Creator Bio
Marcel Janco
1895–1984
The avant-garde artist, architect, and art theorist Marcel Janco was born into an upper-middle-class home in Bucharest. He lived in Zurich from 1914 to 1921, where he took a leading role in the city’s bohemian cultural scene, cofounding the Dadaist movement, along with his fellow Romanian Tristan Tzara (born Samy Rosenstock). Janco broke with Dadaism in 1919 and became a leading proponent of East European constructivism. In January 1941, he and his family fled Bucharest and settled in Mandate Palestine. In 1953, he founded the artists’ colony Ein Hod, southeast of Haifa.
Content by Marcel Janco
Primary Source
Portrait of Tzara (Mask)
Janco and the subject of this portrait, poet Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), played leading roles in creating the Dada movement in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I. Janco made several masks that…
Primary Source
Nocturne (Death of a Soldier)
This 1948 painting of a fallen soldier by Marcel Janco evokes Picasso’s Guernica.