Hannah Höch

Hannah Höch (; 1 November 1889 – 31 May 1978) was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage. Photomontage, or fotomontage, is a type of collage in which the pasted items are actual photographs, or photographic reproductions pulled from the press and other widely produced media.

An important element in Höch's work was the intention to dismantle the fable and dichotomy that existed in the concept of the "New Woman": an energetic, professional, and androgynous woman, who is ready to take her place as man's equal. Her interest in the topic was in how the dichotomy was structured, as well as in who structures social roles.

Other key themes in Höch's works were androgyny, political discourse, and shifting gender roles. These themes all interacted to create a feminist discourse surrounding Höch's works, which encouraged the liberation and agency of women during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) and continuing through to today.

Biography

thumb|Portrait of Hannah Höch (1933), by Chris Lebeau

Hannah Höch was born Anna Therese Johanne Höch in Gotha, Germany. Although she attended school, domesticity took precedence in the Höch household. In 1904, Höch was taken out of the Höhere Töchterschule in Gotha to care for her youngest sibling, Marianne. In 1912 she began classes at the college of Applied Arts in Berlin under the guidance of glass designer Harold Bergen. She chose the curriculum in glass design and graphic arts, rather than fine arts, to please her father. In 1915 she returned to Berlin, where she entered the graphics class of Emil Orlik at the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts. Also in 1915, Höch began an intimate relationship with Raoul Hausmann, a later activist of the Berlin Dada movement.

From 1916 to 1926, she worked in the handicrafts department for the publisher Ullstein Verlag, designing dress, embroidery, lace, and handiwork designs for Die Dame (The Lady) and Die Praktische Berlinerin (The Practical Berlin Woman). The influence of this early work and training can be seen in a number of her collages made in the late 1910s and early- to mid-1920s in which she incorporated sewing patterns and needlework designs. From 1926 to 1929 she lived and worked in the Netherlands. Höch formed many influential friendships and professional relationships over the years with individuals such as Kurt Schwitters, Nelly van Doesburg, Theo van Doesburg, Sonia Delaunay, László Moholy-Nagy, and Piet Mondrian, among others. Höch, along with Hausmann, was one of the first pioneers of the art form that would come to be known as photomontage.

thumb|left|Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919, collage of pasted papers, 90 x 144 cm, [[Staatliche Museen, Berlin]]

Personal life and relationships

Art historian Maria Makela has characterized Höch's affair with Raoul Hausmann as "stormy", and identifies the central cause of their altercations—some of which ended in violence—in Hausmann's refusal to leave his wife. He reached the point of fantasizing about killing Höch. Hausmann continually disparaged Höch not only for her desire to marry him, which he described as a "Bourgeois" inclination, In 1935, Höch began a relationship with Kurt Matthies, to whom she was married from 1938 to 1944. Though her work was not as acclaimed after the war as it had been before the rise of the Third Reich, she continued to produce her photomontages and exhibit them internationally until her death in 1978, in Berlin. Her house and garden can be visited at the annual Tag des offenen Denkmals.

The 128th anniversary of her birthday was commemorated on 1 November 2017 by a Google Doodle.

Dada

Dada was an artistic movement formed in 1916 in Zurich, Switzerland. The movement rejected monarchy, militarism, and conservatism and was enmeshed in an "anti-art" sentiment. Dadaists felt that art should have no boundaries or restrictions and that it can be whimsical and playful. These sentiments arose after the Great War, which caused society to question the role of government, and to reject militarism after seeing the atrocities of war. Many Dada pieces were critical of the Weimar Republic and its failed attempt at creating a democracy in post-war (WWI) Germany.

The Dada movement had a tone of fundamental negativity in regards to bourgeois society. The term "dada" has no actual meaning – it is a childlike word used to describe the lack of reason or logic in much of the artwork. The main artists involved in the movement in Berlin include George Grosz, John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann. Some claim that it was Höch's relationship with Hausmann that allowed her into the sphere of Dada artists. George Grosz and John Heartfield were against Höch exhibiting with them in the 1920 First International Dada Fair, for example, and only allowed her participation after Raoul Hausmann argued for her inclusion. Later, Hausmann still attempted to deny Höch a place in the movement, by writing in his memoirs that "she was never a member of the club."

