HANNAH HÖCH’S COLLAGE OF AVANT-GARDE INFLUENCES

By

KATHLEEN CARA BOYLE

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2014

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© 2014 Kathleen Cara Boyle

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To my parents, Bill and Sheila, and my siblings, Keely, Shaun, and Casey

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my thesis committee—Dr. Joyce Tsai and Dr. Melissa

Hyde—for their support, guidance, expertise, and patience during this research and writing process. I would also like to thank my Art History and Theory professors at

Trinity College, Marymount Manhattan College, and the School of Visual Arts for their dedication to the field and commitment to their students. You have all provided me with numerous sources of inspiration.

Lastly but certainly not least, I would like to recognize my parents for their unyielding belief in me and my dreams. It’s been quite a journey, none of which would have been possible without their love and confidence. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………………………………………. 4

ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………………….. 6

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………. 8

2 CUT WITH THE KITCHEN KNIFE AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC…………… 17

3 BERLIN DADA…………………………………………….………………………….. 30

4 DADA MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY……………………………………………….. 42

5 PHOTOMONTAGE VERSUS COLLAGE………………………………………….. 57

6 AN EXPRESSIONIST INFLUENCE………………………………………………... 68

7 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………...… 76

APPENDIX: LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………. 79

LIST OF REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………….. 81

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH………………………………………………………………….. 87

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Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master of Arts

HANNAH HÖCH’S COLLAGE OF AVANT-GARDE INFLUENCES

By

Kathleen Cara Boyle

December 2014

Chair: Joyce Tsai Co-Chair: Melissa Hyde Major: Art History

German artist Hannah Höch (1889-1978 C. E.) is frequently remembered for being the sole female to participate in Berlin Dada. Like her Dada contemporaries,

Höch's artwork upheld an interest in politics that resonates within her imagery--her early photomontages completed between the years 1918-1922 frequently addressed concerns with gender representation in modern society. In these works, Höch dissected images of women printed in various mass media outlets such as newspapers and fashion magazines, and melded them with pictures of modern technology, political figures, photojournalist images, popular entertainers, advertisement illustrations, and headline text. A number of Höch's photomontage and collage works also include appropriated textile, sewing and embroidery imagery that indicate her background and interest in the applied arts.

The following thesis explores how applied art imagery in Höch's collages also offers a symbolic critique of women in modern society as exemplified in the collage

Schneider Blume (Tailor's Flower) (1920). This thesis examines the foundations of

Expressionism and Dada as they pertain to Höch's Tailor's Flower, and determines that

6 the use of representation in this work provides accommodation for the movements' conflicting ideas. Höch was an artist who tailored her images to challenge the meanings of popular representations via fragmentation; like the cut-outs protruding upon each other in Höch's collage materials, so too does a theoretical overlap occur within the synthesis of her papers' arrangement. Tailor's Flower attempts at once to reconcile different artistic strains while also providing a commentary on the tensions present in the Weimar notion of the New Woman.

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

In 1907, eighteen-year old German artist Anna Therese Johanne Höch (1889-

1978) created a collage. A portrait of the artist’s sister, this work entitled Nitte unterm

Baum (Nitte Under a Tree) (Figure A-1) features a blonde girl adorning a red and white peasant dress.1 Her feet sink into the hilly earth upon which she stands as she leans against a tree whose long, curvy trunk bends in formation centered neatly upon the picture plane. Red, yellow, and hunter green hues of torn paper bring a sense of life to the depicted foliage, a difficult feat given the flat, planar qualities of the medium. But despite limitations presented by the selected materials, the young Höch demonstrated advanced artistry in her ability to convey serenity in a work composed using this seemingly-simple technique. As Höch’s future would continue to unfold, Nitte Under a

Tree proved to be one of the first of many collage compositions that she created throughout her career.2 While her oeuvre consists of a variety of media such as painting, watercolor, drawing, and gouache works, Höch is best-known for her photomontages and collages. Many of these works received acclaim for the ways in which they engaged with popular culture; Höch transformed mass media images into avant-garde critiques of societal ideals. Such work illustrates the program of an artist better known as Hannah Höch.

Born to parents Friedrich and Rosa Höch, Hannah Höch was the eldest of five children in a bourgeois family that resided in the small city of Gotha, Germany. Höch lived at home until her early twenties in order to care for her youngest sister Marianne

1 Maria Makela, “By Design: the Early Work of Hannah Höch in Context” in The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, ed. Maria Makela and Peter Boswell (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1997), 58.

2 Ibid., 58.

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(also known as Nitte, the subject of Höch’s first collage), and thus postponed her academic training in the arts for years after completing high school in 1904.3 As a result, her career began amidst the turmoil of World War I (1914-1918), and came to fruition during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). Having studied at both the School of

Applied Arts in Charlottenburg (1912-1914) and the School of the Royal Museum of

Applied Arts in Berlin (1915-1920), Höch’s training was based in an area of the visual arts rooted in design.4 Tasked with enhancing the aesthetics of utility, or everyday, objects, the applied arts include, but are not limited to, the ornamentation of textiles, home furnishings, household utensils, and fine china. This foundation developed into a career for Höch who from 1916-1926 supported herself as a part-time pattern designer at Ullstein Verlag, a publishing house for popular periodicals.5 Professional, self- sufficient, and innovative, Höch typified what was referred to as the “New Woman,” an early twentieth-century label that identified women who entered a sphere that for centuries had typically been identified as part of a “man’s world”: she often held a job, was politically vocal, lived on her own—she exemplified the evolution of modern culture.6

In addition to providing a basis for her design career, Höch’s applied arts background also influenced her studio artwork; a number of her photomontages and collages include textile pattern appropriation, and Höch’s compositional decisions reflect

3 Ibid., 58.

4 Kay Klein Kallos, “A woman’s revolution: the relationship between design and the avant-garde in the work of Hannah Höch, 1912-1922” (PhD diss., The University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1994), 64-83.

5Maud Lavin, “Introduction: Representing the New Woman,” in Cut With the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 10.

6 Ibid., 9.

9 knowledge of balanced design principles. Höch integrated this foundation into her approach to Dada and Expressionism, movements with which she engaged and to which she contributed. In so doing, she helped to undo the hierarchy that traditionally kept the fine and applied arts separated.7

In the 1918 article “Vom Sticken” (“From Embroidery”) published in Stickerei – und Spitzen-Rundschau (Embroidery and Lace Magazine), Höch wrote that

“Embroidery… is an art… and it has the right to demand that it be treated as such.”8

Although appreciated for relaying degrees of taste and refinement, the applied arts received far less critical attention than the fine arts, and thus populate a domain of shallower cultural importance. Yet the source of Höch’s irritation for applied art’s standing cannot be solely ascribed to the fine versus applied art hierarchy; Höch too was frustrated by motifs such as “flowers, baskets, birds, and spirals” whose frequency contributed to the perception of applied arts’ lack of artistic seriousness.9 In an attempt to further the artistic possibilities of embroidery, Höch began to experiment with this medium early in her career. A selection of Höch’s college assignments demonstrate her attempts as a student to expand upon embroidery’s traditional parameters—she created uncommon imagery and altered stitch techniques in efforts to break new ground for this medium.10 This practice resembled transformations that various avant-garde artists’ circles were embarking upon in traditional art media such as painting, printmaking, sculpture, and even architecture in their search for creating new visual language in the

7 Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, “Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts” in Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1991), 50-81.

8 Makela, 58.

9 Ibid., 58.

10 Kallos, 64-83.

10 arts. Developments within this inquiry saw surging interest in assemblage, mixed media work whose process incorporates non-art materials into compositions, and thereby expanded the discourse concerning art’s relationship to everyday life. A number of artists in the Berlin Dada group are recognized for their contributions to assemblage practice.

In 2006, National Gallery of Art curator Leah Dickerman organized Dada, one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of the movement to date. Its extensive collection of artwork, publications, and ephemera, documented an international movement that from

1914-1922 “displayed a raucous skepticism about accepted values.”11 Cynicism and biting wit were combined in radical artwork, literature, and performances that responded to events such as the tragedies of war, spread of industrialization, and rise in technology. Dada focused on artists who lived in Zurich, Berlin, Paris, Cologne,

Hannover, and New York, and although each of these cities found common ground in the desire to critique the sociopolitical climate of the modern world, the exhibition’s collection of objects proved great variety in the ideas and imagery of these artists.12 In

Dada, Berlin Dada’s largely-male, outspoken aggressiveness tends to characterize the group’s work with chauvinist connotations.13 Such reputation provides cause for recognition of Höch’s capacity within the group; not only was she the only woman to actively participate in the group’s activities, but she was also distinguished by her radically progressive ideas about women, which contrasted with her male

11 Earl A. Powell III, Glenn Lowry, Bruno Racine, Alfred Pacquement, forward to Dada (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2006), xi.

12 Leah Dickerman, introduction to Dada, 1.

13 Brigid Doherty, “Berlin” in Dada, 88-89.

11 contemporaries. In his 2006 review of the exhibition, Washington Post art critic Blake

Gopnik endorsed Höch’s 15 exhibited works for their “full-blown feminist edge” as they

“pull together all the clichéd images of women then in circulation and holds them up to ridicule.”14 Gopnik highlights an obvious difference between Höch’s work and those of other artists: Höch contributed to Dada’s social critique while also upending the Berlin group’s masculine renown.

Höch’s early photomontages completed between the years 1918-1922 frequently addressed concerns with gender representation in modern society. In these works,

Höch dissected images of women printed in various mass media outlets such as newspapers and fashion magazines, and melded them with pictures of modern technology, political figures, photojournalist images, popular entertainers, advertisement illustrations, and headline text. These compositions utilize a barrage of media to contextualize representations of femininity within the Weimar Republic. A number of

Höch’s photomontage and collage works also include appropriated textile, sewing and embroidery imagery that relate to her background and interest in the applied arts. In this thesis, I will argue that applied art imagery in Höch’s work offer a symbolic critique of modern women.

Höch’s applied arts academic and professional backgrounds inform her demands that embroidery be recognized as an art. Such motivation may also reflect her encouragement of women’s evolution in modern society. Höch names embroidery as terrain for women in “From Embroidery” when she states that, “…and women embroider! Women have always embroidered; but now—in wartime—no materials, yet

14 Blake Gopnik, “D is for Dada” Washington Post, February 17, 2006, accessed March 10, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/17/AR2006021700060.html.

12 women are embroidering—embroidering like mad!”15 This claim establishes women as artists responsible for the production of embroidery work, an outlet for creativity even in times of political calamity. For Höch, this medium should thus uphold its gendered connotation, and evolve to reflect changes women were experiencing in the early twentieth century. Höch announces this connection when she states that

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 firmly planted in reality, at least y-o-u should know that your embroidery work is a documentation of your own era!16

As conveyed by the term “New Woman,” the period of the Weimar Republic saw expansion in the roles that women held in society. Höch partook in these changes as reflected by her career as a designer and avant-garde artist; however, she did not entirely negate convention. As the patterns that Höch published in Ullstein periodicals demonstrate, Höch continued to create work that stayed within the parameters of established and thereby expected clothing and embroidery design.17

In addition, Höch’s personal life during this period shows her desire to be a wife and mother to the children of her then-partner artist Raoul Haussmann, a hope that never became a reality.18 The tensions between contemporary and traditional ideas are often at the core of Höch’s early photomontages. These works highlight the limbo of hybrid identities both lived by and marketed to women. Vibrantly complicated, Höch’s

15 Hannah Höch, “On Embroidery” in Hannah Höch (Munich, London, New York: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2014), 72.

16 Ibid., 72.

17 Makela, 54-55.

18 Lavin, “The Berlin Dada Photomontages” in Cut With the Kitchen Knife, 26-27.

13 work offer viewers multifaceted depictions of modernity, an onslaught of images whose juxtaposition interrogates the repercussions of societal changes.

A portion of Höch’s non-representational, abstract works are paper collages composed of textile, sewing, and embroidery patterns that were originally published in women’s magazines; examples of these collages are Weiße Form (White Form) (1919)

(Figure A-2), Auf Tüllgrund (On Tulle Net Ground) (1921) (Figure A-3),

Stramingittercollage (Embroidery Collage) (1921) (Figure A-4), Entwurf für das Denkmal

Eines Bedeutenden Spitzenhemdes (Design for the Memorial to an Important Lace

Shirt) (1922) (Figure A-5), and Rohrfeder Collage (Reed Pen Collage) (1922) (Figure A-

6). Irregular dashed and dotted lines dance jaggedly in formations upon the surfaces of gently drawn lace webs, tinged yellow as indicative of the sheath paper’s gradual weathering aged nearly a century. Höch was an artist who tailored her images to challenge the meanings of popular representations via fragmentation; like the cut-outs protruding upon each other in Höch’s collage materials, so too does a theoretical overlap occur within the synthesis of her papers’ arrangement. This practice heightens the complexity of her composition while also presenting complications for scholarship.

One of her works that best showcases such rapprochement is the photomontage

Schneider Blume (Tailor’s Flower) (1920) (Figure A-7).

My thesis will explore the foundations of Expressionism and Dada as they pertain to Höch’s Tailor’s Flower. It is my argument that the use of representation in this work provides accommodation for the movements’ conflicting ideas. Because Höch’s art reflects her political convictions, the first chapter of this thesis will present an abbreviated account of the Weimar Republic’s history, and relate its events to one of

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Höch’s most notable photomontages Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada

Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany) (1919-1920). An analysis of this work will examine how Höch presented political ideas in her art via imagery and medium selections. I will then move forward to explain how Höch confronted issues of gender in her art, and relate this discussion to representations of women in Cut with the Kitchen Knife. Considerations of gender will continue to be addressed in other examples of Höch’s work throughout the course of this essay.

