DADA Companion -- Raoul Hausmann

Raoul Hausmann was born in Vienna (1886). He spent his early years in Berlin where he met with Johannes Baader and who joined him and Richard Huelsenbeck in founding Dada Club in 1918.

During this period of intense activity he contributed to the review Die Freie Strasse and to the Club Dada. He founded and ran, together with Joannes Baader and Richard Huelsenbeck Der Dada and organized the first Dada exhibition in Berlin.
After the Dada movement, he undertook research in optophonetics, and 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 (Vera Broido).
In 1933 he took refuge in Ibiza. There he developed research, not so far from that of ethnography, on the traditional settlement. From 1937-38, he lived in Czechoslovakia, where he began more research on photography. During the war he lived in a little village in France, near Limoges.
After the war 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. Hausmann died in Limoges in 1971.
more information
More extensive is Sabine T. Kriebel, 'Raoul Hausmann', published in Leah Dickerman (ed.), Dada. Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris (National Gallery of Art : Washington DC 2005) 472 and online available at Dada biographies: Johannes Baader, an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art.
- Chronology Raoul Hausmann
- ifa Künstler-Datenbank
- Österreichische Literatuur im Exil
- Raoul Hausmann [Exil Archiv]
- Raoul Hausmann [NGA, Washington DC].