ArtistInfo

Raoul Hausmann

1886-1971 AT, Vienna
Spoken Word

Raoul Hausmann, born in 1886 (12 July) in Vienna (Austria), lived in Berlin beginning in 1900, and deceased in Limoges (France) in 1971 (1 Feb.), is counted among the most important artists of the historical avant-garde of the 20th century.
He was one of hte founding members of Dada Berlin in 1918 together with Richard Hulsenbeck and Frantz Jung. During this period of intense activity he contributed to the review "Die Freie Strasse" and to the "Club Dada," a special issue of the same. He founded and ran, together with Joannes Baader and Richard Hulsenbeck, "Der Dada," the most celebrated review of the Berlin dadaists.
The Dada revolt demanded a fundamentally new art form and Hausmann turned towards new means of expression such as "phonetic poems" and photo-montages.
The process of the photomontage, of which Hausmann could be considered the father, was also to be taken up by Hanna Höch, Johannes Baader, John Heartfield, and Georges Grosz. Ye tfor Hausmann, Dada had implications well beyond the realm of the artistic, and one can see that he was more attracted to the anarchist Baader and the militant communists Grosz and Heartfield than to Tristan Tzara.
After the Dada movement, he undertook research in optophonetics, and in 1926 he began his autobiographical novel, "Hyle," which he finished around 1955 in Limoges. At the beginning of the 1930s, photography became his preferred means of expression, with views of the Baltic Sea, the island of Sylt, and numerous nudes on the beach.
From 1937-38, he lived in Czechoslovakia, where he began more research on photography. He began a study on that subject and hoped to publish his research on optophonetic works with Moholy-Nagy.
In 1944 he moved to Limoges and, thanks to a parcel of photographic paper sent by Moholoy-Nagy, he made his first photograms. Then he returned to work in photography, photomontage, and sound poetry.
From 1959 to 1964 painting became one of the most important aspects of his artistic production, which he later transformed into pictographic writing.