The Art Critic

The Art Critic Raoul Hausmann, 1919-20

Raoul Hausmann was born in Vienna in 1886. He studied art at a private school in Berlin. Along with Hannah Höch (who he was having an abusive affair with at the time) he was among the founder members of the Berlin Dada Club, which included George Grosz and Franz Jung, in 1918.

Towards the end of the 1920s Hausmann became a photographer concentrating on landscapes, nudes and portraits. After the Nazi's took power and started to persecute avant garde artists he emigrated to Ibiza, returned to Czechoslovakia in 1937 but was forced to leave after the German invasion of 1938 and settled in France near Limoges, where he died in 1971.

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Dada was an avant-garde art movement that first appeared in Zurich as a response to the madness of the First World War. Dadaists described themselves as anti-art and aimed to deliberately disorientate or shock. They were concerned with ridiculing the world around them through absurdity and nonsense or gibberish.

Passing Troop, a sound poem by Theo van Doesburg, using the pseudonym IK Bonset, 1916

After founding the Cabaret Voltaire (in reference to the French philosopher who mocked religious and philosophical dogma) as a venue for performances and manifestos, the movement spread rapidly to Berlin, Paris, New York and other artistic centres around Europe and Asia.

The artform covered literature, poetry (including cutting out words from newspaper articles and randomly selecting them), drama, music, sculpture (often using ‘found objects’ such as Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ – basically a urinal bought from a plumbers shop in New York in 1917, turned on its side and fastened to the wall) and graphic art. Typically posters would use a wide range of typefaces to create a disconnected look, and collage and photomontage techniques (sometimes randomised by dropping images onto the paper and sticking them where they fell).

Kleine Dada Soirée, created by Theo van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters for their tour of the Netherlands, 1922-23

The movement had a wide influence, including on posters designed in post-Revolution Russia, and later surrealism, abstract expressionism, pop art and situationism.