Hannah Höch (1889/1978)

Hannah Höch

Wonderful Female Painters

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Hannah Höch (1889/1978)

Collage with Ethnic Mask (undated)

Hannah Höch, a painter, photographer, and collage artist, is a key figure in the Dada movement.

Dada was born in 1916 with the opening of Cabaret Voltaire, a café in Zurich where artists exiled due to the war met and held events. These artists proposed a rupture with all established order, starting directly from scratch; they proposed not only a new art but also a new world. And Höch fought against convention and tradition and stressed the struggle against women being marginalized, devalued, and humiliated.

At the height of the Dada movement, Höch began to work with photomontage alongside other great artists of the movement, such as Raoul Hausmann, who was her partner and is considered the “father of photomontage.” And that gives her the title of “pioneer” of this technique.

What does this technique consist of? It consists of making collages using images of the visual culture of the time, images cut from the graphic media (which are part of the culture and at the same time build it and influence its evolution). Collages that, with a critical eye, satirize the culture from which they take images. It is as if they were “rearranging” the elements of this world to ridicule the point at which it had reached. (Let’s remember that the artists were exiled in Switzerland because of the First World War, the horrendous carnage that highlighted all the miseries of humanity.)

Dada repudiated the social and cultural order (we always insist on the phrase that seems to accurately represent the spirit of the movement: “We spit on everything”). And Hannah Höch added the theme of women to the provocations of this movement against society, art, and politics, to the mockery against the established and against convention. Her work contains a harsh criticism of the traditional stereotypes of feminine beauty and the role of women in society. (Take note of how she combines features of women of different ethnicities and cultures in her protagonists.)

The amazing thing about her struggle is that it is said that at first, neither her companions in the group nor Hausmann himself took her very seriously as an artist due to her condition as a woman. However, as evidenced by her works, she possessed such a talent and an expressive force that eventually, she earned a dominant, fundamental place among the twentieth-century collage artists.

Recommended links:

Cabaret Voltaire.

Dada.

The “Avant-garde” Movements.

Surrealism.

Psychic automatism.

When does Modern Art Start?

The Return to Order.

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