Biography

Tzara was a Romanian poet, critic and theorist, and was one of the most important figures of the Dada movement. A founder-member of the group in Zürich, where the Dada movement was baptised in 1916, he moved to Paris in 1920 and masterminded a series of sensational 'happenings' modelled on those organised in Switzerland during the First World War. Ideological differences and personal rivalry soon led to bitter disputes with André Breton, who founded Surrealism in 1924, for Tzara was adamantly opposed to Breton's idealist tendencies and to his desire to impose order and system in the place of Dada anarchy and nihilism. Later, however, he was reconciled with Breton and became an influential, if intermittent, force within the surrealist movement.