DADA · WORK

Mechanical Head

Raoul Hausmann · 1920

A barber’s blank wooden head with a tin cup, a ruler, a tape measure, a watch gear and a printer’s roller bolted to it, Berlin Dada’s portrait of the ordinary modern man as a vacant skull with his instruments stuck on the outside.

The canvas

Tap to zoom

Raoul Hausmann, Mechanical Head, 1920. Assemblage: a wooden wig-maker’s dummy head with manufactured objects fixed to it. 1 ft 0 3/4 in × 8 1/4 in × 7 7/8 in.
Centre Pompidou (Musée national d’art moderne), Paris. Purchase, 1974 (inv. AM 1974-6)

Look closer

Find these on the canvas above

The blank wooden face
The whole base form: a smooth, expressionless head with closed, carved-shut features
The foundation is a barber’s or wig-maker’s wooden dummy, a found shop-fitting, not a sculpted likeness. Its face is deliberately vacant: the “spirit” the title promises is absent from the face itself. It reads plainly as a manufactured wooden object, which is the point, since there is no artist’s modelling hand here at all, only a chosen and re-used thing.
The collapsible cup
Fixed to the head among the attached objects
A collapsible, telescopic metal drinking cup (the museum’s gobelet téléscopique). One of the small apparatus of daily life bolted onto the skull as if it were one of the man’s own faculties: the thing he drinks from, stuck where a thought might be.
The leather case and the pipe stem
Attached to the head alongside the cup
A small leather case or wallet and a pipe stem, the everyday gear of pocket and habit. (Many popular descriptions style the wallet as a “crocodile” or jewel wallet and add a camera segment and a typewriter; the museum’s own caption names neither a camera nor a typewriter, so those stay as “often described,” not as fact.)
The number “22”
On a white card fixed to the head
A plain white card bearing the bare numeral 22. Identity reduced to a label, a figure, a filing number. It is the man-as-statistic motif made literal: not a name, a number.
The measuring instruments
The ruler and the strip of tape attached to the head
A double-decimetre wooden ruler and a piece of a dressmaker’s tape measure. The rationalized, quantified modern man wearing the very tools that measure him, the apparatus of standardization fixed to the outside of his head.
The watch gear and the type-roller
Among the objects fixed to the dummy head
A watch gear (a cog from a clock movement) and a roller of printer’s type. Time and standardized text, the machinery that runs and processes modern life, attached where thought should be. Together with the ruler, the tape and the “22,” the attachments are overwhelmingly instruments of measurement, money, time and print.

The story · 5 chapters

~18 min total

Berlin · 1919

Dada in the wreckage of a lost war

Germany has lost the First World War and the streets of Berlin are full of revolution, hunger and fury. Hausmann and a handful of friends turn Dada into the most openly political wing of the movement, and Hausmann, a painter, poet and inventor of photomontage, reaches for a barber’s dummy head and a fistful of office junk.

The making

A head you assemble instead of carve

He does not model the head or cast it. He takes a ready-made wooden wig-maker’s dummy and fixes manufactured oddments to it: a collapsible cup, a leather case, a pipe stem, a card reading “22,” a piece of a dressmaker’s tape, a wooden ruler, a watch gear and a printer’s type-roller. The choosing and the bolting, not the carving, are the art.

The object

The empty face and the gadgets stuck to it

The smooth blank wooden face, deliberately vacant, and the ring of instruments of money, measurement and time fixed where thought should be. Following the museum’s own caption, item by item, and flagging the camera and typewriter that popular descriptions wrongly add.

The break

When a head could be built from junk

For centuries sculpture meant a head carved or modelled from a noble material by the artist’s hand. Hausmann assembles one from cast-off manufactured things and lets the human head become a thing built from junk, its spirit emptied out, the man defined by the apparatus bolted to the outside of his skull.

After

The only one of its kind to survive

Hannah Höch kept it for decades; the Centre Pompidou bought it in 1974. It is the only assemblage of its kind by Hausmann to survive, and it sits in the line that runs from Duchamp’s readymades to Rauschenberg’s combines: the found object glued to a base, made into a portrait of the modern condition.

c.1920

Made

~1 ft tall

Dimensions

Centre Pompidou

Now at

Provenance

Every hand it passed through

c.1920–1922

Raoul Hausmann (the artist)

Berlin

Made in Berlin around 1919–20 (the date is genuinely uncertain: the museum records 1919, while later scholarship points to 1920–21). Hausmann kept it as the only assemblage of its kind he is known to have made that survives.

1922–1966

Hannah Höch (Hausmann’s partner and Berlin Dada collaborator)

Berlin / Germany

On the Centre Pompidou’s own provenance record, the piece passed to Höch in 1922, around the time of her separation from Hausmann, and stayed with her until 1966, when she returned it to him after repairs made for photography. No sale figure is documented.

1974–today

Museum purchase, 1974

Centre Pompidou (Musée national d’art moderne)Museum

Paris

Purchased by the museum in 1974, inventory AM 1974-6, where it has remained. On view.