Raoul hausmann biography of abraham

He would have taught. But I find it hard to see how he could have fitted into the photography milieu and comply with the discipline of illustration. He took part in an exhibition organised in Germany by Otto Steinert. In Limoges itself, he tried to adapt his early researches to make them accessible to the members of a photography club.

Hausmann may have become a photographer in but he had never seriously tried to turn this into a job: that would have required an opportunism for which he manifestly had little inclination. However, from to he did take a very serious interest in the medium, and found a way of devoting himself to it. A short autobiographical reminder. Fotografienthe enigma deepened.

Raoul hausmann biography of abraham: Hausmann's subject is the

This put the emphasis on optical performance, placing the camera user in a distant position of domination with an orthopaedic function. Whereas the role of artists, he argued, was to privilege an emotional experience of space. How could the author of this critique devote himself to photography only six years later? I tried to answer it in the essay I wrote for the touring show of However, thanks to Bartomeu Mari and above all Philippe Rotthier, I had taken quite a close interest in the vernacular architecture of Ibiza.

Seeing this architecture locally was a great help, as was discovering the collection of photographs at the Berlinische Galerie. I should add that in those days I was interested in the history of the representation of landscape and of architecture in landscape. I saw the most successful recent works, particularly that of Robert Adams, as continuing a line that began in the nineteenth century.

I admired and still do admire the work of Henri Le Secq. I have never understood how people can isolate the photography of the s and see the period as a kind of modernist golden age while ignoring the nineteenth century. However, I thought, and still do think, that the photographic instrument is a resource for independent artists who do not accept the artistic conventions and diktats of their time.

Recently, many other photographers have referred explicitly to Hausmann.

Raoul hausmann biography of abraham: Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, Marianne

Illustrated magazines may have lost their ascendancy, but the norms of slick images on glossy paper endure and have even grown stronger, while photography critics feel obliged to subscribe to a neo-Pop or pseudo-vernacular norm. In he showed eight works in a Berlin group exhibition of photomontage art, organized by Cesar Domela Nieuwenhuis. In the same year he applied for the post of lecturer at the Bauhaus design school but was turned down.

See also Nazi art He also produced a number of photo-pictograms and photomontages and, in the s, a quantity of oil painting. In he had his first retrospective in Stockholm. He died on February 1,in Limoges. Art by Raoul Hausmann has been exhibited in some of the best galleries of contemporary art in Europe and America. Here are some examples. Unless stated all shows are solo events.

Biographies of Other Creative Photographers. For early pioneers, see: 19th-Century Photographers. Others Born in Go to all Rankings. Others Deceased in Go to all Rankings. Others born in Austria Go to all Rankings. Austrian born Painters Go to all Rankings. As historian Jeanne Willette writes "The vertical-horizontal arrangement [of text on page] was invaded and dis-arranged.

Rather than organization, the Dada artists stirred up disorganization, which became their contrarian design plan". The writer and Curator Timothy O. Benson adds that Hausmann's phonetic poems "were proposing a new language combining perception and articulation in the subconscious; a form of processing and expressing the world that was no longer limited to just one sense.

As one of the first in his experimentation with phonetics, the aspect of performance came to be thoroughly formative for a lot of ideas later on in his life that toyed with the fusion of sound and image". Indeed, one could site bbbb as an antecedent of mid-twentieth-century Concrete Art movement in the way it offered a precise compositional structure at the expense of any kind of commitment to represent lived or mythological worlds.

Raoul hausmann biography of abraham: This essay outlines the

With this sculpture Hausmann brought together a collection of seemingly random manufactured objects and in so doing he was in keeping with the Dadaist agenda of subverting aesthetic and artistic conventions and expectations. Indeed, The Spirit of Our Time is a classic work of Dada assemblage; giving everyday objects a new context and thereby prompting the viewer to rethink their perception of them.

Hausmann said of the piece: "The everyday man has nothing but the capacities which chance has glued to his skull, on the exterior, the brain was vacant. So I took a nice wooden head, polished it for a long time with sandpaper. I fixed a wallet to the back of it. Now on to the left side. And yes, 1had a mind to change materials. Thus it still stands today with its screws in the temples and a piece of a centimeter ruler on the forehead".

Coming in the immediate aftermath of World War One, this piece remains probably Hausmann's most iconic work. It represents the absurdity of "the war to end all wars" and the idea that human world has been overrun by machines, and that the "machines of war" have reduced the loss of so much human life to an empty list of statistics. The title of the work could be read thus as a direct reference to the influential German philosopher Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel, who discussed the concept of "spirit" "geist" or "zeitgeist"as that which encompassed the human spirit at a given time and place.

In any case, Historian Timothy O. Benson suggested that Hausmann's take on the idea of "geist" was ironic and manifest in "the concrete materiality of the objects used in place of raw art materials". Hausmann himself seemed to confirm Benson's reading when stating, "Dada is the full absence of what is called Geist Spirit. Why have Geist in a world that runs on mechanically?

