Dada Head
Hans Richter
HANS RICHTER, 1918. INK AND CHARCOAL ON PAPER.
Living in Zurich during the war, Richter became the chronicler of the Dadaists with his naïve and intoxicating portraits. Before Tristan Tzara introduced him to a young filmmaker and Richter found his calling in moving pictures, it was painted, mixed media works like these that occupied his attention. Trying to paint using the principles of avant-garde music, using the negative space to offer moments of calm before slowly rising to a crescendo, Richter applied the philosophy of an aphysical medium to the page. As he moved through the 1910s, these portraits got increasingly abstract, and the multiple portraits he painted across his career tell the story of a movement away from the external world and into an inner life. Richter’s experimental films, some of the very first to ever be made, owe a debt to his painterly work. In pushing the boundaries of one medium, he was able to open up unknown potential in another.