Born on July 12, 1886 in Vienna, Raoul Hausmann was an Austrian artist, founder and central figure of the Dada Movement in Berlin, known especially for his satirical photomontages and provocative writing on art.
Hausmann He learned about art through his father, the professional painter and curator Victor Hausmann. The family moved to Berlin in 1900, and in 1908 Raoul He began his formal education at the Arthur Lewin-Funcke Painting and Sculpture Atelier, where he focused on anatomy and nude drawing. Upon finishing in the workshop, he connected with German Expressionist painters, in particular Ludwig Meidner and Erich Heckel. He studied lithography and wood carving with Heckel. He also began what would become a lifelong writing career, writing articles critical of the establishment of art for magazines such as Herwarth Walden’s Die Aktion and Der Sturm.
In 1915, he met the artist Hannah Höch, with whom he began an extramarital affair (Hausmann married his first wife in 1908) and an artistic partnership that lasted until 1922. Hausmann He was committed and loyal to Expressionism until 1917, when he met Richard Hülsenbeck, who introduced him to the principles and philosophy of Dadaism, a new visual and literary art movement that had already taken off in other cities in Europe. Dada artists and writers created provocative works that questioned capitalism and conformity, which they believed to be the fundamental motivations for the war that had just ended, leaving chaos and destruction in its wake.
In 1918, Hausmann He had already started working primarily on photomontage: collage composite images made by juxtaposing and superimposing fragments of photos and text found in media sources. It is commonly held that Hausmann and Höch discovered the photomontage while on vacation at the Baltic Sea in the summer of 1918. Among the notable photomontages of Hausmann are included Art Critic (1919-20), a satirical image of a man in a suit with a German banknote behind his neck, suffocating him, and A Bourgeois Precision Brain Incites a World Movement (later known as Dada Triumphs; 1920), a montage and watercolor that conveys the global shot of Dada with text and image.
Between 1918 and 1920, Hausmann he was also busy inventing other forms of anti-art art, such as “optophonetic” and “poster” poems, both composed of interlocking random letters. The former were meant to be interpreted or read aloud; the latter were visual poems created as typography collages. Two of his best-known works of this type are the poster poem OFFEAHBDC and the optophonetic poem OFFEAH (both from 1918). Hausmann he also created, as an offshoot of collage and photomontage, assemblages of found materials, including possibly his most famous work, Mechanical Head: Spirit of Our Age (1919-20), a barber wig doll adorned with a tape measure, a wooden ruler, a tin cup, a spectacle case, a piece of metal, parts of a pocket watch, and parts of a camera.