Monograph, 2024

Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Dado: Natural History, 1953–2000” at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in December 2024, Dado. The Phenomenon of Life Through Painting, curated by the artist’s daughter, Amarante Szidon, from private and public Serbian collections, is the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s painted work since his death in 2010. Illustrated with nearly 200 images and presented in a trilingual format (Serbian/English/French), the book offers a unique immersion into six decades of the career of a “great outsider of art history” (Catherine Millet), tracing his formative years at the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts in the 1950s, his arrival in France in 1956, and his pivotal encounter with Daniel Cordier, through to the creative resurgence of the 1990s and 2000s. Dado’s collaboration with the Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger is well represented, featuring his 1970s paintings (Inverted Perspective) and the collage series from 1973–1975, including the iconic Boucher de saint Nicolas. The book also includes two seminal interviews, published in Serbian and English: the 1969 conversation with Marcel Billot and Germain Viatte, given for Dado’s first retrospective at the CNAC in 1970, and excerpts from the 2009 interview with Catherine Millet and Jacques Henric published in Artpress. The monograph was published by the Foundation for the Serbian People and State. Graphic design: Borko Petrović. English translations: Catherine Petit and Paul Buck. Serbian translations: Jelena Ilić.