Hannah Höch (1889-1978) moved between differing worlds: as an editorial assistant with a major
Berlin-based magazine publisher and as the only woman who could hold her own in the German
capital's vibrant Dada scene of the 1920s. Höch broke with the traditions of representation and
vision. Her works dissected a world marked by the catastrophe of the Great War and an intense
consumer culture and reassembled it in revolutionary poetic and often ironic ways. Höch kept
to her artistic means and her poetic-radical imagination shimmering between social observation
and dream world even in the post-WWII period. Scissors and glue were the weapons of her art of
montage of which she was a co-inventor. Cutting and montage also shaped film still a new
medium in the 1920s which strongly influenced Höch's art: she understood her assembled
pictures as static films. This richly illustrated and expertly annotated book explores
comprehensively for the first time Höch's fascination with film and the visual culture of the
modern industrial age. It demonstrates how montage evolved in a field of tension between
artistic experimentation commercial exploitation and political appropriation. A text on
photomontage by Hannah Höch writen in 1948 and text-collage on the history of montage in
which major protagonists of Modernism and Avant-garde such as Sergej Eisenstein Raoul Hausmann
László Moholy-Nagy Walter Ruttman Kurt Schwitters Theo van Doesburg and Dsiga Wertow have
their say round out this volume.