Hairdresser's wig-making dummy with mixed media - Pompidou Centre, Paris. The central figure, with his tongue sticking out, often presumed given his distinctive attire and the fact he is holding a pencil to be Grosz or an amalgamation of Grosz and Heartfield is comprised of a series of cut out and drawn images. The female and male onlookers - separated by Hausmann's calling card - appear to be cut respectively from a print advertisement or catalogue and from newspaper print possibly modeled from a photograph of Hausmannwhile the triangular cut of a German banknote is perhaps an indictment of the "art industry" in which the critic - the arbiter of taste - is such a key figure.

Indeed, the art critic's outsized pencil is brandished sword-like as a weapon. As Willette writes, "Cutting and pasting from anonymous sources and turning the media against itself suited the purposes of the Dada artists in Berlin and the result was a critique of the status quo of society and the new Weimar government. The photomontage was a deconstruction and a form of destruction, wiping away the last remnants of the dead hand of history in search of a new mode of marking on the walls of the present".

Benson writes, "Hausmann used photography as an integral element to present the "art reporter" in a sparse atmosphere of fashion shoes and spatsDada art the poster-poem which forms its foundationthe newspaper, and the "currency" of the raoul hausmann biography of abraham and postage stamp. Absent are the references to high art often included in the Klebebilder [glued picture] of the Grosz-Heartfield "Konzern" ["group"] which would suggest the traditional values of art criticism".

The Dadaist's attitude to art criticism was firmly expressed by the author Wieland Herzfeld who wrote in his introduction to the famous Dada Fair exhibition catalogue of "If it [producing art] does happen, at least there should be no despotic standpoint laid down, and the broad masses should not have their pleasure in creative activity spoiled by the arrogance of experts from some supercilious guild".

This work was Hausmann's great scientific project. It was a proposal for a machine that could turn sound into images and vice-versa. It was for Hausmann a machine that the modern age deserved; a device that expanded the sensory experiences; a synaesthestic experience of mixing the senses. It was in fact an expansion of the ideas being explored by Wassily Kandinsky who explored the concept of synaesthesia by translating sound into abstract paintings.

Hausmann looked in fact to the natural world and the example of bees whose "optophonetic" makeup consisted of six hundred tube eyes which allow for the simultaneous perception of sound and vision in a single organ. The Optophone never made it past the stage of prototype even though Hausmann received a patent for his invention in InThe Hungarian polymath Lazlo Moholy-Nagy showed Hausmann a letter he had received from Albert Einstein in which the physicist suggested that Hausmann's blueprint for the Optophone was a triumph in scientific conception.

Raoul hausmann biography of abraham: Free Essay: The Mechanical Head

Einstein's words of encouragement were enough to push Hausmann to develop the plans into something more fully formed but his ambitions were thwarted by the onset of a second world war and the lack of an investor. In a letter dated June 23,to the French avant-garde poet and musician, Henri Chopin, Hausmann wrote: "I would like to attract your attention to the fact that since I have been developing the theory of the optophone, an apparatus that transforms visible forms into sound, and vice versa.

I had an English patent - 'Procedure for combining numbers on the photoelectric base' - which was a variant on this apparatus, and at the same time the first robot. The only thing that kept me from constructing an optophone was money". Benson wrote that "What the Dadaists referred to as the Klebebild [glued picture] and the Plastik [sculpture] were to them the logical place to begin the formation of a new language and myth" and that, like "the numerous other avant-garde groups, the Dadaists worked communally, creating their own 'testing ground' in which their art works were developed".

Hausmann's last photomontage stands as both an ode to the spirit of communal experimentation and also a Dadaist self-portrait. This photomontage, with one image overlapping and partially obscuring another, suggests that the cutout elements have been almost shaken into place. The mixture of text and numbers, and in particular the repetition of the alphabet at two points in the picture, is typical of the Dadaist's interest in written language as an aesthetic device.

It is also in keeping with Hausmann's own phonetic forms and sound poems. We see too a mixture of circular and linear elements that lead our eyes in a zig zag fashion across the picture plane. This adds to the chaotic bustle and "noise" of the work which is a metaphor for the idea of a society in chaos. The face is Hausmann's and the letters he grips in his teeth act as a sort of speech bubble which is confirmed with the ticket or flyer for one of his phonetic poem recitals placed just under his chin.

There is a gynecological diagram at the bottom center of the image which, as well as creating an element of controversy, relates to the idea of creation, and perhaps even the creation of art. The tickets to the Kaiser jubilee in his hat, meanwhile, hints at banalities of a culture he and his Dadaist colleague's had fought so hard to reverse.

Indian ink and magazine illustrations cut and pasted on paper. From aroundwhile still living in Germany, Hausmann became a dedicated photographer, using his camera to make nudes and record land and seascapes during visits to the Baltic coast.