La Dada Mama

More from the e-mail bag:

Ah yes, what a BOLD approach to human physiognomy, I must admit, in those collages you show here!

And yet, being a Höch aficionado I’ll have to insist it wasn’t Mr Paolozzi but Hannah Höch who first applied a human silhouette cut-out in her collage work, back in 1931, in Die starken Männer.

In fact already her 1919 work Da Dandy features the silhouette of a male head in profile, which she filled with clippings of female faces. And 1918 was the year when that famed and fab dada couple, Höch and Hausmann, invented the photo montage, I’m told?

At right: Die starken Männer,
Collage by Hannah Höch, 1931
VG Bild-Kunst
Photo: Liedtke & Michel

I’m sure you’re all familiar with her paintings where Höch liked to transfer collage work onto canvas, and I especially love her 1925 painting Roma (featuring Asta Nielsen and Mussolini) where Höch also included two negative forms, i.e. painting the Nielsen composite photosources sans those parts she had cut out and used in her center montage ?? which obviously shows Asta N. urging Mussolini (after his seizing power in 1922) to get the hell out of Rome…

Ach, what a great and free spirit, our girl from Gotha? After ditching that bitchy Hausmann guy Hannah shacked up with the female Dutch writer Til Brugman in 1926 and in 1938 married Dr Kurt Heinz Matthies whom she’d met on on a Dolomiten Wandertour; Herr Dr Matthies being much younger than her (two decades, sources say).

Like in her essay DIE ERSTEN FOTOMONTAGEN she wrote: “Ein wundersames Neuland, das zu entdecken als erste Voraussetzung hat: Hemmungslosigkeit. Aber nicht Disziplinlosigkeit.”

— zohara

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