The next portion of this thesis will examine the role of Dada as it pertains to

Höch. Because she was an active contributor to Berlin Dada, the group’s ideas and artistic methods are reflected in the work that she produced at this point in her career.

This discussion will clarify how Dada’s agenda informed Höch’s utilization of the collage medium. Particular attention will be paid to the way in which representation was integral to the communication of Berlin Dada principles. Further comparison between photomontage and collage will highlight conflict amid their distinction. Because Höch was one of the originators of the photomontage medium, she was partly responsible for developing the ways in which it divulged meaning; however, her practice of photomontage did not negate her desire to also create collages. .

Höch’s concern with finding resolution between clashing artistic ideas testifies to her individual convictions; such conviction is manifest in the imagery of Tailor’s Flower.

This work tackles Dada’s professed disdain for abstraction as it pertains to

Expressionism by emulating formal sensibilities like those of Kandinsky. An artist who also published ideas intrinsic to his visual compositions, Kandinsky’s written and visual

15 work investigated the relationship between spirituality and art. This thesis will include selections of Höch’s writing that convey ideas influenced by Kandinsky’s outlook; however, Höch does not entirely submit to his position. Like her artwork, Höch’s writing applies aspects of Expressionist claims as they pertain to the relationship between the applied art of embroidery and women. Tailor’s Flower confronts discord between various art movements as it visually makes a critique of modern women.

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CHAPTER 2 CUT WITH THE KITCHEN KNIFE AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

The Weimar Republic began with deep political, economic, and social rifts. It was born out of the energy generated by the German naval revolt that took place on

October 29, 1918—an event that occurred shortly after Germany implemented government changes to become a constitutional monarchy—the German Revolution of

1918-19 saw its citizens demand an end to the war and removal of Kaiser Wilhelm II from Germany.1 Uprisings and street battles ensued, resulting in the formation of councils and worker trade unions that insisted upon better working conditions, better living conditions, and an end to the death and destruction that was mutilating their country.2 Demand for the removal of German troops from combat and government overthrow was quieted on November 11 when the Armistice of Compiègne went into effect, thus marking German defeat by the Allies. Shortly thereafter, Kaiser Wilhelm II to Holland was officially abdicated and exiled on November 28, 1918.

The course of historical events that would unfold as a result of these tumultuous beginnings were complicated. Friedrich Ebert, head of the Social Democratic Party

(SPD) was sworn in as chancellor of Germany on November 9, 1918 by Prince Max von

1 Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 17.

2 Councils are democratic groups which first formed during the Russian Revolution of 1905, and sought new forms of political representation. Weitz describes the generation of World War I German councils as the following: “…the councils were a sign of desperate conditions and a search for new forms of political representation in the age of high industrialization and total war, when workers, soldiers, and sailors all across Europe become decisive political actors… In Germany, there would be sailor councils, workers councils, workers and soldiers councils, even councils organized by artists and by agricultural workers. Their activities were often confused and chaotic, their politics inchoate. But they were, everywhere, grassroots form of democracy that allowed a wider range of political participation, addressed a broader range of issues, than had ever before existed in Germany. Typically, councils were elected at mass meetings of workers on strike, of soldiers defying orders, of artists planning the future of a gallery or theater… Chaotic, loud, unruly, usually masculine, the mass meeting and the council served as a very basic and important form of democratic expression.” Ibid., 17-18.

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Baden, former chancellor under Wilhelm II.3 In his book Weimar: 1918-1933, Walter

Laqueur explains that because the Social Democrats were the strongest party in

Germany at the time of Wilhelm II’s abdication, they were subsequently “the obvious candidates for the succession.”4 But as history has proven, the strength behind the

SPD resided more in political ideas than in actual practice. Laqueur explains that

power was something (the SPD) had never enjoyed, and, worse, they lacked the instinct and the craving for it. Their theoreticians had written about it, to be sure, but the political leadership had long ceased to be revolutionary. They were radical democrats, they opposed the Wilhelmian establishment; but their education and experience, their whole mental make-up, had conditioned them to expect peaceful change, not revolution.5

Fearing that the path to Germany’s restoration would motivate councils and political parties to pursue revolution like that of Russian Bolshevism, Ebert and his supporters strove to secure political balance within the country’s government; they made military alliances that were initially directed against more radical leftist factions, which led to a period of unrest and political assassinations.6 Although accepted seven years after the instatement of Ebert’s leadership, the program of the SPD declared their politics to reflect “the most favorable ground for the liberation of the working class and therefore

3 Ibid., 19.

4 Walter Laqueur, Weimar 1918-1933 (London: Phoenix Press, 1974), 7.

5 Ibid., 7.

6 Weitz, 28-39.

18 for the development of socialism,” and thus made demands that worked toward a unified republic.7

But Ebert’s leadership of the party and of the nation (1918-1925) was met with constant public ridicule and scorn. The volatile political circumstances that engulfed the nation prior to his chancellorship carried into and characterized his term in office, a term that ended upon Ebert’s death on February 28, 1925. Although the SPD was the largest party at this time, numerous political groups were represented on the voters’ ballot, and thus the Social Democrats did not hold a ruling majority in the Reich.8

Parliamentary conflicts abounded as a number of violent attempted coups and violent street battles erupted in the early years of the Republic. Adding to this chaotic atmosphere was Germany’s precarious economic situation. Saddled with war reparations and still suffering from the devastating effects of the war, the fledgling

Republic limped from one economic crisis to the next, culminating in a period of hyperinflation in the early twenties.

In short, the political and economic situation of the Weimar Republic was broken and deeply fractured. Höch’s early photomontages were created during this period, and internalize the chaotic social fragmentation that characterized her homeland. By cutting images from mass media publications that documented, publicized, and illustrated these and other historical events, Höch created sociopolitical art that simultaneously mirrored and reinterpreted Weimar culture from her observations as a single, twenty-something

7 “The Social Democratic Party (SPD) Program,” in Handbuch des öffentlichen Lebens (Handbook of Public Life), ed. Maximilian Müller-Jabusch of The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994), 112.

8 Weitz, 27.

19 woman living in Berlin. One of the most famous works of Höch’s career, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche

Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly

Cultural Epoch in Germany) (1919-1920) (Figure A-8) is a photomontage that envelopes the chaotic sociopolitical environment that led to the formation of the Weimar Republic.

In an effort to convey the explosively chaotic atmosphere of the Weimar

Republic, Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife initially appears to be ruptured. This work composed of many photographic reproductions of politicians, intellectuals, popular entertainers, modern artists, and non-Western “other” cultures, cut from various print media outlets, has absolutely no demonstration of atmospheric perspective, no single focal point or particular figure that Höch attempts to highlight. Rather, Cut with the

Kitchen Knife’s selection of appropriated photography illustrates examples of opposing ideas that inform the modern world. Each individual cutout harbors its own narrative, distinct from the other images that surround it; but when all of these images are brought together onto a single picture plane, visual force moves viewers to feel the impact of numerous stories occurring in simultaneity. The sociopolitical discord of the Weimar

Republic’s modernity becomes palpable.

Despite the initial friction presented in this work, one can see upon closer inspection that Cut with the Kitchen Knife does demonstrate order in its image distribution. Höch organizes the work into four sections, and directs it to unfold in a clockwise rotation as it isolates various political interests of the Republic into the corners of the picture plane.9 The work is centrifugal, with the body of then-popular dancer

9 Lavin, “The Berlin Dada Photomontages,” 19.

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Niddy Impekoven pirouetting in its middle, her head cut from her shoulders, and the face of expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz hovering above Impekoven’s extended arms.10 The top left corner (or left wing) of Cut with the Kitchen Knife features photographs of intellectuals Karl Marx and Albert Einstein, framed by alternating images of seemingly-opposed elements—horses versus locomotives, African indigenousness versus European politics. Positioned diagonally to this corner, the lower right section highlights images of Berlin’s Dadaists (including a photograph of the artist herself) as well as another image of Karl Marx.11 Frequently in this section of the work, the photographic portraits of these individuals are restricted only as faces, with the imges of male heads attached to female bodies wearing highly-gendered attire such as a ballet tutu or swimwear. This repositioning evokes a teasing critique of the expanding roles women were experiencing in the Republic, as the garments worn by either men or women are shown as interchangeable, the notion of emasculation present yet playful in communicating an increasing independence for post-war women. Floating throughout either section appears the word “DADA”, and thus identifies these areas of the composition to be portions in which the leftist, progressive, intellectual interests and beliefs upheld by the Berlin Dada group are represented and very much a part of the

Weimar scene.

Countering these portrayals of leftist politics, Höch provides antagonist, conservative examples that oppose the Dadaist agenda. In what is clearly labeled as the “Anti-Dada” portion of the work, the top right corner (or right wing) is a densely mangled cacophony of politicians such as Wilhelm II, Ebert, Gustav Noske (of the SPD),

10 Ibid., 22.

11 Ibid., 22.

21 and Paul von Hindenburg (an independent who held office as President from 1925-

1934).12 Höch carefully spliced these images, positioning the array of figures amongst photographs of German soldiers, machine gears, lewd women, and high rise buildings.

Here viewers are presented with an abundance of iconography that also connotes modernity, albeit a definition that greatly differed from the ideals of the avant-garde.

There is a sense that this section of the work glares at the intellectuals who populate the opposite corner, as well as looks down upon the lower half of the composition, its elevation indicative of hierarchy in this juxtaposition.

Cheeky yet deliberate in her objective, Höch’s elaborate title of Cut with the

Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany is noted by art historian Brigid Doherty as a title that pokes fun at the photomontage process as it “approximates crude surgery;” Höch provides her viewers with an intricate pun, a literal digest for the “cross-section of culture circa 1920… to be sliced from the nation’s beer belly.”13 And the belly to which she referred was on full view in other works by Höch in the photomontage Staatshäupter (Heads of State) (1919) (Figure A-

9). There she displays the fleshy bellies of Ebert and Noske exposed whilst standing in their swimming trucks on holiday. A photograph that first appeared on the front page of

Berlin’s popular newspaper Berliner Illustrirte on August 24, 1919 (Figure A-10), this image ignited outrage throughout the Republic whose citizen majority was far from able to experience the luxury of a vacation given the socioeconomic conditions of the

12 Ibid., 19.

13 Doherty, 107.

22 nation.14 In Heads of State, Höch has removed the serene lakeside setting from the photograph, and replaced it with a faint outline of an embroidery cross-stitch pattern upon which sketches of butterflies, flowers, and twisting leaves (perhaps a take on the

“flowers, baskets, birds, and spirals” that annoyed her) fill in the backdrop. Framing the bottom edge of the work is a gray cutout that evokes a still water’s gentle wave, while a black ball-like shape skims toward the right edge of the work as though having just swum the length of the horizontal perimeter. These elements of the photomontage allude to the original context of the Ebert and Noske photograph, and thus also indirectly reference the public reception that this image received. By placing the figures upon an embroidery pattern sketch, Höch ridicules these politicians and their masculinity—she does anything but show them as powerful, respectable, and subsequently capable, leaders. And yet, these men are the ones who have been chosen to lead the Weimar Republic out of its post-war slump, to direct the actions of a society whose citizens contradictorily become more connected (via the development of communication technology), and more independent (as reflected by political retaliation) each day.

The lower left corner of Cut with the Kitchen Knife emphasizes this point in its focus of mass crowds, demonstrations, and rallies. A photograph of the National

Assembly is placed in direct relation to the images of citizens taking to the streets in assembly, and thus produces a commentary of the Republic’s disjointed political system.15 Throughout the whole of Cut with the Kitchen Knife, themes of industrialization and technology resonate as images of gears, bearings, engines, and

14 Makela, 60-61.

15 Lavin, 23.

23 wheels appear in all portions of the work. These types of figures indicate the prevalence of mass production and the ever-growing, widespread relationship between man and machine. Of course, the presence of technology as communicative tool in the

Weimar Republic is further emphasized by Höch’s use of photographic images reproduced and distributed through the latest methods of print technology.

Both Cut with the Kitchen Knife and Heads of State offer a political critique of the

Weimar Republic. This objective is made apparent through the inclusion of photographs containing images of specific politicians such as Ebert and Noske, and is furthered by the context Höch creates with other figures, compositional arrangement, and appropriation choices displayed in her work. Yet also evident is Höch’s engagement with questions of gender and sexuality through her depiction of women and their changing roles in the modern world.

The end of World War I brought a dramatic increase in the number of the country’s voting citizens—on November 12, 1918 all women in the Weimar Republic over the age of 21 were given the right to vote for the constituent National Assembly.16

In response to this enormous change, political parties quickly formed women’s committees to reach out and appeal to the interests of the female population.

Propaganda campaign strategies used to persuade male voters were adjusted to lure women; parties publicized their support for women’s emancipation through rallies, films, posters, pamphlets, and publications that specifically catered to a female audience.17

16 Richard J. Evans, “The Unfinished Revolution: The Women’s Movement and the First World War, 1914- 1918” in The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894-1933 (London and Beverly Hills: SAGE Publications, 1976), 229.

17 Julia Sneeringer, “Onward, My Sisters!: Winning Women for Politics, 1918-1920” in Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and Politics in Weimar Germany (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 22.

