Raoul Hausmann

Work

In Raoul Hausmann's collage from 1918–1921, letters and numbers fly around an X-ray image of a head, resembling fragments of thought. A playing card symbolises chance and fate, while the glued-in line of text, 'People are angels and live in heaven', a quote from Johannes Baader's Die Acht Weltsätze (The Eight World Sentences) from 1919, conjures up images of the victims of the First World War when viewed alongside the X-ray image. Thus, the work can be interpreted as posing the question of a spiritual form of human existence beyond drastically disintegrating matter.