Raoul Hausmann

Raoul Hausmann was born in Vienna in 1886. In 1900 his family moved to Berlin, where he studied painting and came into contact with German Expressionism. He contributed to the avant-garde magazines Der Sturm and Die Aktion. In 1917, through Richard Huelsenbeck, he became involved in Dada. The following year, he helped establish the Berlin Dada movement, taking part in its soirées and founding Club Dada with Huelsenbeck and other artists. Hausmann explored the relationship between sound and vision through phonetic poetry and experiments with the correspondence between acoustic and optical phenomena. These investigations also led him to conceive the Optophone, a device intended to translate visual stimuli into sound. In 1926 he began work on Hyle, an experimental novel, and developed his interest in photography. In 1933, following the Nazi rise to power, he left Germany for Ibiza. He continued working there until 1936, when he was forced to leave the island. After years of exile, he settled in Limoges, France, in 1944, continuing his artistic and photographic research until his death in 1971.

Richard Hülsenbeck