Hannah Hoch was a German painter and the only female artist in Berlin Dada group. She stood at the origins of photomontage creating provocative artworks which were related with ethnic differences, gender issues and the social role of woman.
Background
Hannah Hoch was born on November 1, 1889 in Gotha, Germany as Anna Therese Johanne Höch. She was the eldest from five children of Friedrich Hoch, a supervisor of an insurance company, and Rosa Hoch, an amateur painter.
According to Hoch, her father was against her artistic career and said that “a girl should get married and forget about studying art.”
A fifteen-year-old girl, Hannah looked after her younger brothers and sisters.
Education
Hannah Hoch started her education in Gotha at the local girls' high school Höhere Töchterschule which she left in 1904 to take care of her younger sister.
Hoch continued her studies only in 1912 when she entered the School of Applied Arts in Berlin. There, Hannah she learned glass design under the tutelage of Harold Bergen. At the outbreak of the First World War, Hannah Hoch left the institution to join the Red Cross for one year after which she came back to Berlin where she became a student of professor Emil Orlik’s graphics class (woodcut and linoleum-block printing) at the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts. Hoch graduated from the Institute in 1920.
Career
Hannah Hoch started her career in 1916 from the ten-year work at the publishing company Ullstein Verlag in Berlin where she wrote articles and created the ornaments for knitting, crocheting, and embroidery published in such magazines as Die Dame (The Lady) and Die Praktische Berlinerin (The Practical Berlin Woman). This job provided her with a lot of pictures and texts which she used in her future photomontages since 1917 when her hew acquaintance, Raoul Hausmann, introduced her to the Dada movement in Berlin. Hannah Hoch met in the group such persons as George Grosz, Wieland Herzfelde and John Heartfield.
In 1918, the artist created the Manifesto of Modern Embroidery which encouraged the contemporary women to use abstract forms of their generation in their handwork.
Two years later, Hoch’s wide photomontage on the gender issues caused by the World War I, called Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, was demonstrated at the First International Dada Fair organized by the Berlin Dadaist group. The work had great success. While Hoch’s Dadaist period, the artist also created stuffed dolls depicting woman’s portrait through the exaggerated and abstract traits. The pictures of dolls also were the central subjects of her photomontages The Master (1925) and Love (c. 1926).
In fact, after the dissolution of the Berlin Dadaist movement in 1922, the theme of woman’s place in the modern society became the central for Hannah Hoch. The artist portrayed so-called “New Woman”, self-sufficing and free from social traditional roles, in such her works as the series From an Ethnographic Museum (1924- 30), Tamer (about 1930).
Shortly before the World War II, her artworks full of political messages along with all similar Dadaists’ creations, were pronounced degraded and Hannah Hoch received the status of “cultural Bolshevist”.
So, to continue her artistic activity, she had to relocate in cottage in Heiligensee situated in Berlins’ suburbs. The artist remained there till the end of her life.
In her later works, Hoch incorporated the new methods (figural elements in Grotesque of 1963) along with the reference to the early art practices, such as textile and pattern design in Red Textile Page (1952; Rotes Textilblatt) and Around a Red Mouth (1967; Um einen roten Mund).
Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic
Little Sun
Untitled (From an Ethnographic Museum)
Strauss
Around a Red Mouth
Made for a Party
Reed Pen Collage
Study for Man and Machine
Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum
Views
Through her artworks Hannah Hoch expressed her disaffection to the omnipresent concept of women as insufficient people who almost have no right to manage their own lives. So, the artist criticized the institution of marriage.
She demonstrated the dissonance between the portrait of the Weimar New Woman presented in the magazines and journals of the time and the real women’ position. One of the most politically ambitious from such works was From an Ethnographic Museum (1929).
Quotations:
"I have always tried to exploit the photograph. I use it like color, or as the poet uses the word."
"I wish to blur the firm boundaries which we self-certain people tend to delineate around all we can achieve."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Höch's photomontages display the chaos and combustion of Berlin's visual culture from a particularly female perspective." - Kristin Makholm
"The pattern designs Höch created for Ullstein's women's magazines and her early experiments with modernist abstraction were integrally related, blurring the boundaries between traditionally masculine and feminine modes of form and expression." - Kristin Makholm
"Many of Höch's overtly political photomontages caricatured the pretended socialism of the new republic and linked female liberation with leftist political revolution." - Maud Lavin, a cultural historian
"She wasn't interested in becoming a celebrity." - Dawn Ades, an art historian
Connections
Hannah Hoch had seven-year romantic relationships with Raoul Hausmann, a Dada movement member in Berlin. The couple broke up in 1922.
Four years later, mutual friends Kurt and Helma Schwitters introduced her to a writer and linguist Mathilda ('Til') Brugman with whom the artist had lived for three years although they didn’t consider themselves as lesbians but just having a private love relationship.
In 1935, Hoch met a pianist Kurt Matthies who was much younger. The couple married in 1938 and had lived together for six years.