Raoul Hausmann

Biography

On 12 April 1918, a retrospective of Lovis Corinth was on show at the Berlin Secession, and an evening of Dada performances was staged against its backdrop. Richard Huelsenbeck recited the Dada manifesto, George Grosz danced, and Raoul Hausmann ended the evening by shouting a manifesto on “the new material in painting”.

The audience was close to rioting, and the gallery manager simply turned the lights out.

He was born on 12 July 1886 in Vienna, the son of the painter Victor Hausmann and his wife Irene. At fourteen the family moved to Berlin. He received his first drawing lessons from his father, who also worked as a conservator. In 1905 he met Johannes Baader, a future member of the Dada circle, and the violinist Elfride Schaeffer, whom he married in 1908. Their daughter Vera was born in 1907. From 1908 to 1911 he studied at private studios of painting and sculpture in Charlottenburg; between 1909 and 1914 he designed Art Nouveau book covers, stained-glass windows and typefaces. In 1912, after seeing the Expressionists at Herwarth Walden’s gallery Der Sturm, he broke with academic art. His first Expressionist lithographs and woodcuts followed, and his first texts appeared in the magazine “Der Sturm”, sharply critical of the art establishment. An Austrian citizen living in Germany, he escaped the draft.

In 1915 Hausmann met Hannah Höch. Their relationship lasted until 1922, and together they developed photomontage. He later recalled how in the summer of 1918, on the Baltic coast, he saw in a rented room a group portrait of soldiers onto which the landlord had glued photographic heads of his son. It was “like a thunderbolt”: pictures could be assembled entirely from cut-up photographs. That autumn in Berlin he began working with photographs from the press and the cinema. Grosz, John Heartfield and Baader also later claimed to have invented the technique, but no works have surfaced to support those claims.

In 1918, together with Huelsenbeck, Baader, Grosz, Heartfield, Höch and others, he founded the Berlin Club Dada. He wrote sound poems, which he called “phonemes”, and poster poems; the former were built on a printer’s chance lining-up of letters. In June 1919 the first issue of the magazine “Der Dada” appeared, which he edited with Baader. Drawings, polemics and satire were set in a multitude of clashing typefaces. He called himself the “Dadasoph”. In 1920 Hausmann, Baader and Huelsenbeck toured eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia for six weeks with their performances. In the summer of the same year, with Grosz and Heartfield, he organised the First International Dada Fair in Berlin: almost two hundred works, among them his “Tatlin at Home”. It was a financial failure. By 1937 its slogan “Take Dada Seriously!” was repeated by the Nazi exhibition “Degenerate Art”.

“The Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time)” was made around 1919–1920 on a wooden hairdresser’s wig-making dummy. Attached to it are a ruler, a pocket-watch mechanism, parts of a camera, a typewriter and a crocodile wallet. It is the only surviving assemblage of those years by Hausmann; it is held by the Centre Pompidou.

In September 1921 he went to Prague with Höch, Kurt Schwitters and Schwitters’s wife, where he recited sound poems, among them “fmsbwtazdu”. Historians hold that this performance prompted Schwitters to write the “Ursonate”. At the same time he described a machine converting sound signals into visual ones, later called the Optophone; a patent for it was granted in London in 1935. In 1922 Höch left him, and he stopped painting. In 1923 he married the painter Hedwig Mankiewitz. From 1927 he worked mainly in photography: portraits, nudes, landscapes. He lived with his wife and Vera Broido in Charlottenburg until 1934; Höch recalled those visits in the early 1930s as boring. From 1931 he wrote regularly for the magazine “Der Gegner”, edited by Franz Jung and Harro Schulze-Boysen. In 1929 he had obtained a patent for a device for examining body cavities, today’s endoscope.

In 1933 he emigrated: the Nazis counted his work as “degenerate art”. He lived on Ibiza, where he photographed the island’s rural life, then in Zurich and Prague. In 1938, after the German invasion, he left Czechoslovakia and settled in Paris, then fled to the south of France and lived at Peyrat-le-Château almost illegally, with his Jewish wife. From 1944 he lived in Limoges.

After the war he returned to working openly: photograms, photomontages, sound poetry and, in the 1950s, painting too. He planned a magazine, “PIN”, with Schwitters, but Schwitters died in 1948. In 1958 his memoir “Courrier Dada” was published. When interest in Dada revived in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the United States, he corresponded with younger artists and rejected the label “Neo-Dada”. In 1962 he wrote to George Maciunas that the prefix “neo” means nothing and that “ism” is old-fashioned.

Hausmann died in Limoges on 1 February 1971. His last book, “Am Anfang war Dada” (“In the Beginning Was Dada”), appeared in 1972. The artist’s papers are held by the Berlinische Galerie and by the museum of contemporary art in the château of Rochechouart.