Tristan Tzara

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Tristan Tzara (French) – [t[ist dzaa]; Romanian: [tristan]; [tristan tuyro]; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; 28 April [O.S.] 1896 – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist, and performance artist. He was best known for being one of the anti-establishment Dada movement's founders and central figures. He was also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer, and film producer. The adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the journal Simbolul with Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco under Adrian Maniu's influence.

After briefly serving on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland during World War I. Tzara's performances at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, were a key feature of early Dadaism. In contrast to Hugo Ball's more conservative approach, Dada's nihilistic side was on display in his drawings.

Tzara, who by then became one of Dada's "presidents of Dada," joined the Littérature magazine, marking the first step forward in the movement's march toward Surrection. He was involved in the major polemics that resulted in Dada's ouster, defending his views against André Breton and Francis Picabia, as well as Romania's opposition to Vinea and Janco's eclectic modernism. His Dadaist characters, The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924), based on his personal experience of art. Tzara, a forerunner of automation, eventually aligned himself with Breton's Survival, and wrote his celebrated utopian poem "The Approximate Man" under its influence.

Tzara mixed his humanist and anti-fascist viewpoints with a communist perspective, serving with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II, and a term in the National Assembly during his tenure. He had spoken out in favour of liberalization in Hungary long before the 1956 revolution, and he remained a member of the French Communist Party, though not all of it. He was one of the intellectuals who protested against French involvement in the Algerian War in 1960.

Tristan Tzara was a popular writer and performer whose contribution to the Beat Generation, Situationism, and many other rock music styles is credited to him. He was the lover of dancer Maja Kruscek in his youth and later married Swedish artist and poet Greta Knutson.

Early life and Simbolul years

Tzara was born in Bacului, Bacău County, in the historic area of Western Moldavia. His parents, according to reports, were Jewish Romanians who spoke Yiddish for their first language; his father Filip and grandfather Ilie were entrepreneurs in the forestry industry. Emilia Rosenstock (née Zibalis) was Tzara's mother. The Rosenstocks were not emancipated, and Tzara was not a full citizen of the country until 1918, owing to the Romanian Republic's discrimination laws.

At the age of 11, he moved to Bucharest and attended the Schemitz-Tierin boarding school. The young Tzara is believed to have completed his secondary education at a state-run high school, either named as the Saint Sava National College or the Sfântul Gheorghe High School. Tzara was 16 when he joined Vinea and Marcel Janco in editing Simbolul in October 1912. The funds were reportedly obtained by Janco and Vinea. Tzara was also close to their young colleague Jacques G. Costin, who was later his self-declared promoter and admirer, as Vinea.

Despite their youth, the three editors were able to gain connections from established Symbolist writers, who were active within Romania's own Symbolist movement. N. Davidescu, Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo, Emil Isac, Claudia Millian, Eugeniu Sperance, Al. were among their close friend and mentor Adrian Maniu (an Imagist who had been Vinea's mentor). T. Stamatiad, Eugeniu-Est, T. Stoika, and Constantin T. Stoika, as well as journalist and advocate Poldi Chapier, are among the many notables. In its inaugural issue, the journal also published a poem by Alexandru Macedonski, one of Romania's top figures in symbolism. Simbolul also had illustrations by Maniu, Millian, and Iosif Iser.

Even though the magazine stopped printing in December 1912, it was still a vital role in the development of Romanian literature of the time. Simbolul is seen as a central stage in Romania's modernism, according to literary scholar Paul Cernat, who cites the first changes from Symbolism to the radical avant-garde. The collaboration between Samyro, Vinea, and Janco was also an early example of literature becoming "an interface between the arts," according to Cernat, which included the collaboration between Iser and writers such as Ion Minulescu and Tudor Arghezi. Although Maniu left the company to seek a change in style that brought him closer to traditionalist tenets, Tzara, Janco, and Vinea continued their collaboration. Both families were holidaying together between 1913 and 1915, either on the Black Sea or at the Rosenstock family's house in Gârceni, Vaslui County; during this period, Vinea and Samyro wrote poems with similar themes and alluding to one another.

