Collectable

Dau al Set: Invoking the IMPOSSIBLE

The Collectables of the Year Thirty

work
Dau al Set (grup d'artistes)

Revista Dau al Set. Without words

Dau al Set was an avant-garde magazine founded by an eponymous group of poets, philosophers and painters to give voice to their creative and intellectual concerns, shaped by a surrealist spirit. The group was made up of young artists Antoni Tàpies, Modest Cuixart, Joan Ponç and Joan Josep Tharrats—responsible for layout and printing—together with writers Joan Brossa and Arnau Puig. Engraver and typographer Enric Tormo also helped. The first issue was published in Barcelona in September 1948 and was printed manually and semi-clandestinely (many texts were in Catalan) using Tharrats’s small Boston press. Other contributors included artists such as Àngel Ferrant and Francis Picabia, theorists such as Juan Eduardo Cirlot and Alexandre Cirici, and poets such as J. V. Foix and Jean Cocteau. After several members moved abroad—Tàpies to Paris in 1950, Cuixart to Lyon in 1951 and Ponç to Brazil in 1953—the group split up, although Tharrats continued publishing the magazine until 1956.