Cultural Exchanges and Aesthetic Affinities Between Dada and Futurism

Starting from a brief reconstruction of the vast network of cultural and historical relations established between Dada and Futurism from 1916 to 1920, this paper presents a few key moments in the private epistolary exchanges and in the public correspondence between the editorial staffs of the main literary journals of the two avant-garde movements. It also analyses some of Tristan Tzara’s poems and Marcel Janco’s artworks published in Futurist or modernist reviews, which were open to the most innovative artistic trends emerging at the beginning of the 20th century. On the one hand, this approach highlights some affinities and differences between the poetics of the two movements, which gave rise to the Dada aesthetics; on the other hand, it outlines the figures of Tzara and Janco as outstanding personalities of the international avant-garde, emphasising their vocation as leading “cultural mediators” between the Italian avant-garde and the Zurich-based movement, which had extremely fruitful consequences for the program and the existence of the avant-garde circle that was to be founded a few years later in Bucharest.