Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire

The sustained provocations to order, decency, taste and common sense unleashed at the infamous Cabaret Voltaire in neutral Zurich during the war-torn February of 1916 have never really been matched; modernist performance began with an intensity it never fully regained. In almost encyclopedic you-are-there detail, Sandqvist, a professor of art history in Stockholm, convincingly shows that Dada did not emerge fully formed in Zurich but grew out of an already active Romanian avant-garde, one that simply relocated to Switzerland when a group of Bucharest's most advanced modernists settled there. Bucharest—then a mysterious, polyglot city at the fringes of Europe, with one foot in Paris and another in the East, had already been a hotbed of proto-Dada poetry, prose and performance in the period before 1914. That scene's leading light was Tristan Tzara, formerly Samuel Rosenstock, who coined the term "Dada." Tracing the careers of a remarkable group of men and women against a richly woven background of their competing yet complementary Yiddish, Eastern Orthodox, modernist and folkloric traditions was a massive task of intellectual archeology, which Sandqvist has accomplished with ease. In particular, his explorations of archives long hidden by Romania's Communist government provide an unprecedented depth of contextual information about one of art history's most influential movements. (Jan.)