Gheorghe Vasiliu was a Romanian poet who named himself George Bacovia after his native town Bacău. Bacovia was born there in 1881 and distinguished himself as a talented draughtsman, violinist and poet while being educated at the Prince Ferdinand Gymnasium, now located at George Bacovia Street in Bacău. After…
Vagabond poet Dimitrie Stelaru was born in 1917 as Dumitru Petrescu in Romania’s border region with Bulgaria. He never knew his biological father, who was killed in action during World War I, and developed such a bad relationship with his stepfather that he was sent to a strict Christian boarding school in Transylvania at the age of fourteen. Stelaru escaped the institute’s austere regime a couple…
Johannes Baader (1875-1955) grew up in Stuttgart and studied architecture in that town from 1898 to 1899. After having met Raoul Hausmann, Baader moved to Berlin in 1905, where Hausmann introduced him to a circle of artists that would germinate into Berlin Dada some ten years later. Johannes Baader was a Dadaist by nature. The one and only Oberdada. Idealist, messianic, and mad as a hatter, Baader…
As part of his quest for an Ailleurs (Elsewhere) author, poet and artist Henri Michaux (1899-1984) experimented with various hallucinogenic substances. In numerous drawings he has noted down either directly or during flashbacks his experiences with drugs like mescaline, LSD, and psilocybine. In addition he devoted many poems and prose texts to his experiments.