German Photomontage in 1920s and 1930s - Essay Example

Running Head: German Photomontage In what ways did German Photomontage in the 1920's and 1930's break with the conventions of naturalism, and why was this so [Name of the writer] [Name of the institution] In what ways did German Photomontage in the 1920's and 1930's break with the conventions of naturalism, and why was this so In Germany during the 1920's, there was a wave f mass media images f the so-called New Woman. These images were seductive in their depiction f modern women as having greater mobility and sexual freedom. They were also identified as consumers f the products f a modern industrialized society. Paradoxically, the reality for the New Woman included entrapment in low-paying jobs and subjection to male-dominated hierarchies. Hannah Hoch looked at these contradictions and used them to construct a number f fractured, disturbing photomontages which simultaneously expressed the conflicting realities f pleasure, anger, confidence, and anxiety. Hoch was raised in a conventional, middle-class, small-town family. She moved to Berlin during World War I to study art and work for a women's magazine. It was during these years that she became a member f Berlin Dada. She showed her works regularly with the Dada group but did not establish an international reputation as an artist until after the Dada movement had fallen apart. Cut With The Kitchen Knife includes more than 150 illustrations f works Hoch created during 1918-1933, the Weimar years. Hoch assembled her montages by selecting photographs f women from illustrated print sources and juxtaposing them with fragments f scenes from Weimar and German colonial society. Readers will be intrigued by the surprising even shocking compositions which combine the pleasure f viewing mass media images with critical, even destructive feelings about the subject matter. Maud Lavin offers both interpretation and critical analysis f these montages. (Freud 1955, 145-72) Unless you're very knowledgeable, German art in the twentieth century has been done by men, and German women in the twentieth century have been reduced to the equation Woman=Nature, to child-like whores or to old whores, or the scary, brittle, maneating New German Woman. Masks. What a delight to discover the work f Hannah Hoch (1889-1978). The Walker Art Center has mounted an exhibition f her photomontages which will travel from there to the Museum f Modern Art and to the Los Angeles County Museum f Art. The Photo-montages f Hannah Hoch is the catalogue for the exhibition. "Photomontage" (associated with the German word montieren, to assemble or to fit,) was used by the Berlin Dadaists to describe their piecing together f photographic and typographic sources, usually cut from the printed mass media. The Dadaists enjoyed the mechanica--and proletarian--connotations f the term and used it to distinguish their work from Cubist collage. Although Hannah Hoch worked in other media--useful black and white reproductions f her drawings and oil paintings accompany the text--all her work contained the elements she perfected in the photomontages she made for nearly sixty years. (Burgin 1982, 177-216) The obligatory scholarly essays describing Hoch's life and work are inoffensive and useful But the colour plates are glorious. One hundred and nine reproductions are accompanied by a brief bit f text commenting on a play f words in the tide f a work or providing an historical detail or biographical sketch f a ballerina or industrialist or describing how the original mass media sources were manipulated by the artist. This detail, small colour reproductions f the original sources, conveys the creativity f the curators f this catalogue. Showing how a reproduction f drapery from an advertisement was cut, fumed on its side, and conjoled into becoming waves on the surface f water is magic. Somehow words, the right words, said about a work f art make the work f art visible. Magic. The Photomontages, naturally, conveys the same old sad story f the boys refusing to acknowledge that a girl had played in their tree house. The Dadaists with whom Hoch first worked refused to exhibit their work if hers was shown. One collaboration reproduced in the catalogue suggests a possible reason. Raoul Hausmann, an artist with whom Hoch had a long relationship, created the left page and Hoch the right f a double spread f the first issue f Der Dada in 1919. Hausmann's page, exciting and energetic images amid jagged text, was connected by a piston rod to Hoch's page, a formal, composed rectangle surmounting a block f left-justified text. (Hall 1928) His was