together, as can be seen in the photographs of his office on the rue de Lille in the 1950s. Tristan Tzara’s office at 15, avenue Junot, Paris. On the cabinet behind the desk, some sculptures from Marquesas Islands, Papua New Guinea, Easter Island and New Caledonia and Barbus Müller (on the left). © Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg. Photo Mathieu Bertola The poet’s rigorous aesthetic choices and adventurous eye were quickly recognized by his peers, and it wasn’t long before he was regarded as one of the major figures among 20thcentury artist-collectors. His commitment to African and Oceanic art was complete and profound, and expressed through the influence it had on his poetic practice, as well as on his criticisms of the colonial world. It was probably the young Parisian art dealer Paul Guillaume (1891-1934) who introduced Tzara to African art. In 1917, Guillaume lent at least one African sculpture to the 1re Exposition-Dada-Cubistes-Art Nègre (First Dada-Cubist-Art Nègre Exhibition) organized by Tzara at the Galerie Corray in Zurich. In connection with Oceania, we should also mention Tzara’s relationship with German dealer and collector Alfred Flechtheim (1878-1937), who regularly published his texts in his magazine Der Querschnitt. Flechtheim’s name remains closely associated with the dissemination and promotion of tribal art in Europe, and the landmark 1926 Südsee-Plastiken exhibition presented in his galleries in Berlin and Düsseldorf, and at the Zürcher Kunsthaus in Zurich. It featured 184 objects, mostly from Papua New Guinea and the former German colonies of the Bismarck Archipelago. Middle Sepik River Figure, Tristan Tzara Collection, Loudmer-Poulain Auction, Paris 14 June 1979 & Lot 15 and Christie’s Paris 29 June 2022, lot 1--$421,178. It was on this occasion that Tzara acquired a female ancestor figure that he would keep for the rest of his life (see Carl Einstein, Südsee-Plastiken, Das Kunstarchiv Verlag G.M.B.H. Berlin, p. 21, fig. 11). This historic icon of Oceanic art was exhibited at the Galerie du Théâtre Pigalle in 1930, a milestone event organized by Tzara, Pierre Loeb (1897-1964) and Charles Ratton (1895-1986). The show offered a complete panorama of the African and Pacific arts available at the time, and placed particular emphasis on Oceanic art, with the discovery of a substantial group of exceptionally fine objects from Papua New Guinea. In addition to buying from various Parisian galleries, Tzara and his friends at the time also actively traded and sold pieces to enrich their collections. Brokering sales of objects and paintings was sometimes a means of acquiring works as well. As the provenances of some of his objects show, Tzara sourced from collectors such as Carl Einstein (1885-1940) and André Derain (1880-1954) and made purchases at auctions, including at the Paul Rupalley sale in 1930, where he acquired what is probably a Makonde mask from Mozambique or Tanzania, another mask from Vanuatu, a stilt step from the Marquesas Islands, and a shield from the Trobriand Islands. Tzara strove to achieve his goal of moving tribal art into the realm of fine art through his own collection, by being a generous lender, and through exhibitions for which he acted as a consultant or an art critic, sharing his expertise and his well-honed eye. He contributed thirty-eight works (twenty-three from Africa and fifteen from Oceania) to the Galerie du Théâtre Pigalle exhibition. His passion for documenting his collection resulted in his assembling a comprehensive library, which included photographs that also provided a wealth of information. In December 1928, he commissioned a series of photographs from Georges-Henri Rivière (1897-1985), who had just become Paul Rivet’s (1876-1958) new deputy director at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro. It was around this time that Tzara began to forge special connections with the museum and those active in it and became a member of the Société des Amis du Musée (Association of Friends of the Museum). He took part in the Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris in 1931, with a loan that was prolonged in 1933 to the Musée des Colonies, which had been founded for the occasion. Tzara then joined forces with Charles Ratton for the Exposition de bronzes et ivoires du royaume de Bénin (Exhibition of Bronzes and Ivories from the Kingdom of Benin) that Ratton organized at the Musée du Trocadéro in 1932. At Rivière’s request, he also helped produce the exhibition called Île de Pâques. Exposition de la Mission Franco-Belge en Océanie (Easter Island. Exhibition on the Franco-Belgian Mission to Oceania) organized upon the return of Alfred Métraux (1902-1963) in 1935, again at the Musée du Trocadéro. Tzara also lent a number of works to the exhibition organized by Ratton at the Théâtre Édouard-VII in 1936, which was presented to coincide with the screening of the American film The Green Pastures by Marc Connelly (1890-1980). Tzara’s loans were not limited to the Parisian scene. Forty-six pieces from his collection were also exported abroad to be part of the landmark African Negro Art exhibition at New York’s MoMA in 1935. Works that are now recognized as hallmarks of Tzara’s bold