24

As Julia Sneeringer notes in her book Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and

Politics in Weimar Germany, the extension of the vote to women provided a metaphor for the rebuilding of German society. A message to uphold characteristics attributed to femininity such as motherliness, love, and selflessness were utilized as a motivational vehicles that encouraged Germans both to comeback from the defeat of war and to update their social perspectives to meet modern demands.18 The voices of women were ready to be heard.

This change on the political front exemplifies the expansion of women’s roles in society, due in part to the increasing number of females entering the workforce during

World War I. As previously stated in the introduction of this essay, the early twentieth century saw the creation and rise of what is referred to as the “New Woman,” an independent, professional, iconic woman, equal parts real world reality and mass media construction who characterized the Weimar Republic’s young adult female populous.

Art historian Linda Nochlin notes that New Women found harmony in their “heartfelt rejection of woman’s traditional role as it was defined by every society in the world: rebellion against oppressive notions of the ‘womanly’ understood to be a life devoted to subordinating one’s own needs and desires to those of men, family, and children.”19

Although she exuded newfound liberation, the New Woman’s behavior was also directed by the mass media via marketing tactics intended to persuade her interests and

18 Ibid., 68.

19 Nochlin, “Introduction” in the New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s, ed. Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011), vii.

25 actions.20 The image of the New Woman gained popularity due both to the appeal of the lifestyle and the consumption of technology responsible for its transmission. In a collection of essays entitled The New Woman International, editors Elizabeth Otto and

Vanessa Rocco compiled studies that investigate sociopolitical factors that affected the

New Woman. Otto and Rocco state that although this woman was wrought with an identity crisis, she was nonetheless “consistent in all of her manifestations.”21 Otto and

Rocco write:

New Women embodied feminism in action or fashion statement extraordinaire. They entered men’s educational institutions and professions; become catered-to consumers of goods, services, and media; and lived and loved in ways that defied convention. The New Woman was famously associated with the quest for female enfranchisement and political representation, but often, rather than asking for new rights, she simply claimed them—or else she was willing to take to the streets in order to achieve them… Indeed the New Woman seemed to be such a universally recognizable icon of change that she could instantly inspire and simultaneously incite strong reactions of fear or anger.22

But this expression of independence was made in a world that continued to perpetuate gender roles that assigned men to rule the professional sphere, and women the domestic. Therefore, the independent nature of the New Woman overlapped into territory associated as masculine, and created what Otto and Rocco identify as a gender bending between masculine and feminine constructions. To many people, this bend generated “fears that women would poach men’s cultural and sexual authority and

20 Otto and Rocco, “Introduction: Imagining and Embodying New Womanhood,” in The New Woman International, 3.

21 Ibid., 1.

22 Ibid., 1.

26 might even take their jobs.”23 Reservations such as these indicated the presence of long-established gender biases, and thus prevented the New Woman’s identity from making a clean, distinct break from past stereotypes. As a result, the New Woman’s actual identity could be described as expectations and ideals in tension with the status quo.

Cut with the Kitchen Knife’s visual discourse interrogates issues of gender in the

Weimar Republic. In her analysis of this work, Maude Lavin asserts it is images of women that both maintain the work’s visual momentum as well as provide its most substantial content. She explains that

Women occupy the principal revolutionary roles in Cut with the Kitchen Knife, often signified by dramatic or assertive physical movement, such as dancing or ice skating. Formally, the instability of disjunctive montage fragments creates a kaleidoscopic effect of movement which is embodied in the figures of the female dancers and athletes. Dada is disseminated by voice and word is associated with men. (For example, the word “dada” emanates from Einstein’s brain in the upper left of the montage.)… the images of women are allegorical signifiers of female liberation and anarcho-communist revolution. In Cut with the Kitchen Knife, the montages and representations of women function as utopian elements within the centrifugal dissolution of Weimar hierarchies.24

Höch presents a feminist outlook. By placing a selection of women within a composition that directly juxtaposes their figures within the same context of male images, most of whom are very powerful public personas, Höch makes an explicit statement concerning the relevance of women in modern society. She is careful to include images of women who defy traditional convention, women such as Kaethe Kollwitz and Niddy Impekoven

23 Ibid., 8.

24 Lavin, 23.

27 whose intellect and innovations motivated women to aspire toward goals beyond the traditional domestic expectations.25

Höch’s technique is also coy; all images of women in Cut with the Kitchen Knife are very small, many of which appear to be almost hidden throughout the work. This discreetness lends itself to the interpretation that women, while actively present in the

Republic, do not maintain as obvious a presence as men. However if one chooses to agree with Lavin’s analysis of female figures in the work, then the subtlety of women in modern society does not necessarily imply them to be citizens of lesser importance. On the contrary, it is the actions of women who, in their discretion, are responsible for the direction of modernity’s evolution.

Towards the end of her career, Höch gave a reflective interview with writer and scholar Edouard Roditi in which she discussed her experiences as an artist during the

Republic. Much of this interview addressed Höch’s participation in Berlin Dada. When asked what she believed was the group’s “most original and lasting contribution to modern art,” Höch replied with the answer, “I believe we were the first group of artists to discover and develop systematically the possibilities of photomontage.”26 She then continues to further articulate the aims of Dada photomontage, stating that subverting the belief that photographs portray reality was central to their work:

it is generally admitted that a camera can photograph only what is actually there, standing in the real world before the lens. One might therefore say that the Dada photomonteur

25 Ibid., 23-24.

26 Edouard Rodit interview with Hannah Höch in More Dialogues On Art (Santa Barbara: Ross-Erickson, Inc., 1984), 101.

28

sets out to falsify deliberately the testimony of the camera by creating hallucinations which seem to be machine-made.27

Höch’s observation of the desire to “falsify deliberately” as well as focus on that which is

“machine-made” identifies two motivations for Berlin Dada: to contest popular understanding of sociopolitical communications, and utilizes current advancements in media technology to create art. As this essay continues, it will identify the principles of

Berlin Dada that informed Höch’s work.

27 Ibid., 101.

29

CHAPTER 3 BERLIN DADA

The Kurfürstendamm is a long, central commercial boulevard in Berlin that offers consumers the latest mix of goods and services—high fashion boutiques, shops, restaurants, cafes, hotels, and apartments line the street, buffered by broad sidewalks that pave grounds for bustling civic activity. In the early twentieth century, writer and journalist Joseph Roth (1894-1939) wrote vignettes of modern urban life published in major German newspapers.1 One of his most profound works discusses activity as it takes place amongst an ordinary walk along the Kurfürstendamm. A man of Austrian-

Jewish decent, Roth’s writings were recognized as noteworthy contributions that accurately captured both the high and low energies, moods, and atmospheres of major

Western European cities between the wars.2 From poverty to nightlife indulgences, to down trodden ghettos to towering skyscrapers, Roth provided poetic accounts of the rapid changes that bombarded and transformed the world into one of heightened industry with subsequent perfunctory cravings. Roth’s account of the Kurfürstendamm first published in the newspaper Munich’s Latest News on September 29, 1929, “The

Kurfürstendamm” is an article that delivers a brief yet keen observation concerning the hurried transmission of information to the masses via the newspaper press. Roth states that

In the evening I walk along the Kurfürstendamm. I slink along the walls like a dog. I am on my own, but I have a certain sense that my destiny has me on a leash… Trees are planted on the edge of the sidewalk, and newspaper

1 Michael Hofmann, introduction to What I Saw, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), 14-17.

2 Ibid., 14-17.

30

sellers in front of the railings. The news is alarming. The newspapers move faster than the times, not even the cult of speed, for which they are partly responsible, can keep up with them. The afternoon runs panting for the late-evening edition, and the evening chases the first edition of morning papers. Midnight eyes the threat of the following afternoon, and crosses all its fingers and toes for a printer’s strike, which would allow it to behave like midnight for once.3

One of a selection of Roth’s essays reprinted and translated into a book entitled What I

Saw, “The Kurfürstendamm” exemplifies the prose style that characterized Roth’s journalism while also presenting an account of the intense presence the mass media held in Berlin at this point in history. Roth conveys to readers a city barraged by text and image, a cluster of information pushed upon the citizens of Berlin at such a pace that not even printers themselves had a moment to rest from the influx of news produced and consumed by the populous. His statement that “newspapers move faster than the times” identifies a community addicted to the written word, to the cyclical urgency of knowing what headline activities are stirring and, perhaps most importantly, how these actions will affect their everyday lives.

Technology’s evolution saw rise in the volume and geographic span of information made available to the masses. This development also instigated an evolution in visual culture—newspaper, book and magazine markets skyrocketed, dominated by publishing house Ullstein who carried titles such as the women’s magazine Die Dame and the weekly picture-magazine Berlin Illustrirte Zeitung.4 This also reflected the steadfast support for photography (and its extension of cinematic film)

3 Joseph Roth, “The Kurfürstendamm,” in What I Saw, 147-149.

4 Peter Gay, “The Revenge of the Father: Rise and Fall of Objectivity” in Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001), 134.

31 as an information source. Writer Edlef Köppen believed the increase in image as informant indicated “the mark of (the) age (as) haste, hurry, nervousness.”5 In an essay entitled “The Magazine as a Sign of the Times” first published June 17, 1925, Köppen writes that messages communicated via images take less time, energy, and thought to transmit and comprehend. Their surging popularity also reflects heightened demand for efficient proletariat time management in order to meet capitalism’s competitive production needs. The effects of such rapidity leads to what Köppen perceives as a diminished quality of life, one in which contemplation is greatly sacrificed. Köppen writes that

People have no time, indeed they flee the calm on contemplation; they reel recklessly through the streets with no intention of catching hold. The rhythm of life pounds short and hard: further—further! The consequence is in many respects superficiality. This haste also appears in areas that by nature must really expect more: the domains of art. The enjoyment of art presupposes, alongside an intuitive grasp, a tranquil and concentrated focus, a surrender, a release to the self to be conducted beyond the borders of the palpable. (The creation of art presupposes the same measure of inner composure.) But the preconditions are lacking. And if there is one thing right now that could be taken to be symbolic of this, then it is the appearance of all the magazines that have been flooding Germany for just about a year. One finds them everywhere, in every bookstore, even the good ones, in most reading halls, often even in very serious ones. They are spreading like pestilence. One publisher started, a few dozen followed and continue to follow suit. The magazine has become a concentrated sign of our times.6

5 Edlef Köppen, “The Magazine as a Sign of the Time” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 644.

6 Ibid., 644.

32

Interestingly, Köppen’s observation of society’s inability to give art proper contemplation pinpointed the motivation for an avant-garde eruption in the Weimar Republic.

Internalizing mass media’s burgeoning influx, these artists created deliberately critical, sociopolitical work that frequently depicted and/or repurposed materials of industry and mass production. Such practice constituted a movement that sought radical differentiation from art of the past in order to better represent the world in which they lived. This movement was Dada.

To return to the Höch’s interview with Roditi, she claimed that Berlin Dada was motivated by “wanting to be entirely different,”7 that their ultimate goal was to enable others to think critically, to question the effects of so-called modern advancement: “we were trying to point out that things could also be done differently and that many of our conventional ways of thinking, dressing, or reckoning are no less arbitrary than others which are generally accepted.”8 First formed by artist Hugo Ball (1886-1927) and his partner Emmy Hennings (1885-1948) in the politically-neutral city of Zurich during the midst of World War I, Dada attracted individuals who shared concern for society’s evolution, and hoped to promote change using artistic means. “Dada Fragments,” a lengthy text written by Ball, served as the founding manifesto for the movement, making claims such as

The Dadaist loves the extraordinary, the absurd, even. He knows that life asserts itself in contradictions, and that this age, more than any preceding it, aims at the destruction of all generous impulses… The Dadaist trust more in the sincerity of events than in the wit of persons. To him persons may be had cheaply, his

7 Hannah Höch interview with Edouard Roditit, More Dialogues on Art, 106.

8 Ibid., 107.

33

own person not excepted. He no longer believes in the comprehension of things from one point of departure, but is nevertheless convinced of the union of all things, of totality, to such an extent that he suffers from dissonances to the point of self-dissolution…9

Collage, photomontage, paintings, performance, photography, film, poetry, literature, and even readymades were all outlets for Dada announcement; however, Dada art was equally invested in dismissing traditional art if it constrained revolutionary power. In his historical memoir Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Berlin Dadaist Hans Richter explains that “This idea of putting people in a position to exploit their mental and physical energies in a spirit of unbounded optimism and faith in themselves—this was the idea behind the wild and exuberant antics of Dada. ‘To hell with art if it gets in the way!’”10

In 1917, artist and Zurich Dada supporter Richard Huelsenbeck introduced these beliefs to radical Berlin artists and writers whose work already aligned with such ideals:

John Heartfield,11 Wieland Herzfelde, Georg Grosz and Franz Jung were publishing the leftist political journal Neue Jugend (New Youth), while Raoul Hausmann, and Johannes

Baader published a journal of a similar accord entitled Die Freie Strasse (The Free

Street).12 On January 22, 1918, these artists came together at the Secession Gallery sponsored by avant-garde art dealer I. B. Neumann to listen to Huelsenbeck deliver

9 Hugo Ball, “Dada Fragments” in Art in Theory 1900-2000, 250-251.

10 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (London: Thames and Hudson World of Art, 1997), 113.

11 In an effort to sound more American, John Herzfelde changed his name to Heartfield. Both Grosz and Heartfield were very enthusiastic about the innovative spirit of American culture. Richter, 102.

