Hannah Höch is most widely known for her incisively political collages, and for pioneering the medium of photomontage alongside Raoul Hausmann in 1918. A prominent figure in the male-dominated Da Da movement in Germany, her work often questioned the roles assigned to women in society and particularly the German ideal of the “New Woman”, simultaneously liberated and constrained.

Although the Berlin Dada group fractured in the early 1920s, Höch continued to create socially critical work. She was banned from exhibiting during the Nazi regime, but she remained in Germany during World War II, retreating to a house outside Berlin where she continued to make work. In 1945, after the end of the war, she began exhibiting again. Before her death in 1978, her significant contribution to the German avant-garde was recognized through retrospectives of her work in Paris and Berlin in 1976.

Höch’s bold collisions and combinations of fragments of widely circulated images connected her work to the world and captured the rebellious, critical spirit of the interwar period, which felt to many like a new age. Through her radical experimentations, she developed an essential artistic language of the avant-garde that reverberates to this day.

Crédit photo : Hannah Höch with dolls, Willy Roemer, c.1920