Total Length: 3150 words ( 11 double-spaced pages)
Total Sources: 10
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Introduction
Hannah Hoch was an artist most known for her work in between the wars—the Weimar period, in which the Dada Movement came to the fore to challenge the sensibilities and pretensions of the early 20th century. Dada was as much a protest against the bourgeois as it was a slap in the face of the rising Fascist Movement. Hitler despised the Dadaists and the Dadaists despised him. Hoch counted herself as one among the Dadaists during the Weimar period—a period in which art and life came into intense conflict, while the universal stage was being set for the final showdown between the new and the old in WWII. For that reason—and for the reason that Hoch’s art gets to the heart of the changes that society was undergoing during that time of upheaval—I have selected Hannah Hoch as the focus of this paper. She is important to our textbook because she represents the woman’s perspective in a time that was fiercely dominated by men—and her perspective is one in which the superficiality of the times comes under the fire of her intense scorn. This paper will look at Hoch’s background, training, influences, achievements and contributions to art history, including five works that help demonstrate her talent and importance.
Background
Hannah Hoch was born in Germany in 1889. She studied in Berlin briefly before joining the Red Cross during the beginning of WWI. However, her stint there was short-lived and she returned to Berlin to enter into the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts. There she met some members of the Dada Movement and by 1917, she herself was a Dadaist (Makela; Gaze). Dada was like the artistic equivalent of a middle finger to all things—the ruling class, the new ideas, the self-importance of art. Dada was like a wrecking ball that sought to smash over the pomposity of all the people and organizations and belief systems that were cropping up. The war did nothing to slow down Dada—in fact, it enhanced it, pushing the Dadaists to ever more aggressive tactics.
During the war, many Dadaists had fled to Zurich to start up Cabaret Voltaire. Hugo Ball with his sound poetry and Tristan Tzara with his Dada Manifesto and clown poetry; Raoul Hausmann—another sound poet—and the one who introduced Hoch to the Dadaist at the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts—they were all there, enjoying and relishing their cynical takes on the modern world, pompously anti-pompous in their own way (Altshuler).
Training
Hoch thus received her basic training at the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts—but her training in Dada came directly from the movement’s founders—Hausmann, Tzara, Jean Arp, Otto Dix and the others. Tzara helped develop the artistic credo that Hoch and the Dadaists would embrace—and it was full of self-contradictions of the sort that the Dadaists deliberately made in order to mock: “I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am also against principles” (Tzara). It was acerbic and cynical and both serious and not serious at the same time. Dada was a giant sneer at polite society; it was also somewhat reckless in its lack of reverence for all the foundations of modern society and the institutions of art. Hoch absorbed it all; in lieu of much formal training beyond what she received at the National Institute, it served as her induction.
Influences
Influences were all around her—they were not just the artistic influences of the Dadaists in her immediate circle. They consisted of the Weimar environment that took over following the end of World War I. Berlin became vice capital of the world with its cabaret nightlife introducing Anita Berber to the world. Goebbels defined it as—“sin, vice and corruption.” Berber was the original poster girl of the sex, drugs and rock-n-roll lifestyle (pre-rock-n-roll). For example, while the idea of the “new woman” aka the Neu Frau was popping up in the Weimar Republic—a concept which made the new woman into something androgynous and equal to men, socially speaking—Hoch set out to mock the idea and deconstruct it while also asserting her own feminism. She embraced the type of “punk rock” spirit of Berber—unleashing on the modern century with everything inside of her. Instead of doing it through dance and performance in the cabarets of Berlin, Hoch did it through art—that, of course, would end up catching the eye of the Third Reich.
Hoch also spent time working for the publishing company Ullstein Verlag, where she developed her trademark photomontage style. It was for Ullstein Verlag that she spent roughly a decade of her time both during the war and after it when the Weimar Republic was getting under way. There she was given the opportunity to do collages and perfect her craft and her art. This time working for the publisher allowed her to build on the skills she developed at the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts and led to the style that she would become famous for.
Hoch participated in the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920, organized by Hausmann and the other Dadaists (Altshuler). It was there that she displayed Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919). Hoch’s relationship with Hausmann did not go smoothly and by the mid-1920s she broke up with him and to some extent with the other Dadaists. She moved to the Netherlands before eventually coming back to Berlin during WWII. By that time, her art had been classified as degenerate by the Third Reich. Hitler being an admirer of art in the Old World style abhorred the modern artists and Dada in particular. While Hitler was preparing the Great German Exhibition in 1937, Hoch was living quietly in a small cottage in Berlin, trying to mind her own business so as not to be exiled or identified as a political saboteur (Barron). Hoch continued to create collages until her death in 1978 but her fame, once so assured in 1920, faded with the arrival of the Third Reich and the war—and after the war she never really recovered it.
Contributions to Art History: Five Works
Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919)
Described as “a forceful commentary, particularly on the gender issues erupting in postwar Weimar Germany” (Blumberg), her entry into the First International Dada Fair in Berlin proved to be one of the finest. Harris and Zucker state that it represented the political and social chaos of Germany after WWI. The collage captures the fragmentation that was occurring in Germany while simultaneously deriding all the different factions involved in the political and social movements of the time. Everything included in the collage is there to be ridiculed. Hoch was taking a swipe at Germany’s leaders, its followers, its factions, its past, its present and its future. The knife that clipped the pictures was the knife of Dada, here represented loud and clear by Hoch. While other artists would make other splashes—like Duchamp with his Fountain—Hoch was keeping it simple, yet loud—like the true “punk rock” artist that she was.
The collage is housed at the Collection Staatliche Museen Zu Berlin— Preu6ischer Kulturbesitz, Nation Algalerie. Its value and importance is in its character. As Makela notes, it humorously “unites representatives of the former Empire, the military, and the new, moderate government of the Republic in the ‘anti-Dada’ corner at the upper right, while grouping Communists and other radicals together with the Dadaists at the lower right” (25). Around them all are the dancing girls, celebrating the fact that soon they will be voting, too.
The Bride (1924-27)
The Bride represents matrimonial union of the new woman and the same old man, wearing a coat and tails. The new woman is distracted by all the ideas circling her head, indicating that she is just as vapid and an airhead as anything else in Germany at the time. The painting symbolizes that which was superficial and inhuman about Weimar society. The bride has the body of a woman; she is wearing the traditional white dress—but her head is large—ridiculously so—like she is a bobble head of today. The expression of the head is comical: the face of the woman is frozen in surprise, as she looks at the strange orbs that float around her head. Inside of each of the orbs is a message from society. In one there is a pair of wings, in another a wheel, in a third an eye that has a tear falling from it. There is a baby and a snake wrapped round the forbidden fruit. Each orb symbolizes about the mores and values of society—the expectations that the new woman still must face as she is, after all, getting married to a man and will be….....
Gaze, Delia. Dictionary of Women Artists, Volume One. London: Taylor & Francis, 1997.
Goebbels, J. “Around the Gedachtniskirche.” Germany History Docs, 1928. http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=3860
Harris, Beth and Steven Zucker. “Hannah Hoch: Cut with the Kitchen Knife.” Khan Academy. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/wwi-dada/dada1/v/hannah-h-ch-cut-with-the-kitchen-knife-1919-20
Makela, Maria. "Hannah Höch". In: Louise R. Noun (ed.), Three Berlin Artists of the Weimar Era: Hannah Höch, Käthe Kollwitz,
Jeanne Mammen. Des Moines, Iowa: Des Moines Art Center, 1994.
Makela, Maria and Peter Boswell. The Photomontages of Hannah Hoch. Walker Art Center, 1996.
