Between the Covers

Black and white poster (halftone print). Professionally framed. Measuring approximately 30" x 40". Fine. Large poster advertisement for the 1967 exhibition at the Modern Museum in Stockholm: the first full-scale retrospective of Raoul Hausmann’s artwork.

Hausmann, one of the key founders of the Berlin Dada movement, instigated several important firsts in the modern art movement. In 1917-1918 he invented the optophonetic poem and photomontage, and published the first Dada Manifesto; his pioneering work in photography and numerous writings (manifestos and institutional critiques) had a profound influence on the European Avant-Garde throughout the 1930s-1940s; and in 1958 he helped to found the Fluxus movement.

The poster reproduces his most famous work: "Mechanischer Kopf (Der Geist Unserer Zeit)," circa 1919-1920. Constructed from a hairdresser's wig-making dummy, the piece has various measuring devices attached: a ruler, a pocket watch mechanism, a typewriter, some camera segments, and a crocodile wallet. Interpreted by critics as a Marxist reversal of Hegel, “a head whose thoughts are materially determined by objects literally fixed to it,” Hausmann himself likened it to the average German of the day, who has "no more capabilities than those which chance has glued on the outside of his skull; his brain remains empty."

Hausmann also played an important role in the Neo-Dada and Fluxus movements inspired by the famous 1958 Dada exhibition in Frankfurt-Düsseldorf, which included many of his artworks. By the time of his 1967 retrospective, Hausmann had formed close personal and working relationships with the leading figures of both intertwined movements, including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, and Fluxus-impresario George Maciunas, who had assumed the leadership role in Fluxus "happenings."

Maciunas included Hausmann’s works in the earliest happenings or “Fluxfests,” and had initially referred to the movement as “neo-dadaism.” In a letter to Maciunas from 1962, Hausmann discouraged the use of the term: “I note with much pleasure what you said about German neodadaists—but I think even the Americans should not use the term "neodadaism" because neo means nothing and -ism is old-fashioned. Why not simply "Fluxus"? It seems to me much better, because it's new, and dada is historic." A very scarce, beautifully printed copy of the Stockholm poster, well-preserved in a clean wood and glass frame.

Item #387241