Hannah Höch (1889-1978): Collages

Change occurs as a reactionary challenge and opposition to established beliefs and norms. Change is rooted in the development of free thought. It confronts elements of tradition as it provides a chance to expand personal views. Change often allows unique art ideas to emerge, providing an alternative insight and interpretation of contemporary themes.

Industrial growth and new scientific and technological discoveries brought about an evolution of lifestyles, preferences, and rapid urbanization during the early 20th century. Industrialization transformed Western society and made life comfortable: machines replaced human labor; factories replaced domestic production of goods; education and public health standards improved; new means of transportation and communication were invented. These developments also caused sweeping social, economic, and political reforms that gave people more opportunities to establish and invest in various businesses; laws that protect worker's rights; suffrage and active participation in government.

These events encouraged artists to address the need to portray the changes that affected nature and the environment, individual and social relationships, and national character. New materials and techniques allowed artistic experimentation to fulfill this objective. Interpretations of social issues elicited two opposing responses from artists: the unconditional acceptance and acclamation of human advancements because of economic progress, and a concern for the dehumanization and degradation of the common person.

Economic rivalry, nationalist extremism, and militarism in Europe heralded the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, shattering the social, cultural, and political order of modern Western civilization. Artists who fled to Zurich, Switzerland from the battlefronts, were appalled by the mindless slaughter, as well as, the blind rationale and materialism that started the conflict.

Cynical of the Old World order, a group of European literary and visual artists was united by disgust for the intellectual and aesthetic postures of both traditional and new art movements. They attacked cultural conventions and standards of good taste. They called the organization “dada,” a term that meant “hobby horse” in French, and was also the reiteration of the first vocal enunciation of a child.

Dada is characterized by the concept of chance in art creation, using a variety of media: newspaper and photograph clippings, metal sheets, glass, and utilitarian objects to create unusual artworks such as ready-made sculptures, word-image play, and collage. Through other outrageous artistic, literary, and musical parodies and provocation, the Dada movement contrived temporal performances more than permanent artworks because it believed that art, under the whims of a society bent on self-destruction, was not worth saving or perpetuating. Its anti-art influence flourished in Zurich, Switzerland; Cologne, Berlin, Hanover in Germany; Paris, France; and New York, USA from 1915 to 1923.

One of the leading figures of the Berlin Dada Group is its sole female member, Hannah Höch (1889-1978). She studied Applied Arts and Painting at the State Museum of Applied arts in Berlin and worked as a designer at the Ullstein Publishing House. Through her intimate friendship with Austrian artist and photographer Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971), Höch joined the Berlin Dada Group in 1918. Her training in publishing and art proved invaluable in the formulation of the photomontage technique. Photomontage is a type of collage composition made up of overlapping images from photographs and printed pictures.

Hannah Höch’s photomontage works were blatantly critical and satirical of the social and political scene in Germany after World War I. She considered the photomontage as her means of defiant self-assertion, focusing mainly on issues such as racial and gender discrimination, equal work opportunities, decision making, and respect for human rights. Höch’s treatment of these themes combined the serious with the fantastic. Using a pair of scissors, she would cut out various shapes, pictures from newspapers, magazines, and photographs, allowing herself to play around with images and undergo what she termed as a “voyage of discovery.” In her creations, it was imperative for Höch to open the mind to the “delights of the coincidental” because it would act as a constant stimulus on the imagination.

These combinations produced a menagerie of strange animal-men, doll women, and hybrid plant monsters, creating a fairy tale world but communicating a disturbing ambivalence bordering on the hallucinatory. The images’ transformations show us the dual aspect of nature: enchanting and threatening, creative and destructive at the same time.

Though these cutouts may seem arbitrary and turbulent, the artist revealed an underlying value for order and composition by carefully selecting, arranging, and combining the images to form a unified artwork. Höch held the firm conviction, though contrary to Dada’s anti-art position, that the substance of artistic creation is established in the order of its visual elements.

The Nazis labeled Höch’s critical avant-garde works “degenerate” and she was forbidden to create art in 1933. Retreating to the outskirts of Berlin, the artist discreetly continued to create small photomontage works that she hid in her house. During the postwar period, with the availability of full-color magazines and brochures, Höch’s photomontages extensively used its color-saturated pages, interpreting the complex symbolism of advertising and transforming its banal images into visual poetry.

Höch’s body of works reveals an artist confident of her talent and creativity, willing to participate in art’s progress by experimenting with various materials and techniques to create new art forms, regardless of art’s male-dominated cliques and political persecutions. Undaunted by and distant from the emerging art movements of the postwar decades, Höch remained faithful to her technique. Not alienating herself from ideas that would improve her vision, she quietly observed, selected, and interpreted the world’s complex images in her own private way.