As a founder of the Berlin incarnation of Dada, Hausmann searched for a vital, disruptive, and realistic art, piecing together scraps of word and image—the detritus of the real world—to make symbolic and explosive new pictures. ABCD is a self-portrait. Below the artist's face is an announcement of his performance of a phonetic poem. The letters VOCE (Italian for "voice") appear inside an earlike ellipse, and the letters ABCD, a prototypical poem, are clinched in the artist's teeth. The tickets to the Kaiserjubilee in his hat indicate the empty formalities of the social milieu in which he functioned, while the intentionally provocative gynecological diagram alludes to the organic necessity of his art.
