Biography
Born in Upper Bavaria in 1894, his father a wealthy lawyer, Christian Schad studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1913. He fled to neutral Switzerland in 1915 to avoid military service, where he came under the influence of Dadaism, socializing with the likes of Jean Arp. He also launched a literary review around this time. From 1920 to 1925 he visited Italy, taking art classes in Rome and Naples. In 1927 he was associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement in Vienna, before moving to Berlin. Despite his Dadaist tendencies, his work was not condemned by the Nazis, and was in fact shown at the ‘Great German Art’ exhibition—the ‘antidote’ to the degenerate work of George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann. He created his own version of the photogram, and examples of these were used in an exhibition on Dada at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, without Schad’s knowledge. He died in Stuttgart in 1982.
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