Publication : Biography Hannah Höch

Cara Schweitzer
Schrankenlose Freiheit für Hannah Höch
Osburg Verlag : Berlin 2011
439 Seiten
ISBN-10: 3940731641
ISBN-13: 978-3940731647

The life of the Dada artist under the Nazi dictatorship

With her ​​scissors she cut art history, the collages of the grande dame of Berlin Dada movement, Hannah Höch (1889 - 1978), shook the Weimar »Beer Belly Cultural Epoch." Now for the first time a biography of the artist appears, who extensively discussed their predicament under the Nazi dictatorship. Previously undiscovered letters and documents explain why Hannah Höch could not leave Germany at the last minute.

Shortly after the outbreak of World War I in Berlin the Dada movement was formed. Hannah Höch is one of the few women in this illustrious men's club. After the takeover by the Nazis their work was considered as "degenerate". Her closest friends left the country. During the war years, she retired to spend in her garden on the outskirts of Berlin. Her house becomes a secret archive of the avant-garde. The biography focuses on the dramatic circumstances of her marriage to the 21 years younger Heinz Kurt Matthies. In 1938 he was arrested, and for the once cautious artist begins the fight for his release.

Hannah Höch – All Beginnings are DADA!

Hannah Höch – All Beginnings are DADA!
Museum Tinguely, Basel
January 16 through May 4, 2008

On the site of the museum: press releases in English, French and German and Pressphotos

The Museum Tinguely presents the first extensive survey in Switzerland dedicated to Hannah Höch (1889-1978), the sole woman member of the group Dada Berlin. The exhibition covers the period from her early Dada years during and immediately following the First World War through the 1920s, a fertile phase in her career during which Höch was in contact with numerous important avant-garde artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp, Theo van Doesburg. She collaborated in part with them, producing masterly collages, profound yet ironical. During the 1930s and ‘40s, she worked in total retirement and secrecy – and her works contain a cryptic criticism of the National Socialist regime. Her late works, less known, in which she appears to anticipate Pop Art by her themes and colours, were her reaction to new scientific discoveries of the day. To close the exhibition, a section will be dedicated to Höch’s garden – a recurrent theme throughout the artist’s oeuvre.

The exhibition was conceived in close collaboration with the Berlinische Galerie, seat of the Hannah Höch archives; it is organised in a chronological order and divided into five sections, opening with Höch’s large-scale photo-collage 'Lebensbild' that the artist created in 1972/1973 so to speak as a sort of visual autobiography. The collage harks back to numerous important works that the visitor can encounter throughout the exhibition.

See also Hannah Höch, June 2007.

Hannah Höch - Aller Anfang ist Dada

This exhibition is devoted to the probably most significant female German artist of the classical modern period: Hannah Höch. Her œuvre has recently found new international recognition and Höch, who was particularly famous for her collages, will now be honoured with a major show again. This will be the first exhibition in her home city of Berlin for more than 15 years. Around 160 works drawn from all her creative periods will showcase the extraordinary variety of her artistic production, which always kept pace with the latest techniques of her time.

Hannah Höch - Aller Anfang ist Dada, Berlinische Galerie Berlin (April 6 to July 2, 2007). Press Release (English). Catalogue available (see image). Video Interview with curator Ralf Burmeister.