choices include the formidable Bete-Guro mask now at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and the heart-shaped Kwele mask formerly in the Barbier-Mueller collection. From Oceania, a rare hourglass warup drum from the Torres Strait, a canoe prow ornament figure from the Solomon Islands, a watam mask from the Sepik region now in the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and a crocodile-shaped clan emblem from the former Speyer collection now in the Musée du Quai Branly, are all especially noteworthy. The poetic energy essential to Tzara’s perception of these creations is confirmed in his writings. His Note 6 sur l'art nègre, published in 1917 in the magazine Sic (#21-22, September-October 1917), is a manifesto on the regenerative potential that African art represented for modern movements: “Du noir puisons la lumière” (“From blackness let us draw light”), he wrote. Tzara’s fame also spread through the literary and artistic journals to which he was a faithful and frequent contributor. In addition to writing for Les Feuilles Libres, a periodical that hosted texts, images and, occasionally music by all the great names of the post-war avant-garde, Tzara also contributed to Christian Zervos’ (1889-1970) Cahiers d'Art with À propos de l'art précolombien (On Pre-Columbian Art) (#4, 3rd year, 1928) and L'art et l'Océanie (Art and Oceania) (4th year, March-April, #2-3, 1929), an issue devoted entirely to Oceanic art, for which Tzara wrote the introduction and in which fourteen pieces from his collection were presented. The 1931 the Omnibus almanac, published by Galerie Flechtheim, featured Tzara with an article titled L'Art et l'Océanie (Art and Oceania). In 1933, he published two articles in the Swedish magazine Konstrevy, titled Afrikansk Sculptur och Modern Konst (African Sculpture and Modern Art) and Om primitiv konst frân Afrika och Söderhavsöarna (On the Primitive Arts of Africa and the South Sea Islands). A third article had been planned but was ultimately never published. In 1951 he participated in the study presented by Madeleine Rousseau in issue 38 of Le Musée Vivant, the magazine put out by the Friends of the Museums Association, with L'Art océanien - Sa presence (Oceanic Art – Its Presence), featuring an introduction by Paul Rivet, texts by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) and Tristan Tzara, and contributed to the literary publication Les Lettres françaises (The French Letters) (#415, May 23, 1952) with an article devoted to the exhibition L'art méxicain du précolombien à nos jours (Mexican Art from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present) at the French Musée national d'art moderne. Again on the subject of Oceania, together with Christian Zervos, Pierre Loeb and Marcel Évrard (1920-2009), he wrote and edited the catalog that accompanied the Sculpture monumentale de la Nouvelle Guinée et des Nouvelles Hébrides (Monumental Sculpture of New Guinea and the New Hebrides) exhibition, presented at Galerie Jeanne Bucher in 1961. In the realm of film, the poet’s erudition was put to good use by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Ghislain Cloquet, the directors of the short film Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die) (1951-1953), a documentary on African art, and an anti-colonial statement produced in collaboration with the magazine Présence Africaine, with Charles Ratton acting as consultant. Throughout his life, Tzara made fervent commitments, and although his relations with the Surrealists, and in particular with André Breton, who repeatedly excluded him, were tumultuous, he eventually became one of the movement’s leading theoreticians. He officially left in 1935 however, reproaching it for what he perceived as its counter-revolutionary orientation. Tzara went on his first trip to Africa in 1962 to take part in a major cultural event, the International Congress of African Culture (ICAC), in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). In his keynote address on the first day, he highlighted the artistic qualities of African sculpture - a telling example of his lifelong intellectual commitment and unwavering interest in the non-Western arts. Poetry was far from being just a literary genre for Tristan Tzara. It was an act of insurrection that could not exist without struggle and freedom, and while the shadow of totalitarianism hung over Europe his political attachments completed the portrait of a man keenly aware of the conflicts of his time. As an anti-fascist activist and Communist Party sympathizer, he argued not just for committed poetry, but for total commitment. He was a man who maintained constant and ongoing exchanges with much of the European and American intellectual world of his time, and it would be impossible to be exhaustive about describing those contacts here. He died at his home in Paris on December 24th 1963. In 1988, twenty-five years after his death, an auction in Paris of eighty-two works from his eclectic collection revealed the uniqueness and rigor of his collector’s eye to a wide audience, and underscored the major role he played throughout the 20th century in shaping the development of European aesthetic appreciation of non-Western art.
