Web links to images of Hannah Höch’s photomontages

Hannah Höch was a female, 20^th century, German born artist and is customarily considered to be the innovator of the art form known as photomontage. Photomontage is an art process where a new composition is created from parts of other compositions, primarily photographs or images sourced from printed media, including, but not limited to, text and designs printed onto surfaces. Traditionally, these images are on paper. Höch’s work falls under the art historical category, or genre, called Dadaism.

The movement’s name, Dada, means “hobby horse,” and the lore surrounding the founding of the name concludes that it was randomly chosen from the dictionary in the spirit of the art movement: the rejection of logic, that all is chance, and befitting of a confused world, especially at the expense of the development of modern art, that enveloped the culture of Europe post World War I. The Dadaist movement preceded Surrealism and the Dadaist manifesto of being nothing but nothing, because all that was left after the First World War (intellectually, spiritually, and actually) was nothing, grounded the core principles of the Surrealist genre. The Dada movement and its artists such as Höch, built a conceptual foundation from which more acclaimed modern artists working under the guise of Surrealism, such as Dali and Magritte, could develop.

Höch’s Dadaist photomontages reveal the faults of the colonizing of a new Germany through the dissemination of pop culture from soldiers and magazines embedded with American culture during the creation of the Weimar government. Germany’s change from an imperialist government to a capitalistic one allowed for hasty industrialization and the lust for consumer goods, such as automobiles and beauty products. This movement away from imperialism to capitalism is referred to historically as Modernism. The advent of Modernism in Weimar Germany formed an eruption in the expansion of the popular press and the social roles of women being re-defined.

This Americanized culture (for the re-development of Germany post World War I was backed by American monies) had a very different idea of beauty in comparison with the actual appearance of German women living and working in the new Germany, the Weimar Germany. This new Americanized female beauty focused on an idealization of women. Infuriated by these standards by which few women in a war torn society could reach, Höch began to develop her compositions by focusing on comparisons of real depictions of actual women to the newly perceived ideal of a “new modern woman” in magazines and newspapers by means of a collage process that used photographic and mass media images, now known as photomontage. Her intention with these compositions was to show the absurdity and negative impact of the American influenced media pushed by the country’s successes in the War and the newly formed compositions created a scathing review and through her use of carefully chosen images, reviled the new German government for following this tendency towards using the idealized female form to sell industry and political agendas. Not only were gender issues addressed in her work, but Höch also produced compositions that brought the issue racial discrimination to the table, literally and figuratively. At this forum of gender and racial stereotypes that were leading her home country into further disarray, Höch, as a formidable artist, cuts her teeth with a new art media and cuts her images as expressed in her most famous work, “Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser DADA durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands ("Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany"). This work assembles images from newspapers in order to create a statement about the new modern life in Germany for women and the new role of art within the Dadaist art movement. This composition visually translates Höch’s critique on the conditions of Weimar Germany in 1919.

The artwork of Höch reflected her hopes and fears of a new society in which she was living and responding through her juxtaposing with photomontage the acceptance of modernism and its pitfalls for the “old world order” while responding critically to how Modernism was changing the roles of women in this new Germany. Her examination of the social consequences manifested a new art form, photomontage, as well as shed light on cultural stereotypes that were forming as a new world in Germany grew from the devastation of defeat in the First World War and the rise of a new Germany under the control of Adolf Hitler.

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Hannah Höch