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Christian Schad

 
Art Encyclopedia: Christian Schad
 

(b Miesbach, Upper Bavaria, 21 Aug 1894; d Keilberg, nr Aschaffenburg, 25 Feb 1982). German painter, collagist, printmaker and photographer. He studied briefly at the Akademie der Bildenden K?nste in Munich (1913-14) and in 1913 began to make Expressionist woodcuts, which were published in magazines such as Die Aktion (Berlin), Die Weissen Bl?tter (Leipzig) and Sirius (Zurich). From 1915 to 1920 he lived in Zurich and Geneva, where he was associated with the DADA movement. He continued creating woodcuts but also made reliefs, paintings and collages from newspaper cuttings and other printed papers. At the same time he became interested in abstracting photography and using it in a more metaphoric way. In 1918, while living in Geneva, he created his first 'schadographs', such as Untitled (Fish; 1918; New York, MOMA), contact prints of collages and objects on photosensitive paper. Like Man Ray's rayographs and Moholy-Nagy's photograms, these cameraless photographs reproduced the negative image of the textures placed on them, creating a new form of representation.

See the Abbreviations for further details.



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Photography Encyclopedia: Christian Schad
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Schad, Christian (1894-1982), German experimental photographer and painter. He became interested in photography at school, before entering the Munich Academy in 1913. Between 1915 and 1920, after brief military service, he lived as a painter and graphic artist in Switzerland, where he cultivated contacts with Dada artists. In the course of experiments with ‘found objects’ he discovered cameraless photography and created c.30 works later known as Schadographs. In the 1920s, in Italy and then back in Germany, he concentrated on painting, becoming one of the leading exponents of Neue Sachlichkeit and magic realism. But in 1960-3 he rediscovered the photogram, creating a substantial body of late work in the medium.

— Ulrich Rüter

Bibliography

  • Schad, N., and Auer, A. (eds.), Schadographie: Die Kraft des Lichts (1999)
 
Wikipedia: 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.

German postage stamp, reproduces Maika from 1929

Contents

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.

Appendectomy in Geneva (1929)

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.

See also

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Copyrights:

Art Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Art. Copyright © 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.  Read more
Photography Encyclopedia. The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. Copyright © 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Christian Schad" Read more