Marcel Janco, one of the founders of the Dada movement in art in Europe in the 1920’s and one of Israel’s most prominent artists since his arrival here during World War II, died after a short illness at Sheba Hospital yesterday.
Janco, who was 89, was born in Rumania, studied architecture in Zurich where he and a group of “revolutionary anti-bourgeois artists” founded the Dada protest art movement. But in Paris later he parted from the movement and returned to a more formalistic school of painting.
He came to Palestine in 1940 and was the founder of the Ein Hod artists village on the Carmel, where the house he rebuilt was made into a Janco and Dada museum some years ago.
Janco was active until a week before he died, when he was admitted to the hospital suffering from an illness. Until then, he had been a popular figure in the Ramat Aviv suburb of Tel Aviv, where he was to be seen striding along the streets, with his sketching pad tucked under his arm. On Purim last month he was the central figure in a “Dadaloyada” Purim party at the Janco Museum in Ein Hod.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.