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Hannah Höch
(Anna Therese Johanne Höch [actual name], Hanna(h) Matthies-Höch [married name])
born on November 1, 1889 in Gotha/ Germany
died on May 31, 1978 in Berlin-Heiligensee/ Germany
German painter, graphic artist and collage artist of the Dada movement
135th birthday on November 1, 2024
Biography
As the eldest of five children, Hannah Höch grew up in a sheltered middle-class environment. Her father, Friedrich Höch, was the general agent of an insurance company and she helped him with the gardening. Her mother Rosa Höch, née Sachs, had worked as a housekeeper and reader for aristocratic ladies before her marriage. She painted and also encouraged her daughter's love of painting and drawing. Although the parents considered education important, they needed Hannah at home as a nanny until their youngest daughter started school and thus Hannah had to leave secondary school at the age of 15. It was not until 1912 that she was able to move to Berlin and begin her training at the private School of Applied Arts in Charlottenburg. She attended Harold Bengen's design class before transferring in 1915 to the Museum of Decorative Arts (Kunstgewerbemuseum) where she enrolled in Emil Orlik's class in graphic and book art.
She first encountered the artists in the expressionist Storm circle (Der Sturm) through her childhood friend and fellow student Maria Unden.
Hannah Höch’s aim was to apply new art trends to the elements of design. She would retain an interest in textiles and pattern design throughout her artistic career. She often used clippings from magazines and newspapers as the basis for her creations, and she enjoyed easy access to them thanks to her job as an illustrator of needlework magazines for Ullstein – one of the largest publishing houses in Germany at the time. She worked there for three days a week, earning her living as an illustrator for ten years before moving to the Netherlands.
In 1915, she met the artist Raoul Hausmann — who was already married and had no plans of divorce — and began a love affair with him that was to last seven years. It was through him that she then met the artists of the Berlin Dada movement. She did not give in to her lover’s demands to abandon the desire for a monogamous relationship and to have a child with him. It was a very difficult relationship, with Hausmann trying again and again – unsuccessfully – to mold Höch according to his needs.
Höch achieved her first artistic success in 1917 with the publication of her woodcut The Prophet Matthew in the periodical Das Kunstblatt. In 1918 she started creating the photomontages she was later to be famous for. The Dadaists did not merely question the use of traditional materials in art; their more radical approach was to incorporate photographs as well as typographic elements into their works of art. Later there were arguments that Hoch did not take part in as to who exactly had invented photomontage. She had already used the collage technique during her training, glueing elements together to create pictures she called Klebebilder. Her first known glued picture was White Cloud. Casting a critical eye on male-female role clichés common at the time, she then began to concentrate on thematizing gender roles in society in her work. Her photomontages explored the ‘New Woman’ and represented a kind of female counter-design to Dada. She deconstructed the usual gender clichés by creating an exaggerated image from pictures of women that she had glued together. She was attuned to social developments, and her creations were astute analyses of everyday culture in Weimar Germany. She would often also allude to political developments by using photographs of personalities who were well-known and easily recognizable.
Hannah Höch joined the November Group in 1918 and her works were subsequently included in its exhibitions. She presented two of the Dada dolls she had fashioned from various textiles, cardboard and beads at the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920. But much like the dolls that were an oddity at the fair, Höch was to remain an outlier within the Dadaist circle in Berlin.
Between 1919 and 1920, she created the work she is best known for and that now hangs in the National Gallery in Berlin: Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany).
Höch experienced the end of her relationship with Hausmann as liberating. She was on her own again, and able to devote herself to her work and to intensify her contact with artist friends, such as Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber. Her photomontage My House-Sayings is generally regarded as a farewell to her first love as well as to the Dada movement. Through her friendship with Kurt Schwitters, she became acquainted with the members of the Dutch avant-garde art movement De Stijl, whose main representative was Theo van Doesburg. Höch was close friends with him and his wife, the pianist Nelly van Doesburg, for many years.
When Hannah Höch accepted the Schwitters' invitation to come visit them in the Netherlands in 1926, she had only planned on a brief vacation. But she met her new great love, the Dutch writer and translator Til Brugman, and ended up staying a total of three years. While living in the Netherlands, Höch continued to take part in exhibitions in Germany, and her paintings were also shown in exhibitions organized by De Onafhankelijke, a Dutch artists' association. She had her first solo exhibitions starting in 1929. During this period, she worked with various techniques and experimented with different styles.
At the end of 1929, the two women moved together to Höch's old studio apartment in Berlin. Throughout their nine-year relationship, they inspired each other. For each of them the years together in Berlin were to remain among their most creative. They also collaborated, and published two works together: Von Hollands Blumenfeldern (Atlantis. Länder/Völker/Reisen, issue 7, July 1933) and Scheingehacktes, with text by Til Brugman and images by Hannah Höch.
