Hannah Höch was the only official female member of the Berlin Dada group. Though her male associates – starting with her partner, Raoul Hausmann – downplayed the importance of her work, she took an innovative approach to the movement’s visual language. The photomontages she made into the 1930s brim with figures who, even when they seem powerful, are victims of fragmentation. The deformed female figure in Deutsches Mädchen (1930) – where two disproportionately small eyes and a dark fringe are pasted over a young woman’s delicate features –, is a far cry from the confident, seductive image demanded by the growing feminist movement. Höch considered the Neue Frau (New Woman) ideal a fad. Drawing images from magazines that celebrated it, she presents an instable identity that more closely reflects the complexities of modern women. This critical stance is equally evident in Höch’s series Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (1924–1930), where she challenges the perceived cultural supremacy of colonial powers by combining pictures of fashionable bodies with imagery from various non-European traditions. In Der heilige Berg (1927) – in which two mountain climbers have large Asian sculptures where their heads should be –, Höch shows that her grotesque figures are not mere whimsy, but offer an original, perhaps cynical, view of progress.
Stefano Mudu
