The avant-garde artist, architect, and art theorist Marcel Janco was born into an upper-middle-class home in Bucharest. He lived in Zurich from 1914 to 1921, where he took a leading role in the city’s bohemian cultural scene, cofounding the Dadaist movement, along with his fellow Romanian Tristan Tzara (born Samy Rosenstock). Janco broke with Dadaism in 1919 and became a leading proponent of East European constructivism. In January 1941, he and his family fled Bucharest and settled in Mandate Palestine. In 1953, he founded the artists’ colony Ein Hod, southeast of Haifa.
Janco and the subject of this portrait, poet Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), played leading roles in creating the Dada movement in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I. Janco made several masks that…
This story admittedly took place a long time ago and furthermore in a far-off land—in England, in fact. Yet in spite of everything, it is still important and worthy of being…
A Memento Mori is one of three vanitas pictures in a series commissioned by Isaac de Matatia Aboab, a wealthy East India merchant, emphasizing the impermanence of material pleasures and the transitory…