Hans Richter, Zurich, 1959.
Photo: J. Bruell, Zurich

EDITOR’S FOREWORD

This publication of Encounters from Dada till Today marks the first time that Hans Richter’s memoir, originally published in German in 1973 as Begegnungen von Dada bis heute, has appeared in English. In the chapter titled “The Search for New Sounds,” Richter comments that “in modern visual art (e.g., the use of computers), endeavors are afoot that will enlarge the range of auditory and visual experience with the aid of twentieth-century science and technology. Where this will have led to fifty years from now, only our children and grandchildren will know.” In this light, producing Encounters from Dada till Today in e-book and print-on-demand formats seems particularly apt for such a forward-thinking artist who spent his career constantly embracing advancements in technology and new ways of communicating.

Born in Berlin in 1888, Richter was a pioneering avant-garde painter and filmmaker at the center of some of most important movements of the early twentieth century, including Expressionism, Dadaism, Constructivism, and Surrealism. Forced out of Germany by Hitler’s regime in 1933, he eventually immigrated to the United States in 1941, where he became an influential film teacher and a productive writer, and continued to paint well into the final years of his life. His book Dada: Art and Anti-Art (published in German in 1964 and in English in the following year) quickly became a major reference, eventually being translated into nine languages and still in print today.

Following Art and Anti-Art, Richter turned to assembling the highly personal collection of memories, anecdotes, and episodes that are presented here. Encounters from Dada till Today reads as a virtual Who’s Who of the twentieth-century avant-garde, with Hans Arp, Alexander Calder, Jean Cocteau, Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, Federico Fellini, Emmy Hennings, Hannah Höch, Allan Kaprow, Kazimir Malevich, Man Ray, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Kurt Schwitters, Dorothea Tanning, and Tristan Tzara (to name literally just a few) all making appearances in its pages. Though Richter was fluent in English by this time—he once quipped that he taught himself the language primarily by reading Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett novels—he wrote in German, and so would eventually need a suitable translator.

In early 1967, Richter began corresponding with British poet and translator Christopher Middleton, an instructor at the University of Texas at Austin who had written about Dadaism and Expressionism and, by that time, had begun to introduce the English-speaking world to the work of Swiss writer Robert Walser. Middleton recalls that the two met in person, probably later that year, at an event organized by literary scholar Roger Shattuck at UT-Austin. Today he recalls Richter’s charisma: “a very amusing and charming man, but also someone whose significance you understood right away.” The two met again in Locarno, Switzerland, in late 1969, and probably discussed translating Richter’s new book by the early 1970s.

Begegnungen von Dada bis heute was published in Germany in 1973, and Middleton produced his translation in 1974 (with some content altered slightly from the German edition). But due to Richter’s illnesses and advancing age, the English edition remained unpublished. After Richter’s death in 1976, Middleton’s typewritten manuscript was deposited in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin.

Nearly thirty years later, Timothy O. Benson, curator of the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, began working on what would become the first major Richter exhibition since the late 1980s. Inspired by Richter’s own acknowledgment of the importance of his interactions with other artists throughout his life, Benson titled the exhibition Hans Richter: Encounters, conceiving it as an examination of Richter’s work in the context of the social dimensions of his career. Additionally, with the passionate support of the Richter Estate—particularly administrator Veronica Boswell and curator/archivist Erik de Bourbon-Parme—the idea emerged to issue Encounters from Dada till Today as a companion volume to the exhibition catalogue.

In Mary DelMonico, of DelMonico Books • Prestel, we found an enthusiastic partner in this endeavor. My former LACMA colleague, Thomas Frick, kindly put me in touch with Christopher Middleton, who not only gave the project his blessing but graciously took the time to recall his own encounters with Richter more than forty years ago. Our photo editor, Dawson Weber, worked with the indefatigable Erik de Bourbon-Parme in finding just the right images to illustrate as many of Richter’s friendships as possible. Designer Maja Blazejewska created the perfect complement to her striking exhibition catalogue. My fellow editor Phil Graziadei and I have approached the material with a light hand, adding in a few necessary explications and updates while endeavoring to remain as true as possible to Middleton’s graceful interpretation of Richter’s original voice.

And what a voice it is—at turns witty and incisive, lyrical and compassionate, giving each of his subjects, no matter how obscure or famous, what he calls “the small eternity to which everyone is entitled.” Richter’s empathy, without sentimentality, is present on every page. There is Ferdinand Hardekopf, once “the idol of the pre-1914 younger generation,” whose later masterwork is lost somewhere in the French countryside as the poet flees the Nazi invasion of Paris; there is the somber gathering at dawn at a Grand Central Station café after Richter and a small group of friends witness the death of Piet Mondrian; there is the dark comedy that unfolds when collector Hilla Rebay attempts to convince Solomon R. Guggenheim that “the greatest modern artist of all” is none other than . . . Rudolf Bauer.

Richter’s assessment of Raoul Hausmann is particularly striking. Regarding the perpetually embittered Dadaist—known as much for his general misanthropy as for his seminal photocollages, assemblages, and sound poems—with genuine tenderness and respect, he notes that in a world “which for eighty years had noticed him little or not at all . . . [Hausmann] devoted his whole life to the creative element that he bore within him.”

“Meanwhile,” Richter writes, “the wheel of history goes on turning. We are all ground to powder. Grain and chaff fly up, all mixed together, until everything is clarified—until, at some turn or another, the wheel suddenly stops, and Sisyphus is finally called away from his labor.” For me, this project has felt the very opposite of Sisyphean, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to help bring Encounters from Dada till Today into the light. It is a remarkable volume—one that not only documents an array of fascinating historical periods and figures, but ultimately suggests a more humane way to be present in the world: collaboratively, creatively, and above all, generously.

Sara Cody
Los Angeles County Museum of Art