During a period where the Romanian Kingdom kept out of World War I, Tzara's career changed direction between 1914 and 1916. In autumn 1915, as founder and editor of the short-lived journal Chemarea, Vinea, published two poems by his companion, and the first printed works to feature the signature Tristan Tzara. The young poet and several of his acquaintances were early adopters of an anti-war and anti-nationalist movement, which increasingly accepted anti-establishment messages. Tzara and Vinea may have funded Chemarea, which served as a platform for this initiative and attracted new collaborations from Chapier. The journal was "completely different from everything that had been published in Romania before that date," according to Romanian avant-garde writer Claude Sernet. Tzara's works were widely published in Hefter-Hidalgo's Versuri și Proză, and Constantin Rădulescu-Motru's Noua Revistă Română's Nullificate de pension ("Little Cousin, Boarding School Girl") during the 1915-1915 period, and in 1915, he wrote "Little Cousin, Fatigue de pension ("Little Cousin, Boarding School Girl."

Tzara had been attending the University of Bucharest in 1914, studying mathematics and philosophy, but did not graduate. In autumn 1915, he left Romania for Zürich, in neutral Switzerland. Janco and his brother Jules Janco had settled there a few months earlier and were later joined by Georges Janco's older brother Georges Janco. In the Altinger Guest House, Tzara, who may have applied to the Faculty of Philosophy at the local university, shared lodging with Marcel Janco, a student at the Technische Hochschule, in 1919 (Tzara had migrated to the Limmatquai Hotel). His departure from Romania, as well as that of the Janco brothers, may have been a pacifist political statement. The young poet's first work in French was almost entirely rejected Romanian as his expression of expression after settling in Switzerland. He had written before, but the poems, which were the result of poetic conversations between him and his partner, were left in Vinea's care. The majority of these pieces were first published in the interwar period.

The Romanian group met with Gerhard Ball, anarchist poet and pianist, and his teenage widow Emmy Hennings, a music hall performer, in Zürich. Ball hired the Cabaret Voltaire from its owner, Jan Ephraim, in February 1916 and planned to use the space for performance art and exhibits. Hugo Ball recalled this period, noting that Tzara and Marcel Janco, Johann Arp, Arthur Segal, Otto van Rees, and Max Oppenheimer "fully agreed to perform in the cabaret." "Herr Tristan Tzara recited Rumanian poetry" in a series of songs based on various national folklores, according to Ball. The band was introduced by German writer and drummer Richard Huelsenbeck in late March. Ball's tale was published in the late March. He was soon after being invited to Tzara's "impressive verse" performance, "the first in Zürich and in the world," as well as translations of poems by two promoters of Cubism, Fernand Divoire, and Henri Barzun.

Dada was born in this period, but not long before May 1916, when a newspaper of the same name first appeared in print. Tzara and his fellow writers disagreed on the details of the company's establishment. Cernat claims that the first Dadaist performance took place as early as February, when the nineteen-year-old Tzara, wearing a monocle, arrived on stage in sentimental melodies and giving paper wads to his "scandalized audience," allowing the stage to accommodate masked actors on stilts and back in clown attire. After the Cabaret Voltaire was coerced to close down, the same type of performances at the Zunfthaus zur Waag began in summer 1916.

"The Cabaret Voltaire was dada" for as long as it lasted, according to music historian Bernard Gendron. There was no alternative institution or web page that could disentangle 'pure' dada from its mere accompaniment [...] no such website was found." According to other sources, Dada's ancestors can be traced back to several events, including Alfred Jarry, André Gide, Christian Morgenstern, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia.

Ball wrote in the first of the movement's manifestos: "The booklet is intended to introduce the Cabaret Voltaire's activities and interests to the public, which is intended to bring attention, across the boundaries of war and nationalism, to the few remaining independent spirits who live for other ideals." The artist's next goal is to publish a revue internationale [French for a 'international magazine.'] Ball continued his French Message by adding: "The magazine will be released in Zürich and will bear the name 'Dada' ('Dada'). "Dada, Dada." According to historian Walter Serner, who specifically accused Ball of abuseing Ball's initiative, the viewpoint that Ball had prompted the movement was largely supported by writer Walter Serner, who had explicitly accused Tzara of misusing Ball's initiative.

According to visual artist and essayist Hans Richter, a secondary point of contention between the founders of Dada was the paternity for the movement's name, which was first published in print in June 1916. Ball, who claimed authorship and said he selected the word randomly from a dictionary, said that it stood for both the French-language equivalent of "hobby horse" and a German-language term describing the delight of children being rattled to sleep. Tzara herself was not involved in the affair, but Marcel Janco credited him with coined the term. A father's manifestos, whether written or co-authored by Tzara, reveal that the name refers to many other words, including a toy and the word for "mother" in an unspecified Italian dialect; and the double affirmative in Romanian and other Slavic languages.

