Raoul Hausmann

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Raoul Hausmann (July 12, 1886February 1, 1971) was an Austrian sculptor and writer. He was one of the key figures of Dada. He was born in Vienna. He painted Tatlin at Home in 1920 as part of the Berlin Dada movement.

Raoul Hausmann was a co-founder of the Berlin Dada movement in 1917. He was one of the Berlin dadaists who created photographic collages out of cut-up photographs in the summer of 1918. Hausmann, along with German Dadaists George Grosz, Helmut Hertzfelde aka John Heartfield and Hannah Höch, pushed the idea of the photographic collage and the use of mass-printed source material by inventing photomontage. Both photograpic collage and photomontage involve arranging and glueing photographs or other found illustrative material onto a surface. Photographic collages are different from photomontages in that photomontages are photographed so that the final image is converted back into a photographic print. Photographic collages are not photographed, they are the final product. Both are a type of collage. They are both processes of selection, placement and sometimes embellishment, which sets them apart from the photographic record, no matter how much this "record" is distorted by the photographic apparatus or by subsequent techniques of developing.

Hausmann actually gave up painting in 1923 and became more interested in various experimental photographic procedures. In The Art Critic ([1]) the orange brick background is probably from one of Hausmann's phonetic poem posters intended to be stuck on walls all over Berlin. The figure over giant head and pen is stamped "Portrait constructed of George Grosz 1920", and is probably a magazine photograph of Hausmann's colleague, Grosz.

Hausmann was one of the most influential artists of his era[citation needed].

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