Höch is best known for her photomontages. These collages, which borrowed images from popular culture and utilized the dismemberment and reassembly of images, were a central element of the Dada aesthetic, though other Dadaists were hesitant to accept her work due to inherent sexism in the movement. Her work added "a wryly feminist note" to the Dadaist philosophy of disdain towards bourgeois society, but both her identity as a woman and her feminist subject matter contributed to her never being fully accepted by the male Dadaists.

Like other Dada artists, Höch's work also came under close scrutiny by the Nazis as it was considered degenerate. The Nazis put to a stop her 1932 intended exhibition at the Bauhaus (a German art school). They were not only offended by her aesthetic, but also by her political messages and by the mere fact that she was a woman.

Her images portrayed androgynous individuals, which the Nazis despised. Nazi ideology appreciated artwork that portrayed the ideal Aryan German man and woman. The images Höch used often contrasted this look, or used it to make a point about society, such as in the piece Das Schöne Mädchen ("The Beautiful Girl"). The Nazis preferred a traditional clear rational style of artwork that did not require deep thought or analysis. They felt that the chaos of the Dada style bordered on pathological. Höch went into seclusion during the Nazi years and was later able to return to the art world after the fall of the Third Reich. Nadia Sawleson-Gorse and Paula K. Kamenish. While the Dadaists, including Georg Schrimpf, Franz Jung, and Johannes Baader, "paid lip service to women's emancipation," they were clearly reluctant to include a woman among their ranks. Hans Richter described Höch's contribution to the Dada movement as the "sandwiches, beer and coffee she managed somehow to conjure up despite the shortage of money." in which she portrays a modern couple that embraces gender equality in their relationship, a novel and shocking concept for the time. This is an example of how Höch was able to transcend one particular medium and convey her social ideals in many forms.

Höch's time at Ullstein Verlag working with magazines targeted at women made her acutely aware of the difference between women as portrayed in media and their reality, and her workplace provided her with many of the images that served as raw material for her own work. She was also critical of the institution of marriage, often depicting brides as mannequins and children, reflecting the socially pervasive idea of women as incomplete people with little control over their lives.

Höch worked for the magazine Ullstein Verlag between 1916 and 1926 in the department which focused on design patterns, handicrafts, knitting and embroidery, artistic forms within the domestic sphere which were considered appropriate for women. "The pattern designs Höch created for Ullstein's women's magazines and her early experiments with modernist abstraction were integrally related, blurring the boundaries between traditionally masculine and feminine modes of form and expression" (Makholm). In this artwork Hoch metaphorically equates her scissors, used to cut images or her collages, to the kitchen knife. This is used to symbolize cutting through the dominant domains of politics and public life in Weimer culture. Her androgynous characters may also have been related to her bisexuality and attraction to masculinity in women (that is, attraction to the female form paired with stereotypically masculine characteristics).

Works

thumb|Siegfried Kühl, Der archaische Erz-Engel vom Heiligensee, 1989, sculpture in homage to Hannah Höch in Berlin-[[Reinickendorf]]

Höch was a pioneer of the art form that became known as photomontage and of the Dada movement. Many of her pieces sardonically critiqued the mass culture beauty industry of the time, then gaining significant momentum in mass media through the rise of fashion and advertising photography. Many of her political works from the Dada period equated women's liberation with social and political revolution.

Her work displays the chaos and combustion of Berlin's visual culture from the female perspective. Her works from 1926 to 1935 often depicted same-sex couples, and women were once again a central theme in her work from 1963 to 1973. Her most often used technique was to fuse together male and female bodies. This fusion existed in order to give the attributed power of a man to a woman, as well as blur the lines of gender attributed actions. She also used historically feminine mediums such as embroidery and lace in her collages to highlight gendered associations.

