The Art of Living in the Historical Avant-Garde

This dissertation reexamines the art-into-life narrative of the historical avant-gardes through an analysis of a set of experimental life practices established by artists across Dada, Orphism, and Surrealism. Focusing on Tristan Tzara’s performances of identity, Sonia Delaunay’s fashions and self-branding, and the collective endeavor to open and operate the Surrealist Research Bureau, my project proposes a broader envisioning of avant-garde material culture to examine the ways in which artists creatively produced an “art of living” in relation to the normative types of “lifestyle” produced contemporaneously in France during the years 1910-1930. Rooted in original archival research and interdisciplinary in focus, my discussion of these artists is centered on three distinct sites within material culture (the manifesto, advertising, the office) and reveals how these activities at times challenge and at times replicate various dominant discourses. The first chapter examines how Samuel Rosenstock became the Dadaist Tristan Tzara. Specifically, I focus on Tzara’s elaboration of himself through the delivery and subsequent publication of his manifestos, Sept manifestes dada (1924), which p