Poète maudit and vagabond 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…
Les Champs Magnetiques was written long before any surrealist manifesto had been published, and is regarded as the birth of surrealism. The book is the first experiment with ‘écriture automatique’, a literary technique derived from free association in psychoanalysis. The result is an enchanting and evocative collection of prose and poetry. written as in…
Gheorghe Vasiliu was a Romanian poet who named himself George Bacovia after his native town Bacau. 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 Bacau…
August Stramm (1874-1915) was born in Münster and educated in Aachen, Germany. After he had graduated from grammar school, Stramm held various positions in the German Postdienst and regularly travelled between Germany and the USA after having been promoted to a position in the Seepostdienst in 1897. Stramm married journalist Else Krafft in 1902 and moved to Berlin…
Ben Schot’s Krul is a memory in photos and text of an intoxicated night drive on the isle of Schouwen-Duiveland in Kees Krul’s Peugeot 404 in January 1973. Four black and white photo negatives taken from and inside the car that night had been in the possession of the artist without ever having been printed, when they were digitized and converted into photo positives 45 years later. Surprisingly, the photos, unsteady, out-of-focus…