Hannah Hoch @ Whitechapel Gallery

[Originally Posted on Weblearn by  ADAM WALLACE  at Sunday, 9 February 2014 22:08:51 o'clock GMT]

Went to see the exhibition of Hannah Hoch's work at the Whitechapel Gallery, which I found immensely inspiring.Hoch was a supremely skilled collagist, whose work spans most of the 20th century. She was influential on the Berlin Dada scene, holding her own as the only female member of the Berlin dada group; she was also the only female artist to show at the First International Dada fair in 1920.

"...one of Höch's primary preoccupations was the representation of the 'new woman' of the Weimar Republic, whose social role and person identity were in a complex process of redefinition in the postwar period. ... Juxtaposing photographs and text to both endorse and critique existing mass-media representations, Höch parodied elements bourgeois living and morals and also probed the new, unstable definitions of femininity that were so widespread in postwar media culture." (Dickerman, 2005)

Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany.(1919-1920)

Dada Review 1919

Much of Hoch's work is figurative, and thus an important influence on my own practice. Many of her collages involve composite figures, in which the scale has been violently distorted, fractured and fragmented. Her work in the Weimar period was often a satrirical comment on public figures & the militarism so prevalent in German society at that time. The image below, Heads of State, shows the President & Defence Minister of the Weimar Republic in beach trunks, with paunchy bellies, collaged onto a pictorial beach scene from a children's book.

In the piece below, High Finance, she critiques powerful financial interests and the military. Even though the Treaty of Versailles had stripped Weimar Germany of the vast majority of its military power, denying it an airforce or an army larger than 100,000 men, powerful figures in both finance and industry desired re-armament for Germany, and would eventually see their plans brought to fruition through their financial support for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Hoch's collages are particularly important to me as an inspiration in how collage can be used to deform and distort the body in a figurative practice. Much of her work relies on arranging bodily elements in new configurations which produce not only a completely new figure, but show new emotional states & project a sense of personality. Her work is extremely vital, and buzzes with energy. Pieces like Dame, 1923, English Dancer, 1928, Russian Dancer/My Double, 1928, Self Portrait, 1926, German Girl, 1930, Made For a Party, 1936 have helped me in developing work which plays with the proportions of the body, as well as creating entirely new figures through combinations of separate bodily pieces. This is especially true of my electronic collages, and makes me wonder everytime I am working in Photoshop what Hannah Hoch would have been able to produce had she had computer technology available in her time!








During the Weimar period Hoch's also commented on issues of colonialism and race, though she never directly criticised the prevailing racist attitudes which existed at that time in German society. In her series of collages entitled From An Ethnographic Museum, she created a series of grotesques by combining figurative elements of both contemporary Europeans with tribal fetish obects and non-Europeans. The results are both startling, and a powerful commentary on racial stereotyping, [although Hoch did not directly criticise the prevalent racist attitudes current in Germany during that period, today these pieces offer a powerful statement against colonialism and racism].

Peasant Couple, From an Ethnographic Museum 1931

Sweet One, From an Ethnographic Museum, 1926

Hannah Hoch, together with Francis Bacon and Paul McCarthy are three extremely important artists which influence my practice. Hoch's work has shown me the possibilities of collage, its playfulness and energy. I feel extremely fortunate that the Whitechapel Gallery hosted this exhibition and even bought a copy of the book so that I can reference her work whenever I wish.