Tzara had served as Dada's top promoter and boss before the war ended, assisting the Swiss company in opening branches in other European countries. This period also saw the first clash within the organisation: citing irreconcilable differences with Tzara Ball, the group's leader. Tzara converted Dada vaindeville-like performances into more of a "an incendiary and a comedy that is both jocularly provocative theater," Gendron claims after his departure.

He is often credited with inspiring many young modernist writers from outside Switzerland to join the company, including Frenchmen Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Philippe Soupault. Richter, who was in touch with Dada at this time in history, notes that these intellectuals had a "very cool and distant reaction to this emerging movement" before being approached by the Romanian author. He began editing and directing Dada in June 1916, the successor to the short-lived magazine Cabaret Voltaire—Richter's "energy, passion, and expertise for the work," which he claims delighted all Dadaists. He was at the time the lover of Maja Kruscek, a Rudolf Laban student, and Richter's account, their friendship was always tottering.

Tristan Tzara broke away from the Italian Futurists early in 1916, rejecting their leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's militarist and proto-fascist stance. Richter states that by then, Dada had replaced Futurism as the modernization's leader, although still maintaining its clout: "We had swallowed Futurism—bones, feathers, and all." It is true that all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated during digestion. Despite this and the fact that Dada made no advances in Italy, Tzara could name poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Alberto Savinio, painters Gino Cantarelli and Aldo Fiozzi, as well as a few other Italian Futurists among the Dadaists. Julius Evola, a writer who became a personal friend of Tzara, was one of the Italian writers assisting Dadaist manifestos and rallying with the Dada party.

Tzara and Ball opened the Galerie Dada permanent exhibition next year, where they first established connections with the independent Italian visual artist Giorgio de Chirico and the German Expressionist journal Der Sturm, all of whom were described as "fathers of Dada." The Dada group arranged a performance of Sphinx and Strawman, an Austro-Hungarian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka's puppet performance, which he later described as an example of "Dada theater" during the same months, owing to Tzara's intervention. He was also in touch with Nord-Sud, the French poet's magazine that sought to unify all avant-garde trends), and he contributed to both Nord-Sud and Pierre Albert-Birot's SIC magazine. Georg Grosz, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, Kurt Schwitters, Walter Mehring, Raoul Hausmann, Franz Jung, and Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfelde all began in early 1918, through Huelsenbeck. Tzara travelled to Cologne, where he became familiar with the intricate collage works of Schwitters and Max Ernst, which he showed to his colleagues in Switzerland. In Berlin, Huelsenbeck, despite being a member of Schwitters, did not sign up.

Tzara compiled a list of so-called "Dada presidents" who represented various regions of Europe as a result of his campaigning. It included Ernst, Arp, Baader, Breton and Aragon, Evola, Rafael Lasso de la Vega, Martin Chance Huidobro, Francesco Meriano, and Théodore Fraenkel, according to Hans Richter, as well as Tzara, figures ranging from Ernst, Arp, Baader, Breton and Aragon to Kruscek, Evola, Evola, Evola, Evola "I'm not positive if any of the names that appear here would comply with the description," Richter says.

Tzara's appearances in Zürich often became scandals or riots, and he was in permanent conflict with the Swiss law enforcers. Hans Richter talks about a "pleasure of allowing fly at the bourgeois," which in Tristan Tzara took the form of "calculated insolence" (see Épater la bourgeoisie). In one instance, Tzara and Arp incorrectly announced that they were going to fight a duel in Rehalp, near Zürich, and that they would have Jakob Christoph Heer, a well-known novelist. Richter also says that his Romanian colleague profited from Swiss neutrality to pit the Allies and Central Powers against each other, obtaining art works and funds from both sides in order to promote their respective propagation efforts. Tzara's first collection of poetry, "Twenty-five Poems," while working as a promoter.

