and members of Die Aktion magazine, which, along with Der Sturm and the anarchist paper Die Freie Straße published numerous articles by him in this period. 'The notion of destruction as an act of creation was the point of departure for Hausmann's Dadasophy, his theoretical contribution to Berlin Dada.' Berlin Dada When Richard Huelsenbeck, a 24-year-old medical student who was a close friend of Hugo Ball and one of the founders of Dada, returned to Berlin in 1917, Hausmann was one of a group of young disaffected artists that began to form the nucleus of Berlin Dada around him. Huelsenbeck delivered his "First Dada Speech in Germany", January 22, 1918 at the fashionable art dealer IB Neumann's gallery, Kurfürstendamm Berlin. Over the course of the next few weeks, Hausmann, Huelsenbeck, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Jung, Höch, Walter Mehring and Baader started the Club Dada. The first event staged was an evening of poetry performances and lectures against the backdrop of a retrospective of paintings by the establishment artist Lovis Corinth at the Berlin Sezession, April 12, 1918. Amongst the contributors, Huelsenbeck recited the Dada Manifesto, Grosz danced a "Sincopation" homaging Jazz, whilst Hausmann ended the evening by shouting his manifesto The New Material In Painting at the by-now near riotous audience; "The threat of violence hung in the air. One envisioned Corinth's pictures torn to shreds with chair legs. But in the end it didn't come to that. As Raoul Hausmann shouted his programmatic plans for dadaist painting into the noise of the crowd, the manager of the sezession gallery turned the lights out on him." Photomontage The call for new materials in painting bore fruit later the same year when Hausmann and Höch holidayed on the Baltic Sea. The guest room they were staying in had a generic portrait of soldiers, onto which the patron had glued photographic portrait heads of his son five times. "It was like a thunderbolt: one could – I saw it instantaneously – make pictures, assembled entirely from cut-up photographs. Back in Berlin that september, I began to realize this new vision, and I made use of photographs from the press and the cinema." Hausmann, 1958 The photomontage became the technique most associated with Berlin Dada, used extensively by Hausmann, Höch, Heartfield, Baader and Grosz, and would prove a crucial influence on Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitzky and Russian Constructivism. It should also be pointed