Hannah Höch
PRESTEL Munich • London • New York
Contents 4
Foreword Iwona Blazwick
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The Rebellious Collages of Hannah Höch Daniel F. Herrmann
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On Collage Hannah Höch
The Album 144 Glued, Not Cut: On the Singularity of Hannah Höch’s Scrapbook Ralf Burmeister 152 Images
1936 –45 1912–26 18
Hannah Höch, Dada and the ‘New Woman’ Dawn Ades
161
Images
171
Diary entry on the visit to the Entartete Kunst exhibition, 1937
172 Diary entries on the arrival of Russian troops and the ceasefire, 1945
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Hannah Höch, Performance and the Anti-Revue Deborah Lewer
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Images
72
On Embroidery Hannah Höch
174 Hannah Höch’s Later Collages: An Endless Process of Renewal Emily Butler
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Dada Adolf Behne
182 Interview between Edouard Roditi and Hannah Höch
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The Painter Hannah Höch
194 Images
1926–36
233 Fantastic Art Hannah Höch
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88
96
Performing the Culture of Weimar Postcolonialism: Hannah Höch’s From an Ethnographic Museum and Its Legacy Brett M. Van Hoesen The Mess of History, or the Unclean Hannah Höch Maud Lavin Images
140 Catalogue foreword to Hannah Höch’s solo exhibition at the Kunstzaal De Bron, The Hague 141
1945 –78
232 Catalogue foreword to Reinickendorfer Künstler stellen aus!
234 A Glance over My Life, July 1958 Hannah Höch
Appendix 241 246 247 251 253 254 254
List of Works in the Exhibition Biography List of Exhibitions Bibliography Contributors Image Credits Acknowledgements
A Few Words on Photomontage Hannah Höch
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Foreword The Beauties of Fortuity: Hannah HÖch ( 1889 –1978) Iwona Blazwick
Whenever we want to force this “photo-matter” to yield new forms, we must be prepared for a journey of discovery, we must start without any preconceptions; most of all, we must be open to the beauties of fortuity. Here more than anywhere else, these beauties, wandering and extravagant, obligingly enrich our fantasy.1 Hannah HÖch From “On Today's Photomontage” Str̆edisko 4, no. 1
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Part of the modernist revolution, Hannah Höch witnessed the rise of the European avantgardes; the gradual emancipation of women; the growth of photography, cinema and the mass media; and the decimation of Europe through two world wars. These epic social changes are refracted through her remarkable photomontages. Beyond holding up a fractured mirror to the sociopolitical changes around her, however, Höch’s aesthetic also transcends history. Her formal experimentation offers a liberating and poetic excursion into the farthest reaches of the imagination. Moving from small-town Germany to metropolitan Berlin as a young woman, Höch became an active member of one of the most avantgarde cultural movements of her time: Dada. Höch’s work signiicantly inluenced her contemporaries, the legends of Berlin Dada from Raoul Hausmann and Johannes Baader to John Heartield, George Grosz and Kurt Schwitters. She was also in dialogue with other great European modernists, including László MoholyNagy, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. Despite the immense contributions that Höch made, particularly to the media of collage and photomontage, and the reputation that her work has among artists and art historians all over the world, there has never been a major retrospective of her works in the United Kingdom. The Whitechapel Gallery is delighted to bring this exhibition of Hannah Höch’s collages to the British public for the irst time, introducing an artist whose work is as beautiful as it is relevant, and whose masterful command of the medium seems as fresh today as it did at the time of its creation. Höch’s career was long and varied, spanning more than six decades between the 1910s and the 1970s. Her work relects the dramatic pace of change that new technologies brought about in tandem with social and cultural revolutions. She focuses on the changing role of women and the proliferation of photography through advertising and journalism. Her work also draws on how photojournalism expanded to documenting and popularising non-Western cultures. These relections on life are brought into the sphere of art through Höch’s fragmentation of the body and her use of colour to add geometric abstraction
