As a young man, Ribemont-Dessaignes attended
Académie Julian and the
Ecole Beaux-Arts de Paris. In 1909 Ribemont-Dessaignes befriended
Raymond Duchamp-Villon and through him met his brothers
Marcel Duchamp and
Jacques Villon. He joined their artistic circle at
Puteaux, alongside painters
Jean Metzinger,
Albert Gleizes and
Fernand Leger. Following this association, he became one of the leading members of the French
Dada group, alongside
Tristan Tzara by creating numerous early Dada paintings and by contributing to the Dada periodical literature with plays, poetry,
manifestos and opera librettos inspired by the movement’s anti-establishment principles. He contributed to
Francis Picabia's
magazine 391 and published several pamphlets of art criticism. In composing
aleatoric music in 1920 for
Marguerite Buffet, he used chance-based procedures by using a pocket
roulette wheel in the creation of his
dissonant compositions
Dance of the Curly Endive and
Interloping Bellybutton. In a piece of Dada
choreography he called
Frontier Dance, Ribemont-Dessaignes remained still inside a cardboard tube as a self-imposed restriction on creative freedom that he adopted as a compositional principle. Among Ribemont-Dessaignes' works for the theater are the plays
The Emperor of China (1916) and
The Mute Canary (1919), and the opera libretti ''The Knife's Tears
(1926) and The Three Wishes'' (1926), both with music by Czech composer
Bohuslav Martinů. in 1922, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Tzara and
Paul Eluard broke with
André Breton's interpretation of Dada and Ribemont-Dessaignes became an independent writer and artist. He wrote an
autobiographical book he called
Adolescence that was published in 1930. After the
Second World War he settled in
Juan-les-Pins, on the
Côte d’Azur and wrote prefaces to literary works by such authors as
Arthur Rimbaud,
Denis Diderot,
Stendhal,
Leo Tolstoy and
Voltaire. He also wrote books and articles about
Modern Art artists, including
Pablo Picasso,
Georges Braque,
Jean Dubuffet and
Joan Miro and recorded radio interviews with
Tristan Tzara,
Marc Chagall and
Henri Matisse. He also drew landscapes and published several books of his poetry. In 1955 he moved to the village of
Saint-Jeannet, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, near
Vence, where he passed away in 1974. ==References==