Marcel Janco

Marcel Janco (Bucharest, 1895 – Tel Aviv, 1984) was a Romanian-Israeli painter, architect and art theorist, and one of the founders of Dada. His importance lies in carrying the experience of the interwar avant-garde into a body of work that, after his emigration, turned toward Jewish themes and the landscapes of Israel. Although he is best known for Dada, he also worked in illustration, sculpture and oil painting.

Janco studied architecture at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and painting with Iosif Iser. While still a secondary school student, he began publishing the magazine Simbolul with Tristan Tzara and Ion Vinea. When World War I broke out, he settled in Zurich with Tzara and his brothers. There he took part in the Cabaret Voltaire: he carved the grotesque masks worn by performers, helped improvise early simultaneous poems, and his mask work opened a new field of theatrical experiment for the Dadaists. In 1919 he broke with Dada and, with Hans Arp, founded a Constructivist circle. Back in Romania he helped lead the magazine Contimporanul, a key voice of the Romanian avant-garde, and designed some of the most innovative buildings in downtown Bucharest.

Targeted by antisemitic persecution, he emigrated in 1941 to the British Mandate for Palestine. In Israel his painting became more figurative, somewhere between Cubism and Expressionism, and focused on the cities of Safed and Tiberias. In 1953 he founded Ein Hod, an artist colony set up on the ruins of an abandoned Arab village, which today houses the Janco-Dada Museum. He received the Israel Prize for painting in 1967. His legacy survives mainly in the history of Dada and in the artistic heritage of Ein Hod.