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This spring, the museum is celebrating Dada’s 100th anniversary by presenting an exhibition dedicated to the artist Raoul Hausmann. This is the first extensive presentation of the Raoul Hausmann collection kept by the Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne – château de Rochechouart since the 1994 retrospective.
The Dada experience called into question artistic compartmentalizations and the border between art and life, a postulate which never left Hausmann, a self-proclaimed “Dadasophe” artist. In the 1920s, his work diversified. He thought about the optophone, a machine that converted sounds into images, and took up photography. However, in 1933, he had to flee Nazi Germany. He first found refuge on the island of Ibiza where he demonstrated his photographic mastery. Once again, history catches up with him. The Spanish Civil War led him on a new European journey before finding refuge in Limousin. In 1945, he moved to Limoges where he remained until his death in 1971. From there, in the post-war period, he reconnected with the experimental heritage of Dada. He renewed his practice of collage, continued photography, resumed painting abandoned in 1918 in 1959 and, above all, developed an important written and historical work, in particular around the history of Dada and sound poetry. Between polemics (with the Lettrists, the new realists, the neo-Dadas) and affinities (with the situationists, with Fluxus), Dada and its experimental forms, and in particular the work of Hausmann, became references in the 1960s major for the new trends in contemporary art.
With 700 works and a considerable collection of archives (poems, theoretical texts, correspondence, notebooks and even photographic negatives), the Hausmann collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne – château de Rochechouart is rivaled only by that of the Berlinische Galerie. Made up of works and archives coming directly from the artist’s studio, it provides an account of the Dadasophist’s ambitious work and the historical and intellectual background that nourished it. “We are what we keep”: the artist’s archives, their places of conservation and their gaps, reflect the story of a man, the story of an exile and that of a century. Combining artistic mediums (collages, drawings, photographs, paintings, films, recordings, etc.), this exhibition reveals the different facets of the art of the man who proclaimed himself the “Dadasophe”.
The exhibition also exceptionally presents the “machine-work” of Peter Keene which reconstituted the major invention that Raoul Hausmann thought about for several decades, from 1920 to the 1950s, the optophone, capable of converting sounds into images and vice versa.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Dilecta Editions.