Raoul Hausmann

Long before the island became famous for its music, one of the wildest minds of the European avant-garde came to live in the hills of Sant Josep. Raoul Hausmann, a founder of Berlin Dada, spent three years on Ibiza in the 1930s, and the photographs he took of its whitewashed farmhouses and the people who built them are now treasured as a portrait of the island before tourism.

Vienna, Berlin and Dada

Hausmann was born in Vienna on 12 July 1886, the son of a painter and restorer who gave him his first lessons. The family moved to Berlin when he was fourteen, and from 1908 to 1911 he studied at a private art school in Charlottenburg.

In 1918 he founded the Berlin Club Dada with Richard Huelsenbeck, Johannes Baader and others, and became its theorist, the Dadasoph. With Hannah Höch he developed photomontage, the idea coming to him on a holiday with her on the Baltic coast. Years later he remembered the moment: “It was like a thunderbolt: one could – I saw it instantaneously – make pictures, assembled entirely from cut-up photographs.”

Montage, sound and the camera

He worked across every medium the period offered: photomontage, collage, sound poems built from single letters, and the Mechanical Head, a wig-maker’s dummy fitted with a ruler, a watch mechanism and a wallet, now in the Centre Pompidou. In 1920 he was one of the organisers of the First International Dada Fair in Berlin.

From the late 1920s photography became his main medium: nudes, landscapes and portraits, made with the same restless eye. In 1933, when his work was condemned in Germany as “degenerate art”, he had to leave the country.

Three years in Sant Josep

Between 1933 and 1936 Hausmann lived on Ibiza with his wife, Hedwig Mankiewitz, and the Dada artist Vera Broïdo. A letter of 1 August 1933 is written from Can Mestre in Sant Josep, where the three paid 75 marks a month, and from there he wrote letters and postcards to Hannah Höch that the Berlinische Galerie has since digitised.

“What matters here are the people and their works.” Raoul Hausmann, in a letter from Ibiza, 1934

Above all he studied the rural house and the material life of the Ibizan farmer. He made countless drawings, notes and photographs of landscapes, houses, people and plants, and became fascinated by the island’s traditional architecture: the whitewashed payès farmhouses of the Ibizan countryside.

The island moved him. In a letter of 28 June 1934 he wrote that what mattered here were the people and their works, and he called Es Vedrà, the great rock off the south-west coast, the most beautiful thing they had seen. Ibiza also lies behind his novel Hyle, subtitled A Dream-Being in Spain.

After Ibiza

He left when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936. After years on the move, in Zurich, Prague and Paris, he settled in Limoges in France, where he died on 1 February 1971.

His Ibiza work has been rediscovered since. The Berlinische Galerie holds more than 350 of his photographic works, the Musée de Rochechouart near Limoges holds some 1,200 of his negatives, and in 2023 Rochechouart’s exhibition Ibiza 1935 set his island photographs beside those of Elfriede Stegemeyer. The book Raoul Hausmann. Architecte. Ibiza 1933–1936 gathers his studies of the island’s houses.

Our advice: drive out to Sant Josep and walk the lanes around the village, where old farmhouses like those he photographed still stand among the fields, then end the day at Cala d’Hort looking out at Es Vedrà. For the photographs themselves, follow the programmes of the Berlinische Galerie and the Musée de Rochechouart.