Untitled (Tristan Tzara)

In 1914, Romanian-born writer Tristan Tzara was among the founding members of the art movement Dada, formed in Zurich, Switzerland. When the American Dadaist artist Man Ray arrived in Paris in 1921, Tzara guided him through the city. This experimental portrait was taken the same year in Man Ray’s room on the rue de la Condamine. It shows one of Man Ray’s violent sculpture objects—a clock and a hatchet—hanging over Tzara’s head, as Tzara stares defiantly back at the viewer, with cigarette in hand. The image of the semi-nude female model behind him came from another negative. The two negatives were sandwiched together to create this print, which is a visual embodiment of the wicked humor of Dada and the woman-obsessed fever dreams of the emerging Surrealist movement.