Give a magazine and scissors to school kids and there is a tinkling sense of creativity. All dispute, all worries cease and they proudly carry home a piece of sugar paper, weeping tears of glue and spattered with images of televisions, microwaves and men with a chest expanding machines.
It was well known fact that Adolf Hitler applied to art school and was refused entry. Many wonder what would have happened if he had been accepted? Would he have happily cut out magazine images too and forgotten about mastering the universe? Would he have joined the Dada artists, the precursors of Surrealism and drawn a mustache on a Mona Lisa?
The Dada artists began in Zurich in about 1915. They were fascinated with the power of magazine and newspaper journalism and manufactured objects, and would transform ready made objects and photographs into other things.
Continuing in the style of the Dada artists came Hannah Hock
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| Hannah Hoch |
She pursued the Dada ideas, which were at their peak until 1925. She continued to collect the magazine images of pre-Nazi Germany, while such magazines were insidiously influencing the thinking of Germany in the thirties. The wave of brain wash was something that Hannah Hoch steadily dismantled with her ceaseless creativity. The forceful ideas of 'pure race' were succinctly counteracted with in her collage 'hybrids'
In the images below, we see her, with poetic simplicity, the hybrid of monkey's head and beautiful woman. It powerfully illustrates a deeper truth, so beautifully belittling the fashionable current trends of super race thinking of contemporary Nazi Germany, by conjuring Darwin's origin of the species, subtly reminding us of the base truth of all our origins.
In the same way Shakespeare sets out a succinct argument in a sonnet, take for example "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" building up to the conclusion love is compared to a summer's day, and concluding that temporary weather can never be compared to love's eternal flame, Hannah Höch also takes two arguments and neatly argues her way to a poignant truth. She splices together two images, producing a moving commentary of her current time, questioning the concept of beauty, often in an astute and funny way.
Ironically she had to bury 'her well of truth' in a dry well in her garden just outside Berlin, where she lived quietly during the war. Other Dada artists of the time, such as John Heartfield, whose work is much more politically mocking of Hitler, had to be much more careful and many of them had to leave Germany.
Her photomontage work continued after the war, when other artists moved away. For Hoch, it proved to be a lifelong love affair. Her work has such a bedrock of truth about it, that it has a timeless, universal truth about it, that is still understandable today, whereas Heartfield's work, being more political is more dated.
Höch's work is very balanced with a powerful sense of composition and she was much admired by George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters and Theo Van Doesburg. She was hugely prolific and her creative output immense. It reflects deeply on peace, contemplation, conflict resolution among other themes and one can't help wondering if everyone got cutting and pasting and having the fun she did, the world would be a much more peaceful place.
Her work is currently being shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in London until 23rd March 2014.
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