BERLIN.- Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971) is a leading figure in the artistic avant-garde of the 20th century. Throughout his life he challenged conventions of every kind. In his all round resolve to move on from the status quo and make “tomorrow” happen he was a multi-media artist avant la lettre. As a co-founder of Berlin’s Dada movement, nicknamed its “Dadasopher”, he pioneered a broad repertoire of styles and formats which continue to influence artistic production today.

Hausmann’s work and his ideas evolved along an interface between fine art, photography, literature, philosophy and technology. He co-invented collage, devised synaesthetic apparatus, penned experimental texts, explored the relationship between body, sound and space in his performances and used photography to blend vision with haptics.

Driven by his tireless capacity for change, Raoul Hausmann generated an œuvre that is innovative, diverse and unlike any other.

The Berlinische Galerie marks its 50th anniversary with a major retrospective devoted to this radical innovator. With more than 200 items on display, this is the first exhibition to address the full spectrum of his artistic endeavours – from early Expressionist ventures and iconic specimens of Dada to the late work, rarely shown to date, created during exile in France after he left Germany as a discredited “degenerate” artist.

The Berlinische Galerie holds the world’s biggest collection relating to Dada in Berlin and manages the Hausmann estate for the years until 1933; these are the foundations for this exhibition.

The Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne – Château de Rochechouart, as the custodian of Hausmann’s late work and a major source of loans for this event, supplied key works from his exile years. The comprehensive show has been enriched by outstanding items from institutions in Germany and abroad, including the Hamburger Kunsthalle; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden; Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Saint-Etienne; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Tate London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; as well as from private collections, galleries, libraries and antiquarians.

Exhibition chapters

The retrospective is chronologically structured in seven chapters. Some 600 square metres are being devoted to more than 200 paintings, collages, drawings, prints, photographs, films and documents, granting a panoramic insight into the various periods of the artist’s life and work.

“The painter paints like the ox lows”
Early work (1905–1917)

Hausmann encountered art at a young age and his father, a painter at the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II, provided early technical instruction. His independent development as an artist was ignited in 1912 by Expressionism. In the Brücke artist Erich Heckel he found a critical sparring partner, inspiration and a studio where he was able to emulate the group’s onslaught on academic painting. As the young artist tussled with forging a style of his own, his horizons were broadened by his association with Ludwig Meidner and by the shows to be seen at the Sturm gallery. His exhibition debut came in 1914 when his Expressionist works went on display in Munich.

In April 1915 Hausmann met the artist Hannah Höch. It was the beginning of a seven year relationship fraught with conflict and, as his portraits of Höch reveal, intense emotions. Hausmann, never short of self-confidence, described his work of that period as “very personal Cubism”. From 1916 the element of social criticism in his art was deeply influenced by “Die Aktion”, a left-wing journal opposed to militarism.

“Dada is more than Dada”
Revolutionary anti-art (1918–1921)

The Dada spark flew from Zurich to Berlin in January 1918, triggering the decisive phase of Hausmann’s life and work. Dada released a spurt of creative and intellectual energy in the artist. With Hannah Höch he developed photomontage as a form of artistic expression, while his poster poems were the first readymades in literature. He was also among the first to use everyday objects in assemblage with a socially critical punch. At Dada soirées he provoked his audience with eccentric dancing, recitals of sound poems and sharp-tongued lampooning of art and society.

Hausmann was staging art performances before anyone had coined the term. Meanwhile, as editor of the magazine “Der Dada” and author of numerous articles, manifestos and forays into theory, Hausmann became the eloquent, radical voice of Berlin’s Club Dada.

His role as “Dadasopher” made him a key protagonist of Spree-based Dadaism: he raged against “all habits, beliefs and privileges” as he sought, through his artistic practice, to foster a new consciousness and cast aside the old world of bourgeois values.

Dada meant more to Hausmann than a revolution in aesthetics and style. It was synonymous with his lifelong rigorous questioning of cosy certainties.

