Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
"The mordant Dada photomontages of Hannah Höch...made significant contributions to revising the representations of gender. Placing a profeminist spin on the concept of the neue Frau or femme nouvelle-- the emancipated New Woman of Weimar Germany and Third Republic France, crossing class, ethnic, and gender boundaries-- Höch's...practices deliberately overturned codified mannerisms to experiment with what Artur Rimbaud called Je est un autre (I is another)...[Hannah] Höch's politics, intertwined with race and ethnography, are well represented in her provocative photomontages from the 1920s and 1930s. With cutout pictures of Weimar women combined with those of tribal sculptures, Höch developed a critical language that challenged racist and colonialist ideas as well as European gender definitions."
Excerpted from Roxana Marcoci's essay From Face to Mask: Collage, Montage, and Assemblage in Contemporary Portraiture in Modern Women, published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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.
PUBLISHER The Green Box
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9 x 9 in. / 96 pgs / 40 color / 3 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 9/27/2016 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2016 p. 40
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783941644847TRADE List Price: $65.00 CAD $87.00
AVAILABILITY Out of stock
STATUS: Out of stock
Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.
Published by The Green Box. Afterword by Gunda Luyken. Translated by Brian Currid.
A central figure in the Berlin Dada circle, friend to Kurt Schwitters and Piet Mondrian and lover of Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch (1889-1972) is probably the most important female artist from the German modernist period. She is best known for her pioneering works of photomontage, which briskly juxtapose mechanical and organic forms, ancient and contemporary bodies, symbols and text drawn from brands and headlines, also edging feminism, commodity critique and other political concerns into the mix. "It is striking how contemporary to us much of Höch's work feels," Luc Sante wrote recently, "in its sexual politics, its humor, its gleeful appropriation of anything and everything at hand." In 1945, Höch made this fantastical full-color children's book, which chronicles the adventures of the four mythical creatures Runfast, Dumblet, Snifty and Meyer in an enchanted garden, combining photomontage with the hallucinatory plant imagery she had come to favor. It is published here for the first time.
PUBLISHER The Green Box
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 10.75 x 8.75 in. / 44 pgs / 19 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 10/31/2010 Out of stock indefinitely
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2010 p. 105
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783941644137TRADE List Price: $49.95 CAD $67.50
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited and with text by Gunda Luyken.
An important representative of the Berlin Dada movement, Hannah Höch (1889-1978) was a dedicated collagist, noting in her appointment calendar for 1939 that she had been "busy for days going through magazines and cutting things out." The sheer abundance of Höch's collection of visual material is suggested by an album that was presumably compiled in 1933, a singular work that poses a number of fascinating questions. Was it used as a collection of motifs for collages and photomontages? Was it a kind of modern sketchbook? Could it have been a first step toward conceptual art? The album, which contains a remarkable number of female numes, is comprised of 114 pages--two issues of the journal Die Dame were used as backing pages--and combines more than 400 photographic images of nature, technology, sports, dance, the new woman, film and ethnology, all cut out and mounted by the artist. This astonishing Album, only a few pages of which had been published before, was presented for the first time in its entirety as a reproduction of near-facsimile quality in 2004. Now it is available as a deluxe special edition, presented in the original format and accompanied by a booklet of texts in a slipcase.
As one of the protagonists of the Berlin Dada movement, Hannah Höch railed against tradition and conservatism in 1920s Germany. Höch and such cohorts as George Grosz and Raoul Hausmann raised anarchic revolution through cutting photomontage, nonsensical performance, and biting visual satire. A singular and important work in the artist's oeuvre is the so-called “Sammelalbum,” which she produced and pasted together from found imagery for her own pleasure and use, circa 1933. In it, she arranged a choice selection of newspaper and magazine photographs cut from popular German magazines of the time, such as the Berliner Illustrirte and Der Dame. A diverse, allusive group of images they are, representing everything from her favorite film stars to oddly captured animals and toy dolls, nudes, landscapes, scenic travel vistas and synchronized dancers. By combining the collected pictures in continuous and sometimes contradictory sequences and double-page spreads, Höch created startling and often jarring photo collages. Never before published, Album can be considered to represent a heretofore unknown aspect of Höch's work, since its style of collage differs strongly from her well-known photomontages. This publication presents the entire Album in an exquisite facsimile reproduction, maintaining the filmic quality of its order and layout. In an accompanying essay, Gunda Luyken considers the content and history of the Album, locating it in the wider context of Höch's oeuvre.
Published by Walker Art Center. Artwork by Hannah Hoch. Contributions by Peter Boswell, Maria Makela. Text by Carolyn Lanchner.
This catalogue documents Hannah Hoch's relationship to 20th century art movements, and discusses her critique of the mass media. It is also a complete retrospective of Hoch's work in photomontage.
Hannah Höch: Picture Book
Hannah Höch: Album, Limited Edition
Hannah Höch: Album
The Photomontages Of Hannah Höch