Hausmann’s The Art Critic: Reassembling the Critic from Printed Fragments
Follow MoMA curator Anne Umland’s account of print, lettering, and figure, while separating Dada’s satire from uncertain identification.
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In MoMA’s audio guide, curator Anne Umland describes Raoul Hausmann’s *The Art Critic* (1919–20) as a photomontage assembled from everyday printed sources. The reading below follows that object commentary alongside a Centre Pompidou educational account of Dada.
A critic built from printed fragments
Umland identifies an oversized head spliced onto a neatly dressed body and an enormous Venus pencil. At the right are a snippet of Hausmann’s business card and a silhouette filled with newspaper print; the curator says the latter is most likely based on a photograph of Hausmann. The background uses letters a commercial printer selected at random at Hausmann’s request. They belong to his sound-poem practice and were intoned in public performances.
The work is more than a puzzle about who the figure depicts. Track the sources of paper, type, lettering, and body, then ask how their mismatched scale and roles unsettle the authority implied by the title. Umland notes that the figure is often said to portray fellow Berlin Dadaist George Grosz, but does not present this as certain identification. Keep the newspaper silhouette similarly qualified as “most likely” based on Hausmann.
Dada is more than destruction
The Centre Pompidou dossier cautions against reducing Dada to the destruction of artistic values; it also presents the movement as a challenge to Western rationalism. Its account of phonetic poetry describes words being broken apart and their sounds recombined into suggestive new languages. This context helps explain why lettering and sound matter in Hausmann’s practice, but it does not mean the same procedure operates identically in every part of *The Art Critic*.
Four steps for reading the evidence
- 1. Identify sources: Separate the curator’s account of everyday printed matter from the printer-selected letters.
- 2. Compare the assembly: Consider how the head, suited body, and pencil differ in scale and source.
- 3. Ask what is satirized: The title puts critical authority in question, but does not prove the figure’s identity.
- 4. Keep degrees of certainty: Distinguish documented materials from the curator’s qualified proposal about the silhouette.