Jef Golyscheff: The Forgotten Dadaist

Key facts

• Jef Golyscheff was born in 1897 in Kherson, Ukraine, into a bourgeois Jewish family.
• He was a child prodigy, studying violin from 1902 and drawing from 1903.
• At age 8, he toured as a soloist with the Odessa Symphony Orchestra.
• He moved to Berlin in 1909 to study music theory and composition.
• In 1912–13, he circumnavigated the globe, visiting Egypt, India, Japan, the United States, and Brazil.
• He composed a 1914 string quartet and trio based on a serial dodecaphonic principle of 'duration'.
• He was a founding member of the Novembergruppe in 1918.
• He joined the Club Dada in 1919 and participated in Dada soirées on April 30 and May 15, 1919.
• At the first Dada exhibition in April 1919, he showed assemblages, a then-unknown form.
• His Antisymphony was performed at the April 30, 1919 Dada soirée by a young girl in white.
• He co-authored the pamphlet 'Was ist das Dadaismus und was will er in Deutschland?' with Raoul Hausmann.
• He was considered by Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus.
• He wrote the manifesto 'Aismus' in 1920, attacking gravity and defending gaiety.
• He left the Club Dada in 1922 after a quarrel between Huelsenbeck and Hausmann.
• In 1933, the SS seized his final Berlin exhibition, and his works were likely destroyed as 'degenerate art'.
• Only two Dada-era works are known to survive.
• He fled to Barcelona in 1938, lost his works during Franco's bombing, and was interned in France.
• He worked as a chemist in Paris after WWII and moved to São Paulo in 1957.
• In 1965, Walter Zanini exhibited 31 of his canvases at MAC, University of São Paulo.
• Arturo Schwarz exhibited 21 of his paintings in Milan in 1970.
• He died of cancer on September 25, 1970.