to the image. This exhibition illustrates her contribution to the development of collage and photomontage, and to modernism itself. We are very grateful to the many authors and contributors to the catalogue who have contributed such original research and have enabled us to revisit her work and draw out its contemporary signiicance. This publication charts Höch’s career chronologically, starting from her early training in traditional printmaking and pattern design, via the satiric acumen of her 1920s works and the Ethnographic Museum series, all the way to the poetic abstractions of the post-war years, culminating in her own story in one of her last works, Lebensbild, 1972–73. The catalogue includes a host of scholarly essays, but also offers original documents, many of which are translated for the irst time into English, to offer a rich picture of the artist’s life. This show could not have been realised without the enthusiasm of the curatorial team, whose championing of Höch’s work has guided the project from its earliest inception. The project was curated by Daniel F. Herrmann, Eisler Curator and Head of Curatorial Studies at the Whitechapel Gallery, and Emily Butler, Assistant Curator. The Whitechapel Gallery was particularly fortunate in working with Professor Dawn Ades, CBE FBA, as co-curator of the exhibition, whose immense expertise and knowledge were key to guiding the exhibition and the publication. Our thanks go to the whole team at Whitechapel Gallery who have joined forces to produce this major exhibition, including Gallery Manager Chris Aldgate, supported by Patrick Lears and Nat Cary, who helped realise the successful display. We are also grateful to Melanie Stacey and Sarah Auld in the Publications department, as well as the team at A Practice for Everyday Life who have developed such an elegant design, and also everyone at the publishing house Prestel, our co-publishers. Any exhibition is a collage of many collaborators, and no exhibition of such international relevance could have been realised without the sincere and passionate support of international experts. We wish to thank in particular Dr Ralf Burmeister, Dr Annelie Lütgens and the whole team at the Berlinische Galerie, as 5
Portrait of Hannah Höch 1929 Vintage gelatin silver print Ubu Gallery, New York, & Galerie Berinson, Berlin 6
well as Dr Anita Beloubek-Hammer and Dr Andreas Schalhorn from the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett and their conservation departments, who have collaborated closely with us to facilitate the loan of so many fragile objects. We are also particularly indebted to the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and the Landesbank Berlin, both of which have generally loaned their many precious works to us. We are grateful to all the institutional and private lenders listed in the acknowledgements that have generously cooperated with us on this major survey. Their support was vital in helping us realise this exhibition. Our heartfelt thanks go to the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung, which enabled the production of such a beautiful publication by sponsoring this catalogue.
We are delighted to have worked on this project with the support of the German Embassy in London and the Goethe-Institut. The trustees of the Whitechapel Gallery join me in acknowledging the vital inancial support of the Arts Council of England and of our valued members and patrons. Last but not least, we would like to thank the family of the artist. This project could not have happened without their full support. It is a pleasure and a privilege for us to present the work of Hannah Höch here at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.
