Hannah Hoch and the Dada Art Movement - Essay Example

Hannah Hoch and the Dada Art Movement To some extent growing out of the Modern Cubist movement started by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque at the beginning of the 1900s, the Dadaists adopted something of an anti-art stance as an artistic movement. According to Michael Delahunt (2007), Picasso and Braque began introducing previously printed materials in their art as early as 1911. “They used letters, fragments of words, musical notes, then significant material elements: sand or sawdust which create relief, and tend to make the picture more physically an object” (Delahunt, 2007). The creation of collages was not long in following and became a mainstay of the Dadaist movement, particularly as it evolved into the concept of photomontage. Artists during this period struggled against the concept that art created spiritual values and frequently used the products of their creative spirit to protest against the First World War. Beginning in France in about 1916, the movement’s progress and development can be seen in context with the Great War, which started in 1914 and was waged for four years. While this artistic movement didn’t start until two years after the war began, about when the populace, artists among them, was beginning to feel the pressure of constant warlike states, it also persisted for a few years after it ended as the populace, again with artists among them, became reconciled to the new world order thus established. The development of this movement is most frequently associated with artists such as Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters and Marcel Duchamp, among other male artists, but less well known is the equally contributive Hannah Hoch. This investigation into the Dada Movement will therefore focus upon Hoch’s contributions to the movement and her artwork as representative of it. The foundation of the Dada Movement is actually attributed to artists in Zurich, Switzerland and in New York, America. It is described in the Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature as a “nihilistic movement in the arts … that was based on the principles of deliberate irrationality, anarchy, and cynicism and the rejection of laws of beauty and social organization” (cited in Buell, 1998). The name of the movement was arrived at with the same lack of reverence as the movement itself, reportedly arrived at by chance and retained because of its childlike associations. One of its chief goals was to undermine the “rational and civilized standards” then in place in the art world by exploring the icons of the old world, placing them in new contexts so as to expose a lack of inherent meaning in the work (Hardin, 2006) and mostly ignoring the call of the easel. Although it began as a protest against the way art was revered and honored, it began taking on more political overtones with its transference, in 1917, to Berlin under the guidance of Raoul Hausmann and his mistress Hannah Hoch. The concept of photomontage was developed and brought into the movement by the combined efforts of Hannah Hoch and her lover Raoul Hausmann. While on vacation in 1918, “they found a technique of engraving which placed photographic portraits of heads of local men away at war atop a generic, uniformed torso” (Finger, 1998). They used this idea and applied it, much like their Cubist predecessors, to place newspaper and magazine advertisements and images in new arrangements, changing the way these images communicated with the world. “The Dadaists adapted the Cubist idea of collage to new purpose, that of making puzzling or strikingly incongruous juxtapositions of images and letters” (Hardin, 2006). Particularly in Germany, the Dadaists focused on breaking conventions in traditional expression, exploring political issues at hand and attempting to address new social issues emerging at the time, such as a burgeoning women’s movement observed occurring in the rest of Europe, an issue in which Hoch, in particular, was able to identify as even within her own group, she experienced marginalization and suppression (Boswell, 1996). Hoch was strongly influenced in her art by the social issues she saw developing throughout Europe during the Great War and afterwards. Through much of Europe, “women were given suffrage, magazines were being published for women, and Hoch was using the epochal time as material for her art. The rigid gender roles are toyed with in a destructive manner, often placing a woman’s head or legs on a male body and vice versa” (Finger, 1998). Her illustrations often depict women as being in closer proximity to the primitive or uncivilized, clearly comparing women’s progress, as a gender, with social progress as a nation and finding the former severely lacking. She seemed to have a strong grasp on the social constraints that still held women back in all fields as she made the conscious decision to pursue a career in applied arts as a more practical career choice. However, her professional position as a designer for dress and embroidery patterns within the same company that published German women’s magazines also provided her with quick access to the types of images she used in her outside artwork. While her early work was cutting and sharp, later images became more humorous, perhaps as a result of the slow assimilation of the Dada movement into the Surrealist camp. The two approaches were based on a more imaginative, dream-like or nightmare-like approach to art in which images portrayed did not necessarily coincide with images likely to be encountered in the natural, waking world, but Surrealism had a wider range of exploration available, easily enfolding Dada into its exploratory embrace. Unfortunately, the efforts of Hannah Hoch and her male colleagues were often more misunderstood by their contemporaries than appreciated. “Many of the movements such as Cubism, Expressionism, and Dada were misunderstood by the German people, suffering from economic collapse. The demoralized nation viewed these art forms as intellectual, and highly elitest linking them to the poor condition of the country. This also linked these artists to the ‘supposed international conspiracy of Communists and Jews’” (McAllister, 2001). This ironic twist of fate ended up linking the artists of this and other modern movements with ideas of insanity and anti-social, anti-national affiliation. “The nineteenth-century founders of German psychiatry felt that the Jew was inherently degenerate and more susceptible than the non-Jew to insanity. As Sander Gilman has pointed out, the classifications of ‘degenerate’ and ‘healthy’ appeared for the first time in the late nineteenth century, by the late 1930’s they were fairly standard in discussions about the avant-garde and the traditional” (McAllister, 2001). By the time the Nazis came to power, this form of artwork was considered subversive to the state, placing the lives and works of numerous artists at peril. Despite its attempt to prove that art did not convey some form of inherent moralistic convention to its audience, Dada, along with its immediate successor Surrealism, instead proved the opposite. Through its efforts at exploring the relationships between the dream world and reality, the lack of meaning within meaning and the meaning within serendipity, these artists have helped change the way the world views itself. Hannah Hoch, along with her counterparts in Germany, Switzerland, France and America, helped bridge the distance between the hard scientific intellectualism of the Cubist movement to the imaginative and loosely formed connections of Surrealism even as they found a means of exposing the realities of their world as illusion and reality combined. References Boswell, Peter; Makela, Maria & Lanchner, Carolyn. The Photomontages of Hannah Hoch. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1996. Delahunt, Michael. (2007). “Cubism.” Artlex. Available 5 January 2008 from Finger, Missy. (1998). “Book Review.” Dallas Goethe Center. Available 5 January 2008 from < http://www.dallasgoethecenter.org/hannah.htm> Hardin, Mark. (2006). “Dada and Surrealism.” The Artchive. Available 5 January 2008 from McAllister, Jennifer. The Degenerate Art Exhibit at the Munich Haus der Kunst. Temple University, 2001. Read More