unmoored. Modern advertising. Hers, I thought, was another example f a woman being timid, correct. But I was wrong. The next day I remembered hers, but could not conjure his to mind. The rectangle from which she never deviated was for her the sonnet form. I slowly understood: she was making poetry. Every element within the frame is upended, detached from its original context, and perfectly placed. Like a sonnet, no element is other than it must be. Many f Hoch's lovely, haunting, evocative photomontages f women date from the beginning f her nine-year relationship with the Dutch poet Til Brugman in 1926. Impossible to describe, they are mysterious, joyful, sexy, a more accurate rendering f the New German Woman. (Freud 1905) Hoch was among the few artists with unacceptable styles--"cultural Bolshevists"--who chose not to leave Germany in the 1930s. It is not difficult to see why Hoch's work was unacceptable: Men's heads surmounting babies' bodies; brides with women's bodies, babies' heads; grids supporting machine parts called "Design for the Memorial to an Important Lace Shirt"; ethnographic images given glasses and mismatched eyes; compound images f women, alluring but not coy or pleasing, parts f faces provided by reproductions f Blacks; nature depicted as the simultaneous surreal cohabitation f prehistoric beasts and upended Zeppelins against a red sky unseen before space travel. Following the war, artists were compelled to choose between representation and abstraction. (Foucault 1980) Hoch lifted the abstract elements from her previous work, distilled and purified them. It was with her i abstractions that I discovered that she was making poetry. I found the work exciting. Discovering someone who is deeper than I am, who can pull me through mystery to understanding, is exciting. (Baumgardt 17-27) Though she was also a painter, German artist Hannah Hoch is remembered primarily for helping to develop the modern art f photomontage--a form f collage which involves cutting illustrations from magazines and newspapers and reassembling them into new, often humorous and politically charged images. The current travelling exhibition f her work, The Photomontages f Hannah Hoch, affords Americans their very, first opportunity to view together works that span the artist's lifetime. The curators have organized the exhibit in the context f Hoch's personal life as well as the political and social history f 20th-century Germany-and the result is extraordinary. Anna Therese Johanne Hoch was only 23 years old in 1912 when she moved to Berlin from the small town f Gotha to study art. She was working primarily as a designer f embroidery patterns in 1915 when she met and began a stormy seven-year love affair with the married Czech artist and writer Raoul Hausmann. (Weininger 1906) By the end f World War I, Hausmann and Hoch found themselves at the center f a circle f avant-garde artists known as the Berlin Dada group. "Dada" was a nonsense word that reflected the group's distrust f the cultural and political institutions that characterized German society in 1918, especially its corrupt postwar Weimar government. New printing technologies developed about the same time made the mass production f illustrated magazines possible, and photomontage, with its ability to turn common-place magazine images upside down, seemed especially suited to the Dadaist's desire to make art that questioned traditional vaines. (Lacan 1977, 11-52) Hoch's most impressive work from this early phase f her career, Cut with the Kitchert Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch f Germany, reflects not only her distaste for Reich President Friedrich Ebert and the deposed Kaiser Wilhelm, but her concern about what she considered to be the corrupting masculine influence in German public life--an arena that excluded most women. In this work, the scissors f the photomontage artist have become the silent housewife's kitchen knife. Hoch, as the only female member f the macho Berlin Dada group, often found herself patronized by the movement's more radical artists. By 1922, Hoch broke away from Hausmann and the Dadaists, and her photomontages from that time show her growing interest in the ambiguous role f the so-called "new woman" f Weimar Germany. Hoch began a new phase in her career in 1925. For the next five years she created the disturbing, yet often humorous, series f photomontages collectively titled From an Ethnographic Museum. In many f these works, Hoch married primitive images from non-Western cultures with the bodies f European women, and set them on what appear to be museum pedestals, inviting viewers to