The Orange Easel: Day 23: Hannah Höch

November 23, 2013

Day 23: Hannah Höch

Hannah Höch (1889-1978) was part of the German Dada group and is mostly known as one of the originators of the photomontage (the assemblage of photographs and other graphic material to make a picture).

First, what is Dada?

The Dadaists came about during World War I as a kind of rebellion to a society that would even agree to the War happening at all. They were pretty pissed off about it all and used their art to express how they felt about it. Art, to them, was not art, they were not artists, and the Dada movement wasn’t really a movement. Anything they felt was a contribution to the War was attacked in their non-art—especially the traditions in the art world. They were really into the shock factor in their non-art—these are the folks who used poo humor in their pieces. (Think Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1919) sculpture that was really nothing more than a urinal and his copy of Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), with a mustache and beard along with the letters L.H.O.O.Q. at the bottom which, when pronounced in French, sounds like the phrase “Elle a chaud au cul,” translated in English as “she has a hot ass.”)

Back to Höch…the rest of the Dadaists were mostly men, so they didn't exactly consider her part of the crowd. She used anti-feminist acts in her art; she was very aware of how society treated women differently in the media vs. reality because she worked for a magazine that catered to women. She even used some of the material in the magazine in her photomontages. Höch wasn’t too fond of marriage and used mannequins and children to represent how women barely ran their own lives. Her work often showed same-sex couples (she was bisexual) and androgynous characters.

Höch’s most famous photomontage is titled Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919) as a reaction to the Weimer Republic in Germany.