Hans Richter was a German painter, graphic artist, and experimental filmmaker associated with a number of the European avant-garde movements, most notably Dadaism. After 1940 he moved to the United States where he continued to paint and make films.

Richter’s earliest artistic contacts were with the Blaue Reiter group and Cubism. In 1916 after being wounded and discharged from the army, he joined the Dada movement where he met Hans Arp, Marcel Janco, and, most notably, Viking Eggeling. Eggeling’s influence was crucial, since he introduced Richter to ‘orchestrations’: formal experiments similar to the musical counterpoint that sought to establish relations between opposites from which the artistic object eventually emerged.