12 Huelsenbeck would begin to also write for this publication upon his return to Berlin. Brigid Doherty, “Berlin Dada” in Dada, ed. Leah Dickerman (Washington, DC: National Gallery Press, 2006), 87.

34

“First Dada Speech in Germany.”13 In this speech, Huelsenbeck demanded a break from the modern art movements Expressionism, Futurism, and Cubism; these movements, he argued, reinforced bourgeois constraints that limited the potential of the proletariat, and inadequately portrayed the tone of modern society. Huelsenbeck then continued by triumphing the importance of the manifesto as the key written document through which Dada demands be communicated. In Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Richter described the deliverance of Huelsenbeck’s speech, and quoted his acclamation of the manifesto as the following:

There is one literary form into which we can compress much of what we think and feel: the manifesto… From the day the Cabaret Voltaire opened its doors, we read and wrote manifestos. We did not only read them, we spoke them as vociferously and defiantly as we could. The manifesto as a literary medium answered our need for directness.14

Huelsenbeck’s delivery of the “First Dada Speech in Germany” marked the formation of

Berlin Dada.

Brash, sarcastic, critical, exuberant, and angry, Dada aggressively confronted the realities of the Weimar Republic. Yet the group delivered their work in a paradoxical manner: Dadaists found alliance in council-like meetings, declared their agendas in manifestos, produced public performances, published journals, created propaganda posters, curated exhibitions.15 This radical group both developed and broadcasted their program of disdain for civilization using established social practices, and thereby challenged popular expectation in order to invite cultural critique. Albeit dissatisfied and

13 Ibid. 102.

14 Richter, 103.

15 Dickerman, 7-14.

35 preposterous, Dadaists were also nimble intellectuals whose talents pioneered new ground regarded as avant-garde for artists, writers, and performers of the twentieth century.

Berlin Dada was largely dominated by men, and consisted of the following participants: Richard Huelsenbeck (1892-1974), a writer who is attributed with bringing

Dada to Berlin from Zurich; Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971), a writer and artist highly- recognized for his contributions to the medium of photomontage; George Grosz (1893-

1959), a painter and cartoonist who was well known for his caricatures of politicians and military leaders, and frequently collaborated with John Heartfield on artworks and publications; John Heartfield (1891-1968), an artist who revolutionized the art of periodicals and political posters; Hans Richter (1888-1976) published a well-known historical memoir Dada: Art and Anti-Art (published in 1965) as well as created substantial paintings and experimental films; Johannes Baader (1875-1955), a writer and artist whose collages featured an ample amount of text and thus showcased his interested in both typography and fragmented poetry; Otto Dix (1891-1969) painted fiercely provocative paintings of the callous realities of warfare; Wieland Herzfelde

(1896-1988), a writer who published a Dada journal Neue Jugend (New Youth) with his brother John Heartfield; Rudolf Schlichter (1890-1955) and Georg Scholz (1890-1945), artists who also participated in the New Objectivity art movement and whose work depicted grim perspectives on everyday existence. Höch is known for being the only woman to participate in Berlin Dada. Infamously referred to in Richter’s Dada: Art and

Anti-Art text as a “lightweight” participant in the Berlin group, a “good girl” with a “small,

36 precise voice,”16 this personality description further emphasizes Höch’s difference within the Berlin Dada group, men who are frequently described as being overtly boisterous bordering on obnoxious.17

Only a few months after Huelsenbeck delivered of the “First Dada Speech in

Germany,” an official Berlin Dada presentation took place at the Secession Gallery on

April 12, 1918. Open to the public and marking the sixtieth birthday of Munich

Secession Gallery founder and Expressionist artist Lovis Corinth (1858-1925), this event was one marked by chaos, an evening where “the threat of violence hung in the air,” according to a newspaper reviewer for the Berliner Börsen-Courier.18 The gallery held a maximum capacity audience who was not expecting such dramatic, seemingly incomprehensible resurgence against established modern art movements, especially at the birthday celebration of an Expressionist. Performances included Grosz’s dance and recital of “Sincopations,” a jazz-inspired work that reflected the artist’s interest in

American culture, and Hausmann’s profession of “The New Material in Painting,” a manifesto that pronounced his exploration of medium specificity as visual language.

But perhaps the most noted performance of the evening was that delivered by

Huelsenbeck. Described by a journalist as a performance whose duration lasted for more than an hour and a half, Huelsenbeck orated “The First German Dada

Manifesto.”19 Through this text, the demand for a new art that stood against all that

16 Richter, 132.

17 Georg Grosz and Wieland Herzefelde, “Dadaism” in Dadas on Art: Tzara, Arp, Duchamp, and Others, ed. Lucy Lippard (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971), 86-88.

18 Doherty, 88.

19 Ibid, 88.

37 preceded, particularly Expressionism and Futurism, was pronounced. With written interjections such as, “No! No! No!” and, “Dada!!!!!,” Huelsenbeck’s writing style encapsulated the bombastic and vigorous energy of Dada that served to catapult art into a new, culturally representative direction. In this manifesto, Huelsenbeck states that

Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and the artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash… Has expressionism fulfilled our expectations of such an art, which should be expression of our most vital concerns? No! No! No! … Under the pretext of turning inward, the expressionists in literature and painting have banded together into a generation which is already looking forward to honorable mention in the histories of literature and art and aspiring to the most respectable civic distinctions. On pretext of carrying on propaganda for the soul, they have, in their struggle with naturalism, found their way back to the abstract, pathetic gestures which presuppose a comfortable life free from content of strife… Hatred of the press, hatred of advertising, hatred of sensations are typical of people who prefer their armchair to the noise of the street, and who even a point of pride to be swindled by every smalltime profiteer... The signers of this manifesto have, under the battle cry: Dada!!!!! Gathered together to put forward a new art, from which they expect the realization of new ideals. What then is DADAISM? The word Dada symbolizes the most primitive relation to the reality of the environment; with Dadaism a new reality comes into its own. Life appears as a simultaneous muddle of noises, colors, and spiritual rhythms, which is taken unmodified into Dadaist art… This is the sharp dividing line separating Dadaism from all artistic directions up until now…20

20 Huelsenbeck, 257-258.

38

The First German Dada Manifesto acknowledges a few problems with Expressionism that provide premise for Dada’s agenda. Finding fault in the “…pretext of turning inward… carrying on propaganda for the soul…” references Expressionism’s lack of acknowledgement to the happenings of the outside world. Because enormous shifts such as the catastrophes of World War I and the rise of industrialization were rapidly changing the face of Europe, Dadaists believed it necessary to create art that reflected these huge societal changes. An art movement such as Expressionism that focused on one’s thoughts, emotions, and spirituality whilst ignoring factors that physically altered everyday life seemed inadequate in terms of embodying the needs, desires, and realities of modern European society. Much of this problem lies in Expressionist art’s use of abstraction, imagery that offers little to no direct, and thereby readily-accessible, depictions of the external. As a result, abstraction was understood by Dada as being detached from the actual demands of modern society. Huelsenbeck’s criticism that

Expressionism’s “hatred of the press, hatred of advertising…” exemplifies the movement’s deficient ability to address and assess the evolution of culture. These mass media platforms were extensions of modernity’s sociopolitical evolution, direct ways in which the press, government, and big business could communicate with a populous as both informant and influence to societal behaviors. And yet Expressionism was a movement that anticipated “civic distinction.” Such an honor infuriated Dadaists not only because they perceived Expressionism as a movement unable to sufficiently capture the contemporary moment, but also because this award reinforced the

Expressionism’s desire for applause from the bourgeoisie.21

21 Ibid., 257-258.

39

Up until this point, “The First German Dada Manifesto” was premised on defining itself against art of the past. It is at the end of the discussion of Expressionism that

Dada is revealed as a word that “symbolizes the most primitive relation to the reality of the environment.” As the manifesto continues, Huelsenbeck outlines the ways in which

Dada stands on its own behalf. By giving an account of the poetry and paintings that

Dadaists create, Huelsenbeck explains how these media will offer new and more accurate reflections of current culture. This discussion then continues to address the social order of the group, and invites the public to partake in this movement.

Huelsenbeck writes that

Dadaism for the first time has ceased to take an aesthetic attitude toward life, and this it accomplishes by tearing all the slogans of ethics, culture, and inwardness, which were merely cloaks for weak muscles, into their components.

… Dada is a CLUB, founded in Berlin, which you can join without commitments. In this club every man is chairman and every man can have his say in artistic matters. Dada is not a pretext for the ambition of a few literary men (as our enemies would have you believe), Dada is a state of mind that can be revealed in any conversation whatever, so that you are compelled to say: this man is a DADAIST – that man is not… Blast the aesthetic-ethical attitude! Blast the bloodless abstraction of expressionism! Blast the literary hollowheads and their theories for improving the world! For Dadaism in word and image, for all the Dada things that go on in the world! To be against this manifesto is to be a Dadaist!22

In retaliation to Expressionism, Dada art will thus avoid depictions of “inwardness” by utilizing culture’s external production as a muse for their work: “Dadaism for the first time has ceased to take an aesthetic attitude toward life, and this it accomplishes by tearing all the slogans of ethics, culture, and inwardness, which were merely cloaks for

22 Ibid., 258-259.

40 weak muscles, into their components.”23 This statement determines that all facets of life are at the disposal of Dadaists. Their disinterest in “an aesthetic attitude toward life” provides for them a motive to depict art that will reflect honest observations of humanity regardless of how grim or uncomfortable it may make viewers. Dada identified the need to change the world by acknowledging modern evolution in both its successes and faults; it not only challenged the public’s expectation of art, but also channeled cultural production taking place at that point in time.

23 Ibid., 257-258.

41

CHAPTER 4 DADA MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY

Shortly after Dada was formed, the group mounted one of the most notorious exhibitions of the movement. Consisting of approximately 200 objects and shown from

June 30-August 25, 1920, the First International Dada Fair demonstrated resistance to traditional art exhibitions by employing contradiction as method for challenge and change. From curatorial decisions to posed marketing photos, the Fair was staged as a conventional art show within which classic perceptions of art were disrupted. For example, in his essay “The Dada Spirit in Painting” art historian Georges Hugnet notes that wall text accompanied artworks as is a common exhibition practice; however, he describes these texts as “insults and advice of which are negative and gratuitously subversive.” 1 The wall texts of the Fair differed greatly from typical texts that offer contextual information. An example such as Grosz and Heartfield’s proclamation that

“Art is dead, long live Tatlin’s machine art,” embraces the innovation of Tatlin’s constructivist, eminently modern portfolio whilst announcing the irrelevance of precedent movements. In doing this, Dadaists not only pushed inquiry regarding the purpose of art, but also interrogated the mode of production by which art is framed and consumed by the public. 2

A key idea explored by Berlin Dada was incorporating new technology into the production of art. Wieland Herzfelde calls for destruction to the “cult of art” in the introduction to the Fair’s catalogue, upholding the mechanized processes of

1 Georges Hugnet, “The Dada Spirit in Painting: Berlin” in Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), 148.

2 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Art in Theory, 495-496.

42 photography and film to be media that best reflects the contemporary moment.3 Rather than romanticize photography’s development process as an expressive act, Herzfelde’s interest lies in its real, anti-illusionist qualities. He argues that the photographic image is one that can truly be used to ignite radical change when he states that

Any product that is manufactured uninfluenced and unencumbered by public authorities and concepts of value is in and of itself Dadaist, as long as the means of presentation are anti-illusionistic, and proceed from the requirement to further the disfiguration of the contemporary world.4

But although Herzfelde’s catalog introduction upholds the modern merit of photographic imagery, it was not requisite for Berlin Dadaists to include this particular medium in their artwork. While great variance took place amongst the styles and media used by the artists, Dada found agreement in the allusion to modern technology. For example, in a press photograph for the exhibition, one can see the large-scale painting by Otto Dix hung on one of the gallery walls. Entitled War Cripples (1920) (Figure A-11), this work features soldiers marching home at the end of World War I, disfigured from serious battle wounds, and depicted in a caricature-like manner—a stark break from the realistic imagery produced by photography.5 Although painting is one of the most traditional forms of media in the visual arts, Dix brings direct representations of modern technology into this work by depicting his subjects with battle scars that necessitate the use of prosthetic intervention. The intermingling of the human body and technology is a theme that many Dadaists produced in their work as a way of reflecting the battle scars of

3 Doherty, 100.

4 Ibid, 100.

5 Dix’s War Cripples was seized by the Nazis as degenerate art. Although the painting is no longer in existence, prints of this work can still be found in collections throughout the world.

43

World War I. Some members in Berlin Dada had been soldiers, had participated first hand one of the most brutal wars the world had experienced. The widespread devastation that resulted from this combat was due largely in part to the stronger, harsher weaponry yielded by European militaries. George Grosz was one of the

Dadaists who partook in the fight despite his opposition to such event. In an essay entitled “Art is in Danger” co-written by Grosz and Herzfelde, Grosz explains that the emotional strain brought about by his solider experiences provided cause for his art stating that, “I drew and painted out of opposition and attempted in my work to present the world in all its ugliness, sickness, and untruthfulness.”6 But because art of past centuries did not grapple with problems resulted from modern advancement, Grosz and

Herzfelde hold conviction that “art is in danger,” and summarize their rationale in the conclusion of their essay when they write

the meaning, nature, and history of art are directly related to the meaning, nature, and history of society. The prerequisite for the perception and evolution of contemporary art is an intellect directed at the knowledge of facts and of correlation with real life and all its convulsions and tensions… Today’s artist, if he does not want to run down and become an antiquated dud, has the choice between technology and class warfare propaganda. In both cases he must give up “pure art.”7

Technology’s irreversible presence in contemporary society must forever be acknowledged, interrogated, and utilized in art in order for art to remain germane. Art which does not intervene with technology, regardless of its purpose, is rendered inadequate. This belief in the comingling of art and technology was fundamental to

Dada; it not only substantiated a break from art of the past, but it also corresponded to

6 Georg Grosz and Wieland Herzefelde, “Art is in Danger” in Dadas on Art, 80.

7 Ibid., 84-85.

44 an integral component of daily modern life--a basis for Dada’s infamous origination of anti-art.

