Well, I can’t exactly see them needing to close Whitechapel High Street because of the stampedes to see this one. A neglected German Dadaist usually remains a neglected German Dadaist – for good reason. Yet, in the case of Hannah Höch, getting her first ever UK exhibition, another look is entirely justified.
In part, this is because of the times she worked in – Berlin, from 1912 to 1978 – though few artists responded to those times quite so deftly as Höch. Take 1920’s The Father, a collage of a sober-looking man, in frock and high heels, holding a baby which unsuspectingly takes a facial blow from a boxing champ.
Imbued with Cabaret-era androgyny, Höch’s oeuvre abounds in such images of fluid sexuality. The punch, meanwhile, reflects the anarchy of the period: one of uncontrollable inflation, Spartacist uprising, and humiliation at the Treaty of Versailles.
It was also a time of unprecedented cultural freedom. In such a context, and after the unimaginable losses of the Great War, the Dada movement was born. Eschewing the artistic forms and norms of a supposedly cultivated – but actually slaughterous – previous generation, they rejected painting and sculpture for readymades, photomontage and performance (though always with a sense of mischief over menace).
Höch specialised in photomontage, and in Heads of State, shots of the German president Friedrich Ebert and his equally portly Defence minister in their bathing trunks are collaged into an embroidery pattern.