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| Hannah Hoch |
Anna Therese Johanne Hoch, also known as Hannah Hoch, was born on November 1, 1889, in Gotha, Germany. She is the eldest of five children and grew up in a small town bourgeois environment. She enrolled in the School of Applied Arts in Berlin-Charlottenburg where she studied glass design. Later she enrolled at the School of the Royal Museum of Applied Arts and studied a graphic arts class. During her time in college in 1915, she had a relationship and artistic partnership with Raoul Hausmann, a Viennese Artist. Through him, she became part of the Berlin Club Dada in which she showed nine works at the infamous First International Dada Faoir in 1920, one includes the Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (1919-1920) [shown below]. This piece combines images from newspapers of the time re-created to make a new statement about life and art in the Dada movement.
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| Hannah Hoch, Cut With the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Culture, 1919 |
The Berlin Club Dada was an artistic movement that also involved political radicalism. Dadaists were self-proclaimed radical thinkers who championed women's rights. Hoch was the only female Berlin Dadaist, therefore, was marginalized for her independent spirit, masculine dress, and bisexuality. She also expressed herself less politically than the others in the group. Her art works often confronted gender issues and depicted how she was against pro war societal issues.
Hannah Hoch's relationship with Hausmann didn't last, however. He though that women were only good for support and childbirth. Hoch was against that proposal, therefore, she ended their relationship in 1922. She took all the negativity in her life and used it to strengthen her work in the future. She experimented with non-objective art through painting, collage, photography and graphics. She pieced them together and worked with a style that would later become known as photomontage. She mainly centered her work on women as they are depicted in media in comparison to actuality. She also created many pieces combing males and females. She did this by extracting pictures of women’s bodies then detaching the body parts and replacing them with what she thought society wants in terms of the male society. Her complex imagery expressed her oppressed broken life in a patriarchal society in pre-war and post war Germany.
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| Hannah Hoch, Da Dandy, 1919 |
Through her Montages of women she became known as discovering the "New Woman". The "New Women" were independent modern female, free to smoke, wear sexy clothes, vote and work (Guerrilla Girls, 66). Hoch created a pathway for women in society and art; she even explored her own sexuality in her art. She was bisexual, although it was looked down upon at that time. She had a relationship with Til Burgman. This relationship also influenced Hoch's artwork because the photomontages would now contain same sex couples. The Nazi's took over and were not fond of the relationship, so she was forced to end it and start a new one with a younger man whom she eventually married. She also had to hide her dada artwork because it was not acceptable during this time of war. Her artwork wasn't displayed until the war was over(Guerrilla 67).
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| Hannah Hoch and Til Brugman 1947 |
She died May 31, 1978.
Bibliography:
The Guerrilla Girls. The Gurrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. New Yok: Penguin Books, 1998. Print.
Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and society. forth edition. Londen: Thames and Hudson. 2007. Print.
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2006/dada/artists/hoch.shtm
http://nmwa.org/explore/artist-profiles/hannah-h%C3%B6ch
http://chewonstyrofoam.wordpress.com/biography-of-hannah-hoch/
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/artpainting/a/hannah_hoch.htm
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