Hannah Höch (German: [hœç]; November 1, 1889 –
May 31, 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.
Hannah Höch was born Anna Therese Johanne Höch in Gotha, Germany. In 1912 she began classes at the School of Applied Arts in Berlin under the guidance of glass designer Harold Bergen. She chose the curriculum glass design and graphic arts, rather than fine arts, to please her father. In 1914, at the start of World War I, she left the school and returned home to Gotha to work with the Red Cross. In 1915 she returned to school, entering the graphics class of Emil Orlik at the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts. Also in 1915, Höch began an influential friendship with Raoul Hausmann, a member of the Berlin Dada movement. Höch's involvement with the Berlin Dadaists began in earnest in 1919. After her schooling, she worked in the handicrafts department for Ullstein Verlag (The Ullstein Press), designing dress and embroidery patterns 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 her later work involving references to dress patterns and textiles. From 1926 to 1929 she lived and worked in the Netherlands. Höch made many influential friendships over the years, with Kurt Schwitters 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.
Höch left her seven-year relationship with
Raoul Hausmann in 1922. In 1926, she began a relationship with the Dutch writer
and linguist Mathilda ('Til') Brugman, whom Höch met through mutual friends
Kurt and Helma Schwitters. By autumn of 1926, Höch moved to Hague to live with
Brugman, where they lived until 1929, at which time they moved to Berlin. Höch
and Brugman's relationship lasted nine years, until 1935. They did not
explicitly define their relationship as lesbian (likely because they did not
feel it necessary or desirable), instead choosing to refer to it as a private
love relationship. In 1935, Höch began a relationship with Kurt Matthies, whom
she was married to from 1938 to 1944.
Women
In Dada
While the Dadaists "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." Raoul Hausmann even
suggested that Höch get a job to support him financially. Höch was the lone
woman among the Berlin Dada group, although Sophie
Täuber, Beatrice Wood, and Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven
were also important, if overlooked, Dada figures. Höch references the hypocrisy
of the Berlin Dada group and German society as a whole in her photomontage, Da-Dandy.
Höch's time at Verlang working with magazines
targeted to women made her acutely aware of the difference between women in
media and reality, even as the workplace provided her with many of the images
that served as raw material for her own work. She was also critical 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 considered herself
a part of the women's movement in the 1920s, as shown in her depiction of
herself in Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser DADA durch die letzte weimarer
Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (1919–20). Her pieces also commonly
combine male and female traits into one unified being. During the era of the Weimar
Republic, "mannish women were both celebrated and castigated for
breaking down traditional gender roles." 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).
Höch spent the years of the Third Reich
in Berlin, Germany, keeping a low profile. She lived in Berlin-Heiligensee, a
remote area in the outskirts of Berlin, hiding in a small garden house. She
married businessman and pianist Kurt Matthies in 1938 and divorced him in
1944.Though her work was not 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 Day of the Memorial (Tag des offenen Denkmals).
SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA
See Höch Works here [Photomontage/Collage]
*****
Repost: The New Woman: Berlin’s feminist, Dadaist pioneer Hannah Höch
The first major
exhibition of Hannah Höch is being held at the Whitechapel Gallery.
by
Juliet Jacques Published
Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Culture Epoch
Although the Dadaist
‘anti-art’ that arose in Zürich and Berlin during the First World War had
opposed militarism, monarchism and conservatism, the movement’s fundamental
negativity complicated its relationship with socialism. Dada painter George
Grosz was unwilling to lionise the proletariat as a counterpoint to his Pillars of
Society, which its ruling class heads full of excrement,
and years later, Richard Hülsenbeck explained that when they sought a target for their resentment,
the Dadaists asked themselves “What is the bourgeois?” and “made the sad
discovery that we were all bourgeois”, which kept the group from the Communist
affiliation of their Surrealist successors.
Although it attacked
the bloated, beer-fuelled German military after the war and the crushing of the
revolution of November 1918, Cut
with the Kitchen Knife was not didactic. Rather, it presented an
array of images – the deposed Kaiser and new president Friedrich Ebert in the
‘anti-Dada’ section, Marx and Lenin with Grosz and Höch, fellow montage artist John
Heartfield and Dada artist Raoul Hausmann, who was Höch’s lover from 1916 to
1922. Sadly, in the Whitechapel Gallery’s retrospective – the first in Britain
– we see only a detail of its Dada section, with the fragile original in
Berlin’s Neues Nationalgalerie, with the whole appearing in the catalogue.
There are 120 other
works from Höch’s life, however, with the downstairs gallery charting her
development until the end of the Republic, with a few collages from the
mid-1930s, and two upstairs looking at how she worked in private after the Nazis
declared her art Degenerate, and how she resumed her career after 1945. The
first section is strongest, showing how Höch’s aesthetic and political
interests evolved, from her involvement with Dada and Hausmann to her European
travels, friendships with Bauhaus and De Stijl artists and relationship with
female Dutch poet Til Brugman in the late 1920s.
Höch was one of
several women associated with Dada, besides artist Sophie Täuber and performer/poet Emmy Hennings, but she was not given a nickname or
included in all of the Berlin group’s activities. The significance of her
position in Dada, and in Germany, is highlighted: having worked in the
industry, Höch often used images from fashion magazines, pasting male heads on to
female bodies or vice versa. Her critique of traditional gender roles and how
they upheld a conservative society is often subtle, especially when compared to post-war feminist art, but is most effective
when making explicit the role of violence in maintaining them: The Father (1920) is
particularly jarring, placing a composite of male authority heads onto a
woman’s body in a white dress, her feet in stilettos, with a boxer punching the
baby in her arms.
Höch’s engagement with
the mid-1920s idea of the ‘New Woman’ also emerges strongly. The ‘New Woman’
had bobbed hair, worked, and had sex – a product of getting the vote, and
Article 119 of the Weimar constitution stating that marriage was ‘based on
equality of the sexes’. However, many remained in low-status work with unequal
pay, and married women were not allowed jobs if able-bodied veterans could take
them. Within her circles, Höch was the New Woman, sharing both her style and
her frustrations, and her background made her acutely aware of how this figure
was a media creation and an advertising target. Portrait of Hannah Höch (1926) and another
from 1929 show her looking like the New Woman, with her short hair and
androgynous dress, but far from satisfied, let alone liberated.
Unlike many of her
contemporaries, Höch stayed near Berlin between 1933 and 1945. Unable to
exhibit, she began collating the Album
– a change in her method, putting existing images together in a way
that, shown here in a book, allows viewers to find meanings in their
juxtaposition, rather than cutting fragments together to generate new works.
Her interests in the New Woman and ethnography remain constant, but overt visual
messages are resisted – unsurprisingly, given the conditions.
The collection of
post-war works in Gallery 8 shows how Höch first borrowed elements of Dalí or
Magritte’s Surrealism, and then turned towards a more abstract style, in her
‘Fantastic Art’ which explored the ‘tension … between the world of ideas and
the real world’. These were often more colourful than her Dadaist montages, but
become repetitive, being most successful when Höch revisits her inter-war
social concerns. Homage to Riza Abazi (1963) presents
a jumble of Orientalist signifiers of female beauty to Western audiences, with
Höch’s techniques retaining the power to defamiliarise. Her huge Life Portrait (1972-73)
shows Höch from childhood to old age, often with the Dada artists she’d
outlived, closes the exhibition, letting her have the final word on a history
that has often excluded her, commenting on her times with all the scale and
force of Cut with the
Kitchen Knife.
