Hannah Höch

"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.

ACTIVE BACKLIST

HANNAH HöCH: PICTURE BOOK
Afterword by Gunda Luyken. Translated by Brian Currid.
THE GREEN BOX
ISBN: 9783941644137 | US $49.95
Pub Date: 10/31/2010
Active | Awaiting stock

HANNAH HöCH: ALBUM
Edited by Gunda Luyken.
HATJE CANTZ PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9783775714273 | US $70.00
Pub Date: 4/2/2004
Active | In stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

HANNAH HöCH: ALBUM, LIMITED EDITION
Edited and with text by Gunda Luyken.
HATJE CANTZ
ISBN: 9783775714280 | US $340.00
Pub Date: 7/1/2007
Out of print | Not available

THE PHOTOMONTAGES OF HANNAH HöCH
Artwork by Hannah Hoch. Contributions by Peter Boswell, Maria Makela. Text by Carolyn Lanchner.
WALKER ART CENTER
ISBN: 9780935640526 | US $55.00
Pub Date: 10/2/1996
Out of print | Not available

Hannah Höch

Hannah Höch: Picture Book

Afterword by Gunda Luyken. Translated by Brian Currid.
Published by The Green Box

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.

Hannah Höch: Album, Limited Edition

Edited and with text by Gunda Luyken.
Published by Hatje Cantz

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.

Hannah Höch: Album

Edited by Gunda Luyken.
Published by Hatje Cantz Publishers

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.

The Photomontages Of Hannah Höch

Artwork by Hannah Hoch. Contributions by Peter Boswell, Maria Makela. Text by Carolyn Lanchner.
Published by Walker Art Center

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.