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Raoul Hausmann (July 12, 1886 – February 1, 1971) was an Austrian artist and writer. One of the key figures in Berlin Dada, his experimental Photomontage, sound poetry, and institutional critiques would have a profound influence on the European Avant-Garde in the aftermath of World War I.
After seeing Expressionism paintings in Herwarth Walden's gallery Der Sturm in 1912, 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. In keeping with his Expressionist colleagues, he initially welcomed the war, believing it to be a necessary cleansing of a calcified society, although being an Austrian citizen living in Germany he was spared the draft.
Hausmann met Hannah Höch in 1915, and embarked upon an extramarital affair that produced an 'artistically productive but turbulent bond'Dada, Dickerman / Sabine T Kriebel, National Gallery of Art Washington, 2006 p472 that would last until 1922 when she left him. The relationship's turmoil even reached the point where Hausmann fantasized about killing Höch.Maria Makela (1996). "By Design: The Early Work of Hannah Höch in Context". In Boswell, Peter; Makela, Maria; Lanchner, Carolyn (eds.). The photomontages of Hannah Höch (1. ed.). Minneapolis: Walker Art Center. p. 64. . He talked down to her about her opinions on everything from politics to art, and only came to her aid when the other artists of the Dada movement tried to exclude her from their art shows.Makela, Maria (1997). von Ankum, Katharina (ed.). Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 119–121. Even after defending her art and arguing for its inclusion in the First International Dada Fair, he went on to say Höch "was never part of the club."Hemus, Ruth (2009). Dada's Women. United States: Yale University Press. p. 92. . Though Hausmann repeatedly told Höch that he was going to leave his wife to be with her, he never did.Makela, Maria (1997). von Ankum, Katharina (ed.). Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 119–121.
In 1916 Hausmann met two more people who would become important influences on his subsequent career; the psychoanalyst Otto Gross who believed psychoanalysis to be the preparation for revolution, and the anarchist writer Franz Jung. By now his artistic circle had come to include the writer Salomo Friedlaender, Hans Richter, Emmy Hennings and members of Die Aktion magazine, which, along with Der Sturm and the anarchist paper Die Freie StraßeDie freie Straße On German Wikipedia published numerous articles by him in this period.
'The notion of destruction as an act of creation was the point of departure for Hausmann's Dadasophy, his theoretical contribution to Berlin Dada.'Quoted in Dada, Dickerman/ Sabine T Kriebel, National Gallery of Art Washington, 2006 p472
"The threat of violence hung in the air. One envisioned Corinth's pictures torn to shreds with chair legs. But in the end it didn't come to that. As Raoul Hausmann shouted his programmatic plans for dadaist painting into the noise of the crowd, the manager of the sezession gallery turned the lights out on him."Contemporaneous review from the Berliner Börsen-Courier, quoted in Dada, Dickerman, National Gallery of Art Washington, 2006 p88
"It was like a thunderbolt: one could – I saw it instantaneously – make pictures, assembled entirely from cut-up photographs. Back in Berlin that september, I began to realize this new vision, and I made use of photographs from the press and the cinema." Hausmann, 1958Quoted in Dada, Dickerman, National Gallery of Art Washington, 2006 p90The photomontage became the technique most associated with Berlin Dada, used extensively by Hausmann, Höch, Heartfield, Baader and Grosz, and would prove a crucial influence on Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitzky and Russian Constructivism. It should also be pointed out that Grosz, Heartfield and Baader all laid claim to having invented the technique in later memoirs, although no works have surfaced to justify these claims.
At the same time, 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. Schwitters' Ursonate was directly influenced by a performance of one of Hausmann's poems, "fmsbwtazdu", at an event in Prague in 1921.
At the beginning of 1920, Baader, the "Oberdada", 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 Hausmann, and Hausmann's "Dada-Trot (Sixty-One Step)" described as 'a truly splendid send-up of the most modern exotic-erotic social dances that have befallen us like a plague...'Hamburger Nachrichten, 1920, quoted in Dada, p440-1
" Der Geist Unserer Zeit – Mechanischer Kopf specifically evokes the philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). For Hegel...everything is mind. Among Hegel's disciples and critics was Karl Marx. Hausmann's sculpture might be seen as an aggressively Marxist reversal of Hegel: this is a head whose "thoughts" are materially determined by objects literally fixed to it. However, there are deeper targets in western culture that give this modern masterpiece its force. Hausmann turns inside out the notion of the head as seat of reason, an assumption that lies behind the European fascination with the portrait. He reveals a head that is penetrated and governed by brute external forces.
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. Hannah Höch - by now herself living with a woman, the Dutch author Til Brugman – left a sketch of Hausmann around 1931:
"After I had offered to renew friendly relations and we met frequently (with Til as well). At the time he was living with Heda Mankowicz-Hausmann and Vera Broido in Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße in Charlottenburg. Elfrided Hausmann-Scheffer, Til and I went there often. But I always found it very boring. He was just acting the photographer, and the lover of Vera B, showing off terribly with what he could afford to buy now – the ésprit was all gone." Hannah HöchCollages, Hannah Höch 1889-78, Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations,1985.p54
In later years, 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. He 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, 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.
'His almost complete isolation was relieved only by extensive and partly conflict-ridden correspondence with old friends from the Dada movement as well as young writers and artists such as Jasper Johns, Wolf Vostell and Daniel Spoerri.'He wrote to George Maciunas, who had included his work in the early Fluxfests, in 1962:
"I think even the Americans should not use the term "neodadaism" because neo means nothing and ism is old-fashioned. Why not simply "Fluxus"? It seems to me much better, because it's new, and dada is historic. I was in correspondence with Tzara, Hulsenbeck and Hans Richter concerning this question, and they all declare "neodadaism does not exist"... So long."Mr Fluxus, Williams and Noël, Thames and Hudson, 1998, p40
He died on February 1, 1971, in Limoges. His last work, the book, Am Anfang war Dada, was published posthumously in 1972.
The documentary part of the estate was acquired by the museum in 1992 and focuses on evidence of Raoul Hausmann's life and activities in Berlin up to his emigration in 1933, as well as correspondence with his wife Elfriede and his daughter Vera Hausmann up to Raoul Hausmann's death.
In addition to biographical documents, the partial estate consists largely of correspondence. These document, among other things, Hausmann's intellectual exchange with contemporaries, including Johannes Baader, Adolf Behne, César Domela-Nieuwenhuis, Otto Freundlich, Werner Graeff, Franz Jung, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, Hans Richter, Franz Roh, Kurt Schwitters, Arthur Segal and Franz Wilhelm Seifert. Typewritten business correspondence has been preserved as carbon copies and reply letters.
In addition, manuscripts and texts by Hausmann (and third parties) on art, culture and philosophy, as well as technical and scientific studies, have survived in the partial estate.
The focus of the literary texts is the novel manuscript Hyle, whose stages of development are documented by manuscripts and typescripts.
In 2019, the Hausmann collection was expanded through a donation by the German universal artist Timm Ulrichs (*1940). The documentary collection comprises Ulrichs' correspondence with Hausmann from 1967 to 1970, enriched with drafts of Hausmann's texts.
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