Marcel Janco
Untitled
c. 1945

Name: Untitled
Brand: Marcel Janco
Price: 12000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

We are pleased to present this vivid, modernist work by Marcel Janco, one of the founders of Dada. It is housed in a stunning House of Heydenryk frame. Marcel Janco was a Romanian-Israeli-Jewish painter who was one of the founders of Dadaism and a noted modernist architect. His career evinced the modern artist's interest in the primitive in art. In its earliest years, the Romanian avant-garde flourished mainly outside of Romania, thanks to the conservative and nationalistic mood of that country during the post-World War I era. Dada, the anti-art movement, was hatched by a group of Romanian expatriate artists, Tristan Tzara (born Sami Rosenstein), Marcel Janco and other intellectuals working in Zurich in 1915. The Dada movement, which later took root in other centers in Europe and the United States, fostered an abandonment of traditional artistic methods and forms and urged an approach to art without preconceived ideas. A manifesto by Tristan Tzara said that Dada meant nothing, that ''we want works, straightforward, strong, accurate and forever not understood, logic is always wrong.'' Janco built the scenery for Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich that was the first Dadaist meeting place, and he was one of the most energetic members of the Zurich group. At the cabaret the members of the group put on shows and performances that were alien to and completely different from anything to which the bourgeois society of Zurich was accustomed. Marcel Janco was a full partner in all the group's activities - he created the masks they wore during stage performances, and took part in the shows that evoked great rage and indignant responses from the audience. A Dada construction of his was reproduced on the cover of Dada, the group's magazine, published in 1917. His best known Dadaist works were abstract, architectonic plaster reliefs, one of which is in the collection of the MOMA. Janco had his first exhibition at Cafe Voltaire in 1916. In 1917, Janco exhibited at the first Dada show in Zurich at the Dada gallery together with Hans Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, and Tzara. In 1918, he became a member of Das Neue Leben, a group of artists in Basel that included Arp, Fritz Baumann, Augusto Giacometti, Oscar Lüthy, Otto Morach, and Sophie Täuber. He parted with Dada in 1919, when he and painter Hans Arp founded a Constructivist circle, Das Neue Leben. Janco came from an assimilated, well-to-do Jewish family. Targeted by rising anti-semitism in Romania prior to WWII, he and his family would immigrate to Israel in 1941. There he became one of the leading lights of the new Israeli art. There is a museum dedicated to his work in Ein Hod, Israel. His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Israel Museum, and others.

Creator:

Marcel Janco (1895 - 1984, Israeli, Romanian)

Creation Year:

c. 1945

Dimensions:

Height: 19.5 in (49.53 cm)Width: 26.5 in (67.31 cm)

Medium:

Oil

Movement & Style:

Abstract Expressionist

Period:

1940-1949