One of the methods used by Berlin Dadaists to integrate art and technology was assemblage, as exemplified by a number of highlights from the First International Dada

Fair. Sculptural works such as John Heartfield and Rudolph Schlichter’s Prussian

Archangel (1920) (Figure A-12) repurpose a mannequin dummy by giving it the face of a pig, and adorning it with a Freikorps uniform. Suspended from the ceiling, Prussian

Archangel was exhibited with the claim that it is “Hanged by the Revolution,”8 a jesting reference to the deaths brought upon the Republic by the National Union party. George

Grosz and John Heartfield’s Middleclass Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild [Electro-

Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture] (1920) (Figure A-13) is another sculptural assemblage that comments on the modern world. With a body made from an old dress form, the figure utilizes a light bulb for a head, is ornamented with a breast plate and a gun, and stands with a prosthetic leg. This image conjures associations of the frivolousness of fashion and consumerism in its repurpose of found objects, as well as makes connections to violence and authoritative control with the gun, militant dress, and imitation limb. The

Philistine’s light bulb head takes notice of technology as it simultaneously provides humor with a bright idea pun. Middleclass Philistine presents a nice contrast to another collaborative work made by Grosz and Heartfield, a photomontage entitled The

Worlddada Richard Huelsenbeck (1919) (Figure A-14). The imagery of this composition is very clean—a work on paper, the primary focus is a suit with “Dada” proclamations streaming from the opening of the clothing. Unlike the Philistine, this work contains no actual body; the figure (implied to be Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck) is reduced to suit

8 Richter, 133.

45 anonymity, the uniform of the professional world. As Hugnet explains in his assessment of Berlin Dada, much of the group’s strength did not necessarily lie in the draftsmanship of the artists. Rather, it was the underlying messages and intellectual merits of the work that provided them with the greatest power. In a discussion of the collaboration between Grosz and Heartfield, Hugnet writes that, “The (artistic) talent which Grosz may or may not have had—and the same is true of Heartfield—is secondary to the moral intent implicit in his work. All German plastic production must be considered in this light.”9 Also illustrated by these examples is the aspect of collaboration; Berlin Dada was an art movement, a group whose individual and cooperative efforts were equally important to its impact. While Höch’s solo efforts saw her production of great work, she too created work in conjunction with other Dadaists, most particularly Raoul Hausmann whom she described as “the artist who, among the early Berlin Dadaists, was gifted with the greatest fantasy and inventiveness… a restless spirit.”10

In a press photograph taken for the First International Dada Fair (Figure A-15),

Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch pose side by side in front of their work. Höch leans her weight on a cane as she looks over Hausmann’s shoulder at a publication, while

Hausmann, dressed in a hounds tooth hat and monocle, looks across the room. For seven years, Hausmann and Höch were a romantic couple who received much attention throughout their relationship. Although Hausmann was married with a daughter during the entire course of his relationship with Höch, he was very open and public with their courtship. The two artists collaborated on works, and have proclaimed recognition for

9 Hugnet,149.

10 Hannah Höch interview with Edouard Roditit, More Dialogues on Art, 103.

46 their “discovery” of photomontage.11 Hausmann is credited with introducing Höch to

Dada, an introduction that was not warmly welcomed by other artists in the group.

Opposed by Heartfield and Grosz, Höch’s inclusion in the First International Dada Fair was approved only after Hausmann refused to show his work if Höch was omitted.12

Of the works pictured in this photograph of the couple, Hausmann’s Tatlin at

Home (1920) (Figure A-16) and A Bourgeois Precision Brain Incites a World Movement

(1920) (Figure A-17) provide excellent examples of Dada photomontage. These works are composed of images cut from periodicals, juxtaposed to create imagery that elicits reflection on the political, socioeconomic affairs of the Republic while also demonstrating an interest in technology. Hausmann melds together human forms with machines, offering a visual commentary on man’s persistent reliance ontechnology.

The central image of Tatlin at Home features a headshot of Vladimir Tatlin (1818-1953),

Russian avant-garde artist know for his purely abstract, streamline constructions barren of ornamentation and made of industrialized metals. An inspiration to Dadaists for his embrace of modernity, Tatlin is depicted by Hausmann in this photomontage with a gear-heavy machine atop his head, giving the impression that his mind is mechanically- driven, thus rendering technology as muse for his artwork.

Hausmann draws a connection to the driving force of the mass media, consumerism, and finance in A Bourgeois with his inclusion of typewriter and cash register images—machines that direct economic activity. Hausmann adheres his photograph in the work, staring out from the picture plane wearing trousers, an overcoat, and a fedora as he stands centrally on the image’s surface. Also pictured in A

11 Makela, 59.

12 Lavin, 16-18.

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Bourgeois is a map of the world, the word “DADA” sprawled across its breadth in announcement of the movement’s international relevance. Such tactic aligns well with the determined assertions delivered by Dadaists in manifestoes and performances in the effort to expand their support.

The Berlin Dadaists put forth great effort to publicize this exhibition not only throughout the Weimar Republic, but to the entire world.13 Thanks to this effort, the attention received for the Dada Fair was a success—reviews of the exhibition appeared in newspapers of major cities beyond Europe, with images of the work accompanying many of the articles.14 Although the press was talking about Dada, the remarks were not necessarily of the most flattering kind; like the negative impressions of the April 12th performance, so too did this exhibition stir mixed reaction.15 Anticipating a negative critical reaction from the press, Raoul Hausmann wrote a comical “review” of the First

International Dada Fair entitled “A Dadasoph’s Opinion of What Art Criticism Will Say about the Dada Exhibition.” Proclaiming that the exhibition is “not worth a visit”,

Hausmann’s short critique unfolds in a slew of insults that attack both the artwork and the artists. “Unoriginal,” “talentless,” “snobby,” “fashionable,” “foolish nonsense”—

Hausmann showed no mercy in his belligerent denunciation of the show.16 And while he was merely making jest of the attention he was expecting to receive, Hausmann’s “A

Dadasoph’s Opinion” also reads as a manifesto-like declaration of the exhibition’s

13 Doherty, 100.

14 Ibid., 100.

15 Ibid., 100.

16 Raoul Hausmann, “A Dadasohp’s Opinion of What Art Criticism Will Say about the Dada Exhibition” in Dada’s on Art, 58.

48 purpose—here he enlists criticism as a means to announce the radical artwork being exhibited. Through this posed criticism, Hausmann also produces a platform upon which he is able to expound the mission of Dada, writing that

While Germany is trembling and shaking in a governmental crisis of unforeseeable duration, while the meeting in Spaa (Sparta) pushes our future fate further and further into uncertainty—these boys come along making wretched trivialities out of rags, trash, and garbage. Such a decadent group, showing no ability at all and lacking in serious intent, has seldom appeared so boldly in public, as these dadas dare to. They don’t surprise anyone anymore… Oh Grünewald, Dürer, and you other great Germans, what would you say about it?17

Hausmann’s call for opinion from German art masters employs sarcasm in its channeling of popular public opinion firmly loyal to a specific idea of what great art should be. The Dada method of “making wretched trivialities out of rags, trash, and garbage” ridicules assemblage for its surface value; yet this opinion completely neglects to understand social critique inherent in the work. In 1918, Huelsenbeck highlights that photomontage was employed by Dada artists in order to communicate the “conscious content” of present-day problems, and thus exhibit art that comprehends “all the slogans of ethics, culture, and inwardness… into their components.”18

As has been discussed in Cut with the Kitchen Knife, the “conscious content” of

Höch’s photomontages engaged specifically with gender in the Weimar Republic. She composed a number of photomontages that explored a political side of femininity, the ways in which female identity was calculated by the mass media, and the repercussions such projections created for women. In the essay “Grotesque Bodies: Weimar-era

17 Ibid., 58.

18 Huelsenbeck, 257-258.

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Medicine and the photomontages of Hannah Höch”,19 Maria Makela explores the ways in which Höch combated mass media beauty standards through the dissection of the human form in her photomontages. Although the earliest works that this essay addresses were completed in 1925, three years after the Dada movement disbanded, the premise of Makela’s argument is equally relevant to compositions completed during the Dada years. Her essay addresses the idealization of the human form as it relates to the rise in plastic surgery that took place during the Weimar era. The growth of these surgeries was due both to societal demand for youthful beauty, and to the dramatic number of individuals who had experienced catastrophic injuries from World War I combat. Makela asserts that Höch’s artistic motivations stem from mass media’s influence of body idealization, claiming that

many of Höch’s Weimar-era photomontages responded to contemporary medical discourse about the body, as presented in both the mass media and elsewhere. Widely perceived as something that could be shaped, molded, even profoundly altered to conform to the widespread norms of the period, the body and its various functions took front and center stage in the Weimar era.20

In her photomontages, Höch appropriates and dissects mass representations of the idealized female form in order to provide them with a new context. During the

(re)assembly process, Höch’s figures are fragmented, and thereby posit a semiotic technique in which supposedly disassociated areas of modern culture are interconnected. Höch’s methods of appropriation and fragmentation establish critique by enabling her the agency to mimic marketing tactics.

19 Maria Makela, “Grotesque Bodies: Weimar-Era Medicine and the Photomontages of Hannah Höch,” in Modern Art and the Grotesque (Kansas City: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 193-219.

20 Makela, 198.

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Expanding on this position, Matthew Biro introduces the idea of Höch’s photomontage subjects as cyborgs. In an essay entitled “Hannah Höch’s New Woman:

Photomontage, Distraction, and Visual Literacy in the Weimar Republic”, Biro discusses the representation of the New Woman as an “interrogation of modern identity.”21 He claims that the recalculation of female as cyborg (part human, part machine) identifies the growth of industrialization to be reflective of humanity’s de-evolution; Höch’s photomontages operate similarly to the mass media. Biro explains this stance when he writes

In many ways, Höch’s girl cyborg follows the traditional forms of allegory in that it seems to present an embodied representation of an abstract concept or quality, in this case the new ideas about beauty created by the growth of commodity culture and spectacle during the early years of the Weimar Republic. Like traditional allegorical emblems, the cyborg’s photomontage attributes… can be read and enumerated. Here, because they are represented by means of idealized depictions appropriated from the mass media, these signs of desire—namely of beauty, sport, sexuality, travel, and status—are all shown to exist as different types of manufactured products. And because they reveal the commodification of even the most intimate aspects of human existence, they also function as indicators of anxiety, a connotation that is reinforced by Höch’s photomontage technique, which is characterized by disturbing physical and spatial disjunctions.22

The relentlessly transmitted idealized female form is a commodity; therefore, the subjects of Höch’s compositions reflect an anxiety experienced by women generated by the spread of commodity culture. When Höch cuts up and repositions these images to form an original composition, she manipulates the female form to appear attractive yet

21 Mathew Biro, “Hannah Höch’s New Woman: Photomontage, Distraction, and Visual Literacy in the Weimar Republic” from The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s, 115.

22 Ibid, 118.

51 contrary to the representation of beauty viewers have been trained to anticipate. Das schöne Mädchen (The Beautiful Girl) (1919-1920) (Figure A-18) is an excellent example of this cyborgian construction.

The Beautiful Girl emphasizes branding as director for consumption. On what appears to be the first layer of this work, a number of BMW logos are randomly juxtaposed across the right side of the picture plane. Circular in shape, these logos are shown in a variety of sizes, their irregular positioning reminiscent of a collection of coins newly released from a piggy bank now splayed across a table’s surface. The BMW logo positioned at the highest point on this composition slightly covers the face of an unidentifiable woman with cropped blonde hair. Her mouth, most of her nose, and the right side of her face are completely covered by the yellow, black and blue bruise of the logo, while the left eye of this face has been replaced by an eye cut from another photograph much too large for the head upon which it now rests. The effect is quite unnerving, as though a one is being creepily stared down by an eye magnified beyond recognition. To the left of this sits a puffy woman’s wig, the form upon which it rests is completely filled by an advertisement placed abstractly within the composition. Such an effect taunts viewers to stare at this image, as though one may win a prize if able to correctly identify the original advertisement solicited for The Beautiful Girl. The recognition of this “face’s” original image is also hindered by a large light bulb placed directly upon the head. Its positioning mirrors that of the previously-described face located at the top right of the composition. The light bulb, both a symbol for a brilliant idea and the beginning of the industrial world, is reminiscent of Heartfield and Grosz’s previously mentioned work The Middle-Class Philistine. Further supporting this allusion

52 to industry is a large, heavy, metallic gear whose repetitive rotation overpowers human endurance. And yet a human is precisely the next image that Höch affixes to this composition. A woman fashioned in a black swimming costume sits as her healthy legs drape over the edge of the seat, crossed at the ankles in a carefree yet ladylike manner.

