25 Facts About Raoul Hausmann

Raoul Hausmann was an Austrian artist and writer.

Raoul Hausmann was born in Vienna but moved to Berlin with his parents at the age of 14, in 1901.

Raoul Hausmann met Johannes Baader, an eccentric architect and another future member of Dada, in 1905.

That same year Hausmann enrolled at a private Art School in Berlin, where he remained until 1911.

Raoul Hausmann met Hannah Hoch in 1915, and embarked upon an extramarital affair that produced an 'artistically productive but turbulent bond' that would last until 1922 when she left him.

The relationship's turmoil even reached the point where Raoul Hausmann fantasized about killing Hoch.

Raoul Hausmann 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.

In 1916 Raoul 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.

When Richard Huelsenbeck, a 24-year-old medical student 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.

Amongst the contributors, Huelsenbeck recited the Dada Manifesto, Grosz danced a "Sincopation" homaging Jazz, whilst Raoul Hausmann ended the evening by shouting his manifesto The New Material In Painting at the by-now near riotous audience;.

The Spirit of Our Time is a collage of some sort by Raoul Hausmann, created in 1919, that shows an abstract, mechanical representation of modern man.

Raoul 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.

Raoul Hausmann turns inside out the notion of the head as seat of reason, an assumption that lies behind the European fascination with the portrait.

Raoul Hausmann reveals a head that is penetrated and governed by brute external forces.

Raoul Hausmann took part in an exhibition of photomontages in Berlin in 1931, organised by Cesar Domela Nieuwenhuis.

In later years, Raoul Hausmann exhibited his photographs widely, concentrating on nudes, landscapes and portraits.

Raoul Hausmann 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-Chateau, near Limoges, living there illegally with his Jewish wife Hedwig, in a quiet, secluded manner, until 1944.

The war over, Raoul Hausmann was able to work openly as an artist.

Raoul Hausmann resumed correspondence with Schwitters with the aim to collaborate on a poetry magazine, PIN, but Schwitter's death in 1948 stopped the project.

Raoul Hausmann published books about Dada, including the autobiographical Courier Dada,.

Raoul Hausmann worked on "photograms", photomontages and sound poetry, and even returned to painting in the Fifties.

Raoul Hausmann refuted the term Neo-Dada, currently in vogue, which had been applied to a number of artists including Yves Klein and the Nouveau Realistes, Robert Rauschenberg and Fluxus.

Raoul Hausmann wrote to George Maciunas, who had included his work in the early Fluxfests, in 1962:.

In 2019, the Raoul Hausmann collection was expanded through a donation by the German universal artist Timm Ulrichs.