Books by Michel Sanouillet

Dadaglobe Reconstructed

by Tristan Tzara, Karl Buchberg, Samantha Friedman, Adrian Sudhalter, Anne Sanouillet, Michel Sanouillet, Catherine Hug, Lee Ann Daffner

2016 marks the centennial of Dada's birth in Zurich, a landmark in 20-th century culture. Kunsthaus Zurich celebrates the Dada anniversary with the exhibition Dadaglobe Reconstructed. It reunites some one hundred artworks sent to Tristan Tzara for Dadaglobe, the unrealized anthology of the Dada movement.
Had it been realized as planned in 1921, Dadaglobe would have constituted the movement's most ambitious publication: 160 pages illustrated with more than 100 reproductions of artworks by some thirty artists from seven countries. Edited by Tristan Tzara, the Dada movement's Romanian-born co-founder, it was meant to be Dada's apotheosis as an artistic and literary movement of truly international reach.
Dadaglobe was not merely designed to be a vehicle for existing works. Rather, it was intended to serve as one of Dada's most generative catalysts for the production of new ones. Tzara's request for four types of visual submissions--photographic self-portraits, original drawings, photographs of artworks, and book layouts--provided parameters for production and simultaneously encouraged their subversion.
The Dadaglobe Reconstructed exhibition reveals for the first time that many of Dada's most iconic artworks were created in direct response to Tzara's call and conceived specifically for presentation as a reproduction, rather than being admired as an original. Dadaglobe was meant to be a manifesto on the revised status of the artwork in reproduction. Its legacy altered the terms of 20-century artistic discourse.
Due to a lack of funding and many difficulties in organization, Dadaglobe remained unpublished. This left a void where there ought to have been a magnum opus, an absence at the core of Dada and at the heart of twentieth century avant-garde artistic production.
The belated presentation of the artworks intended for Dadaglobe in this exhibition, and their publication as reproductions in the coinciding book, enables a major historical revision. It brings the notoriously unwieldy Dada movement into sharp focus and restores a crucial missing chapter in the history of modernism.
The book features all works submitted for Dadaglobe in a complete reconstruction of Tzara's concept. The essays, examining the history and significance of Dadaglobe as an avant-garde undertaking, are also richly illustrated.
Kunsthaus Zurich's Dadaglobe exhibition is planned to be shown also at the MoMA later in 2016 (TBC). MoMA would do their own edition for sale at the museum only. North American and world sales right remain with VSS.

Dada in Paris

by Michel Sanouillet

The long-awaited publication in English of the definitive book on Paris Dada.

Michel Sanouillet's Dada in Paris, published in France in 1965, reintroduced the Dada movement to a public that had largely ignored or forgotten it. More than forty years later, it remains both the unavoidable starting point and the essential reference for anyone interested in Dada or the early-twentieth century avant-garde. This first English-language edition of Sanouillet's definitive work (a translation of the expanded 2005 French edition) gives English-speaking readers their first direct access to the author's monumental history (based on years of research, including personal involvement with most of the Dadaists still living at the time) and massive compilation of previously unpublished correspondence, including more than 200 letters to and from such movement luminaries as Tristan Tzara, André Breton, and Francis Picabia.

Dada in Paris offers a behind-the-scenes account of the French avant-garde's riotous adolescence.