Hannah Höch

Jone Johnson Lewis is a women's history writer who has been involved with the women's movement since the late 1960s. She then continued her studies under Emil Orlik, concentrating on collage techniques. She found freedom from society’s limiting views by employing fantasy, or assuming the perspectives of non-human creatures and objects. Even in her famed photomontages built from mass-media magazine cutouts, she embeds the tenets of painting—a respect for color and pattern. In the 1920s Höch began a series of photomontages including images of women and of ethnographic objects from museums. ThoughtCo uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience. Indeed, all of the paintings, sculptures, and especially photomontages Höch made throughout her career evidence a passionate fascination with the world around her.

In 1915 she began an affair and artistic partnership with Raoul Hausmann, a Viennese artist, which lasted until 1922. From 1926 to 1929 Höch lived and worked in Holland. And she references processes that were considered craft and women’s work at the time: embroidery, lace, textile, and fashion design. Hannah Höch was an originator of the photomontage and helped define it as an expressive and effective tool for social critique. Dada Puppen (Dada Dolls) Höch's darkly playful Dada Dolls are quite distinct from any work created by the others in the Berlin group of Dada artists with which she was affiliated early on. Hannah Höch and Dadaism . In her own practice, Höch eschewed constraints in favor of art that combined the political and the personal, the conceptual and the formal. Instead, she forged her own artistic path that, while certainly linked to Dada’s absurdist underpinnings, veered boldly away from her male colleagues. She blended political critique with elements of fantasy, autobiography, gender identity, queerness, and craft. A 1976 retrospective was displayed at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Nationalgalerie Berlin. She is a former faculty member of the Humanist Institute. Hannah Höch c1926. She began exhibiting more frequently starting in the late 1920s. Hannah Höch was born Johanne or Joanne Höch in Gotha. “The peculiar characteristics of photography and its approaches have opened up a new and immensely fantastic field for a creative human being,” she wrote. In a 1934 artist statement, which coincided with an exhibition of her photomontages in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Höch emphasized the creative potential of the up-and-coming photographic medium—which had only recently begun to be used journalistically—and her remixing of it. “Here more than anywhere else, these beauties, wandering and extravagant, obligingly enrich our fantasies.”In Nazi Germany, the work of Höch and her contemporaries was deemed degenerate. In her essay, Höch distinguished photo editing used for advertising and political purposes from artistic experimentation—“an art form that has grown out of the soil of photography.” She defended photomontage, pointing to its potential to inspire progressive and even revolutionary lines of thought and social critique. The Dadaist sociopolitical commentary was often satirical. Biography of Hannah Höch, Co-Founder of Berlin Dada Starting in 1912, Höch received her formal art education at the Kunstgewerbeschule Charlottenburg (Charlottenburg School of Applied Arts) and the Unterrichtsanstalt des Königlichen Kunstgewerbemuseums (School of the Royal Museum of Applied Arts), where she explored a wide range of disciplines and mediums: graphics, calligraphy, glass, embroidery, book design, and more. But even in the Dadaists’ anarchic approach, Höch recognized limitations.

“I would like to do away with the firm boundaries that we human beings so self-assuredly are inclined to erect around everything that is accessible to us,” she wrote in 1929, in the foreword to the catalogue for her first solo exhibition at the Kunstzaal De Bron, in The Hague. But her experimentation with photography and mass media images from contemporary magazines and newspapers led to her most enduring, inventive, and incisive work. But they’ve also gone on to transcend time and lay bare the most contemptuous—and regrettably enduring—aspects of human nature. In her work, she used photos, other paper objects, pieces of machines and various other objects to produce images, usually quite large. Below, we’ve extracted several words of wisdom around these themes. She studied glass design in Berlin from 1912 to 1914 at the Kunstgewerbeschule. She was also involved, after the first World War, with political radicalism, though Höch herself expressed herself less politically than many of the others in the group. Images about same-sex love appear in some of her artwork of those years. Simultaneously, Höch celebrated and elevated domestic crafts, reclaiming them as art forms. A member of Berlin’s Dada movement in the 1920s, she was a driving force in the development of 20th century collage. In part, her views aligned with the Dadaists: a group of artists intent on critiquing both the art establishment and political authority. She lived there for the remainder of her life, removed from the epicenter of artistic activity in her home country, but still deeply curious about and engaged with the world around her. Photomontages combine images from popular publications, collage techniques, painting, and photography. Höch spent the years of the Third Reich in Germany, forbidden from exhibiting because the regime considered Dadaist work “degenerate.” She tried to remain quiet and in the background, living in seclusion in Berlin. Hannah Hoch, 1973.

Artwork Images. Hannah Höch was born Anna Therese Johanne Höch in Gotha, Germany. She used this imagery to playfully—and sometimes causticly—allude to traditional women’s roles and domestic spaces.