Collage can be a difficult medium to gauge, with its apparent simplicity and the fact that, at some point, surely, everybody has cut out images from magazines or newspapers to make something. It is an accessible art form and consequently occasionally undervalued. This exhibition of Hannah Höch’s work at the Whitechapel Gallery however, demonstrates the potential of collage to be as profoundly affecting as any other art form.
Höch worked in the early part of the 20th century amongst the Berlin Dada-ists, and her practice has, until now, been somewhat obscured by the shadow of the men that made up the Dada movement. The first major UK exhibition of her work, this show covers the full expanse of her career from the 1910s to the 1970s and features her collaborations, excerpts from her source journals and wall upon wall of small and beautiful collage works, sliced together from magazines and journals.
Höch is quoted on the walls of the exhibition, and her claim to ‘blur the firm borders that we human beings are inclined to erect around everything’ is perhaps a better summary of the work on offer than anything that could be written. Her works cuts bodies and perspectives together into frequently sad little frames of abstraction, experimental but full of emotion.
The period between 1920 and 1930 offers the classic signs of Dada, an irreverent silliness in the combination of images and colour, but with a social critique embedded throughout. As a woman working alongside the titanic egos of Dada Höch would have struggled not only against the expectations of her time but for her recognition as a serious artist. Women and the female figure occur often throughout her work of the Dada period, alongside the playful impulse to colonise classic signs of masculinity that appears across several pieces; a tiny head on the barrel chest of Der Sieger (1927) or the high heeled, breast-feeding moustachioed figure of Der Vater (1920). Moving between the frames, the fascination of the occasionally peeling combinations of cuttings offsets their completeness. Materially, they are wonderful, and for their time constitute a strong critique of racial and sexual discrimination.
The melancholia of the images increases as the century progresses, beginning when Höch retired to a small house outside Berlin as Nazism gripped 1930s Germany. Isolated and despairing, her work quiets as the War begins, with less play and humour. Of course the question remains as to why she would have stayed, and not joined her contemporaries in flight. Kurt Schwitters came to England and Hans Richter to New York, but Höch elected to stay, for reasons unexplained here. This work exhibits sadness, and perhaps a loneliness felt in her little garden house on the outskirts of the Reich.
It is at the end of this section that there appears one of the more startling images of the exhibition, Friedenstaube (1945) or Dove of Peace. A single dove flies above the empty jutting barrels of artillery, slanted by the false perspective of the collage and the space between the top of the frame and the image. As a comment on the hollowness of the post-war era and the battered remains of Germany it is deeply powerful.
The last section moves into the 1950s and 60s, where the pieces rely more on abstraction and form for their affect, signifying perhaps a new sense of hope and potential in their vaguely space age figures and vertigo perspectives on life. More colour appears throughout this period as printing improves, and full modernity bursts out of the pictures.
Turning one final corner, the last work of the exhibition appears; old collage, self-portraits and snapshot pictures of Höch’s private residence combined into a huge mural. It is a collage of collage, an artist’s meditation on her life’s work, filled with sense of an impending end. This last piece, like the exhibition, takes stock of Höch’s extraordinary body of work in a direct transposition of her practice. A selection of image, layered and framed by a careful eye.