With a parasol slung over her left shoulder, the woman reaches her right arm above her head in a pose that omits a lighthearted air implied solely by body language. The facial expression of this woman is absent, for her head is completely replaced with the light bulb that blocks the “face” of the wig-wearing bust. The position of the light bulb and face offers visual correlation to the BMW logo that blocks the large-eyed face previously discussed. Another faceless person is adhered to the left corner of the work. American boxer Jack Johnson shirtless and armed in mitts stands prepared to knock the woman in swimwear out of her seat.23 She is an easy target; having no eyes of her own this woman is unable to see the approaching punch and move from its impact. Even if she could wither the blow, a return punch would be met by no resistance as Johnson’s face has been completely cut from his head leaving behind nothing but a black hole. The final aspect of The Beautiful Girl is a human hand that protrudes from behind the woman’s wig, and clutches a dangling pocket watch. The watch elicits a mechanical tick-tock sound, each pulse a pestering reminder of time’s insouciance for youth’s brief span.

The Beautiful Girl presents an all-encompassing context for the production of beauty in the modern world. By removing the faces of the work’s figures and replacing them with marketing imagery, Höch is making a bold, dehumanizing maneuver that testifies to the relationship of commodity and beauty. Absent from this work is any

23 Makela, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, 34.

53 semblance of nature; rather, it is a photomontage of manufactured runoff suggests that prized beauty can be produced for and purchased by the interested public. Biro relates to his theory of subject as cyborg to this work, concluding that

one could imagine the beautiful cyborg’s consciousness being left behind as she explores physical pleasure and consumption in the modern world. No longer the figure in control, she is, instead, a passive and gullible consumer, a woman seduced by a field of attractive but ultimately two- dimensional images.24

This assessment relieves the beautiful subject of responsibility from exploitation.

Because she is no longer a true human, it is expected that she gravitate toward material consumption, and feed the need for mechanized stuff. The negation of a pure beauty is a compromise that no longer interests the cyborg. But does this negation interest

Höch?

Composed of images that identify branding, manufacturing, and advertising tools,

Höch’s The Beautiful Girl alludes to an environment in which beauty is constructed and sold. As a result, those who buy into this scheme demonstrate naivety in their consumption. This is implied by Höch’s selection of the term “girl” rather than “woman” in this work’s title, a maneuver that also refers to the privileging of youth as premise for beauty’s ideal. Yet, in this composition Höch reestablishes control over the situation by showcasing her critique of marketing tactics and their effects. But this is not to assume that Höch was wholly against the beauty mechanism in popular culture. Höch’s work highlights its contradictions; even if one is fully aware of beauty consumption’s detrimental repercussions, to deny its element of allure is short sighted.

24 Biro, 118.

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In 1931, seven years after Berlin Dada’s disbandment, Hausmann presented a lecture in which he discussed the origins and purpose of photomontage. He states that traditional and Expressionist art’s perceived “non-objectivity and absence of convictions” provided motivation for Dadaists to create work that better reflected the environment in which they lived, for the Berlin Dadaists believed artists and art

needed a fundamental and revolutionary change, in order to remain in touch with the life of their epoch. The members of Club Dada were naturally not interested in elaborating new aesthetic rules… But the idea of photomontage was as revolutionary as its content, its form as subversive as the application of the photograph and printed texts which, together, are transformed into static film.25

In an effort to mimic a response generated by film, photomontage frequently combines text and image to grab viewers’ attention, and communicate to them in a manner similar to print advertisements. As this chapter has aimed to prove, images can be very powerful tools; the meaning of a work can often extend beyond its surface representations, and produce numerous cognitive and/or emotional responses within viewers. An additional inclusion of text can affirm, strengthen, or challenge an image’s presumed message. Dada photomontage implies such correspondence, and employs tactics of subversion in order to elicit shock-like responses through unexpected image/text juxtaposition. Although Hausmann states in his lecture that Dadaists were

“not interested in elaborating new aesthetic rules,” one can see in the examples mentioned throughout this chapter that, while each artist offered unique modes of compositional orchestration, a persistent logic informed their creative methods.

Dadaists conveyed ideas that addressed their “epoch” largely because they

25 Dawn Ades, “The Supremacy of the Message” in Photomontage (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), 24.

55 appropriated everyday materials to create art; therefore, a work composed of recognizable elements immediately grabs hold of one’s notice most simply because a relationship has already transpired between viewer and object/image. Thus when a collection of seemingly-unrelated parts are unified, the result may be puzzling due to the unfamiliar setting newly-created for the work. It is this puzzled reaction that Dadaists desired; such response requires deliberate concentration from viewers to piece together parts in search of coherency. Dada photomontage is effective in its transmission of ideas because it assumes and utilizes common knowledge, only to upset such understanding through reconfigured associations. This process prompts one to think critically of the world in which they live by transforming the meaning of an image’s original purpose. In the same lecture delivered by Hausmann in 1931, he declares this intention when he states that, “(Dadaists) were the first to use photography as material to create, with the aid of structures that were very different, often anomalous and with antagonistic significance, a new entity which tore from the chaos of war and revolution an entirely new image…”26 Höch’s Tailor’s Flower, while informed by this rhetoric, differs profoundly from the aggressive images associated with Berlin Dada, and thus reveals differences between her approach to the medium and that of her contemporaries.

26 Ibid., 24.

56

CHAPTER 5 PHOTOMONTAGE VERSUS COLLAGE

In 1971, Höch composed a brief reflective essay entitled “On Collage” in which she mused over how this medium generates meaning. She defines collage not as a finished work, but as a method, stating that it is “the process of remounting, cutting up, sticking down…”1 This practice stems from an idea developed by artists Pablo Picasso

(1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) less than ten years prior to the creation of her first Dada photomontages. Picasso and Braque introduced what they referred to as papier collé to Cubist painting in 1912 when they assimilated fragmented, ephemeral materials into works such as Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) (Figure A-19), and Braque’s Fruit Dish (1912) (Figure A-20). Strips of newspaper, rope, wood grain wallpaper, and stray pages of sheet music are but a few examples of seemingly stray materials that began to be incorporated onto the surfaces of Cubist images. In an effort to interrogate the idea of art’s parameters, the use of these materials brought new lines of inquiry to traditional art media—does art have to restrict itself to total removal from materials that inform daily activity? And, is it possible for materials to maintain purposes for which they are not intended? Picasso has stated that his intention for such media exploration was to

give the idea that different textures can enter into a composition to become the reality in the painting that competes with the reality in nature. We (Picasso and Braque) tried to get rid of the ‘trompe l’oeil’ to find a ‘trompe l’esprit’… If a piece of newspaper can become a bottle, that gives us something to think about in connection with both newspapers and bottles, too. The displaced object has entered a universe for which it was not made and for where it retains, in a measure, its strangeness. And this

1 Hannah Höch, “On Collage” in Hannah Höch, 16

57

strangeness was what we wanted to make people think about because we were quite aware that our world was becoming very strange and not exactly reassuring.2

Picasso’s statement describes the visual fusion that takes place between the materials in his collages. The papier collé marks recognition of displacement, of putting materials into environments for which they were not intended in order to create an unexpected relationship within the work. While both he and Braque claimed that papier collé also enabled them the ability to bring color back to Cubism,3 the material overlap functions to introduce everyday life to art.

Art historian Christine Poggi highlights in her 1992 essay “Collage and the

Modernist Tradition” that the blending of traditional art and appropriated materials in

Cubist collages generates nostalgia for separation between these two elements. This is due to the popular belief that art is a sign of originality, creative work completed by the human hand that cannot be reproduced. Papier collé disrupts the notion that art as material object is unique, and therefore superior to mass production, through the incorporation of mechanically reproduced materials into a work. Poggi explains that

Within the development of Cubism, the notion that works of art are constituted by the manipulation of iterable signs rather than from original, unique gestures culminated in collage, a compositional technique that calls attention to the diverse origins of the disparate elements affixed to a particular surface… within the context of early twentieth- century painting, to substitute ready-made elements for the indexical traces of the hand, as Picasso did in his first series of collages, is to demonstrate the impersonal, conventional aspects of personal expression. Moreover, because these elements were drawn from the familiar realm of mass-

2 Pablo Picasso in Marjorie Perloff’s “The Invention of Collage,” in Collage, (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1983), 5.

3 Christine Poggi, “The Invention of Collage, Papier Collé, Constructed Sculpture, and Free-Word Poetry,” in In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 12-14.

58

culture, they provoke a reevaluation of the attempt to found the authenticity of painting on its difference from popular cultural artifacts.

The distinction between art and mass production is challenged by the collage. And, as

Poggi argues, the understanding that art’s originality opposes mass production’s accessibility becomes null upon the surface of collage. This was the result of what

Poggi argued to be Picasso and Braque’s “attack on modernist purity and autonomy.”

She further explains this stance when she writes

(Picasso and Braque’s) attack on modernist purity and autonomy was the result of a broader challenge to the mythical aura of painting and sculpture and to the notion that these media constituted eternal forms of expression devoted to the revelation of truth, whether of the object represented or of the work of art as object. Everywhere that the modernist tradition sought a sense of necessity or certainty, the Cubists substituted the ambiguous fragment, the formal paradox, the opposition of conflicting signs. The homogenous, unified field of representation was thereby ruptured and opened to a different process of cultural exchange, one in which the signs of fine arts and those of popular culture proved to be of equal value.4

The invention of papier collé interrogated the cause and effect dynamic between the fine arts and the consumption of mass produced goods. As has been previously discussed, this relationship was also one that was examined by the Berlin Dada; however, a major distinction between the collages of the Cubists and the photomontages of the Dadaists lies in the use of technology. Whereas Cubism engaged in a discourse that examined continuity between the fine arts and consumer materials, the Dadaists sought ways for technology to source artistic media.

Furthermore, while the appropriation of discarded consumer materials into a Dada work

4 Christine Poggi, “Collage and the Modernist Tradition,” in In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage, 256.

59 maintained a social critique rooted in the Cubist “attack on modernist purity,” it branches away from this idea in its challenge to modern art’s failure to confront the politics, economics, and ethics of contemporary society.

Roditi observes in his interview with Höch that “collages of the earlier Paris

Cubists, where a piece of newspaper in a painted still life represents a newspaper, or has been inserted for its nature, like any other artist’s material…” does not show interest in prompting social criticism.5 In agreement with Roditi’s position, Höch determines that the agenda for Berlin Dadaists was to not only physically include non-art materials, but also allow this process to generate inquiry that concerns how the materials of human production reflect Weimar culture. Höch explains of Berlin Dada photomontage that

our whole purpose was to interrogate objects from the world of machines and industry in the world of art. Our typographical collages or montages set out to achieve this by imposing, on something which could only be produced by hand, the appearances of something that had been entirely composed by a machine; in an imaginative composition, we used to bring together elements borrowed from books, newspapers, posters, or leaflets, in an arrangement that no machine could yet compose.6

Although there is debate between Dadaists in regards to who invented the practice of photomontage,7 concord is found in their sociopolitical agenda for photomontage.

In her historical assessment of photomontage, modernist scholar Dawn Ades attributes the Berlin Dadaists—most particularly John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann,

Georg Grosz, and Hannah Höch—to be a group that greatly influenced the rapid momentum of its popularity. She also notes that the positions of photomontage were

5 Edouard Roditi interview with Hannah Höch, More Dialogues on Art, 102.

6 Hannah Höch interview with Edouard Roditi, More Dialogues on Art, 101.

7 Raoul Hausmann, “New Painting and Photomontage” in Dada’s on Art, 59-66.

60 laid out by this group in an effort to articulate its difference from collage. Ades writes that, “When Dada photomontage was invented, it was within the context of, although in opposition to, collage. The name was chosen, clearly, to distance the two activities.”8

Yet it is important to note that Cubist collage was not the only type of collage exhibited at this point in time. Futurism also developed its own direction for collage media, as did

Dadaist living in cities aside from Berlin. Jean (also known as Hans) Arp (1886-1966), a participant in the Cabaret Voltaire and primary member of Zurich Dada, began to take up methods of collage in his creation of paper and fabric works such as Untitled

(Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance) (1916-1917) (Figure

A-21). Featuring bold, solid squares arranged in irregular patterns, Arp writes that his intention with collage was motivated by an interest opposite from Braque and Picasso’s papier collés. Arp created simple form artworks that maintained independent realities free from outside context, stating of his collages that

These pictures are Realities in themselves, without meaning or cerebral intentions. We rejected everything that was a copy or description, and allowed the Elementary and Spontaneous to react in full freedom. Since the disposition of planes, and the proportions of colors of these planes seemed to depend purely on chance, I declared that these works, like nature, were ordered “according to the law of chance,” chance being for me merely a limited part of an unfathomable raison d’être, of an order inaccessible in its totality.9

It is here that Arp unintentionally articulates a distinction between collage and photomontage: his collages were created in an effort to convey feelings of spontaneity, and avoid overly-analytical imagery.

