Background
Raoul Hausmann was born on July 12, 1886 in Vienna, Austria. His father - a professional conservator and painter.
Raoul Hausmann
Autoportrait by Raoul Hausmann
Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch
(Raoul Hausmann is remembered primarily for the central ro...)
Raoul Hausmann is remembered primarily for the central role he played in Berlin Dada with his assemblages, photomontages and optophonetic poems. Raoul Hausmann: Photographs 1927-1936 presents a comprehensive study of Hausmann as a photographer during the interwar years.
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(Raoul Hausmann started to experiment with sound poems he ...)
Raoul Hausmann started to experiment with sound poems he called "phonemes" and "poster poems", originally created by the chance lining up of letters by a printer without Hausmann's direct intervention. Later poems used words which were reversed, chopped up and strung out, then either typed out using a full range of typographical strategies, or performed with boisterous exuberance.
1919
Raoul Hausmann was born on July 12, 1886 in Vienna, Austria. His father - a professional conservator and painter.
Moved to Berlin with his parents at the age of 14, in 1901. His earliest art training was from his father, a professional conservator and painter. He met Johannes Baader, an eccentric architect and another future member of Dada, in 1905. At around the same time he met Elfride Schaeffer, a violinist, whom he married in 1908, a year after the birth of their daughter, Vera. That same year Hausmann enrolled at a private Art School in Berlin, where he remained until 1911.
After seeing Expressionist paintings in Herwarth Walden's gallery Der Sturm in 1912, Raoul Hausmann started to produce Expressionist prints in Erich Heckel's studio, and became a staff writer for Walden's magazine, also called Der Sturm, which provided a platform for his earliest polemical writings against the art establishment.
Raoul Hausmann met Hannah Höch in 1915, and embarked upon an extramarital affair that would last until 1922 when she left him. The relationship's turmoil even reached the point where Hausmann fantasized about killing Höch. In 1916 he met two more people who would become important influences on his subsequent career; the psychoanalyst Otto Gross and the anarchist writer Franz Jung.
When Richard Huelsenbeck, who was a close friend of Hugo Ball and one of the founders of Dada, returned to Berlin in 1917, Raoul Hausmann was one of a group of young disaffected artists that began to form the nucleus of Berlin Dada around him. Huelsenbeck delivered his "First Dada Speech in Germany", January 22, 1918 at the fashionable art dealer IB Neumann's gallery, Kurfürstendamm Berlin. Over the course of the next few weeks, Hausmann, Huelsenbeck, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Jung, Höch, Walter Mehring and Baader started the Club Dada. The first event staged was an evening of poetry performances and lectures against the backdrop of a retrospective of paintings by the establishment artist Lovis Corinth at the Berlin Sezession, April 12, 1918.
After Raoul Hausmann contributed to the first group show, held at Isaac Neumann's Gallery, April 1919, the first edition of Der Dada appeared in June 1919. The periodical contained drawings, polemics, poems and satires, all typeset in a multiplicity of opposing fonts and signs. At the beginning of 1920, Baader, the "Oberdada", Raoul Hausmann, the "Dadasoph", and the "Welt-Dada" Huelsenbeck undertook a six-week tour of Eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia, drawing large crowds and bemused reviews. The programme included primitivist verse, simultaneous poetry recitals by Baader and Raoul Hausmann, and Hausmann's "Dada-Trot (Sixty-One Step)".
By the end of the year (1920) Raoul Hausmann had published the Dada Almanach and The History of Dadaism, two historical records that implied that Dada was at an end. In the aftermath, Hausmann's friendship with Kurt Schwitters deepened, and Raoul Hausmann started to take steps toward International Modernism.
In September 1921, Raoul Hausmann, Höch, Schwitters and his wife Helma undertook an 'anti-dada' tour to Prague. As well as his recitals of sound poems, he also presented a manifesto describing a machine "capable of converting audio and visual signals interchangeably, that he later called the Optophone". After many years of experimentation, this device was patented in London in 1935. He also took part in an exhibition of photomontages in Berlin in 1931, organised by César Domela Nieuwenhuis.
In the late 1920s, he re-invented himself as a fashionable society photographer, and lived in a ménage à trois with his wife Hedwig and Vera Broido in the fashionable district of Charlottenburg, Berlin. In later years, Raoul Hausmann exhibited his photographs widely, concentrating on nudes, landscapes and portraits. As Nazi persecution of avant-garde artists increased, he emigrated to Ibiza, where his photos concentrated on ethnographic motifs of pre-modern Ibizan life. He returned to Czechoslovakia in 1937, but was forced to flee again in 1938 after the German invasion. Raoul Hausmann moved to Paris, then Peyrat-le-Château, near Limoges, living there illegally with his Jewish wife Hedwig, in a quiet, secluded manner, until 1944 . After the Normandy landings in 1944, the pair finally moved to Limoges.
The war over, Raoul Hausmann was once again able to work openly as an artist. He resumed correspondence with Schwitters with the aim to collaborate on a poetry magazine, PIN, but Schwitter's death in 1948 stopped the project. He published books about Dada, including the autobiographical Courier Dada, (1958). He also worked on "photograms", photomontages and sound poetry, and even returned to painting in the Fifties.
Raoul Hausmann died on February 1, 1971, in Limoges.
(Raoul Hausmann is remembered primarily for the central ro...)
In addition to his work as an artist, Raoul Hausmann was interested in science and technology throughout his career, especially emerging fields like television and sound film, and Einstein's work on relativity (which Hausmann rejected).
In 1905 he met Elfride Schaeffer, a violinist, whom he married in 1908, a year after the birth of their daughter, Vera.