Hannah Höch
Dada's collage artist.
Hannah Höch cut pictures out of magazines and made collages that mocked the men of the Weimar Republic and the New Woman.
Hannah Höch was born in 1889 in Gotha, Germany. She moved to Berlin to study, first glass painting and then graphic design at the School of Applied Arts. From 1916 she worked for ten years for the large publisher Ullstein, designing patterns for embroidery and needlework for women's magazines. The work brought her into direct contact with magazine images and the mass media.
Through the artist Raoul Hausmann, with whom she had a relationship from 1915 to 1922, she entered Berlin Dada. She was the only woman in the inner circle and took part in the great Dada Fair of 1920, even though several of the men were reluctant to include her. There she showed her best-known work, a large photomontage entitled Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, of 1919–20. It is now in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
Höch was one of the pioneers of photomontage. She cut photographs of politicians, machines, crowds, female bodies and faces out of magazines and assembled them into new, fragmented images. Her collages mock militarism and the bourgeoisie, but also the male Dadaists' own complacency. They are often about the New Woman, who voted, worked and cut her hair short, and about the roles she was expected to play. In the series From an Ethnographic Museum of the 1920s she combined women's faces with objects from non-European cultures.
Between 1926 and 1935 she lived with the Dutch writer Til Brugman, partly in the Netherlands. Under the Nazis her art was branded degenerate and she was not allowed to exhibit. She withdrew to a small house on the outskirts of Berlin, where she hid both her own works and those of other Dadaists throughout the war.
After the war she continued to make collages, now often abstract and colourful. She died in Berlin in 1978. For a long time she was seen mainly as Hausmann's companion, but today she is regarded as one of the most important Dada artists and a forerunner of later artists who work with mass-media imagery and questions of gender.