1
Hannah Höch, “A Few Words on Photomontage”, in: Str̆edisko 4, no. 1, Brno, 1934. Reproduced on p. 141 of this volume. 7
The Rebellious Collages of Hannah Höch Daniel F. Herrmann
These phantasms are not escapist, they are attacks, and no longer about creating moods. They set about reality with a hitherto unseen rigour and compare it to the ideal. This art is a call and an exhortation in amongst the ruins of a lost world...1 Hannah Höch, “Fantastic Art”, 1946
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A spectre was haunting Berlin – the spectre of Dadaism. It stared from mannequins on the ceiling and peered down from frames on the walls, it sat on pedestals and shouted from posters, and it promised revolution: “TAKE DADA SERIOUSLY” – only to add, winking slyly at the visitor, “it’s worth it.” From 30 June to 25 August 1920, the Kunsthandlung Dr Otto Burchard, an art gallery near the bustling Potsdamer Platz, had been turned into the venue for the First International Dada Fair. Its programmatic invitation card set the tone: The Dadaistic person is the radical opponent of exploitation; the logic of exploitation creates nothing but fools, and the Dadaistic person hates stupidity and loves nonsense! Thus, the Dadaistic person shows himself to be truly real, as opposed to the stinking hypocrisy of the patriarch and the capitalist perishing in his armchair.2 This was a rambunctious affair, and it was supposed to be. Its exhibiting artists claimed opposition to traditional tastes, art forms and the organisation of art in Weimar Germany, and they were not going to do this quietly. Instead of breathing ‘soul’ into the representations of reality, as they saw to be the impressionists’ wont, or “endlessly presenting nothing but the world within their own breasts”, as they accused the expressionists of doing,3 the Dadaists set out to embrace the fragmented noise of the city, the turmoil of the vast political change of their time, and the huge increase in imagery which photography in the age of mass-reproduction was prompting. The First International Dada Fair celebrated the triumph of cut-and-paste collage: instead of using brush and paint, the Dadaists declared they would take up “scissors and cut out all that we require from paintings and photographic representations”.4 The Fair’s list of artists reads as the who’s who of the Berlin Dada art world in the 1920s: Jean Arp, Johannes Baader, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Wieland Herzfelde and many others contributed to the exhibition – a brazen bunch of boisterous blokes. And then there was Hannah Höch. Slender, elegant and not at all boisterous herself, her works nevertheless packed a considerable punch.
Exhibiting several conident collages, Höch’s contributions were described by the critic Adolf Behne as “outstanding works”, which, despite any perceived shortcomings of the Fair, made “a visit to the exhibition worthwhile” and received mention even before the works of the better known Hausmann and Grosz.5 Höch was standing her ground in a male-dominated environment, using collage with deining expertise. Her irm embrace of the medium’s capacity to question traditional artistic forms was not just a momentary artistic development. It also foreshadowed an interest in exploring the acerbic, poignant and beautiful possibilities of collage that would continue throughout her entire life’s work. This resolute artistic curiosity and a determination to break down intellectual boundaries were to become Hannah Höch’s lasting legacy. 1912–1926 Born in 1889 in Gotha, Germany, into an upper middle-class family, Anna Therese Johanne Höch left home in 1912 for cosmopolitan Berlin. Höch’s desire for artistic education was as pragmatic in its beginning as it was determined in stepping beyond its limitations. Studying at the craft-oriented School of Applied Arts, and from 1915 on at the School of the Applied Arts Museum, Höch’s education followed conventions not uncommon for young women of her time. But her cultural interests and artistic talent allowed her to take applied pattern and printmaking well beyond traditional craft. Interested from the beginning in modern design and art, Höch quickly became familiar with Berlin’s avant-garde galleries. She met Raoul Hausmann at the famous Der Sturm gallery and for many years maintained an intellectually stimulating and artistically proliic, if emotionally abusive relationship with the volatile fellow artist. Living in the German capital during the time of the First World War, she became more and more aware of her political, social and economic surroundings. Höch met poets and painters, publishers and musicians, became friends and collaborated with Kurt Schwitters, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber and many others. The verdant undergrowth of Berlin’s art scene would lead to a radicalisation of her interests and aesthetics which would bring about her involvement with the First International Dada Fair.
