Christian Schad

A "self-inflicted heart defect"[4] allowed the pacifist to flee to Switzerland in 1915 to avoid service in World War I, settling first in Zürich sharing his apartment with Walter Serner, with whom he launched Sirius, a literary review.

Recent research revealed that Christian Schad arranged with the Nazi in his own way entering the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) in 1933.

When his Berlin studio was destroyed in aerial bombing, his future wife Bettina saved the artworks in a spectacular action and brought them to him to Aschaffenburg.

They are characterized by "an artistic perception so sharp that it seems to cut beneath the skin", according to Wieland Schmied,[12] who calls Schad the "prototypical possessor of the 'cool gaze' which distinguishes this movement from earlier forms of realism".

[13] In 1919, while living in Geneva, Schad created his own version of shadowgraphs respectively photograms exposing flat objects and detritus on printing-out paper[14][15] in a copy frame to the sun.

His friend Walter Serner was excited about the disruptive power of the depicted negative shadows considering the tiny paper works as an "intrusion of pure technics into art".

[4] Christian Schad offered these "composition photographiques"[16] for publication among others to Tristan Tzara, who finally published in March 1920 a reproduction in the Dadaphone, the seventh edition of his Dada magazine.

The reproduction entitled ARP et VAL SERNER dans le crocodarium royal de Londres precedes the publication of similar approaches by Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy at least by two years.

The estate consist of over 3,200 works, which are exhibited in a changing selection and in a breadth that is unique worldwide at the Christian Schad Museum in Aschaffenburg, which was planned to open in 2018[21] and was finally inaugurated in June 2022.

Operation (Appendectomy in Geneva) (1929), Lenbachhaus , Munich [ 1 ]