In autumn 1918, Francis Picabia, then-publisher of 391 magazine and a distant Dada associate, met with colleagues in Zürich and introduced them to his nihilistic views on art and reason. Picabia, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp had earlier created their own version of Dada in the United States. This group, which is based in New York City, was looking for a connection with Tzara's younger brother, who begged him to use "Dada" as their own word (to which Tzara replied: "Dada belongs to everybody." Richter credited the trip with raising the Romanian author's fame, but also with making Tzara himself "switch immediately from a place of harmony between art and anti-art into the stratospheric regions of pure and joyful nothingness." Käthe Wulff, Hans Heusser, Tzara, Hans Richter, and Walter Serner followed the movement for their final major Swiss show, held at the Saal zur Kaufleutern, with choreography by Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and with the support of Käthe Wulff, Hans Heusser, Tzara, and Walter Serner. Serner's "Final Dissolution") was on display in the following mêlée, where the public sluggishly attacked the performers and resulted in preventing, not canceling the performance.

Dada's evolution was marked by political transitions after the 1918 Armistice in Germany. Tzara, Arp, and Otto Flake, a journal aimed at increasing Dadaism in a post-war world, published Der Zeltweg in October 1919. Richter, who admits that the newspaper was "rather tame," also mentions that Tzara and his colleagues were dealing with the consequences of communist revolutions, particularly the 1910 German revolts, which "sparked man's minds, fractured man's interests, and diverted energies in the direction of political transition." The same commentator, on the other hand, dismisses those accounts, which, he claims, led to readers to believe that Der Zeltweg was "an alliance of revolutionary artists." According to one account written by historian Robert Levy, Tzara shared company with a group of Romanian communist students, and as such, Ana Pauker, one of Romania's most influential activists, may have met with Ana Pauker, who was later one of the Romanian Communist Party's most influential activists.

Arp and Janco departed from the movement ca. Das Neue Leben, 1919, when they opened the Constructivist-inspired workshop. Dada's former Tzara associate Vinea gave her a tumultuous reception in Romania. Vinea warned Tzara and the Jancos that despite being sympathetic to the company's objectives, treasured Hugo Ball and Hennings, and promised to adapt his own writing to its specifications. When Vinea submitted his poem Doleanțe ("Grievances") to be published by Tzara and his associates, he was refused, a contrasting between the piece's reserved tone and Dada's revolutionary tenets.

Tristan Tzara left Switzerland in late 1919 to work with Breton, Soupault, and Claude Rivière in editing the Paris-based magazine Littérature. He was already a mentor for the French avant-garde and was described as a "Anti-Messiah" and a "prophet" by Hans Richter, who said he was also a mentor for the French avant-garde. According to reports, Dada mythology had it that he arrived in Paris in a snow-white or lilac-colored sedan, descending Boulevard Raspail via a triumphal arch made from his own pamphlets, being welcomed by cheering crowds and a fireworks display. Richter dismisses this report, implying that Tzara walked from Gare de l'Est to Picabia's home, without anyone apprehensing him to arrive.

He is often portrayed as the leading figure in the Littérature circle, and has been credited with having more concretely established its artistic values in the tradition of Dada. Tzara seconded him and, according to Richter, the magazine "decked out" in all the colors of Dada when Picabia began a new series of 391 in Paris. He was also suing his Dada magazine, which was published in Paris but in the same style, renaming it Bulletin Dada and later Dadaphone. He met American author Gertrude Stein, who wrote about him in Alice B. Toklas' book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, as well as artist Robert and Sonia Delaunay (with whom he worked in tandem for "poem-dresses" and other contemporaneist literary works) around the time.

Tzara was involved in a variety of Dada experiments, on which he collaborated with Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Picabia, or Paul Éluard. Jean Cocteau, Paul Dermée, and Raymond Radiguet were among the authors who came into contact with Dada at that time. Dada's performances were often meant to promote its ideals, and Dada continued to draw attention with hoaxes and false advertisements, announcing that Hollywood film star Charlie Chaplin will appear on stage or cut off their hair on stage. Tzara and his companions lectured at the University populaire in another case, although industrial workers were apparently less impressed. Richter believes that Tzara was still in favor of Picabia's nihilistic and anarchic views (which prompted the Dadaists to condemn all political and cultural ideologies), but that it also expressed a measure of sympathy for the working class.

In March 1920 variety show at the Théâtre de l'oeuvre, which featured excerpts from Breton, Picabia, Dermée, and Tzara's earlier work, La Première aventure céleste de M. Antipyrine ("The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine"), fathera's Paris adventures culminated. On a growing scale, Tzara's melody, Vaseline symphonique ("Symphonic Vaseline"), which required ten or twenty people to yell "cra" and "cri" as a result, was also performed. When Breton read Picabia's Manifeste cannibale ("Cannibal Manifesto"), they yelled at the audience and ridiculed them, to which they replied by aiming rotten fruit at the stage, a scandal erupted.