Höch also made strong statements on racial discrimination. Her most famous piece is Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser DADA durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands ("Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany"), a critique of Weimar Germany in 1919. This piece combines images from newspapers of the time mixed and re-created to make a new statement about life and art in the Dada movement.

From an Ethnographic Museum (1929), one of Höch's most ambitious and highly political projects, is a series of twenty photomontages that depict images of European female bodies with images of African male bodies and masks from museum catalogues, creating collages that offer "the visual culture of two vastly separate civilizations as interchangeable—the modish European flapper loses none of her stylishness in immediate proximity to African tribal objects; likewise, the non-Western artifact is able to signify in some fundamental sense as ritual object despite its conflation with patently European features." Hoch created Dada Puppen (Dada Dolls) 1916. These dolls were influenced by Hugo Ball, the Zurich-based founder of Dada. The doll's costumes resembled the geometric forms of Ball's own costumes worn in seminal Dada performances.

Important works

Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919)

Dada was an inherently political movement; Dadaists often deployed satire to address the issues of the time. They attempted to push art to the limits of humanity and to convey the chaos in post-war (World War I, which did not yet have this title) Germany. "Many of Höch's overtly political photomontages caricatured the pretended socialism of the new republic and linked female liberation with leftist political revolution" (Lavin). This photomontage is an excellent example of a piece that combines these three central themes in Höch's works: androgyny, the "New Woman" and political discourse. It combines images of political leaders with sports stars, mechanized images of the city, and Dada artists.

The Beautiful Girl (1920)

"The New Woman of Weimar Germany was a sign of modernity and liberation" (Lavin). She pastes a woman's mouth over the bottom of the mask, and a single eye over one of the eye holes. The image is part of an ongoing critique by Höch of Paragraph 218, a law outlawing abortion in Germany at the time.

Death Dance and Time of Suffering Series

Höch also executed two series around 1943, TotenTanz ("Death Dance") and Notzeit ("Time of Suffering"). Death Dance consists of three works, titled Death Dance I, Death Dance II, and Death Dance III. This series is primarily watercolor and pencil. The images show individual figures without hair or defining features, in long gray shifts, filing across barren pastel landscapes. The Time of Suffering series is black and white but contains similar figures to the Death Dance series. The series, comprising two works titled Time of Suffering I and Time of Suffering II, shows the figures walking through a cemetery towards a grim reaper, and a line of people leading up into the sky.

Strange Beauty II (1966)

Höch returned to the female figure in the 1960s after a long period where she favored surrealism and abstraction. Fremde Schönheit II ("Strange Beauty II") is a part of this return, showing a woman surrounded by feathery pink fauna. The woman's face is covered by a Peruvian terracotta trophy head. In this piece, Höch effaces the figure of the New Woman and replaces her head with a tribal mask, turning the figure from beautiful to disturbing.

Exhibitions

Höch's work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions.

The Whitechapel Gallery in London presented a major exhibition of Höch's work from 15 January to 23 March 2014. This exhibition was composed of over one hundred works from international collections that Höch created from the 1910s to 1970s. Highlights included Staatshäupter (Heads of State) (1918–20), Hochfinanz (High Finance) (1923), Flucht (Flight) (1931), and many works from the series From an Ethnographic Museum.

Examples of her work were included in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction.

Selected solo shows

2017: Hannah Höch – Auf der Suche nach der versteckten Schönheit, (Looking for the hidden beauty), , Hamburg, 20 April – 16 June 2017.
2016: Hannah Höch – Revolutionärin der Kunst, Kunsthalle Mannheim und .
2015: Vorhang auf für Hannah Höch (Curtain up for Hannah Höch), , Stade, Germany, 7 November 2015 – 21 February 2016.
2014: Hannah Höch, Whitechapel Gallery, London.
1974: Hannah Höch, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.
1961: Hannah Höch: Bilder, Collagen, Aquarelle 1918–1961, Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin.
1929: Hannah Höch, Kunstzaal De Bron, The Hague.

Bibliography

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