HANNAH HÖCH
Hände / Hands, 1924-1927
© Hannah Höch, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018 / Courtesy Kicken Berlin
Biography
Hannah Höch (German, 1889–1978) was born Anna Therese Johanne Höch, and was an innovative member of the Dada circle in Berlin. She is best known for her work from the Weimar period. Born in Gotha to petit-bourgeois parents, she had to leave school early to take care of her siblings. Emancipating herself from her family in 1912, she went to Berlin in order to study art. In 1915 she met and fell in love with Raoul Hausmann, who was married at the time. Their relationship lasted 7 years and was also an artistic collaboration. With him she developed the technique of photomontages already in 1916. Exhibiting with the Dada circle in the first Dada exhibition in 1920, she became increasingly famous, also exhibiting with the November Group. In 1926 she met the Dutch writer Til (Matilda) Brugmann and fell in love with her. Their artistically productive relationship lasted about 10 years. Over the course of the 1920s her work was exhibited internationally and she traveled to Paris to meet fellow artists, among them Piet Mondrian, and members of the De Stijl group. Because her visionary art was deemed “degenerate” by the National Socialists and banned from exhibition, however, she spent most of the 1930s and the war years (1939 to 1945) hiding in a garden house in Heiligensee, on the outskirts of Berlin, where she continued to live and work until her death in 1978.
