Hannah Höch. Collages

Stylistically, she influenced the artistic technique of photomontage as well as the pictorial motifs of an emancipated woman who challenges the social position of women in the conventions of her time. Her attitude towards men was coloured by skepticism and irony but not outright rejection. Höch was also aware that the Roaring Twenties were more façade than substance. Raoul Haussmann, who was close to her for several years, detected in Höch’s works a “decisive mixture” that made her a collagist of styles to the benefit of her own stylistic freedom.

During the defamation and persecution that prevailed in Nazi Germany, Höch was in “inner emigration ”, and in her house and garden at Heiligensee she developed the sheets of adhesive art known today as her “Inner Pictures”. After the war, Höch’s works also gave rise to new worlds of form and meaning that were capable of expressing her search for hidden beauty. Especially in her late work, the vegetative as well as the ambivalent character of her sagacious to hallucinatory combinations were palpable in her collages.

Over the decades, Hannah Höch’s collages grew into a uniquely complex gesamtkunstwerk in which reality, irony, enthusiasm, gentle mockery, and deep melancholy were irresolvably interwoven.