Raoul Hausmann banished meaning from art and became one of the driving forces of Dadaism. The Austrian-German painter, photo artist and writer created a diverse oeuvre of paintings, collages and texts which is still widely received today.
(...) Continue readingRaoul Hausmann – The death of art leads to Dadaism
Raoul Hausmann was born in Vienna on 12 July 1886. The son of the Austrian-German portrait and history painter Victor Hausmann, he was confronted with the fine arts from an early age. In contrast to his father, however, he was interested in the emerging Expressionism in Germany; as a young man he befriended Johannes Baader - who was extremely mission-conscious and imbued with great cultural pessimism - and became involved with the journals Der Sturm and Die Aktion. His first published works there still showed clear traces of his initial influence from Expressionism and Futurism, but Raoul Hausmann soon developed in another direction: He joined the Berlin Dada movement in 1918 and was their important protagonist until 1922. In 1919 he brought the journal Der Dada to life, in the first edition of which he immediately declared the whole of art as dead, and that Dadaism was a way out of the postulated crisis of meaning: finding meaning in meaninglessness.
A tense relationship web of love and art
During these intense years, Raoul Hausmann had an affair with his colleague Hannah Höch, the close circumstances of which have given rise to much speculation. Its tragic end was imminent: Hausmann, already married, resisted his lover’s request for his divorce, and conversely, under the teachings of the psychologist and anarchist Otto Groß, he urged Höch to break from her parents. Whilst the famous Dada couple demoralised each other in this way, a rich creative activity developed, one of the highlights of which was undoubtedly the discovery of artistic photomontage. Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch’s relationship also mirrored the path of Dadaism, with its emergence in a frothing melting pot of euphoria and passion, its gruelling struggle with itself and its surroundings, and its ultimate failure. In 1922, Hausmann, Höch, and the Dada movement separated. Furthermore, Raoul Hausmann stopped painting altogether, devoting himself entirely to the newly discovered photomontage.
Flight from National Socialism to France
Alongside photography, Raoul Hausmann worked primarily on composing texts. He founded ‘sound poetry’ with his good friend Kurt Schwitters and also inspired the latter to create the famous Ursonate. In 1926, during a stay on the Balearic Island of Ibiza, which he cherished, he wrote his great novel Hyle, which was adapted as a radio play in 2007 by Bayerischer Rundfunk starring Axel Milberg. From 1931, Hausmann’s texts appeared regularly in Harro Schulze-Boysen and Franz Jung’s journal Der Gegner. With his works defamed as degenerate art by the National Socialist cultural politics, Hausmann was forced to emigrate in 1933; via Spain he landed in Switzerland and then on to the Czech Republic and finally to France. He settled in Limoges in 1944 where he remained the rest of his life. Prompted by Surrealism, Hausmann took up painting again in his final years and created new oil paintings.
Raoul Hausmann died of jaundice on 1 February 1971 in Limoges.
Raoul Hausmann - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