8 Dawn Ades, introduction to Photomontage,15.

9 Jean Arp, “Dadaland” in Dada’s on Art, 24.

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Yet, as articulated by Ades in her discussion of Berlin Dada, photomontage was

“invented… within the context of, although in opposition to, collage.” Counter to Arp’s work, Berlin Dada photomontage assumes that prior to integration, the materials were first created to perform a specific function. Removal from original context may create new meaning, as a spatial correlation also occurs in which viewers are prompted to critique relationships between original and newly-constructed contexts. Photomontage also enabled artists to uphold their support for the artistic advancement of photographic technologies. “The photomontage,” Hausmann writes in his 1958 essay “New Painting and Photomontage”, “allows the elaboration of the most dialectical formulas, because of its opposing structures and dimensions… The technique of photomontage is visibly simplified in proportion to its range of application.”10 Appropriated photographic imagery drawn from mass media sources, when repurposed creates compositions whose messages are often wholly different from their parts’ original intents. This transposition generates a new context that does not necessarily negate its initial purpose. “Dada art,”

Hausmann writes, “will offer (Cubism) enormous refreshment, an impetus toward the perception of all relations.”11 The term “photomontage” readily addresses the intervention of technology to the medium. Unlike collage which can be composed of appropriated materials of any form, photomontage directly connects to photography, and thus also decidedly subsumes the history and practice of this medium. Höch expounds upon this idea in her 1934 essay “A Few Words on Photomontage” first published in the Czech journal Stredisko (Center), writing that

10 Hausmann, 65.

11 Ibid., 60.

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Photomontage is based on photography and has developed from photography… When, in 1919, the Dadaists grasped the possibility of forming new shapes and new works through photography and made their aggressive photomontages… (it was because) photography itself revived this genre. This rebirth was due, in the first place, to the high level of quality photography has achieved; second, to film; and third, to reportage which has proliferated immensely. For decades, photo journalism has used photographs cut up very modestly but quite consciously, and often pasted on parts of photographs whenever it felt the need to do so.12

The influence of the press in Weimar was, as previously mentioned, enormously influential in its ability to relay to widespread populations specific ideas procured as factual information. But, as Höch has mentioned in her essay, photographic images that circulate in mass media are highly edited, laid out to present a message that might bear no relation to the complex realities of any given historical moment.

Photomontage’s procedure of ripping images out of context and reconstituting their relationships anew allow for the full chaos, dynamic energies, and social and political tensions to surface. Like the media’s manipulation of presented truths, so too does the process of photomontage employ editing practices that reconfigure images in order to generate stronger visual affect.

Höch’s Tailor’s Flower is a collage that was created during the start of Berlin

Dada’s photomontage development. And although the photographic imagery in this work is limited to a small, single, central photograph of a flower, critical ideas manifest in

Dada photomontage are also applicable to this composition. Arranged in portrait orientation and measuring roughly 20 ¼ x 17 ¼ inches, Tailor’s Flower is work on paper composed primarily of printed sewing patterns. The foundation is a rectangular

12 Hannah Höch,” A Few Words on Photomontage” in Hannah Höch, 141.

63 embroidery grid whose size is approximately three-quarters of its paper’s entirety, neatly centered and bordered around all edges by a blank margin. This grid is composed of numerous, small square outlines whose original intentions are to help with the planning and placement of embroidery design. It is upon this grid that Höch situates the second component of her work—the collage of abstracted sewing patterns. The presentation of this collage offers an element of humor, as though these stitch guides are intended to utilize the grid upon which they reside. Höch brings a great amount of variety in the type of stitches that she uses for this work, an assortment of dash, cross, and chain illustrations that would demand a mixture of technique to complete the presumed garment. And when this article is sewn to completion, Höch provides viewers with suggested embellishment to complete its styling—a photographic reproduction of a pink azalea adhered just shy of the work’s center, and teasing the classification of photomontage. Signifying the completion of Tailor’s Flower, Höch signs the lower right area of the work with her initials, date, and title just below the grid’s ledge. But Tailor’s

Flower extends beyond its paper parameters; Höch also created a frame specific for this work in which the aspects of collage are extended onto its surface. Like most framed works, Tailor’s Flower is surrounded by a mat (a cream hue that compliment its natural tones) encased in a wood frame. Adhered to the surface of the frame is a border of zippers, beside which lies a path of alternating clothing snaps and fasteners. Such ornamentation communicates to viewers a sense of homage to the art of sewing, while also resourcing methods of Dada technique.

Although text is absent and photographic imagery is minimal in Tailor’s Flower,

Höch is still able to convey the belief that a composite image made from various other

64 images can express multiple meanings via connotations that occur both on and off the picture plane. In return to the essay “On Collage,” Höch reflects upon the process and effects of photomontage when she writes

This wide range of uses for photographs led to a new form of compressed utterance. Photomontage. This term was later subsumed in ‘collage.’ It means: stuck down, adjoining. The process of remounting, cutting up, sticking down, activating—that is to say, alienating—took hold in all different forms of art… There are no limits to the materials available for pictorial collages—above all they can be found in photography, but also in writing and printed matter, even in waste products... But complicated thought processes can also be communicated by this means… In the visual arts (collage) predominantly refers to a newly created entity, made from alienating components.13

Here the physical process of making a collage—the cutting, the adhering, the compiling of materials from an array of sources—is described in an effort to explain how new work is generated from various materials. Tailor’s Flower contains three layers of appropriated paper materials: the foundation consists of an embroidery grid, followed by an abstract line design showcasing an array of sewing stitch techniques, with a small, central photograph of a pink azalea atop the abstraction. Collage is further incorporated onto the work’s frame as zippers, snaps, and clasps adorn the exterior border of the mat. And yet, it is important to note Höch’s use of the term “alienating,” a term that alludes to “awakening,” in “On Collage.” Höch’s description of the collage process emphasizes the artist’s act of sifting through produced materials, and singling out specific objects for their formal, symbolic, and/or representational qualities useful for a composition. This effort to create rapport among materials simultaneously produces an

13 Höch, “On Collage,” 16.

65 opposed effect in which the sum of a work’s materials also emphasize their solidarity or purpose prior to incorporation into the work. Through this process, the alienation of the materials, or editing and repurposing for different use, also brings to them a new vitality.

Höch explains this point further when she makes a comparison between the collage process in visual art and music, stating that

In music we find this alienation when new, or also older, creations are enriched by means of some other sound- producing objects. When external additions are built in, sequences of alien sounds, for instance. But Beethoven too, in his greatest instrumental composition, his Ninth Symphony, suddenly allowed the human voice to be heard…14

It is when a collection of outside elements are brought together through human intervention to form new work that this alienating process potentially inspires an awaken response from within. Such a reaction is a type of reflective, even spiritual experience.

As examples of her writings have proven, Höch was an artist who maintained a belief that art can provide a link to emotions. This idea was at the core of artist Wassily

Kandinsky’s (1866-1944) work.

An artist dismissed by many Berlin Dadaists, their attack against Expressionism believed that the “abstract, pathetic” gestures of this movement offered no direct relation to the realities of the outside world. Höch, however, maintained appreciation for art that did not fit the Dada ideal. As noted in his description of Höch in the memoir Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Richter describes Höch to be one who stood up for her artistic principles despite the conflicts it held with the Berlin Dadaists. Richter writes that

But how did Hannah Höch, a quiet girl from the little town of Gotha… come to be involved in the decidedly unquiet Berlin Dada movement? At the first Dada shows in Berlin she only

14Ibid.,, 16.

66

contributed collages. Her tiny voice would have only been drowned by the roars of her masculine colleagues. But when she came to preside over gatherings in Hausmann’s studio she quickly made herself indispensible, both for the sharp contrast between her slightly nun-like grace and the heavyweight challenge presented by her mentor… On such evenings she was able to make her small, precise voice heard. When Hausmann proclaimed the doctrine of anti-art, she spoke up for art and for Hannah Höch. A good girl.15

This passage highlights Richter’s observation of Höch’s artistic conviction. Although she made herself “indispensable” to the Berlin Dada group, she also voiced concerns that differed from those of her contemporaries. The abstract imagery in Tailor’s Flower offers an example of how Höch’s formative engagement with Expressionism persists in her own work.

15 Richter, 132.

67

CHAPTER 6 AN EXPRESSIONIST INFLUENCE

In addition to creating hundreds of artworks, Höch also saved an amassed collection of letters, journal entries, and exhibition catalogs throughout the course of her life that offer insight to her artistic inspiration. An anthology entitled Hannah Höch: Eine

Lebenscollage (Hannah Höch: A Life’s Collage) has published a portion of these various materials from her archive, and prove Höch’s interest in Expressionism prior to and during her participation in Berlin Dada.1 One of the materials included in this collection is a copy of the 1912 journal Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), published by famed

Berlin art gallery Der Sturm (The Storm). Featuring illustrations and critical essays by

Expressionists Wassily Kandinsky (1900-1900) and Franz Marc (1900-1900), this publication subtitled Über das Kunstverstehen (About the Understanding of Art) contains Höch’s reading comments for key passages. Near the title page of the publication, a message from Höch to a family member states that this is a “good read,” and requests that it be shared with her father.2 Further into the catalog, Höch has underlined passages from essays that outline claims for art’s spiritual connection. One of the statements underlined by Höch was written by Kandinsky, and denotes what he identifies as “two old, eternal laws that govern the spiritual world”:

1. The fear of the new, the hatred of non-experience 2. The hasty inclination to end new, non-experience3

An artist committed to exploring a connection between art and the human character,

Kandinsky dedicated his career to examining ways in which form and color provide a

1 Hannah Höch, Hannah Höch: Eine Lebenccollage (Archiv-Edition) (Hannah Höch: A Life’s Collage (Archive Edition)) (Berlin: Argon Verlag, Berlinische Galerie, 1989).

2 Höch, Eine Lebencollage, 84.

3 Ibid., 84.

68 path for understanding man’s “internal truth.”4 Both Kandinsky’s and Marc’s ideas informed the art movement Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). Professing the idea that art provided an avenue for “spiritual awakening,” Der Blaue Reiter supported experimental art, music, and writing to be showcased in exhibitions and published in the group’s Almanac.5 In the preface for their publication, Kandinsky and Marc introduce their program by recognizing great changes taking place in society and art at this point in history. Kandinsky and Marc write that

A great era is beginning by this time and has begun: the spiritual ”awakening,” the emerging inclination to regain “lost balance,” the inevitable necessity of spiritual cultivation, the unfolding of first blossoms. We are standing at the threshold of one of the greatest epochs that mankind has ever experienced, the epoch of Great Spirituality… Our first and most important goal is to reflect artistic events directly connected with this change and the facts needed to shed light on these events…6

Unlike other artists’ groups, Der Blaue Reiter was not interested in establishing a communal style or technique for their work; rather, Kandinsky and Marc desired to exhibit artistic contrasts that showcased variety and practice among artists of non- traditional backgrounds.7 Höch’s notation in About the Understanding of Art proves her interest in Kandinsky’s theories and artwork, which she viewed at Der Sturm.

4 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M.T.H. Sadler (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1977), 9.

5 Helmut Friedel and Annegret Hoberg, “The History of the Blue Rider” in The Blue Rider in the Lenbachaus, Munich (Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2000), 44.

6 Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, preface (not published) for Der Blaue Reiter Almanac, in German Expressionism, ed. Rose-Carol Washton Long Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993,) 46.

7 Ibid., 43.

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During the development of The Blue Rider, Kandinsky created a number of works that he referred to as “improvisations,” abstract paintings in which the subjects of his images were blurred and dissolved into an amalgamation of irregular forms and colors.8

In 1911, the same year Der Blaue Reiter published their Almanac, Kandinsky also published Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art), a collection of his theories that regard psychological and spiritual manifestations specific to painting.

In his chapter entitled “The Language of Form and Color,” Kandinsky identifies form to be a visual component that “can stand alone… as a purely abstract limit to a space or surface.”9 His discussion continues to address form as that

is nothing but the separating line between surfaces of color. That is its outer meaning. But it also has an inner meaning, of varying intensity, and, properly speaking, form is the outward expression of this inner meaning. To use once more the metaphor of the piano—the artist is the hand which, by playing on this or that key (ie. form), affects the human soul in this or that way. So it is evident that form- harmony must rest only on a corresponding vibration of the human soul; and this is a second guiding principle of the inner need.10

The translation of this doctrine to the work of Kandinsky is not formulaic. As exemplified by works such as Improvisation 6 (1909-1910) (Figure A-22) and Improvisation 26

(1912) (Figure A-23), one can see the Kandinsky’s progression further and further into abstraction. He employed a vivid color palette, believing that “color provides a whole wealth of possibilities of her own,”11 in his theory that color and form are expressions of

8 Ibid., 121.

9 Kandinsky, “The Language of Form and Color” in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 28.

10 Ibid., 29.

11 Ibid.,33.

70 inner need.12 “The Language of Form and Color” unfolds into a number of complex comparatives between color relationships that hypothesize effects generated by hue mixtures, juxtapositions, and/or intensification within a work.13 Over the course of his career, Kandinsky created hundreds of paintings, drawings, and prints that demonstrated the artist’s commitment to exploring his theories. Another publication of

Kandinksy’s that was included in Höch’s archive was the 1913 catalog Klänge (Soul) which contained over 40 woodcuts and theoretical essays. A print of Kandinsky’s as published in Soul showcases the type of interplay the artist was experimenting with in the early 1910s. This untitled work (Figure A-24) is a black and white woodblock print that offers no representational imagery, pattern, or apparently planned structure. A number of curved lines populate the page’s surface, all of varying lengths and thickness as they intersect with at least one other formal element in the composition. Kandinsky also provides a solid, irregular shape to the work—an oblong oval-like form filled almost entirely with black pigment and placed centrally on the picture plane. The top right corner is also filled, and alludes to the edge of the print’s original block. There is visual balance to this work as the lines are evenly distributed throughout the composition, yet the rhythmic interplay of its formal qualities offer a sense of spontaneity, as though

Kandinsky was allowing his hand to determine the placement of form without logical intervention.

