April 16, 1896

Tristan Tzara, (April 16 1896 to December 25, 1963) was a Romanian artist who worked in many media. He is considered one of the founders of Dadaism, which he said, "penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions."

Tzara moved to Paris in 1919, and married in 1925, the Swedish artist Greta Knutson. Paul Bowles recalls a dinner with with them in Paris, in 1931 or 1932. There was his "beautiful Swedish wife, ...a salon full of African sculptures and masks and ....a splendid Siamese cat". In his account Bowles tells a surely somewhat exaggerated story of a then recent event in the Tzara household. This cat everyone was convinced had deliberately waited til their cook, who disliked the cat, and had even once removed the cat from the kitchen with his foot, had left his room door ajar, and fallen asleep. The cat at this point attacked the cook's throat with the intent to remove the cook from the household. The cook, so Tristan Tzara said, in his account to Bowles, demanded that he would leave if they did not get rid of the cat. And the Tzaras, "refused to do this." We learn about this tempest at the Tzaras, from one of Bowles' articles, collected in Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993, (2010).

Tristan Tzara's heyday saw a jocular approach to public conventions, and even in titles, such as  Handkerchief of Clouds (1924), and The Approximate Man, (1931) his genius is evident.

During the occupation of France, though Jewish, Tzara was active in the resistance, and managed to elude capture without leaving France. His activities after the war include researching that fellow outlaw, with whom a kinship  stretched across 400 years, Francois Villon.