Hannah Höch

Hannah Höch (born November 1, 1889, Gotha, Thuringia, Germany—died May 31, 1978, West Berlin, West Germany (now part of Berlin, Germany) was a German artist, the only woman associated with the Berlin Dada group, known for her provocative photomontage compositions that explore Weimar-era perceptions of gender and ethnic differences.

Höch began her training in 1912 at the School of Applied Arts in Berlin-Charlottenburg, where she studied glass design with Harold Bengen until her work was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I.She went back to Berlin in 1915 and reenrolled at the School of Applied Arts, where she studied painting and graphic design—woodcut and linoleum-block printing—with Emil Orlik until 1920. In 1915 she met and became romantically involved with Austrian artist Raoul Hausmann, who in 1918 introduced her to the Berlin Dada circle, a group of artists that included George Grosz, Wieland Herzfelde, and Wieland’s older brother, John Heartfield. Höch began to experiment with nonobjective art—nonrepresentational works that make no reference to the natural world—through painting, but also with collage and photomontage—collages consisting of fragments of imagery found in newspapers and magazines. (It is commonly held that Höch’s interest in photomontage was born in 1917 while she and Hausmann were on vacation at the Baltic Sea and thus preceded her association with the Dada circle.) From 1916 to 1926, to support herself and pay for her schooling, Höch worked part-time at Ullstein Verlag, a Berlin magazine-publishing house for which she wrote articles on and designed patterns for “women’s” handicrafts—mainly knitting, crocheting, and embroidery. That position gave her access to an abundant supply of images and text that she could use in her work.

Those credited with employing and elevating collage to a fine art, namely Picasso and Georges Braque, had incorporated some photo elements, but Höch and the Dadaists were the first to embrace and develop the photograph as the dominant medium of the montage. Höch and Hausmann cut, overlapped, and juxtaposed (usually) photographic fragments in disorienting but meaningful ways to reflect the confusion and chaos of the postwar era. The Dadaists rejected the modern moral order, the violence of war, and the political constructs that had brought about the war. Their goal was to subvert all convention, including conventional modes of art making such as painting and sculpture. Their use of photomontage, which relied on mass-produced materials and required no academic art training, was a deliberate repudiation of the prevailing German Expressionist aesthetic and was intended as a type of anti-art. Ironically, the movement was quickly and enthusiastically absorbed into the art world and found appreciation among connoisseurs of fine art in the 1920s.

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In 1920 the group held the First International Dada Fair, which took on the traditional format of an art salon, but the walls of the site were plastered with posters and photomontages. Höch was allowed to participate only after Hausmann threatened to withdraw his own work from the exhibition if she was kept out. Höch’s large-scale photomontage Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919)—a forceful commentary, particularly on the gender issues erupting in postwar Weimar Germany—was one of the most prominently displayed and well-received works of the show. Despite her critical success, as the group’s only woman, Höch was typically patronized by and kept at the margins of the Berlin group. Consequently, she began to move away from Grosz and Heartfield and the others, including Hausmann, with whom she broke off her relationship in 1922. The Dada group dissolved in 1922 as well. One of Höch’s final Dada works, My House-Sayings (1922), is a subverted version of a traditional German guest book that, instead of bearing good wishes from house guests written upon their departure, is scrawled with sayings by Dadaists and German writers, including Goethe and Nietzsche. For example, one saying by Dada poet Richard Hülsenbeck read: “Death is a thoroughly Dadaist affair.”

It was Höch’s concern with and criticism of constructed gender roles that distinguished her work from that of her contemporaries in the Dada period. Höch had become interested in representing—and embodying—the “New Woman,” who wore her hair short, earned her own living, could make her own choices, and was generally ridding herself of the shackles of society’s traditional female roles. After all, she had already been supporting herself for several years. Between 1924 and 1930 she created From an Ethnographic Museum, a series of 18 to 20 composite figures that challenged both socially constructed gender roles and racial stereotypes. The provocative collages juxtapose representations of contemporary European women with “primitive” sculptures portrayed in a museum context. From 1926 to 1929 Höch lived in The Hague with female Dutch author Til Brugman, who supported and encouraged her art. Their romantic relationship, scandalous for the time, compelled her further examination of traditional gender roles, cultural conventions, and the construction of identity. She produced many androgynous figures, such as that of Tamer (c. 1930), a photomontage of a large female mannequin head atop a muscular male body with arms folded across the chest. The mannequin’s head is peering downward at a sly-looking sea lion in a corner of the composition. Though the human figure is much larger, the facial expressions of the two make it unclear who is “taming” whom.

Höch was also particularly interested in the representation of women as dolls, mannequins, and puppets and as products for mass consumption. During her Dada period she had constructed and exhibited stuffed dolls that had exaggerated and abstract features but were clearly identifiable as female. In the late 1920s she used advertisement images of popular children’s dolls in several somewhat disturbing photomontages, including The Master (1925) and Love (c. 1926).

In 1934 Höch was pinpointed as a “cultural Bolshevist” by the Nazis. In order to continue to make art during World War II, she retreated to a cottage in Heiligensee, on the outskirts of Berlin, where she remained incognito until it was safe to resurface. In 1938 she married the much-younger pianist Kurt Matthies, who lived with her there until the couple divorced in 1944. That cottage was her home for the rest of her life, and she occupied herself by making art and gardening. In addition to tending plants, Höch used her garden to safeguard a trove of controversial materials related to the Dadaists—in particular, works by Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters, with whom she had had a close relationship since she met him in 1919.

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After World War II, Höch worked hard to remain relevant and exhibit her work, coming out of hiding and participating in exhibitions already in 1945 and 1946. Until the end of her life, Höch worked with new modes of expression but regularly made reference to her past as well. She returned to influences and art-making practices from her early career, such as textile and pattern design, which she had learned with Orlik and from her job at Ullstein Verlag. Her experience with textile design can be seen in Red Textile Page (1952; Rotes Textilblatt) and Around a Red Mouth (1967; Um einen roten Mund). Both of the aforementioned collages show Höch’s increasing use of colour images, which had become more readily available in print publications. In addition to exhibiting the wider use of colour, with the return of artistic freedom after the war, her work became more abstract, as in Poetry Around a Chimney (1956; Poesie um einen Schornstein).She achieved that abstraction by rotating or inverting her cut fragments so that they were readable no longer as images from the real world but instead as shapes and colour, open to many interpretations. In the 1960s she also reintroduced figural elements into her photomontages. In the colour assemblage Grotesque (1963), for example, two pairs of women’s legs are posed on a cobblestone street; one pair supports a woman’s fragmented facial features, the other a man’s bespectacled eyes and wrinkled forehead.

Because Höch’s prolific career lasted six decades, her legacy can be attributed only partly to her participation in the short-lived Dada movement. Her desire to use art as a means to disrupt and unsettle the norms and categories of society remained a constant throughout. It is fitting that she used collage to construct a retrospective work: in Life Portrait (1972–73; Lebensbild), she assembled her own past, using photos of herself juxtaposed with images of past collages that she had cut from exhibition catalogues. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, her work began to receive renewed attention, thanks to a concerted effort by feminist scholars and artists to uncover, reevaluate, and reclaim the art created by Höch and other women during the early 20th century.