Beloosesky Gallery is interested in purchasing original paintings and drawings by Marcel Janco.
Please call (917) 749-4557 or email us at info@beloosesky.com
Marcel Janco was a Romanian and Israeli visual artist, architect and art theorist. He was the co-inventor of Dadaism and a leading exponent of Constructivism in Eastern Europe. In the 1910s, he co-edited, with Ion Vinea and Tristan Tzara, the Romanian art magazine Simbolul.
Marcel Janco was born on May 24th, 1895 in Bucharest to an upper middle class Jewish family. His father, Hermann Zui Iancu, was a textile merchant. His mother, Rachel née Iuster, was from Moldavia. The couple lived outside Bucharest's Jewish quarter, on Decebal Street.
Janco was a practitioner of Art Nouveau, Futurism and Expressionism before contributing his painting and stage design to Tzara's literary Dadaism. Together with Arp, Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hugo Ball, and Ball's wife Emmy Hennings, Janco participated in the opening of the famous Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich on February 5, 1916. He had his first show there that same year. A year later, Janco exhibited at the first Dada show in Zurich at the Dada gallery together with Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, and Tzara.
In 1918, he became a member of Das Neue Leben, a group of artists in Basel that included Arp, Fritz Baumann, Augusto Giacometti, Oscar Lüthy, Otto Morach, and Sophie Täuber. Following a conflict with Tzara, he became a founding member of the Radikale Künstler, along with Arp, Baumann, Viking Eggeling, Hennings, and Hans Richter. At their first group show at the Zurich Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Janco exhibited abstract reliefs incorporated into the gallery walls. He parted with Dada in 1919, when he and painter Hans Arp founded a Constructivist circle, Das Neue Leben.
Reunited with Vinea, he founded Contimporanul, the influential tribune of the Romanian avant-garde, advocating a mix of Constructivism, Futurism and Cubism. At Contimporanul, Janco expounded a "revolutionary" vision of urban planning. He designed some of the most innovative landmarks of downtown Bucharest. He worked in many art forms, including illustration, sculpture and oil painting.
Janco was one of the leading Romanian Jewish intellectuals of his generation. Targeted by antisemitic persecution before and during World War II, he emigrated to British Palestine in 1941. He won the Dizengoff Prize and Israel Prize, and was a founder of Ein Hod, a utopian art colony, controversially built over a deserted Palestinian Arab settlement.
In 1967 he was awarded the Israel Prize for Painting. In the last years of his life he worked together with his friends to erect the Janco Dada Museum. Janco died ten months after the inauguration of the museum in 1984.
Biography partially from the Archives of AskART
Museum Collections
Art Institute of Chicago
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Harvard University Art Museums, Massachusetts