Artists Hannah Höch

Hannah Höch

German Photomontage Artist

Movement: Dada

Born: November 1, 1889 - Gotha, Germany

Died: May 31, 1978 - Berlin, Germany

Table of contents

> Summary
> Key Ideas
> Artworks
> Biography & Legacy
Influences and Connections
Resources

"I have always tried to exploit the photograph. I use it like color, or as the poet uses the word."

Summary of Hannah Höch

Höch was not only a rare female practicing prominently in the arts in the early part of the 20^th century - near unique as a female active in the Dada movement that coalesced in her time - she also consciously promoted the idea of women working creatively more generally in society. She explicitly addressed in her pioneering artwork in the form of photomontage the issue of gender and the figure of woman in modern society. Her transformation of the visual elements of others by integrating them into her own larger creative projects evidenced a well-developed early example of "appropriation" as an artistic technique.

Key Ideas

Höch was a key progenitor of the self-conscious practice of collaging diverse photographic elements from different sources to make art. This strategy of combining formerly unrelated images to make sometimes startling, sometimes insightful connections was one that came to be adopted by many Dada and Surrealist artists of her era, and also by later generations of "post-modern" conceptual artists in other media, including sculptural installations, mixed media and moving images, as well as in still photography.

Höch also helped expand the notion of what could be considered art by incorporating found elements of popular culture into "higher" art. She was one of many Dadaists to take advantage of such means, but she was both among the first, and one of the most self-consciously explicit in describing the goals and effects of doing so.

A political iconoclast, she actively critiqued prevailing society in her work, and, implicitly, through many of her life choices. Her active interest in challenging the status of women in the social world of her times motivated a long series of works that promoted the idea of the "New Woman" in the era.

Portrait of Hannah Höch by Chris Lebeau. Detail. (1933)

Saying, “I always had an experimental turn of mind,” Hannah Höch transformed her experience working with textiles and mass media images for commercial women’s magazines into pioneering Dada photomontages with a gender-bending feminist slant.

Hannah Höch's childhood, life, career, and various anecdotes

Read Hannah Höch's Biography

And, the artists and movements that built upon Hannah Höch's art

Read Hannah Höch's Artistic Legacy

Important Art by Hannah Höch The below artworks are the most important by Hannah Höch - that both overview the major creative periods, and highlight the greatest achievements by the artist.
Artwork Images	Dada Puppen (Dada Dolls) (1916) Artwork description & Analysis: Höch's darkly playful Dada Dolls are quite distinct from any work created by the others in the Berlin group of Dada artists with which she was affiliated early on. Given that the Berlin chapter of Dadaists only formed in 1917, these small-scale sculptural works suggest her awareness of Dada ideas more generally from its inception in 1916 in Zurich. She was likely influenced by writer Hugo Ball, the Zurich-based founder of Dada, given Höch's doll costumes' resemblance to the geometric forms of Ball's own costume worn in a seminal Dada performance at the Swiss nightclub Cabaret Voltaire. Ball achieved notoriety for his declamation there of sound poetry, which he recited while wearing a mechanical looking outfit comprised of geometric shapes. The costume can be read as a commentary on contradictory feelings held towards developing technology. Technology was both revered and feared at this time, since it both aided social and economic progress but also threatened humanity with its destructive power. A common belief among Dadaists was that technology caused humans to become more machine-like themselves. One intent of the Dada movement was to use art as a satirical critique of such elements of culture that were both intimidating and absurd. As Paul Trachtman has portrayed it, in a description that is apt for both Ball's and Höch's work: "When Dadaists did choose to represent the human form, it was often mutilated or made to look manufactured or mechanical. The multitude of severely crippled veterans and the growth of a prosthetics industry struck contemporaries as creating a race of half-mechanical men." Fabric, yarn, thread, board, and beads - Berlinische Galerie. Landesmuseum fur Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur
Artwork Images	Heads of State (1918-20) Artwork description & Analysis: Heads of State is built around a newspaper photograph of the German president Friedrich Ebert and his Minister of Defense, Gustav Noske. Having carefully cut the men out, Höch proceeded to create a composition with characteristically disjunctive and unexpected outcomes. The two statesmen look decidedly foolish out of context in their bathing suits, and Höch places them against a background of an iron-on embroidery pattern of flowers and butterflies surrounding a woman. At this point, in time she was still working for magazines designing similar patterns, and this work is testament to her ability to converge her disparate experiences to create new and striking images. The effect is deliberately comical, but it also sends a powerful message. The President and his minister, who had recently and ruthlessly put down the Spartacist Rebellion, are presented frolicking in a whimsical fantasy land, as if they are unaware of the intense hardships and political and financial problems being faced by Germany and its citizens during this period. The embroidery-pattern background alludes to a source of income and occupation for many German women at this time, including Höch herself, and serves to contrast the role of women with that of men. The collage is arranged so that it looks like the two figures have been caught in the net of the embroidery pattern, and it positions these paunchy heads of state as worthy of ridicule in the process of stripping them of their usual trappings of masculinity. At the same time, the composition attacks the patriarchy and questions the arbitrary values projected onto different art forms by society. Photomontage

