Raoul Hausmann

Raoul Hausmann (born July 12, 1886, Vienna, Austria—died February 1, 1971, Limoges, France) was an Austrian artist, a founder and central figure of the Dada movement in Berlin, who was known especially for his satirical photomontages and his provocative writing on art.

Hausmann was first exposed to art through his father, the painter and professional conservator Victor Hausmann. The family moved to Berlin in 1900, and in 1908 Hausmann began his formal training at Arthur Lewin-Funcke’s Atelier for Painting and Sculpture, where he focused on anatomy and nude drawing. Upon finishing at the atelier, Hausmann connected with the German Expressionist painters—in particular, Ludwig Meidner and Erich Heckel. He studied lithography and woodcutting under Heckel. He also began what would become a lifelong writing career, penning articles that decried the art establishment for journals such as Die Aktion and Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm.

In 1915 Hausmann met artist Hannah Höch, with whom he began an extramarital affair (Hausmann married his first wife in 1908 ) and an artistic partnership that lasted until 1922. Hausmann was engaged in and loyal to Expressionism until 1917, when he met Richard Hülsenbeck, who introduced him to the principles and philosophy of Dada, a new visual and literary art movement that had already taken off in other cities in Europe. Dada artists and writers created provocative works that questioned capitalism and conformity, which they believed to be the fundamental motivations for the war that had just ended and left chaos and destruction in its wake. Along with Hülsenbeck, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, and Wieland Herzfelde, Hausmann founded the Berlin Dada Club and, with Hülsenbeck, wrote a manifesto claiming that Dada was the first art movement that “no longer confront[ed] life aesthetically.” Hausmann also wrote a manifesto titled “The New Material in Painting,” in which he demanded an alternative to traditional oil paint. He later published the piece as Synthetisches Cino der Malerei (“Synthetic Cinema of Painting”). Both the anti-art Dada manifesto and Hausmann’s declaration on new media were recited before a riotous audience at the first event of the Berlin Dada Club, on April 12, 1918. The artists’ evening of performance and readings was staged at a meeting of the Berlin Sezession, a breakaway group of artists, including Lovis Corinth and Max Liebermann, still very much devoted to traditional art forms.

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By 1918 Hausmann had already begun to work primarily in photomontage—composite collaged images made by juxtaposing and superimposing fragments of photos and text found in mass-media sources. It is commonly held that Hausmann and Höch discovered photomontage while vacationing on the Baltic Sea in the summer of 1918. Notable photomontages by Hausmann include Art Critic (1919–20), a satirical image of a man in a suit with a German banknote behind his neck, choking him, and A Bourgeois Precision Brain Incites a World Movement (later known as Dada Triumphs; 1920), a montage and watercolour that conveys with text and image the global takeover of Dada.

Between 1918 and 1920 Hausmann was also busy inventing other anti-art art forms, such as “optophonetic” and “poster” poems, both of which were made up of random letters strung together. The former were meant to be performed or read aloud; the latter were visual poems created as collages of typography. Two of his best-known works of this type are the poster poem OFFEAHBDC and the optophonetic poem OFFEAH (both 1918). Hausmann also created, as an offshoot of the collage and photomontage, assemblages of found materials, including arguably his most famous work, Mechanical Head: Spirit of Our Age (1919–20), a hairdresser’s wig dummy adorned with a tape measure, a wooden ruler, a tin cup, a spectacles case, a piece of metal, parts of a pocket watch, and pieces of a camera.

Along with Heartfield and Grosz, Hausmann in 1920 helped organize the First International Dada Fair, a subverted version of an academic art exhibition. Works of art—defined as such by the Dadaists—were crammed into a small gallery, and all were for sale. Among the works Hausmann exhibited at the fair are some of his best known: a photomontage (now lost) bearing the title of his 1918 manifesto, Synthetisches Cino der Malerei; a collage-photomontage titled Self-Portrait of the Dadasoph; an ink drawing, The Iron Hindenburg; and a photomontage including the face of Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin, Tatlin Lives at Home (all from 1920). All of the aforementioned works include some visualization of a mechanized human, a man-machine hybrid. On the cover of the exhibition catalog was Hausmann’s photomontage and collage Elasticum (1920), which includes images of tires, a speedometer, nuts and bolts, and, most likely, the head of Henry Ford—inventor of the assembly line and father of mass-produced automobiles. Throughout the Dada era, which flourished for about six years (1916–22), Hausmann contributed his “Dadasophy” (his philosophy on Dada) to several publications and edited the journal Der Dada (which produced only three issues, 1918–20). In 1923 Hausmann created his final photomontage, titled ABCD: his face appears at the centre of the image with the letters ABCD clenched in his teeth, and an announcement for one of his poetry performances is collaged right below his chin.

Somewhat surprisingly, after that final Dada photomontage, Hausmann turned to more-traditional media: photography and drawing. His photographs consist primarily of nudes, landscapes, and portraits. He also continued to write and publish regularly, sometimes in relation to his theories about the uses and possibilities of photography. Under the scrutiny of the Nazi Party, he and his second wife, artist Hedwig Mankiewitz, who was Jewish and whom he had married in 1923, and their lover, Vera Broido (also Jewish), left Germany for Ibiza, Spain, in 1933. While in Spain Hausmann wrote about and photographed the country’s indigenous architecture and published his work in several French-language journals, including Oeuvres and Revue anthropologique. During that period, as a result of his ongoing research and interest in the relationship between the audible and the visual, he invented the “optophone,” a mechanism by which to convert visible forms into sound, for which he got a patent in 1935. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Hausmann and Mankiewitz left Spain, first stopping in Zürich and then going to Prague and Paris. Between the onset of World War II (1939) and the Allied invasion of France (1944), they lived in hiding in Peyrat-le-Château, France. They settled in Limoges in late 1944.

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In the late 1940s and the 1950s, Hausmann continued to pursue photography, exhibited often, and published articles on photography in journals such as A bis Z and Camera. He also published writings on his recollections of Dada, including an autobiographical volume called Courier Dada (1958). During that period and through the last two decades of his life, in addition to engaging in photography, he created photograms, recorded sound poetry, and returned to oil painting. His final piece of writing, Am Anfang war Dada (“At the Beginning Was Dada”), was published posthumously in 1972.