Hannah Höch

Hannah Höch's involvement with the Berlin Dadaists began in earnest in 1919. and although on the fringe due to her gender she was a major player in the Dada movement. Her work was also influenced by early work and training in embroidery, dress patterns and textiles. Höch was one of the first pioneers of the art form that would come to be known as photomontage.

“Hannah Höch the Dadaist” is the way that this German artist is usually pigeon-holed in art history. And indeed she was a leading member of the movement in Berlin in the 1920s, full of the calls for artistic revolution, the rejection of all that had gone before, the hectic partying and the collage works which made this movement so energetic and so productive.

Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919, collage of pasted papers, 90 x 144 cm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

The above photomontage “Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany” reflected her views of the political and social issues that arose during this transitional time in German society. She chooses to give specifications, such as kitchen knife and beer-belly, to make it clear that this piece is social commentary regarding gender issues in post-war Germany. The Dada movement wished to critically examine German culture by not glossing over the negative aspects, but rather accentuating them. Hoch cut out pieces of images and text found in magazines, advertisements, newspapers and journals. She carefully pieced all these clippings back together in a way that made sense to her and as she felt appropriately served her purpose of critical examination.

I love the self expression in this piece, and you can see and feel what she may have been thinking as she put the piece together. Typical of Dada artists she uses photomontage to express messages of critique that censorship would not allow to be put into words.

As stated by George Grosz. “Cut with the Kitchen Knife…” has a feeling of rapid progress portrayed through a mocking and satirical tone. Pieces of machine are exploding throughout the montage to symbolize booming industry and culture within an urban area. This booming progress is not displayed in a proud, exciting and dignified manner however, but rather in a circus-like environment. The mood is whimsical to the point of ridiculous, with theatrical expressions and dramatic body language mixed in with images of political figures serving as a critique of the political free-for-all between the old Weimer leaders and the new left-wing communist agenda.

Untitled [From an Ethnographic Museum] (1930)

(Untitled) [From an Ethnographic Museum], she uses the photographic images of primitive statues in museums and from magazines and pastes on contemporary heads and body parts. The result is an astonishingly subtle and challenging portrayal of what makes up the human and gender in the modern world. It's quite brilliant but also intriguing in its layered meaning.

The series known as From an Ethnographic Museum fuses European bodies and African masks, black men and white women, blue-eyed boys and dark-skinned girls (montage as miscegenation). These are signs of the times. One infers a savage ridiculing of Nazi ideals of racial purity, and perhaps of western notions of beauty in general. But what is so contradictory about these montages is that they are always so elegantly made. Höch's deftness, her flawless sense of colour, tone and touch, her instinct for shape-making and balanced composition, leads to an anti-dada aesthetic – an art that is beautiful in itself.

Synthetic Flowers (Propeller Thistles)’ 1952

The fascination of Höch's art is the tension between the formal and the emotional and her collages after the Second World War give full rein to both. The colours grow brighter but the imagery, when it is recognisable, is more urgent. Journey into the Unknown from 1956 has a knife blade searing upwards through waving weeds, Synthetic Flowers (Propeller Thistles) from 1952 is literally that, thistles with propeller blades pushing towards you.