	Cut With the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919-20) Artwork description & Analysis: Though one of Höch's earliest works, this ambitious collage is unusual within her canon for being particularly large; it measures 35 x 57 inches. Here she uses cuttings from newspapers and magazines to create one cohesive image out of a myriad of disparate parts. This technique of taking words and images from the established press to make new and subversive statements was highly innovative. The piece was exhibited in the First International Dada Fair, which took place in Berlin in 1920, and it was reportedly one of the most popular pieces in the show. In the top right corner Höch has pasted together images of "anti-Dada:" figures of the Weimar government and representatives of the old empire. Elsewhere in the collage, the proponents of Dada including photographs of Raoul Hausmann are ranged in opposition to these establishment figures. The effect is initially one of visual confusion, and yet a kind of nonsense-narrative begins to develop with sustained attention. One figure is transformed into something else by the addition of a de-contextualised newspaper clipping, such as the Kaiser's iconic moustache replaced by a pair of upside-down wrestlers. The work encapsulates the eclecticism and eccentricities of Dadaism, but also makes a pointed political statement against the staid establishment; it is a carefully-crafted homage to anarchistic opposition. Photomontage

More Hannah Höch Artwork and Analysis:

Untitled, From an Ethnographic Museum (1930)

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Artists, Friends, Movements

Influenced by Artist

Artists, Friends, Movements

Interactive chart with Hannah Höch's main influences, and the people and ideas that the artist influenced in turn.

View Influences Chart
Show influences

Artists

	Theo van Doesburg
	El Lissitzky
	László Moholy-Nagy
	Max Ernst
	Piet Mondrian

Personal Contacts

	Johannes Baader
	George Grosz
	Raoul Hausmann
	John Heartfield
	Kurt Schwitters

Movements

	Dada
	De Stijl

Influences on Artist

Hannah Höch

Years Worked: 1910s-1970s

Influenced by Artist

Artists

	Cindy Sherman
	Claude Cahun
	Martha Rosler
	Hannah Wilke

Personal Contacts

	Johannes Baader
	George Grosz
	Raoul Hausmann
	John Heartfield
	Kurt Schwitters

Movements

	Dada
	Surrealism

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Cite this page

Content compiled and written by Anna Souter

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

" Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Anna Souter
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
Available from:
First published on 21 Jan 2016. Updated and modified regularly.
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Hannah Höch

Summary of Hannah Höch

Key Ideas

Important Art by Hannah Höch

Dada Puppen (Dada Dolls) (1916)

Heads of State (1918-20)

Cut With the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919-20)

More Hannah Höch Artwork and Analysis:

Influences and Connections