Hannah Hoch Research

Known for her incisively political collage and photomontage works, Dada artist Hannah Höch appropriated and rearranged images and text from the mass media to critique the failings of the Weimar German Government. Höch drew inspiration from the collage work of Pablo Picasso and fellow Dada exponent Kurt Schwitters, and her own compositions share with those artists a similarly dynamic and layered style. Höch preferred metaphoric imagery to the more direct, text-based confrontational approach of her contemporary John Heartfield, whose work she found “tendentious.” She rejected the German government, but often focused her criticism more narrowly on gender issues, and is recognized as a pioneering feminist artist for works such as Das schöne Mädchen (The Beautiful Girl), (1920), an evocative visual reaction to the birth of industrial advertising and ideals of beauty it furthered. Höch was, for a period of time, the partner of Dada artist Raoul Haussman.

Höch began her training in 1912 at the School of Applied Arts in Berlin-Charlottenburg, where she studied glass design with Harold Bengen until her work was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I.She went back to Berlin in 1915 and reenrolled at the School of Applied Arts, where she studied paintingand graphic design—woodcut and linoleum-block printing—with Emil Orlik until 1920. In 1915 she met and became romantically involved with Austrian artist Raoul Hausmann, who in 1918 introduced her to the Berlin Dada circle, a group of artists that included George Grosz, Wieland Herzfelde, and Wieland’s older brother, John Heartfield. Höch began to experiment with nonobjective art—nonrepresentational works that make no reference to the natural world—through painting, but also with collage and photomontage—collages consisting of fragments of imagery found in newspapers and magazines. (It is commonly held that Höch’s interest in photomontage was born in 1917 while she and Hausmann were on vacation at the Baltic Sea and thus preceded her association with the Dada circle.) From 1916 to 1926, to support herself and pay for her schooling, Höch worked part-time at Ullstein Verlag, a Berlin magazine-publishing house for which she wrote articles on and designed patterns for “women’s” handicrafts—mainly knitting, crocheting, and embroidery. That position gave her access to an abundant supply of images and text that she could use in her work.

My views on her work:

I have quite mixed opinions on her work, this is because at a first glance, I thought her pictures seem quite random and very distorted, especially as a lot of her pictures are based around a portrait / human figure so it is very easy to make it look very random and abstract just by changing one element. For example slightly enlarging one eye on portrait, instantly distorts the proportions on the face making it appear unrealistic. However researching her and her work, and also reading more into the connotations of her work, I realised connections can be made between all the different aspects she places in one picture. These connections can be seen differently for everyone but I think that shows the power behind her work as everyone sees the same denotations in her work but everyone could see a different meaning and message.

"Grotesque" This is an example of her work where connections can be made between all of the different things she has on this picture.

Denotations:

This picture shows female legs and sections of a female face along with half of a males face.

Connotations:

This picture to me, represents how females can be sexualised when dressing, to what society sees as 'provocatively'. The male face could portray society. This is seen through the judgemental facial expression.