Preview our Spring 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
THE GREEN BOX
Hannah Höch: Life Portrait
A Collaged Autobiography
Introduction and text by Alma-Elisa Kittner. Photographs by Orgel-Köhne.
German photomonteur Hannah Höch (1889–1978) is best known for her association with the Berlin Dadaists. But her life and artistic career far outlasted Dada, spanning two world wars and most of the 20th century. And at the age of 83, Höch began to look back.
The result was Höch’s last--and largest, at nearly 4 x 5 feet--photo-collage, “Life Portrait,” created between 1972 and 1973. Though she did not originally set out to make an autobiographical work, the collage functions as a kind of self-portrait for the artist, looking back on her life and work while also ironically and poetically commenting on key political, social and artistic events from the previous 50 years. Höch literally inserts herself into the work several times, with photographs of herself at various ages (always identifiable with her trademark bobbed hair), and returns to themes and images which she had addressed throughout her oeuvre, including fashion imagery, news photographs, African art and pictures of plants and animals, which had become typical of her work after the end of the Second World War. London’s Whitechapel Gallery called it “a collage of collages.”
Hannah Höch: Life Portrait divides the monumental composition into 38 individual sections, as Höch imagined it, and offers explanatory texts and relevant quotations to complement each section. One of only a few English-language publications on the artist, this volume explores Höch’s final masterpiece, and the life’s work it represents.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Hannah Höch: Life Portrait.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
New York Magazine
Anna Furman
Both sinister and sentimental, the collection is as emotionally charged as it is layered in historical complexity.
STATUS: Out of stock
Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.
Recently picked by New York Magazine and LitHub, Hannah Höch: Life Portrait, published by The Green Box, spotlights 38 individual sections of the largest collage created by revered German photomonteur Hannah Höch (1889-1978), who produced the piece between 1972 and 1973. Measuring nearly 4x5 feet, "Life Portrait" was not only the largest, but also the last major photo-collage that Höch would produce before her death at the age of 88. It is rightly thought by many to be her masterpiece. continue to blog
"One is always in a rush, driven by current events," Hannah Höch wrote in 1951. "By one's own drive to create, that vegetated for so long, suppressed, and now is impossible to control." Featured image is reproduced from Hannah Höch: Life Portrait, The Green Box's wonderful new book presenting 38 details of Höch's final large-scale collage. At top, center, this detail appropriates a portion of a 1930 photomontage of "a reverse rhinoceros that looks like a deformed elephant" which Höch created to explore "the oppressive political situation with the increasing threat of the Nazis. Do they attack the seal, or does the seal represent a positive counterpart?" continue to blog
What a treat we have in Life Portrait, The Green Box's small but certain new "collaged autobiography" of Berlin Dadaist and photomonteur Hannah Höch. Presenting 38 details of Höch's last and largest collage—finished in 1973, just five years before her death at the age of 83—the book allows the reader to zoom in, just as one would before the fascinating, revealing and yet still enigmatic finished artwork. Enlightening texts and perfectly chosen quotations accompany each detail. Alongside this image, we learn that Höch's gaze is doubled by the portrait of her cat, Panther, for example. "The small-format scene shows Höch with the photographer Armin Orgel-Köhne, who created the photographic material for Life Portrait together with Lisolotte Orgel-Köhne." Meta. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9 x 9 in. / 96 pgs / 40 color / 3 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $65.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $87 ISBN: 9783941644847 PUBLISHER: The Green Box AVAILABLE: 9/27/2016 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: Out of stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Hannah Höch: Life Portrait A Collaged Autobiography
Published by The Green Box. Introduction and text by Alma-Elisa Kittner. Photographs by Orgel-Köhne.
German photomonteur Hannah Höch (1889–1978) is best known for her association with the Berlin Dadaists. But her life and artistic career far outlasted Dada, spanning two world wars and most of the 20th century. And at the age of 83, Höch began to look back.
The result was Höch’s last--and largest, at nearly 4 x 5 feet--photo-collage, “Life Portrait,” created between 1972 and 1973. Though she did not originally set out to make an autobiographical work, the collage functions as a kind of self-portrait for the artist, looking back on her life and work while also ironically and poetically commenting on key political, social and artistic events from the previous 50 years. Höch literally inserts herself into the work several times, with photographs of herself at various ages (always identifiable with her trademark bobbed hair), and returns to themes and images which she had addressed throughout her oeuvre, including fashion imagery, news photographs, African art and pictures of plants and animals, which had become typical of her work after the end of the Second World War. London’s Whitechapel Gallery called it “a collage of collages.”
Hannah Höch: Life Portrait divides the monumental composition into 38 individual sections, as Höch imagined it, and offers explanatory texts and relevant quotations to complement each section. One of only a few English-language publications on the artist, this volume explores Höch’s final masterpiece, and the life’s work it represents.