contemplate not only the role f women in society, but their own fears about "primitive" and foreign cultures. Her criticism f racial prejudice, as perpetrated by the Nazi party (seen in such works as 1931's Flight, in which a wing-headed pursuer resembling Adolf Hitler swoops down upon a frightened victim), placed Hoch in jeopardy when Hitler came to power in January 1933. She was labelled a "degenerate artist" by the Nazis, but unlike many f her compatriots, Hoch chose not to flee Germany. Instead, she moved to the suburbs f Berlin, married, and kept a low profile by directing her artist's eye inward. The photomontages on view from this period expand the limits f the medium as they take on the colouration and abstraction found in modern painting. Hoch's work continued in this vein until the 1960s, when the early stirrings f the women's movement once again ignited her passion for exploring sexual attitudes. She began to create witty photomontages on this theme that evoke the playful spirit f the pop art movement. By the late '60s, failing eyesight put an end to Hrch's career. She died in 1978 at the age f 89. The current exhibition f her work, which was organized and first presented by the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis before travelling to the Museum f Modern Art in New York, can now be seen (if you hurry.) at its last venue, the Los Angeles County Museum f Art in Los Angeles, through September 14, 1997. An excellent catalogue f the show, published by the Walker Art Centre, features essays on Hoch's work and is illustrated with colour plates. (Freud 1961, 169-177) Plus, as a special treat, it includes fascinating black-and-white source photos f many f the original illustrations Hoch cut apart to craft her provocative works f art. While these visual annotations demystify, the process f making a photomontage, they also illuminate the brilliance f Hoch's artistic eye as she selected mundane images and reassembled them into rare and profound works f art. There is a gratifying modesty in how "The Photomontages f Hannah Hoch"[1] at the Museum f Modern Art has been properly, if not perfectly, scaled to its subject. Hannah Hoch (1889-1978) was the sole woman artist associated with Berlin Dada, a group known for its strident politics and anti-art stance. In contrast to renowned Dadaists such as George Grosz and John Heartfield, H/Sch has been, until recently, a modernist footnote. At the time f her death in 1978, she was remembered as the "Bobhaired Muse f the Men's Club" and, most infamously, the "good girl" f Dada, a moniker given to her by the artist Hans Richter. The exhibition at MOMA attempts to correct this dubious recognition by spotlighting the work for which she is best known, and though the hundred or so photomontages on view are as small in scope as they are in size, they are not negligible. While "The Photomontages f Hannah Hoch" does not reveal a major talent, it does show us why Hoch is an artist worth considering in the first place. This is, f course, seeing the glass half full rather than half empty. Yet at a time when marginal artists are hyped with claims that have little to do with art, "The Photomontages f Hannah Hoch" is, as an exhibition f pictures, the equivalent f straight talk. Indeed, the curators' focus--which, by its very nature, excludes Hoch's paintings, drawings and watercolours--involves something resembling connoisseurship. Admittedly, the resuscitation f Hoch's career owes much to feminist art history, and the catalogue underscores (in the jargonistic parlance f the times) her "poignant commentaries on the strains and confusions caused by culturally exacted gender performances." One doesn't have to be an ideologue to find the "good girl" tag belittling, but politics is never a good reason for salvaging (or judging) art. If a few reputable artists have been rescued from oblivion because f their race, gender, or what have you, then we are less blessed than lucky. So it is with Hannah Hoch. Just how much the revitalization f Hoch's reputation is due to extra-aesthetic matters can be divined from the attention bestowed upon the large collage Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch f Germany (1919-20). With its snipped and jumbled photos f politicians, artists and entertainers, Cut with the Kitchen Knife is a bona fide artifact f the Dadaist epoch. The title alone is fraught with enough symbolism to launch a dozen thesis papers. (Cut with the Kitchen Knife did, in fact, serve as the title f a study f the photomontages.) In her catalogue essay, Maria Makela pinpoints the work's imagery--from Marx and Lenin to Pola