Art Of The Day Weekly
#502 - from 15 February 2018 to 21 February 2018
Jean Brusselmans, The Storm, 1936, oil on canvas, 147 x 147 cm, private collection (exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague).
BOOKS
Hausmann, a dormant Europe
He was born in one of Europe’s capital, Vienna, in 1886. He was one of the stars of the Dada movement in Berlin, the inventor of photomontage, the great friend of Moholy-Nagy, who would have loved to have him come to the New Bauhaus in Chicago to have him discover the new world and have the latter discover his value to this New World. Yet, when Raoul Hausmann died in 1971, at the antipodes of this Europe of the avant-gardes, in the depths of the French province that hid him during the war, in the region of Limoges. His burial was attended by a handful of persons, among them Claude Viallat. The exhibition at the Jeu de paume and this elegant square shaped catalogue unveil the intermediate period of the thirties. Faced with the rise of extremists, Hausmann cultivated his interior self, that is, photography. Nudes, portraits, flowers and fields, still lives and the cubic architecture of Ibiza, the mirage that attracted the outcasts of all types at the time, among them Walter Benjamin.
• Raoul Hausmann, photographies, 1927-1936, texts by Cécile Bargues, Le Point du Jour/Jeu de paume/Musée de Rochechouart, 264 p., €39.
