Hannah Höch wore her hair in a clipped Louise Brooks bob, and her wardrobe was a mix of 1920s androgynous “smart-wear”: pinstriped and sailor-collared dresses, woolen skirts, or unisex suiting worn with floppy bow-ties and simple Peter Pan–collared blouses—and robust lace-up shoes. In these wardrobe staples she looked inventive and strong. She kept the same characteristic look until her death in 1978: a tidy boyish style that expressed a liberated, modern approach to life but was nonetheless impossibly elegant. Even at the age of eighty-four, she wore her snow-white hair in a bob with bangs. There is something reminiscent of Prada about Höch: a sturdy experimentalist who has taken unexpected turns.
Born in 1889 in Gotha, Germany, Höch worked from 1916 to 1926 at the German publisher Ullstein Verlag, where she designed dress patterns for women’s magazines including Die Dame. She was fully up to date with the world of women’s media during the Weimar Republic era. While primarily known for her photomontage work, she wrote a Manifesto of Modern Embroidery in 1918 and saw the unique value of the craft in a creative world dominated at the time by men. Women’s creativity need not, she felt, be a reduced or shabbier kind of endeavor. Inspired by an originator of Dadaism, Hugo Ball, Höch later went on to make Dada dolls dressed in Cubist costumes, resembling what Ball might wear to the Cabaret Voltaire nightclub in Zurich, a hotbed of Dada activity. Höch was attracted to the Dadaist manifesto that aimed “to remind the world that there are people of independent minds—beyond war and nationalism—who live for different ideals.”
DACS 2018: © Hannah Höch
Hannah Höch, Self Portrait, 1930.
Embroidery is very closely related to painting. It is constantly changing with every new style each epoch brings. It is an art and ought to be treated like one. . . . You, craftswomen, modern women, who feel that your spirit is in your work, who are determined to lay claim to your rights (economic and moral), who believe your feet are firmly planted in reality, at least Y-O-U should know that your embroidery work is a documentation of your own era.
—Hannah Höch, Embroidery and Lace, 1918
Höch herself lived for different ideals. She was one of the few female artists connected to the Dadaists, but her legacy has been overshadowed by male artists such as George Grosz and John Heartfield. Despite their radical stance, they undermined her and tried to oust her work from the First International Dada Fair, held in Berlin in 1920, simply because she was a woman. Another of their ilk, Hans Richter, said that her contribution to the movement was her ability, despite a lack of funds, to “conjure up beer and coffee” when required. Despite their intentions, Höch’s influential photomontage Cut With the Dada Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany went on display and became one of the exhibition’s standout pieces. Magazine pages and advertisements are artfully collaged on the canvas, in spaces labeled “Dada” and “Anti-Dada.” The title of the piece references how Höch navigated gender issues in the years after the World War I—a theme she explored over and over.
Höch deliberately signed her name H.H., which when spoken in German sounds like ha ha—a witty nod to her Dada experience.
Höch’s art was considered “degenerate” by the Nazis during the Third Reich, and she took refuge in a cottage at Heiligensee, near Berlin. In the garden there she buried the work of her artist friends from the Dada days to protect their legacy.
Höch didn’t conform. Her confident and clearly defined style of dress reflects a sure sense of purpose; she was, she admits, “self-certain.” Quietly and unflagrantly, she had affairs. For a time she was married to the much younger businessman Kurt Matthies, and she had a nine-year relationship with a woman, the Dutch writer Mathilda Brugman. Although she was private in her personal life, Höch’s work examines how the world defined men and women. She shows a satirical alternate masculinity in the montages Da Dandy and The Strong Men—images compiled from women’s weekly magazines—and she appraised the notion of self in her work The Gymnastics Teacher, which depicted a thin, fashionable young woman with modish bobbed hair juxtaposed with a large, apron-clad fräulein. She used familiar images for effect, explaining “that the image impact of an article—for example, a gentleman’s collar—could produce a stronger impression if a photograph of one of them were taken, cut out, and ten such cut-out collars were just laid on a table and a photograph made of them.”
In 1920, Höch wrote a short story, “The Painter,” about a modern, forward-thinking couple whose relationship breaks down when the man is asked to wash the dinner plates four times a year; this, he says, is “an enslavement of his spirit.” It’s a tale based on her life with an early lover, the artist Raoul Hausmann.
One of Höch’s most famous collages, The Fashion Show (1925–35), is alive with the possibilities of how we see women in fashion and contemporary culture. The Canadian-born, UK-based designer Edeline Lee was inspired by Höch to create her 2017 catwalk collection. Lee explained the appeal of the artist’s era to current fashion, “This was post–World War I—a very nervous period, not so different from today. We have a strong idea of what a ‘lady’ was supposed to look like in the past, but how should a capable, independent woman dress today, pertaining to her grace and dignity, yet still be comfortable?” Höch was very in tune with such questions. The bombardment of new media and the expectations of modernism shaped her art and molded her wardrobe, in ways very much like young designers experience today.
Getty Images: Schütt/Ullstein Bild via Getty Images
Hannah Höch in her Berlin studio, 1967.