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Hannah Höch, double exposure portrait c. 1930 10
Just as importantly, from 1916 onward, Höch took up employment as a pattern designer for the Ullstein Verlag and its popular women’s magazines. She created illustrations, shapes and designs that were mass-distributed to an increasing group of female consumers interested in fashion and modern lifestyles. Her day job inluenced her own practice: Höch’s early works showed a clear interest in composition, colour and form. Figurative studies and designs like Stickmusterentwürfe no. 3 (Embroidery Pattern no. 3), 1915–16 (p. 41), gave way to taking ornamental pattern as a basis for investigating abstraction, as in Doppelform (Double Form), 1917 (p. 45). She began to cut up previously printed works, pasting them into new compositions, soon moving on to incorporating mass-media photography into these arrangements. In 1918, Höch’s work at Ullstein and her intellectual interests came together in what amounted to a manifesto of embroidery:
Having met the Dutch poet Mathilda (Til) Brugman, she spent more time away from Berlin, finally leaving in 1929 in order to live with Brugman in The Hague. For her first Dutch solo exhibition that year, the exhibition catalogue framed Höch’s approach to art in a far less confrontational way than any Dada declaration ever would have:
But you, craftswomen, modern women, who feel that your spirit is in your work, who are determined to lay claim to your rights (economic and moral), who believe your feet are irmly planted in reality, at least y-o-u should know that your embroidery work is a documentation of your own era!6
The imagery used in the text is evocative of Höch’s collages of the time. Leaving the wild and unruly style of Dada collages behind, works like Liebe (Love), 1931 (p. 65), are more narrative in their compositional approach, introducing a fantastic element which also recurs in later works. With its poetic turn of phrase, the 1929 text is conciliatory in tone but nevertheless built on a principle of revolution: addressing an art audience, the passage presupposes an existing world view that is static and self-centred. It has to be educated by the intervention of the artist, whose agency will expose existing limitations. Art is still a rebellious project, and not one of mere utility or entertainment.
Here, the artist purports that the purpose of art is not to “decorate” or to replicate reality through “naturalistic little lowers, a still life or a nude”,7 but to act as a document of the “spirit” and the changing values of a generation. While written for a crafts magazine, such a revolutionary notion of art was just as true for many of Höch’s explicitly political collages of later years: works like Hochinanz (High Finance), 1923 (p. 58), provided biting criticism of military-industrial collusion, while the jolly Staatshäupter (Heads of State), 1918–20 (p. 57), took igures of authority for a sardonic ride. 1926–1936 Berlin Dada provided the background and context for Hannah Höch’s breaking with conventions. But this inquisitive as much as rebellious impulse can be found as a recurring theme throughout her artistic work. In 1926, the artist began a new chapter of her life.
I would like to blur the firm borders that we human beings, cocksure as we are, are inclined to erect around everything that is accessible to us… I want to show that small can be large, and large small, it is just the standpoint from which we judge that changes… I would like to show the world today as an ant sees it and tomorrow as the moon sees it… I should like to help people to experience a richer world so that they may feel more kindly towards the world we know.8
For Höch, such rebellion was also inherent in her use of the medium. She would later describe her fascination with the “process of remounting, cutting up, sticking down, activating – that is to say, alienating” 9 of images. In this account, the power of the collaged image stems from its potential for alienation. Höch describes a Brechtian moment, brought about through the medium’s own speciicity. Many of her collages from the late 1920s until her return to Berlin in 1935 can be seen in the light of such alienation. In works like Englische Tänzerin (English Dancer), 1926 (p. 98), or Unsere lieben Kleinen (Our Dear Little Ones), 1924 (p. 103), Höch’s overt distortion of proportion and 11
Ohne Titel (Aus einem ethnographischen Museum) (Untitled [From an Ethnographic Museum]) 1929 Collage
126
Ohne Titel (Aus einem ethnographischen Museum) (Untitled [From an Ethnographic Museum]) 1930 Collage
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128
Der Sieger (The Victor) 1927 Collage
Indische Tänzerin (Aus einem ethnographischen Museum) (Indian Dancer [From an Ethnographic Museum]) 1930 Collage with ink and metallic foil
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Antiker Läuferfries (Unvollendet) (Antique Frieze [Unfinished]) 1930 Collage
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Modenschau (Fashion Show) 1925–35 Collage
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Auf dem Weg zum siebenden Himmel (On the Way to Seventh Heaven) 1934 Collage
Marlene 1930 Collage with watercolour
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Poesie um einen Schornstein (Poetry around a Chimney) 1956 Collage
204
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Rotes Textilblatt (Red Textile Page) 1952 Collage
Vivace 1955 Collage
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