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Nocturne (Death of a Soldier)
Marcel Janco
1948
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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.
That night, I was a clockwork doll
and I whirled around, this way and that,
and I fell on my face and shattered to bits
and they tried to fix me with all their skill.
Then I was a proper doll once…