In 1931, Hannah Höch took part in Frauen in Not (Women in Distress), an exhibition held to highlight the widespread public disapproval of Paragraph 218 (a law outlawing abortion in Germany at the time) and organized with Käthe Kollwitz playing a central role and giving the opening speech. In the same year, Höch took part in the Fotomontage exhibition where photomontages were recognized as an autonomous artistic genre for the first time.
In addition to contemporary art, Höch increasingly turned her attention to “primitive” art as evidenced in the series she then created entitled Ethnographic Museum. This also led her to question European definitions of femininity.
An important source of income for Höch during this period was the work offered to her by a Dutch friend, Anthony Bakels, who until the end of the 1930s owned a magazine publishing house in Berlin. She designed book covers and newspaper illustrations for him. She continued to participate in international exhibitions, receiving invitations from Belgium and the United States, among others.
Even before Hitler came to power in 1933, numerous friends of Höch and Brugman had left Germany and gone abroad; many of them came to rely on the couple for help with their affairs in Germany. Höch and Brugman had themselves considered leaving for Paris many times, but ultimately decided not to move. The paintings she created during this period – from ironic works to those full of melancholic symbolism – point clearly to the different reactions she had to the new political situation. Her participation in exhibitions declined sharply and had ceased almost completely by 1945.
In 1934, Höch had to undergo a serious thyroid operation which resulted in recurring health problems. While recuperating during a stay in the Dolomites the following year, she met the traveling salesman Kurt Heinz Matthies and then entered into a relationship with him in 1936 after separating from Til Brugman. The two married in 1938. They shared a passion for travelling, and they took numerous trips together. Matthies would pursue his work, and Höch would visit museums. Yet from the outset a heavy burden was placed on the relationship by Matthies: an arrest warrant had been issued due to his habitual exhibitionism. In the end, he was sentenced to a year in prison and to the “emasculation” he had voluntarily offered. Although Höch believed her husband’s behavior the result of a sickness and therefore supported him throughout, the extremely stressful situation resulted in her falling ill.
The next blow came shortly after her marriage. The exhibition “Degenerate Art” — a monumental Nazi propaganda show held in various cities across Germany starting in 1937 — was an attack on almost all known modern and avant-garde artists of the 1910s and 1920s, as well as on the museum policy of the previous years. It included works of the November Group, although there were hardly any women represented. Nothing by Hannah Höch was exhibited. The show was based on the book Säuberung des Kunsttempels. Eine kunstpolitische Kampfschrift zur Gesundung deutscher Kunst im Geiste der nordischen Art. Author Wolfgang Willich explained why the artworks he included were ‘culturally Bolshevist,’ ‘degenerate’ and ‘sick.’ Unlike in the exhibition, she was mentioned by name as part of the November Group and one of her works was also depicted.
Without abandoning her own convictions, she tried to live as inconspicuously as possible during the Nazi era. Nevertheless, she had to become a member of the Reich Chamber of Culture in order to be able to procure material for her work. Two things gave her strength during this time: the books that she considered an intellectual lifesaver and the English-language radio broadcasts that she listened to regularly and that gave her the will to persevere. She created numerous paintings full of symbols, most of which thematized the journey through life. She also created many still lifes of flowers and plants between 1933 and 1944; in all probability, she focused on depictions of nature in order to avoid being viewed as politically suspect. The last group exhibition in which she took part was Deutsche Frauenkunst der Gegenwart (Contemporary German Women’s Art) in Mannheim in 1936.
In 1939, Hannah Höch bought a house far from the city center on the outskirts of Berlin in Heiligensee. It was to serve as her retreat until the end of the war. The garden was doubly crucial: it provided her both with energy and with food during those years. She now had the space to sort through her archive of magazines, and in the fall of 1940, she began once again to work on photomontages and collages. She separated from Matthies two years later, and divorced him in 1944. She also stored numerous art treasures and documents from the Dada period and from the 1920s in her house, which survived the bombing of Berlin.
Between 1940 and 1945, she created the Notzeitbilder series that includes fifteen watercolors, gouaches and oil paintings.
Immediately after the end of the Second World War, Hannah Höch threw herself into Berlin's cultural life with great energy. She took part in the reconstruction of educational work and gave lectures on “Women and Art.” She felt she had to “catch up” on what she had not been able to work on in the previous years. She made use of the drawings she had sketched during her numerous travels, creating watercolors from them, for example.
She became a member of the Kulturbund, the organization founded by cultural politicians from all political camps with the aim of culturally renewing Germany, and also took part in its exhibition projects. From 1946, she also participated in group exhibitions at the Gerd Rosen Gallery in Berlin. The exhibition of her works at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1948 also raised her profile in the United States.
Individual retrospectives of Hannah Höch's works were held — including, for example, at the Berlin Academy of Arts in 1971, at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1976 and at the National Gallery in Berlin. In 1976, Hannah Höch was awarded an honorary professorship by the Berlin Senate.
Hannah Höch died in Berlin on May 31, 1978. She was given an honorary grave in the cemetery in Heiligensee.
(Text from 2014, translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.
Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
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