The Dada phenomenon was only apparent in Romania beginning in 1920, and there was no interest in the country at that time. Nicolae Iorga, a traditionalist historian who influenced Ovid Densusianu, the more reserved modernists Camil Petrescu and Benjamin Fondane, have all refused to recognise it as a valid artistic expression. Vinea defended the subdued current in the face of mounting criticism, but denied the widespread assumption that Tzara acted as an agent of power for the Central Powers during the conflict. Eugen Lovinescu, editor of Sburteigul and one of Vinea's younger avant-garde writers, acknowledged the influence exercised by Tzara on the younger avant-garde writers, but criticized his work only briefly, citing one of his pre-Dada poems as a promoter of literary "extremism."

Tzara had been embroiled in controversy with other figures in the movement by 1921, who said he had parted with the spirit of Dada. He was attacked by the Berlin-based Dadaists, in particular Huelsenbeck and Serner, the former of whom was also interested in a rivalry with Raoul Hausmann over leadership status. Breton and Tzara were first involved in 1920, when Breton announced his intention to ban musical performances entirely and said that the Romanian was simply repeating himself, according to Richter. The Dada was portrayed as one of those regular occurrences that were supposed to be mocked by the performers.

In May, fathera arranged a mock trial of Maurice Barrès, whose early connections with the Symbolists had been obscured by his antisemitism and reactionary position, with Tzara, Ungaretti, Benjamin Pétt, and others as witnesses (a mannequin stood in for Barrès). Pérez immediately shocked Picabia and Tzara by refusing to make the trial an absurd one and giving a political subtext with which Breton eventually agreed. After Tzara's assertion that his former mentor was becoming too radical, Tzara and Picabia clashed with each other in June. Breton, Arp, Ernst, Maja Kruschek, and Tzara were in Austria, perhaps in Imst ("The Battle of the Singers in Tyrol") or Der Grae ("The Battle of the Singers in Tyrol"). Tzara also visited Czechoslovakia, where he is reported to have hoped to attract adherents to his cause.

Ion Vinea wrote an article for the Romanian newspaper Adevărul in 1921, claiming that the movement had died (although he continued to ask his friend to return home and spread his word). Marcel Janco recovered after 1922 in editing Contimporanul, which collected some of Tzara's oldest poems but never gave rise to any Dadaist manifesto. According to reports, Tzara and Janco's friction started over a personal note: Janco later wrote "some shocking quarries" between his colleague and him. The two women stayed away from each other for the remainder of their lives, with Tzara striking out the dedications to Janco from his early poems. Julius Evola was also dissatisfied with the movement's complete abandon of tradition and started his personal search for a new path, later leading to esotericism and fascism.

Breton attacked Tzara openly in a Le Journal de Peuple article in February 1922, where the Romanian writer was branded "an impostor" with a passion for "publicity." Breton opened the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit in March. In his support for Dada's Huelsenbeck, Serner, and Christian Schad, the French writer used the occasion to distinguish Tzara's name from among the Dadaists, quoting in his defense of him. Basing his argument on a note that was allegedly written by Huelsenbeck, Breton accused Tzara of opportunism, arguing that he planned wartime versions of Dada to avoid offending actors on the political stage and making sure that German Dadaists were not made available to the public in countries subjected to the Supreme War Council. Tzara, who attended the congress solely as a means to subpoena, denied the charges the following month, arguing that Huelsenbeck's note was fake and that Schad was not one of the original Dadaists. Brion Gysin, an American writer, had it that Breton's allegations also depicted Tzara as an informant for the Prefecture of Police.

Dada's funeral took place in May 1922. According to Hans Richter, the main part of this festival took place in Weimar, where the Dadaists gathered in a Bauhaus art school festival, during which Tzara revealed the elusive nature of his art: "Dada is useless, as everything else in life." [...] Fathera is a virgin microbe that penetrates all those spaces that for some reason have struggled to fill with words and conventions."

