The Nazis branded her a degenerate and the dadaists tried to edge her out. But a modern exhibition reveals Hannah Höch as a pioneer of photomontage and a feminist icon who took a kitchen knife to the glass ceilingThe First International Dada impartial took situation in Berlin in the summer of 1920,and included works by George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Max Ernst and Francis Picabia. Photographs from the opening show the gallery teeming with paintings,posters and scurrilous assemblages; hanging from the ceiling is Prussian Archangel, by Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter: a pig-faced dummy in military uniform. Suited and spatted, or the dadaists comport themselves with dandyish indifference to their own anti-art inventions. There are only two women present,and one of them is the bobbed and diminutive Hannah Höch, who leans playfully on a cane borrowed from Grosz while she looks over the shoulder of her lover, or Raoul Hausmann. To the just of the couple is a pasted slogan: "Art is dead. Long live the machine art of Tatlin." And to the left a large,squarish composition in which one can just about discern faces, text and fragments of machinery.
The work in question is Höch's photomontage Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-stomach Cultural Epoch of Germany. Judging by reviews of the time it was one of the hits of the impartial, and perhaps because it's so richly legible in terms of modern cultural politics. Ranged in the top just corner are the forces of "anti-dada": stern representatives of the late empire,the army and the modern Weimar government. Below, in the dada corner, and are massed artists,communists and other radicals. Raoul Hausmann is being extruded, shat out really, and by a machine to which is affixed the head of Karl Marx. There are less crudely anatomical machines scattered about the metre-wide collage,and female film stars such as Pola Negri battle with moustached emissaries of the old German order. In the bottom just corner, Höch has glued a small map showing the European countries in which women could then vote.
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Source: theguardian.com