14 Facts About Christian Schad

Christian Schad was a German painter and photographer.

Christian Schad was associated with the Dada and the New Objectivity movements.

Christian Schad was born in Miesbach, Upper Bavaria, to a prosperous lawyer who supported him for nearly half his life.

Christian Schad studied at the art academy in Munich in 1913.

Christian Schad was witness of the foundation of Dada at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916.

Christian Schad became interested in Eastern philosophy around 1930, and his artistic production declined precipitously.

Recent research revealed that Christian Schad arranged with the Nazi in his own way entering the National Socialist German Workers' Party in 1933.

Christian Schad lived in obscurity in Germany through the war and after it.

Christian Schad continued to paint in the 1950s in the Magic Realist style and would return in the 1960s to experiments with photograms.

Christian Schad's reputation did not begin to recover until the 1960s, when a couple of shows in Europe dovetailed with the rise of Photorealism.

In 1919, while living in Geneva, Christian Schad created his own version of shadowgraphs respectively photograms exposing flat objects and detritus on printing-out paper in a copy frame to the sun.

Christian Schad offered these "composition photographiques" for publication among others to Tristan Tzara, who finally published in March 1920 a reproduction in the Dadaphone, the seventh edition of his Dada magazine.

Christian Schad realized numerous of these late Schadographs among other for an album in 1978 dedicated to Aloysius Bertrand's poetical prose Gaspard de la Nuit.

Christian Schad's works are now part of the collections of, among others, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate, London; and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.