A number of artists backed Breton's marginalization of Tzara in favor of Tzara's "The Bearded Heart" exhibito. Erik Satie, Theo van Doesburg, Serge Charchoune, Rene Dupré, Nicolas Dessip Zadkine, Montrai, Jerichy, and Éluard were among the Pro-Tzara squad members, alongside Cocteau, Arp, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Éluard. Tzara's re-staging of his play The Gas Heart (which had first performed two years ago to howls of derision from the audience) was performed at a related soirée, Evening of the Bearded Heart, which began on July 6, 1923, for which Sonia Delaunay created the costumes. Breton interrupted its appearance and reportedly clashed with several of his former employees and broke furniture, sparking a theatre riot that only the police could interfered. After that date, Dada's vaindeville lost its luster and disappeared completely.

Picabia joined Breton's tzara against Tzara and retrained the employees of his 391, gaining enlisting collaborations from Clément Pansaers and Ezra Pound. In 1924, Breton announced the first Survival Manifesto, marking the end of Dada. "Surreality devoured and digested Dada," Richter says. Tzara distanced himself from the new trend, rejecting its methods and, increasingly, with its politics. He and a few other retired Dadaists from 1923 collaborated with Richter and the Constructivist artist El Lissitzky on the magazine G, and the following year, he wrote pieces for the Yugoslav-Slovenian magazine Tank (edited by Ferdinand Delak).

Tzara continued to write, becoming more involved with the theater. He published and staged the play Handkerchief of Clouds in 1924, which was soon included in Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes' repertoire. As the Seven Dada Manifestos, he also collected his older Dada texts. Henri Lefebvre, a Marxist thinker, wrote enthusiastically about them; he later became one of the author's associates.

Tzara's work in Romania was partly revived by Contimporanul, which also staged public readings of his works during 1924's international art exhibition and then again during the 1925 "new art exhibition." In parallel, the short-lived magazine Integral, where Ilarie Voronca and Ion Călugauru were the main animators, expressed stifled concern in Tzara's work. He expressed his opposition to the Surrealist party's embrace of communism in a 1927 interview with the journal, saying that such politics would only result in the birth of a "new bourgeoisie" and that "the holiness of the ego" would be preserved.

Tristan Tzara was born in 1925 in Stockholm, where he married Greta Knutson, with whom he had a son, Christophe (born 1927). André Lhote, a former student of painting, was known for her phenomenology and abstract art. Tzara hired Adolf Loos, a former Wiener Secession representative who had met in Zürich, to build him a house in Paris around the same time. The rigidly functionalist Maison Tristan Tzara, which was constructed in Montmartre, was created in response to Tzara's specific needs and adorned with African art works. It was Loos' only major contribution in his Parisian years.

He reconciled with Breton in 1929 and sporadically attended the Surrealists' meetings in Paris. He published De nos oiseaux, the poetry book "Of Our Birds" the same year. The Approximate Man (1931), as well as the volumes L'Arbre des voyageurs ("The Travelers' Tree") (1932), Où boivent les loups ("Where Wolves Drink") and Grains et issues ("Seed and Bran" 1935), were published in this period. By then, it was also revealed that Tzara had begun working on a screenplay. He produced and produced a cinematic version of Le C à barbe in 1930, starring Breton and other leading Surrealists. He signed his name against Gertrude Stein, who was published in response to Stein's book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which he accused his former companion of being a megalomaniac, five years later.

The poet was instrumental in further developing Surrealist techniques and, with Breton and Valentine Hugo, drew one of the best-known examples of "exquisite corpses." Tzara also prefaced a 1934 collection of Surrealist poems by his friend René Charman, and the following year, he and Greta Knutson visited Char in L'Isle-sur-sur-la-Sorgue. Around the same time, Tzara's wife was also associated with the Surrealist party. This relationship came to an end when she parted with Tzara in the 1930s.

Tzara's works were collected and edited by Surrealist promoter Saşa Pană, who worked with him for many years at home. In 1934, the first such edition appeared in print, and it contained the 1913-1915 poems that Tzara had left in Vinea's care. Tzara exchanged letters with his friend Jacques G. Costin, a Contimporanul affiliate who did not know all of Vinea's literary theories, from 1928 to 1929, who volunteered to organize his trip to Romania and begged him to translate his texts into French.

