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.

This publication follows in the footsteps of the website www.dado.fr, Syndrome Dado, the artist’s anti-museum virtual space, created by Dado and his son-in-law Pascal Szidon in 2008, and the fruitful collaboration with François-Marie Deyrolle, director of Éditions L’Atelier contemporain, with whom Amarante Szidon has produced three books over the past ten years. The first, Peindre debout, published in the “Écrits d’artistes” collection in 2016, is a collection of 23 interviews with Dado, prefaced by Anne Tronche and edited by Amarante Szidon — opening with the seminal 1969 conversation with Marcel Billot and Germain Viatte. Richly illustrated, the book offers essential insights into understanding Dado’s work, painting a portrait of a truly multifaceted artist — a draftsman, engraver, sculptor, as well as a creator of collages, in situ works, and digital art. Also published in the same collection, Portrait en fragments was conceived by Amarante Szidon from recordings made by Christian Derouet in the 1980s, notably during the exhibition of Dado’s graphic works at the Centre Pompidou in 1981. Organized into thematically grouped excerpts (“Youth,” “France,” “Mediums, Techniques,” “Affinities,” “Dealers, Exhibitions,” “Reception”…), and abundantly illustrated, it serves as an indispensable complement to the previous volume. Graphic design: Juliette Roussel.

Finally, Dado. Le temps d’Hérouval is a photography book by Dado’s son, Domingo Djuric (1961–2022), who, starting in the early 1980s, tirelessly documented his father’s studio and the world of Hérouval (in the French Vexin) with an exceptional photographic eye. Hérouval, a former ruined mill, became Dado’s home and creative refuge in 1960, thanks to Daniel Cordier. Punctuated by short texts from Germain Viatte — one of the most insightful connoisseurs of Dado’s work — the book offers a poetic journey through the artist’s studio over more than a decade, as well as glimpses of Hérouval’s interiors and surrounding landscapes. The preface and the annotated captions at the end of the book are written by Amarante Szidon. Graphic design: Stéphane Spach.

These last two books, published in 2023, were supported by the Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, which dedicated a new exhibition to the artist in 2024, titled Portrait en fragments.