Richter's first contacts with Modern Art were in 1912 through the Blaue Reiter and in 1913 through the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon gallery Der Sturm, in Berlin.

In the same year he was wounded and discharged from the army and went to Zürich and met Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Jean Arp, and Hugo Ball, who together were forming the Dada movement, which he joined.

From 1923 to 1926, Richter edited, together with Werner Gräff and Mies van der Rohe, the periodical G. Material zur elementaren Gestaltung.

More especially, the cinema can fulfill certain promises made by the ancient arts, in the realization of which painting and film become close neighbors and work together.Richter moved from Switzerland to the United States in 1940 and became an American citizen.

[8] While living in New York City, Richter directed two feature films, Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) and 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1957) in collaboration with Max Ernst, Jean Cocteau, Paul Bowles, Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, and others, which was partially filmed on the lawn of his summer house in Southbury, Connecticut.

In 1957, he finished a film entitled Dadascope with original poems and prose spoken by their creators: Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Kurt Schwitters.

Peggy Guggenheim organized his first solo show in the United States in which his large painted scrolls, inspired by the Second World War, featured prominently.

[citation needed] Hans Richter was married four times: in 1916 to Elisabeth (Lisa, Lies, Lieska) Steinert († 1923), in 1921 to Maria von Vanselow (divorced 1922), in 1927 to Erna Niemeyer (pseudonyms: Renate Green, Ré Soupault, René Mensch), in 1951 to Frida Ruppel (1910-78), whose two children Hans Ruppel and Ursula Lawder administered the estate.