He merged his job as an art promoter with the cause of anti-fascism, after being alarmed by the establishment of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, which also represented the demise of Berlin's avant-garde, and was close to the French Communist Party (PCF). Richter recalled that he published a series of photographs taken by Kurt Schwitters in Hanover in 1936, which chronicled Nazi propaganda's demise by the locals, ration stamps in reduced amounts of food, and other hidden aspects of Hitler's reign. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he briefly left France and joined the Republican forces for a short time. Tzara visited Madrid, which was besieged by the Nationalists alongside Soviet reporter Ilya Ehrenburg (see Siege of Madrid). Midis gagnés' collection of poems ("Conquered Southern Regions") was released upon his return (Included Southern Regions). Some of them had previously been published in the booklet Les poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol ("The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People," 1937), which was edited by two prominent writers and activists, Nancy Cunard and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Tzara had also signed Cunard's call to action against Francisco Franco in June 1937. He and Nancy Cunard, according to reports, were romantically involved.

Despite the poet's departure from Survivalism, his commitment to strict Marxism-Leninism was apparently questioned by both the PCF and the Soviet Union. Semiotician Philip Beitchman takes a stand in connection with Tzara's own conception of Utopia, which combined communist messages with Freudo-Marxist psychoanalysis and made use of particularly graphic images. According to reports, Tzara refused to be enlisted in favor of the party line, retaining his individuality, and refusing to stand at political rallies.

However, others note that the former Dadaist king would often appear as a follower of political policies. Tzara started organizing an informal trial of liberate-minded Salvador Dalin's, who at the time was a confessed fan of Hitler and whose portrait of William Tell was feared by them because it shared similarity with Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Historian Irina Livezeanu argues that Tzara, who identified with Stalinism and shunned Trotskyism, made a written appeal for the PCF during the 1930 writers' congress, well before his friend Crevel committed suicide to protest socialist realism's adoption. Tzara reinterpreted Dada and Survival as modern day, presenting them as such to the public at a later date. In this regard, she contrasts Breton's stance, who was more reserved in his views.

Tzara fled from the German occupation forces during World War II, emigrating to the southern areas ruled by the Vichy era. On one occasion, Je Suis Partout, an antisemitic and collaborationist newspaper, announced his whereabouts were known to the Gestapo.

He was in Marseille from late 1940-early 1941, as part of a group of anti-fascist and Jewish refugees who, under American diplomat Varian Fry's protection, were seeking to flee Nazi-controlled Europe. Among the attendees were the anti-totalitarian socialist Victor Serge, philosopher and poet René Daumal, and several influential Surrealists, including Breton, Chard, Christophe Lalibert, Victor Brauner, and Jacques Hérold. They invented a new card game during the months together, and before some of them were allowed to leave for America, on which traditional card images were replaced with Surrealist symbols.

Tzara joined the French Resistance some time after his stay in Marseille, rallying with the Maquis. Tzara, a writer for Resistance magazines, was also in charge of the cultural broadcast for the Free French Forces clandestine radio station. He lived in Aix-en-Provence, then in Souillac, and eventually in Toulouse. Cristophe, his son, was a Resistant in northern France at the time and had joined the Francs-Tireurs Partisans. The Ion Antonescu family, who lived in Axis-allied and antisemitic Romania (see below for details about World War II), has ordered bookstores not to sell Tzara and 44 other Jewish-Romanian authors' books. Tzara was also denied of his Romanian citizenship rights in 1942, as a result of widespread antisemitic policies.

He was contributing to L'Éternelle Revue, a pro-communist newspaper edited by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in December 1944, while Sartre was prominently proclaiming a strong resistance image of a France united in opposition, as opposed to the belief that it passively accepted German rule. Aragon, Char, Éluard, Elsa Triolet, Eugène Guillevic, Raymond Queneau, Francis Ponge, Pablo Picasso, and Jacques Prévert were among the writers.

Tzara was naturalized a French citizen at the time of the war and the restoration of French independence. He served as a representative of the Sud-Ouest region of the French Republic during 1945, during the Provisional Government of the French Republic. "He helped reclaim the South from the cultural figures who had attributed themselves to Vichy [France]," Livezeanu says. On a midnight broadcast on Parisian Radio in April 1946, his early poems, as well as similar works by Breton, Éluard, Aragon, and Dal were among the collection of Breton, Éluard, Aragon, and Dal. He became a full member of the PCF in 1947 (accord to various sources, he had been one since 1934).

Tzara lent his help to political causes over the next decade. He became a critic of the Fourth Republic's colonial program and joined those who favour decolonization, owing to his interest in primitivism. Nonetheless, the Paul Ramadier cabinet had named him as the Republic's cultural ambassador. He also attended the PCF-organized Congress of Writers, but unlike Éluard and Aragon, he avoided adapting his style to socialist realism.