Negri and Kathe Kollwitz to a map f Europe that identifies the countries in which women were able to vote--and makes a kind f sense f it, though scant attention is paid to it as a work f art. And, as such, Cut with the Kitchen Knife is a mess. Physically, it has not held up well; the piece's discoloured and mottled surfaces suggest a work that once had graphic power. As it is, Hoch's composition--or, should one say, non-composition--is diffuse. Portions f it are funny, but they don't coalesce into anything consequential; it lacks the basic armature a good joke requires. What seems a jolting piece f propaganda is, finally, a dissipated rebus. The appeal f Cut with the Kitchen Knife to contemporary taste may be precisely this fragmentary quality. There are, it would seem, few things more validating for a confused culture than a confused work f art. Cut with the Kitchen Knife is the largest and most overtly political f Hoch's photo-montages. Yet both its scale and "content" were alien to her sensibility. Most f the collages are small--"intimate" is not an inappropriate word--and without the vitriol typical f Berlin Dada. A German critic described the photomontages as being "skeptical in an almost tender way" and this seems about right. For Hoch never took great interest in expounding an anti-art agenda. "A clear aesthetically resolved statement" (as the artist had it) was important to Hoch. It is noteworthy that not until 1929, almost ten years after the First International Dada Fair, did she feel confident in exhibiting her photomontages publicly. During this time Hoch was not completely convinced f photomontage's viability as an art form and exhibited, albeit sporadically, only her paintings and textile designs. Nonetheless she found within its "traditionless" parameters an artistic and imaginative freedom absent from her other work. Although the philosophy f Dada didn't altogether jibe with Hoch's world view, the movement itself was an essential catalyst for her art. She clearly benefited, artistically if not emotionally, from being in proximity to the "men's club." Hoch's vision, however, was not fueled by anger or despair. What emerges from the photomontages is a sly and not ungentle intellect with a deft eye for design and a love for absurdist disjunction. She was a quirky miniaturist at the beginning f what seemed, at the time, an impossibly big century. The century turned out to be bigger (and more impossible) than anyone in 1920 could have predicted, and if some f Hoch's collages seem dated it isn't due to yellowing newsprint alone; the fractured juxtapositions f scale, image, and text in the photomontages have long been a part f our cultural life. (Hansen 1983, 147-84) The artist (and Hoch's one-time lover) Raoul Hausmann, writing in 1931, griped that photomontage was rapidly being shanghaied by commercial and political interests. In this respect, he was prophetic--more than he could ever imagine, in fact. If the edge in Hoch's work has dulled a bit, her portrayal f the new century--dizzying and open to possibility and paradox--is often still exhilarating. It is impossible, for instance, not to read the rush f overlapping images in The Beautiful Girl (1919-20) or Untitled (1921), with its glamour girl spinning atop a turntable, as anything but paeans, albeit acerbic ones, to a world in flux. References Lacan, Jacques, "Desire and the Interpretation f Desire in Hamlet" [1959], Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 11-52. Baumgardt, Manfred, "Das Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft und die Homosexuellen-Bewegung in der Weimarer Republik," Eldorado 17-27. Foucault, Michel, The History f Sexuality, vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vinatge, 1980). Hansen, Miriam, "Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere" New German Critique 29 (Spring/Summer 1983): 147-84. Weininger, Otto, Sex and Character, trans. and 6th ed. f Geschlecht und Charakter (London: Heinemann, 1906). Magnus Hirschreid, Die Homosexualitat des Mannes und des Weibes (Berlin: Louis Marcus, 1914). Hall, Radclyffe, The Well f Loneliness (1928; London: Virago, 1984). Freud, Sigmund, "Fetishism," The Standard Edition XXI, James Strachey, ed. (1927; London: Hogarth, 1961) 169-77. Freud, Sigmund, "The Psychogenesis f a Case f Homosexuality in a Woman," The Standard Edition XVIII, James Strachey, ed. (1920; London: Hogarth, 1955) 145-72. Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory f Sexuality (1905; London: Norton, 1967) 95. Burgin, Victor, "Photography, Phantasy, Function," Thinking Photography (London: Macmillan, 1982) 177-216. Read More