Knowra Hannah Höch Hannah Höch Hannah Höch (1889–1978) was a German Dada artist who pioneered photomontage, using images from mass media to challenge gender roles and social conventions.
Photomontage : An image-making technique that combines fragments of photographs or other printed material into a new composition. Höch helped establish this technique as a defining form of Berlin Dada.
Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany : Hannah Höch’s 1919–20 photomontage, a dense satire of German politics, Dada, and social power. This landmark work shows how she assembled press images into a fractured political panorama.
The Beautiful Girl : Hannah Höch’s 1920 photomontage pairing a woman with machinery, consumer goods, and industrial imagery. The work turns the modern ideal of feminine beauty into a collage of technology and consumption.
Raoul Hausmann : An Austrian-born artist and writer who became a leading Berlin Dadaist and photomontage practitioner. Hausmann was Höch’s artistic collaborator and partner during the early Berlin Dada years.
Degenerate Art : A Nazi label for modern art condemned as culturally and politically unacceptable, used in a 1937 exhibition and campaign. The Nazi regime’s hostility to modern art narrowed the conditions in which Höch could work.
Berlin Dada : A politically engaged German branch of Dada active in Berlin after the First World War. Höch developed her art among Berlin Dadaists responding to war and upheaval.
Mass Media : Communication channels that distribute information and entertainment to large audiences, including newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. Höch mined illustrated newspapers and magazines for the fragments in her photomontages.
Dada Puppen : Hannah Höch’s assemblage dolls made from varied materials and exhibited in the 1920s. These figures extend her experiments with constructed bodies beyond the printed page.
John Heartfield : A German artist who used photomontage for communist political satire and anti-Nazi propaganda. His politically direct montage offers a close comparison with Höch’s broader social critique.
Nazi Germany : The German dictatorship under Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1945, marked by totalitarian rule, persecution, and genocide. Höch’s career continued under a regime hostile to the avant-garde and its politics.
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