Tuesday 13 October 2009

Hannah Hoch



Hoch's impact on Berlin Dada was profound. She was a master practitioner of photomontage -- a technique that all the dadaists adopted. With its roots in the kitsch tradition of splicing heads from family photos onto magazine pictures of ideal soldiers or angelic women, photomontage took images and type from the popular press and combined them in ways to reveal the fissures that ran through middle-class ideology.

Hoch's most famous work, "Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-belly Cultural Epoch of Germany" (1919), is a 3' x 4' collage bursting with images of German industry, military figures, and recreational gaieties. Amid these pictures, the word "dada" cuts like a knife, exposing the ludicrous contradictions that were Weimar. Other works such as "Hochfinanz" (High Finance) directly critique the connection between bankers, industrialists, and the military.

(Art and Culture)

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