Marcel Janco Biography
Marcel Janco (maɐ̯ˈsɛl ˈjaŋko), born Marcel Hermann Iancu (marˈt͡ʃel ˈherman ˈjaŋku) (Bucharest, 24 May 1895 – 21 April 1984) was a Romanian painter. He was also an architect, art theorist and cultural promoter, known as one of the founders of Dadaism and one of the main exponents of Constructivism in Eastern Europe. His first contributions date back to the 1910s, when together with the poets Tristan Tzara and Ion Vinea he wrote for the art magazine Simbolul. Janco's debut was in Art Nouveau, but he later found his way into futurism and expressionism, before creating the visual and scenic context for Tzara's literary Dadaism. They separated during 1919, when he and the painter Hans Arp founded a constructivist circle, Das Neue Leben. Subsequently, Janco and Vinea became editors of Contimporanul, one of the leading magazines of the Romanian avant-garde, where Janco first published his vision of new and better urban planning. Having developed Contimporanul into a publication between the constructivist, the futurist and the cubist, Janco later designed and built some of the most innovative monuments in Bucharest's suburbs, and envisioned a "revolution" in the city's development. The rest of his work from the time covered a wide range of media, from illustration to sculpture to interior design to oil painting. Janco was also one of the leading Romanian-Jewish intellectuals of his generation, and was the victim of anti-Semitic persecution before and during the Second World War. He was forced to emigrate to Palestine in 1941, becoming an Israeli citizen and contributing to the development of Israeli Jewish art. For this, he received the Dizengoff Prize and the State Prize. After 1953 his work focused on the establishment of Ein Hod, an artists' colony and utopian experiment, controversially built on top of an abandoned Arab settlement.
