Weltrevolution

Hannah Höch

1920 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

This photograph reproduces a detail of Höch's large photomontage "Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch". In it, Höch takes aim at the hypocrisies and moral bankruptcy of the Weimar Republic through the radical techniques of disorientation, negation, and disjunction. This new, fragmented art of cut and pasted clippings from the mass media allowed the Dadaists, in the words of George Grosz, to say "in pictures what would have been banned by the censors." Here, Höch sets into motion a swirling, anarchic panoply of military leaders, crowds, spinning machine parts, cabaret dancers, and Dadaist pranksters; the work's engagement with the social praxis--in terms of both its subject and its construction--marks a decisive rupture with traditional bourgeois modes of expression. Höch often reworked her photomontages, and this image records a crucial revision in the image's development: the removal of the charged textual fragment "Weltrevolution" (World Revolution) and its replacement by the relatively innocuous "Die grosse Welt Dada" (Big Dada World).

Artist

Hannah Höch

Date

1920

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987