He returned to Romania in late 1946-early 1947 as part of the emergence of the Eastern Bloc, during which he stopped in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia's Republic. The speeches delivered by Sașa Pană on the occasion were lauded for supporting the PCF and the Romanian Communist Party's official positions, and Irina Livezeanu has been credited with causing a rift between Tzara and young Romanian avant-gardists such as Victor Brauner and Gherasim Luca (who opposed communism and were alarmed by the Iron Curtain having fallen over Europe) and young Romanian avant-gardists like Victor Brauner He attended the International Union of Students' conference in September (where he was a member of the French-based Union of Communist Students and met with similar organisations from Romania and other countries).

Tzara answered Aragon's call and became active in the international movement to free Nazm Hikmet, a Turkish poet whose 1936 detention for communist activities had made a cause célèbre for pro-Soviet public opinion. Tzara chaired the Committee for the Liberation of Nazm Hikmet, which distributed petitions to national governments and commissioned works in honor of Hikmet (including musical works by Louis Dug and Serge Nigg). Hikmet was eventually released in July 1950 and paid homage to Tzara on his subsequent visit to Paris.

Among his paintings of the period are Le Signe de vie ("Sign of Life"), Terre sur Terre ("From a Man's Memory," 1949), Parler allein ("Without a Need to Fight"), Le Temps naissant ("The Perpetrant Fruit"), and the 1956 Le Fruit permis ("The Perpetible Fruit"), among others. Tzara continued to promote modernist culture. Tzara helped with the production's staging by approaching producer Roger Blin around 1949 after reading Irish author Samuel Beckett's book Waiting for Godot. Several poems by Hikmet and Attila József were also translated into French by the Hungarian writer Attila József. Heinz Berggruen (thus assisting in the beginning of their lifelong relationship) and in 1951, he published a catalog describing Picasso's "free use of stimuli" and "his encounter with a new kind of humor."

Tzara visited Hungary's People's Republic, where the government of Imre Nagy was coming into conflict with the Soviet Union in October 1956. This was sent after Gyula Illyés, a Hungarian writer who wanted his colleague to be present at the funeral of László Rajk (a local communist leader whose trial had been ordered by Joseph Stalin), was referred to by Joseph Stalin. Tzara, who was supportive of the Hungarians' call for liberalization, called Anti-Stalinist and former Dadaist Lajos Kassák, and called the anti-Soviet movement "revolutionary." However, unlike much of Hungary's public opinion, the poet did not advocate emancipation from Soviet rule, but instead described local writers' rebellion as "an abstract concept." The statement, which was widely distributed in the Hungarian and international press, prompted a reaction from the PCF: through Aragon's response, the party regretted that one of its members was being used to promote "anti-communist and anti-Soviet campaigns."

His return to France coincided with the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution, which culminated in Soviet military involvement. Tzara was summoned to a PCF meeting on October 24th, where opposition Laurent Casanova reportedly ordered him to remain anonymous, as Tzara did. Breton, who had adopted a pro-Hungarian stance and dubbed his acquaintance and rival "the first spokesman of the Hungarian government," Tzara's apparent indignation and the explosion he helped create within the Communist Party, was lauded.

He was mostly barred from public life after committing himself to studying François Villon's work and, alongside Surrealist Michel Leiris, campaigning primitive and African art, which he had been collecting for years. Tzara's father, Robert Gauche, died in early 1957, following a protest triggered by rival avant-garde Mouvement Jariviste, which apparently pleased him. French forces were fighting Algerian rebels in August 1960, one year after President Charles de Gaulle's Fifth Republic had been established (see Algerian War). He wrote to Prime Minister Michel Debré in a letter of protest against France's refusal to recognize Algeria's independence. As a result, Minister of Culture André Malraux declared that his cabinet would not subsidize any films to which Tzara and the others might contribute, and that the signatories will no longer appear on stations operated by the French Broadcasting Service.

In 1961, Tzara was awarded the prestigious Taormina Prize for his work as a poet. One of his last public performances took place in 1962, when he attended the International Congress on African Culture, directed by English curator Frank McEwen and held at the National Gallery in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. He died in his Paris home a year later and was buried at the Cimetière du Montparnasse.

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