Cut with the Cake-Knife Dada Through the Last Weimer Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany

Cut with the Cake-Knife Dada Through the Last Weimer Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany Hannah Höch, 1919-20

Anna Therese Johanne Höch was born in 1889 in Gotha. In 1912 she began classes the College of Applied Arts in Berlin. Along with Raoul Hausmann (who she was having an abusive affair with at the time) she was among the founder members of the Berlin Dada Club, which included George Grosz and Franz Jung, in 1918.

During the Nazi dictatorship she stayed in Berlin, living quietly in a suburb, unable to exhibit because the Nazis had declared Dada degenerate art. After the war she continued to create photomontage art. She died in Berlin in 1978.

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Dada was an avant-garde art movement that first appeared in Zurich as a response to the madness of the First World War. Dadaists described themselves as anti-art and aimed to deliberately disorientate or shock. They were concerned with ridiculing the world around them through absurdity and nonsense or gibberish.

After founding the Cabaret Voltaire (in reference to the French philosopher who mocked religious and philosophical dogma) as a venue for performances and manifestos, the movement spread rapidly to Berlin, Paris, New York and other artistic centres around Europe and Asia.

The artform covered literature, poetry (including cutting out words from newspaper articles and randomly selecting them), drama, music, sculpture (often using ‘found objects’ such as Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ – basically a urinal bought from a plumbers shop in New York in 1917, turned on its side and fastened to the wall) and graphic art. Typically posters would use a wide range of typefaces to create a disconnected look, and collage and photomontage techniques (sometimes randomised by dropping images onto the paper and sticking them where they fell). 

The movement had a wide influence, including on posters designed in post-Revolution Russia, and later surrealism, abstract expressionism, pop art and situationism.