Hannah Höch: Dealing Early with Feminist Issues

Hannah Höch - Dada Puppen (Dada Dolls) - 1916 - Fabric, yarn, thread, board, and beads - National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (click photo for larger image)German artist, Hannah Höch (1889-1978) was the only woman associated with the Berlin Dada group. She was best known for her provocative photomontage compositions, which explore Weimar-era perceptions of gender and ethnic differences. But Höch was also particularly interested in the representation of women as dolls, mannequins, and puppets—in essence, products for mass consumption. During her Dada period, she constructed and exhibited stuffed dolls that bore exaggerated and abstract features, but were clearly identifiable as female.

In 1920, the Dada group held the First International Dada Fair, which took on the traditional format of an art salon. But the walls of the site were plastered with posters and photomontages. Höch was allowed to participate only after her fellow artist and lover—Raoul Hausmann (also featured on this site)—threatened to withdraw his own work from the exhibition if she was kept out of it.

In the work featured here, these small-scale sculptural works suggest her awareness of Dada ideas more generally from its inception in 1916 in Zurich. She was likely influenced by writer Hugo Ball, the Zurich-based founder of Dada, given Höch's doll costumes' resemblance to the geometric forms of Ball's own costume worn in a seminal Dada performance at the Swiss nightclub Cabaret Voltaire.”

In 1934 Höch was pinpointed as a “cultural Bolshevist” by the Nazis. In order to continue to make art during World War II, she retreated to a cottage in Heiligensee, on the outskirts of Berlin, where she remained incognito until it was safe to resurface.