Christian Schad
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Christian Schad (August 21, 1894 in Miesbach, Oberbayern - February 25, 1982 in Stuttgart) was a German painter associated with Dada and the New Objectivity movement.
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[edit] Life
Schad studied at the art academy in Munich. In 1915, to avoid service in World War I, he fled to Zurich in Switzerland where he participated in the Dada movement. He was witness of the foundation of the famous Cabaret Voltaire. In this period he developed a close friendship with the writer and dadaist Walter Serner. Beginning in 1918, Schad created his own version of the Photogram (which later was named "Schadographs" by Tristan Tzara) where a contour picture is developed on light-sensitive platters. From 1920 to 1925, he spent some years in Rome and Naples, where he married and studied the Italian painters. Then the family emigrated to Vienna. His paintings of this period are closely associated with the New Objectivity Movement. In the late twenties, he returned to Berlin and settled there. Although many sense that he was horrified by the Nazis, his art was not condemned in the same manner as the rest of the New Objectivity movement of Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Max Beckmann, possibly because of his lack of commercial success.
[edit] Work
In 1918 Christian Schad who was inspired by cubism, began experimenting in Europe by making cameraless photographic images. Talbot had originally called these images “photogenic drawings” which were prints made by placing objects onto photosensitive paper and then exposing the paper to sunlight. By 1919 Schad was creating photogenic drawings from random arrangements of discarded objects he had collected such as torn tickets, receipts and rags [Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, 3rd edition 1997, Abbeville Press, p393].
Schad's new imagery was constructed by taking discarded unimportant objects and arranging them. The photograms created from these arrangements had taken on a new form and meaning not considered previously. These prints were published in 1920 in the magazine Dadaphone by Tristan Tzara. She referred to these as “Schadographs”. It was Tristan Tzara who called these images Schadographs to express a Dadist desire to create art from discarded objects. Schad's descriptions of his techniques were eventually used by both Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy in their more extensive explorations.
