It is difficult to look at an early photomontage by Hannah Höch and realise it wasn't produced yesterday, but in 1920s. Despite referencing or criticising precise historical events, political figures and gender roles, most works by Höch are indeed extremely modern.
People who may not be familiar with her works or who may want to rediscover her iconic photomontages will be excited to know that the first major Hannah Höch exhibition in Britain will open tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery.
Born in Gotha, Hannah Höch (1889-1978) studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (Arts and Crafts School) in Berlin between 1912 and 1915. After graduating, she started working in the handicrafts department of Ullstein Verlag (The Ullstein Press), designing dress and embroidery patterns for Die Dame (The Lady) and Die Praktische Berlinerin (The Practical Berlin Woman).
Many critics highlight the fact that she had access to decorative sewing, needlepoint, lace and embroidery patterns at that time, and she must have developed a talent for assembling and reassembling such images during her years at Ullstein. Around the same time she began an influential friendship that turned into a love affair with Raoul Hausmann, a member of the Berlin Dada movement.
In 1919 Höch started developing her photomontages by cutting out images from popular magazines, illustrated journals and fashion publications. Scissors, glue and cut outs became the main tools to create her unique abstractions in which she carried out a perfect synthesis of styles, forms, colours and ideas.
In 1920 she became the only woman who took part in the First International Dada Fair at Dr. Otto Burchard’s Berlin art gallery. In the mid-to-late '20s Höch moved to Holland where she started a scandalous relationship with another woman, Dutch writer Til Brugmann. They returned to Germany in 1929 and Höch took part in exhibitions of her photomontages in Berlin, Philadelphia and Brussels.
The advent of Nazism meant the end of public support for Höch who in 1939 moved to the Berlin suburb of Heiligensee where she lived in oblivion, reviving her artistic activity only after the war and starting to produce once again abstract works and colour collages between the '50s and the '60s.
An important retrospective exhibition of Höch's work was organised in 1973 in Paris; Höch died five years later in her house in Berlin-Heiligensee.
Höch employed her collages in powerful ways mainly to criticise society: one of her most famous pieces remains "Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser DADA durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche" (Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch). In this complex work, the artist combined together a wide range of human figures - including Dadaists, politicians, soldiers, cabaret dancers, and female film stars like Pola Negri - with assorted objects, cogwheels and texts to create the confusion, decadence and disorientation of Weimer-era politics.
More political commentary followed in Höch’s "Heads of State" (1918-20) in which Friedrich Ebert, first President of the Weimar Republic, and defence minister Gustav Noske are depicted in bathing suits with a background displaying an embroidery pattern of butterflies, a way to hint at women's activities Vs men's work.
Though "Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife" is not included in the event at the Whitechapel Gallery, visitors will get the chance to admire over 100 montages and watercolours from major international collections. The photomontages featured go from the 1910s to the 1970s and also include "High Finance" (1923), which critiques the relationship between bankers and financiers and the army during the economic crisis in Europe, and the series "From an Ethnographic Museum".
Influenced by the tribal art displays in Berlin's Ethnological Museum, this series combines female bodies with photographs of women, masks and sculpture from non-Western cultures. The juxtapositions of these different layers of femininity hint at the stereotypical roles modern women were still confined in at Höch's times: the artist vented her frustration for example in collages in which cut outs of beautiful women contrasted with traditional pictures of housewives in aprons.
Having worked for magazines targeted to women, Höch was indeed aware of the image society projected on women, and also used her works to criticise the hypocrisy of the Dadaists who only spoke in favour of an independent woman and of women’s rights, but then marginalised Höch.
The artist left behind powerfully disquieting yet humorous, satirical, political and erotic photomontages: her dismembered figures, oversized heads and mouths, anticipated in a way our current obsession with image manipulation, and paved the way for more feminist artists, prompting further pioneers of the cut and paste technique (including Linder Sterling) to come forward and use collages in a clever and poignant way.
Hannah Höch is at the Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London, UK, from tomorrow until 23rd March 2014. The exhibition is accompanied by a major new publication, Hannah Höch, edited by Prof. Dawn Ades OBE, Emily Butler and Daniel F. Herrmann, and by a programme of collateral events including films and talks about the Dadaists.
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments