French Literature Reviews - 2026
C. Bargues, Raoul Hausmann après Dada
Art and Visual Culture
Raoul Hausmann après Dada
Cécile Bargues
Marc Dachy (Preface)
Publication date: 17/04/2015 Publisher: Mardaga Collection: Architecture ISBN: 978-2-8047-0194-9 EAN: 9782804701949 Format: Paperback No. of pages: 257 p.
Raoul Hausmann, a leading figure of 20th-century art, embodies Dada and a freedom that continually reinvents itself. This book traces his odyssey in Ibiza and beyond. As a learned thinker of primitive architecture, a singular art historian, an anthropologist and photographer, the creator of striking photomontages and the rare, monumental book Hyle, Hausmann gave Dada a new dimension, carrying the movement far beyond its conventional chronological boundaries (1916–1923).
Driven out of Nazi Germany—where, starting in 1933, he was branded as a "degenerate" artist—Hausmann fled the country in haste the day after the Reichstag fire. Thus began a dual exile, both sun-drenched and terrible: a little-known epic originating on a small island then forgotten by mainstream commerce, Ibiza. There, Hausmann developed a deep passion for vernacular, cubic, and timeless architecture, photographed white houses, produced an anthropological study of them, and even conceived a "new art history" that challenged the very nature of human vision.
Hausmann shattered categories, habits, and certainties. Hailed by his friend Franz Jung as the "greatest cultural agitator" of 1920s Berlin, he pioneered an alternative way of living—a sort of prehistory to the counterculture of the 1970s. From the early days of Dada to the developments he brought to the movement after the Second World War—the most overlooked yet profoundly fertile period of his career—Hausmann endlessly demonstrated that, decisively, "the new man must have the courage to be new."
Drawing on previously unpublished archives, this study places Hausmann in dialogue with his contemporaries, including Jean Arp, Tristan Tzara, Carl Einstein, Otto Gross, Leo Frobenius, and Walter Benjamin, who happened to be in Ibiza at the same time.
Art historian Cécile Bargues has taught at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and served as co-curator for the exhibitions "Chefs-d'œuvre ?" (2010) and "Hans Richter" (2013) at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. A specialist in Raoul Hausmann and the Dada movement ("Dada after Dada"), she has authored numerous articles and essays. She recently completed postdoctoral research on Dada and primitivism at the "Creation, Arts and Heritages" Laboratory of Excellence and the Quai Branly Museum.
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An article on this book can be read on nonfiction.fr:
Raoul Hausmann remains one of the defining figures of twentieth-century avant-garde art, closely associated with the birth of Dada in Berlin and its subsequent evolution across Europe. The interwar period and the rise of the Nazi regime forced many artists into exile, shifting the geography of modern culture toward peripheral regions and Mediterranean havens. Ibiza, long before its emergence as a contemporary tourist destination, offered a stark, sunlit landscape where traditional vernacular architecture and rural life persisted largely unchanged, attracting displaced intellectuals and creators seeking refuge and new aesthetic vocabularies.
This study draws upon unpublished archives to examine Hausmann's engagement with vernacular architecture, anthropology, and photography during his time in exile. The text highlights his broader intellectual exchanges with contemporaries such as Jean Arp, Tristan Tzara, and Walter Benjamin, contextualizing his later work beyond the conventional chronological boundaries of the movement. Readers interested in the history of Dada, modernist exile, and the intersections between art and anthropology may find this volume relevant.