The use of line, and the irregular, curved shapes that give form to Tailor’s Flower offer formal affinities to Kandinsky’s abstractions; however, the ideas manifest within this work do not solely align with Kandinsky’s program. As was previously discussed,

12 Ibid., 33.

13 Ibid., 33-45.

71

Kandinsky was an artist committed to the notion that his works explored a spiritual connection to man’s creativity: “form is the outward expression of inner meaning.”14

While Höch’s work does not necessarily negate a spiritual investigation, her abstractions also support a social critique informed by the visual language of Dada. As this essay has attempted to argue, the imagery of photomontages such a Cut with the

Kitchen Knife or Beautiful Girl offers much contrast to the abstraction of appropriated sewing patterns in Tailor’s Flower. But despite both its limited use of representation and integration of fluid Expressionist forms, Tailor’s Flower’s collage medium allows for an outward critique of gender in the Weimar Republic.

Höch was a professional designer and avant-garde artist who lived independently. A number of her works created during the Dada period reflect upon her lifestyle, and provide viewers with a repercussive account of how women were culturally represented. Höch often employed mass media images of women in her work, and utilized this practice as a means of critiquing ways in which the media construed ideals for women. Höch’s conviction to address the changing roles of women in modern society is also present in Tailor’s Flower through a symbolism she establishes using sewing and floral imagery. Through the process of assembling sewing patterns into a collage composition, Höch addresses the source of these materials such as women’s magazines that printed patterns. Because sewing is associated with domesticity, a stereotype also follows that sewing is a woman’s art. Tailor’s Flower tackles this gender associations using Dada’s photomontage rhetoric; Höch presents an abstract pattern design that ignores the parameters of a traditional sewing grid. This work makes a symbolic parallel to the traditional versus modern challenges women faced at this point

14 Ibid., 29.

72 in history. The New Woman did, as the name suggests, demonstrate expanded societal roles and options; the right to vote, hold a career, and be self-sufficient exemplify enormous changes offered to women.

Tailor’s Flower posits an analogy between the stereotypes of the applied arts and traditional roles for women. Höch was an advocate for the applied arts as she claimed that “they deserved to be treated” with as much esteem as the fine arts. The lifestyle

Höch led and the artwork she created also stands to make a similar announcement for women, one that states that women deserve to be treated with as much esteem as men. In the previously mentioned essay “On Embroidery”, Höch touches upon the importance for embroidery to evolve like the other arts if it is to be given respect as a medium when she writes

Embroidery is very closely related to painting. It is constantly changing, with every new style each epoch brings. It is an art and ought to be treated like one, even if thousands upon thousands of sweet female hands— displaying scant skill, no taste or color sense, and not a hint of inspiration—‘mis’handle quantities of good materials as foolishly as possible and call the results ‘embroidery’.15

Höch’s negative criticism of woman who embroider reveals frustration not only for the meager work produced, but also for the reputation it perpetuates for both embroidery as an art form and those responsible for creating it—women. Höch desired an update for embroidery, one that would heighten the quality of this medium so that it too would reflect modern advancement in the visual arts. She continues to make this point in “On

Embroidery” when she asks

Why do you modern craftswomen go on doing your poor slowcoach work, which the nineteenth century has already

15 Höch, “On Embroidery” in Hannah Höch, 72.

73

allowed to descend into such a pitiable state? Have you no eyes to see what is happening in your own time? How art now, right now, is going through a major revolution, that soon it will be striving for height again, changed, cleansed and with huge momentum? Just as it is no longer enough for a painter to just replicate naturalistic little flowers, a still life or nude, it is essential that in the future embroidery should once again develop a feeling for abstract forms, so that beauty, emotions, spirit, and, yes, soul will return to it.16

Höch’s discussion of returning the “emotions and spirit” to embroidery demonstrates a longstanding Expressionist concern. Yet it important to recognize that Höch maintains a twofold argument: she shows support for the relationship between art and inner need, and employs Expressionism as the model for modern art. Höch wants embroidery to evolve because she also wants those who embroider to evolve as well. She wants the

“female hands” of the “craftswoman” to look at the abstractions that artists like

Kandinsky are creating in painting, and understand that this work illustrates an entirely new possibility for what art can and has done. This point she articulates further when she writes

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 firmly planted in reality, at least y-o-u should know that your embroidery work is a documentation of your own era!17

This cry extends beyond the applied arts; Höch wants to find a common connection with women, and use this to introduce them to modern ideas. Although Tailor’s Flower is made of sewing and not embroidery patterns, these two applied arts inhibit a similarly gendered space. And it is within this space that Höch wants to see growth. She is not encouraging an end to embroidery; she is not even calling for men to pick up the needle

16 Ibid., 72.

17 Ibid., 72.

74 and thread. Höch is rather identifying this area of the applied arts to be a terrain for women in which they experiment, create, and develop work the represents their moment in the twentieth-century.

Because Tailor’s Flower is an abstract work composed of appropriated sewing materials, the collage becomes symbolic of a modern woman. Höch takes up feminine stereotypes, and argues that there is room within them for growth, for change, for evolution. As suggested by both the abstract form’s denial of grid parameters and the elements’ incorporation onto the work’s frame, no longer will established barriers be of withhold for modern women. As this thesis aimed to prove, Höch was an artist whose various practices in the arts, and whose life choices reflect both modern and traditional interests, portray a woman who did not negate her beliefs in order to fulfill social expectations. Rather, her art shows viewers that she was committed to informing herself of modern ideas in the arts, and found ways to apply them (even if they conflicted) to her work in order to fit her point of view. Such conviction is visible in

Tailor’s Flower.

75

CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION

“I had already begun in 1915 to design and paint abstract compositions in the same general tradition as those that Kandinsky had first exhibited a couple of years earlier in Munich,” recalled Hannah Höch in her interview with Roditi.1 Throughout the course of their conversation, Höch reflected upon her experiences with Dada. She explained the somewhat naïve politics of the group, the attributes and shortcomings of their artwork, and the overall feeling of alienation that permeated the atmosphere of

Berlin. Such feeling may have been responsible for the short-lived span of Dada; Höch attributes 1925 to be the year in which Dada “ceased to be of much significance as a movement.”2 This is partly due to the different directions the artists pursued as individuals, a repercussion that seems almost satiric given the individualism Höch exercised while contributing to Dada.

Created in 1920, midway into the early period of Höch’s career, Tailor’s Flower is a collage that demonstrates remarkable singularity in comparison to other works from her oeuvre. Tailor’s Flower is an abstract collage composed of sewing and embroidery pattern imagery; however, this work differs from others due to the inclusion of a small, central photograph—a flower cut from a mass media publication. Tailor’s Flower sources an assortment of modern art techniques to address sociopolitical issues: its medium upholds a Dada method for social critique; the form’s gestural lines bear strong likeness to the abstraction of Expressionist artist Kandinsky; and the appropriated sewing imagery maintains applied art’s inherent connotations. Yet this mix of ideas

1 Hannah Höch interview with Edouard Roditi, 97.

2 Ibid., 105.

76 from different art movements presents grounds for conflict within Tailor’s Flower, a conflict due primarily to Dada’s agenda. Coining the term “anti-art,” Dada was premised on the desire to fulfill a need that they believed art had failed to do—Dada was going to present an unfiltered critique of modernity’s grimness.3 Because of this, all art that does not align with the Dada mission provided source for ridicule. How then does Höch reconcile this conflict between Dada and other influences in Tailor’s Flower?

As professed in “The First German Dada Manifesto” orated by Berlin artist

Richard Huelsenbeck in 1918, Expressionism is deserving of ridicule for “carrying on propaganda for the soul.”4 Huelsenbeck further articulates this position when he states that

(the Expressionists) have, in their struggle with naturalism, found their way back to the abstract, pathetic gestures which presuppose a comfortable life free from content of strife…”5

This accusation suggests that the use of abstraction as illustrative of spiritual ideas avoids direct address of and confrontation with the sociopolitical realities of the historical moment. This perceived lack in Expressionism provided reason for Dada’s artistic retaliation; Dadaists welcomed representation in order to immediately connect viewers to their sentiments of the world in which they lived. Even though this rebellion provided a platform for Berlin Dada, Höch maintained her interest, support, and practice within an

Expressionist realm. As shown in Tailor’s Flower, its abstract linear formations demonstrate this influence. However, Höch subtly includes representation into this work

3 Hans Richter, forward to Dada: Art and Anti-Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 7.

4 Richard Huelsenbeck, “First German Dada Manifesto (Collective Dada Manifesto)” in Art in Theory 1900-2000, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, Massachusetts, Oxford, United Kingdom, Carlton, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 257-258.

5 Ibid., 257-258.

77 by employing the sewing pattern lines to generate the abstraction. This imagery is seemingly simple, yet its collage rhetoric enables a critique of gender in the Weimar

Republic. Collage would continue to be the medium that Höch would pursue throughout the rest of her life. In July 1958, twenty years before her death, Höch published a concise autobiographical account of her career as artist. Entitled “A Glance Over My

Life,” Höch declares her loyalty to the collage medium: “Since Dada… I haven’t ceased to be involved with these small format paste-up pictures. Right up to the present I’ve continued making collages, in an attempt to sublimate the aesthetic element into what for me are its ultimate possibilities.”6

6 Höch, “A Glance Over My Life, July 1958” in Hannah Höch, 236.

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APPENDIX LIST OF FIGURES

A-1 Hannah Höch, Nitte unterm Baum (Nitte Under a Tree). 1907, collage. Collection Peter Carlberg, Hofheim, Germany. (in Boswell, Makela, and Lanchner, 58)

A-2 Hannah Höch, Weiße Form (White Form). 1919, collage. Collection Staatliche Museen Zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. (in Boswell, Makela, and Lancher, 37)

A-3 Hannah Höch, Auf Tüllgrund (On Tulle Net Ground). 1921, collage. Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Boston. Accessed 23 October 2014. http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/art/310704

A-4 Hannah Höch, Stramingittercollage (Embroidery Collage). 1921, collage. (in Ades, Butler, and Herrmann, 54)

A-5 Hannah Höch, Entwurf für das Denkmal Eines Bedeutenden Spitzenhemdes (Design for the Memorial to an Important Lace Shirt). 1922, collage. (in Boswell, Makela, and Lancher, 39)

A-6 Hannah Höch, Rohrfeder Collage (Reed Pen Collage). 1922, collage. . (in Ades, Butler, and Herrmann, 53)

A-7 Hannah Höch, Schneider Blume (Tailor’s Flower). 1920, collage. (in Boswell, Makela, and Lancher, 38)

A-8 Hannah Höch, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany). 1919-1920, photomontage. (in Boswell, Makela, and Lancher, 25)

A-9 Hannah Höch, Staatshäupter (Heads of State). 1919, collage. (in Boswell, Makela, and Lancher, 28)

A-10 Berliner Illustrirte on August 24, 1919. Newsprint periodical. (in Boswell, Makela, and Lancher, 28)

A-11 Otto Dix, War Cripples. 1920, drypoint print. Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Accessed 23 October 2014. http://www.moma.org/collection_ge/object.php?object_id=69799

A-12 John Heartfield and Rudolph Schlichter, Prussian Archangel. 1920, mixed media. (in Dickerman, 123)

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A-13 George Grosz and John Heartfield, Middleclass Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild [Electro-Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture]. 1920, mixed media. (in Dickerman, 123)

A-14 George Grosz and John Heartfield, The Worlddada Richard Huelsenbeck. 1919, photomontage. (in Dickerman, 122)

A-15 Press photograph for the First International Dada Fair. 1920, photograph print. (in Richter, 129)

A-16 Raoul Hausmann, Tatlin at Home. 1920, collage. (in Ades, Photomontage, 29)

A-17 Raoul Hausmann, A Bourgeois Precision Brain Incites a World Movement. 1920, collage. (in Dickerman, 126)

A-18 Hannah Höch, Das schöne Mädchen (The Beautiful Girl). 1919-1920, photomontage. (in Dickerman, 141)

A-19 Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning. 1912, mixed media. (in Poggi, 1)

A-20 Georges Braque, Fruit Dish. 1912, mixed media. (in Poggi, 2)

A-21 Jean (Hans) Arp, Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance). 1916-1917, collage. (in Dickerman, 56)

A-22 Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 6. 1909-1910, oil on canvas. (in Friedel and Hoberg, 101)

A-23 Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 26. 1912, oil on canvas. (in Friedel and Hoberg, 131)

A-24 Wassily Kandinsky, Untitled. 1910-15, print. (in Hannah Höch: A Life’s Collage, 95)

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Kathleen Cara Boyle began her scholarship of art history in 2001 at Trinity

College in Washington, D.C. In 2003, she transferred to Marymount Manhattan College where she completed an Art History Bachelor of Arts degree in 2005. Her undergraduate thesis addressed the influence of hip-hop in the work of Jean-Michel

Basquiat. Boyle continued her studies at the School of Visual Arts where she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Art Criticism and Writing in 2007. Her studies focused on issues of gender and feminism in modern and postmodern art, with a thesis that addressed the ephemeral work of the 1990’s riot grrrl movement. In 2010, Boyle returned to academics at the University of Florida. She was the first student to complete a graduate certificate in Museum Studies, and completed her Master of Arts degree in Art History in 2014.

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