Cutting the illustrated press
Hannah Höch was the only woman at the center of Berlin Dada after the First World War. She worked for years at a large publishing house, designing patterns for women's magazines, which gave her a daily stream of the printed images she later cut apart.
Her large photomontage from 1919–20, known in short as 'Cut with the Kitchen Knife', mixes politicians, machines, dancers and slogans into a chaotic portrait of the Weimar Republic. Later series such as 'From an Ethnographic Museum' combined fashion photographs with images of non-European sculpture, questioning how women and other cultures were looked at.
Visual anatomy
Faces, eyes, legs and machine parts cut from the illustrated press.
Heads on tiny bodies, giant eyes, mismatched sizes that create humor and unease.
Crowded and dynamic in early work, quieter and more focused later.
Cut letters and headlines join the image as visual material.
The 'New Woman', gender roles, politics, mass media and beauty standards.
Precise scissor cuts; joins are left visible.
How to recognize her work
- Photographs cut from print and recombined.
- Bodies assembled from different people or objects.
- A tone that is playful and critical at once.
Where people get it wrong
Höch is sometimes treated as a footnote to the male Dadaists, but she was one of the inventors of photomontage. Her work is also not chaos for its own sake: each juxtaposition makes a point about who is looking and who is being looked at.
The words to describe it
Words for what you see and feel in this work. They are for describing and understanding, not a recipe for copying an artist.
- Dada photomontage
- cut magazine imagery
- mismatched scale
- hybrid figures
- machine parts and gears
- cut-out lettering
- Weimar-era press
- satirical juxtaposition
- visible scissor edges
- New Woman imagery
A photomontage on pale paper: a woman's face from a fashion magazine set on a small mechanical body, a giant eye floating above, a gear and a crowd of tiny figures cut from newspaper below, scattered cut letters, every edge sharp and visible.
What to learn from it
- Describe a montage by naming where each fragment came from.
- Notice what changes when scale is wrong on purpose.
- Ask who is looking and who is being looked at.
Find her 1919–20 montage online. List ten fragments you can identify. For each, write one word for where it came from (politics, fashion, machine, crowd, text) and see which kinds dominate.