Raoul Hausmann
 

(b Vienna, 12 July 1886; d Limoges, 1 Feb 1971).

Austrian photomontagist, painter, photographer, printmaker, writer and theorist. He trained in the academic artistic tradition under his father, Victor Hausmann (1859–1920). In 1900 he went to Berlin, where he later became a central figure in Dada. His important friendship with the eccentric architect and mystical artist Johannes Baader (1875–1956) began in 1905. In the first years of the next decade he was associated with such artists as Erich Heckel and Ludwig Meidner and produced numerous paintings, including Blue Nude (1916; Rochechouart, Mus. Dépt.), and woodcuts, several of which were published in his book Material der Malerei Plastik Architektur (Berlin, 1918). These works blended Expressionism with the influences of artists then exhibiting at Herwarth Walden’s Sturm-Galerie: Fernand Léger, Alexander Archipenko, Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay, Arthur Segal and others. Around 1915 his widening contacts with the writers Salomon Friedländer and Franz Jung led to innumerable theoretical and satirical writings that were published in Der Sturm, Die Aktion, Die freie Strasse and other magazines of the era. Hausmann’s views reflected a diversity of influences ranging from biologist Ernst Haeckel and psychologist Otto Gross, to Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, to Eastern philosophers including Laozi, and to such anarchists as Max Stirner. In 1915 he also met Hans Richter and Hannah Höch; Höch became Hausmann’s close companion until 1922. By 1917 he was associated with Richard Huelsenbeck, George Grosz, John Heartfield and Wieland Herzfelde, who together formed the nucleus of Dada in Berlin during 1918–22.