La Toilette
One of the founders of Berlin Dada in 1918, Hausmann worked in a range of materials, making sculptural assemblages and photocollages, before becoming primarily a photographer in the late 1920s. This work, depicting a seated woman bent over her washbasin, is equal parts tradition and avant-garde exploration. Like nineteenth-century paintings of women at their toilette, the figure is presented to our gaze as an object for consumption. Yet Hausmann employed a steep viewing angle from above, disrupting our sense of space and direction, and refusing a coherent depiction of the female body.
Artwork Details
- Title: La Toilette
- Artist: Raoul Hausmann (Austrian, Vienna 1886–1971 Limoges)
- Person in Photograph: Person in photograph Vera Broido (Russian, St. Petersburg 1907–2004 England)
- Date: ca. 1930, printed later
- Medium: Gelatin silver print
- Dimensions: 23.7 x 15.8 cm (9 5/16 x 6 1/4 in.)
- Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
- Object Number: 1987.1100.74
- Rights and Reproduction: © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
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