“The conquest of all our senses”
Synaesthesia (1921–1927)

Hausmann’s efforts to combine the optical with the phonetic was already evident in his poster poems of 1918, designed as images yet conceived as speech. The early 1920s witnessed his growing interest in human sensory perception and his determination to expand and rewire it. Hausmann formulated his own theory on the subject, which he called “PRÉsentism”. It would remain a defining force in all his creative work.

Parallel to this, Hausmann spent several years developing apparatus for synaesthetic perception. His “optophone” was intended to transform images into sounds and vice versa. Here Hausmann cultivated his image as the prototype of a generation typical of the early 20th century: the artist as inventor and the inventor as artist.

“Seeing is a magical process”
Photography (1927–1947)

In 1927 Raoul Hausmann discovered photography as an all-embracing life art and it played a dominant role in his output the next twenty years. His photographic œuvre bears little resemblance to the New Vision of the time. Rather than focusing on formal constructions, Hausmann wanted, with and through the camera, to expand and renew the way people used their eyes and to enhance their sensory perception of the cosmos.

While insistent that he should not be regarded as a photographer, he devoted a considerable corpus of work to ostensibly trivial, seemingly obvious motifs. There were close-ups of objects resembling still lifes from his own immediate environment, but also nudes and landscapes, and the spectrum ranged from more conventional documentary images to experiments in photographic art. The guiding principle was always to capture the texture of the subject-matter by combining its visual and haptic qualities.

Hausmann was pursuing his idea of a “new vision of the world” which would enable the viewer to experience a new sensory relationship with reality. His photographs aimed to “educate” the eye, for he believed that seeing was subject to historical and social factors and could, therefore, be changed.

During this period, Hausmann publicised his ideas about photographic techniques and the potential of the medium by authoring prolific articles and positioning himself as a significant theoretician of the genre.

“Make tomorrow happen”
A fresh start (1945–1959)

In March 1933 Hausmann, who was to be discredited as a “degenerate” artist, left Nazi Germany with his wife Hedwig Mankiewitz and his lover Vera Broïdo, both of them Jewish. After a meandering exile, he settled in the French city of Limoges in 1944. Hausmann began to explore his new home by drawing.

His focus then shifted to experimental photography as his œuvre extended to photograms and photo- pictograms. For the first time since his Dada years he returned to photomontage and collage and in his seventies he began painting in an organic abstract manner. Hausmann’s ability to adapt is all the more astonishing in the light of his exile experience and the many personal and material losses he suffered.

Old times ahead
Late work (1960–1971)

Hausmann’s late work reflects Dada’s incipient recognition in art history: his works pick up directly on the early formative years of his artistic career. Although he saw contemporary movements in the 1960s, such as Neo-Dada and Fluxus, as a mere echo of his own Dada activities, several young artists were eager to exchange ideas with him. This, in turn, had a fruitful impact on his own creativity. He insisted to the very end that collage as a design principle was his intellectual property. Collage also marked the end of Hausmann’s career: the last ones were made entirely by touch, shortly before he died, when he was almost blind.

“Mr Me” and the others
Artistic networks (1913–1971)

Raoul Hausmann was a productive egocentric, not least in his desire to steer society toward new creative pathways of self-empowerment. Others may have feared him as an intellectual provocateur but many remained close friends, among them Conrad Felix- müller, Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp, Theo van Doesburg, László Moholy-Nagy, Otto Freundlich and (for a decade) Hannah Höch. That much is clear from the works dedicated by Raoul Hausmann to his fellow artists and by them to him.

The last chapter in the exhibition show- cases these personal connections and a mutual willingness to engage with each other’s art. Drawing on correspondence, manifestos, magazines and photographs, the retrospective breaks new ground by reconstructing the artist’s networks and the bi- directional process of inspiration. Particular attention is granted here to the women in Hausmann’s life, all of whom were active in the arts but whose significance in his work has rarely been considered in previous exhibitions.