‘Dada Means Nothing’ – Presented by Tzara, with an Autograph Letter
TZARA, Tristan; Francis PICABIA (illustrator). Sept manifestes Dada. quelques dessins de Francis Picabia. Paris: Éditions du Diorama, Jean Budry & Co. [1924.]
8vo. Mid-twentieth-century pebbled morocco, upper board lettered in gilt, marbled endpapers, uncut edges, silk page-marker, original black wrappers with blue label to front bound in, housed in a custom-made slipcase; pp. 97, [7], with full-page portrait of Tzara to p. 7 and a further 11 in-text illustrations by Picabia; spine and joints expertly restored at head; subtle marginal repairs to wrappers and upper corner of half-title, uniform light toning (more pronounced to first and final pages); overall a very good, clean, copy; presentation inscriptions to Armand Salacrou to half-title (see below), respectively dated April 1925 (signed ‘TZARA’ and accompanied by a small ink drawing of a finger piercing a heart) and 10 February 1946 (signed ‘Tristan TZARA’ and with a small ink drawing of a flower), autograph letter to Salacrou (8vo, pp. [1], signed ‘Tristan TZARA’ and dated 1 June 1956) and press photograph of Salacrou at the Académie Goncourt (typescript caption dated 5 January 1949 adhered to verso, photographer’s blue ink stamp to verso) loosely inserted.
First complete edition of Tzara’s seven revolutionary Dada manifestos, no. 216 of 250 copies printed on Lafuma paper from a total edition of 300, twice inscribed – first in 1925 and again in 1946 – by the author to the dramatist Armand Salacrou (1899–1989), with a 1956 letter from Tzara to Salacrou loosely inserted.
The Romanian-born French writer Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) was an early pioneer of the Dada movement in Zurich. His Seven Dada Manifestos – subverting the traditional aim of a manifesto and establishing the Dadaist disavowal of meaning – were originally published separately between 1916 and 1920, and here appear together for the first time. This reaffirmation of the movement’s principles (or lack thereof) was published in the aftermath of Surrealism’s definitive split from Dadaism, which had culminated in a riot at the July 1923 restaging of Tzara’s play Le Cœur à gaz (The Gas Heart) instigated by André Breton.
Breton leapt onstage and purportedly broke an actor’s arm with his cane. Picabia, whose illustrations - including a portrait of Tzara - appear here, would formally renounce Dada in 1921, briefly positioning himself within the Surrealist movement.
The present copy testifies to the enduring friendship between Tzara and his artistic collaborator Salacrou over the course of some three decades; Salacrou had been introduced to Tzara – as well as Artaud – by the Surrealist painter André Masson. ‘Adumbrating Surrealist moods, Salacrou’s first plays are almost totally introspective’ (Silenieks, p. 1); in 1923, Tzara had some of Salacrou’s earliest works (Pièces a lire, Magasin d’accessoires, and Les Trente tombes de Judas) sent to a Belgian magazine, pieces ‘intended to be read rather than acted’ in which Salacrou ‘conjures up weird images and fantastic forms that pass by in a continuous flow’ (ibid., p. 11). A member of the Académie Goncourt from 1949 and a Grand Officer of the Légion d’honneur, he was president of the jury of the 1963 Cannes Festival (which opened with Hitchcock’s The Birds, the Palme d’Or awarded to Visconti’s Il Gattopardo). Around 1923 Salacrou was closely connected with the avant-garde Rue Blomet circle, centred around the studio of painter André Masson, where he befriended the likes of Joan Miró and Max Jacob.
In the first inscription to Salacrou on the half-title, written in verse and dated April 1925, Tzara makes reference to the drama of his friend Le Casseur d’assiettes (The Plate Breaker), which premiered in that same year: ‘To Armand Salacrou | who breaks the plates of my heart | and knows how to fill the holes with cries of dreams and with tears. The flower of all my friendships.’ (trans.), adding a symbolic drawing of a flower and of a finger poking through a heart. Tzara revisited this copy twenty-two years later (presumably at Salacrou’s request), adding another drawing of a flower in tribute of their friendship and the inscription ‘with the same friendship always’ (trans.). Loosely inserted is autograph letter from Tzara to Salacrou, dated 1 June 1956, in which Tzara ‘highly recommends a friend, Miss Sophie ?Wenck, who is charming and capable of doing of being useful to you’.
Ades 8.58; Meyer 218. See Silenieks, ‘Themes and Dramatic Forms in the Plays of Armand Salacrou’, in University of Nebraska Studies 35 (1967).
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