Discover a pioneer of the photomontage and a post-WWI artist who challenged her male colleagues, the accepted wisdom, gender roles and more with her art: Hannah Höch.
- Major retrospective with around 80 photomontages
- Includes other media and material
- Juxtaposed with films from the 1920s
- Runs Jun 21 – Oct 6, 2024
- See also:
- Lower Belvedere overview
- Art exhibitions in Vienna
Assembled Worlds
(Hannah Höch, Made for a Party (Detail), 1936; this work is part of the ifa art collection; photo: © Christian Vagt; © Bildrecht, Vienna 2024)
We’ve got used to photomontages and other collage forms in art. But it wasn’t always so.
You never saw Michelangelo pasting bits of cut-up canvas to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, for example. (Though I haven’t checked.)
All artistic developments need their pioneers. And one such pioneer when it came to the photomontage was the avant-garde German Dada artist Hannah Höch (1889–1978).
Höch’s compositions in the 1920s blazed various trails. The skilled recombination of images in a new whole, for example. Or the repurposing of everyday pictures the artist found in the new post-war wave of printed periodicals.
The works also offered (often satirical) sociopolitical critiques, as well as commentary on, for example, gender roles and women’s position in society.
(View of the “Hannah Höch. Assembled Worlds” exhibition; photo: kunst-dokumentation.com, Manuel Carreon Lopez; © Bildrecht, Vienna 2024)
Such artistic characteristics bode badly for a woman in the early part of the 20th century. Back then, men still dominated art despite gradual post-WWI emancipation. In a development that will surprise nobody, the Nazis were not big fans of Höch either.
Yet Höch (eventually) earned deserved acclaim, particularly for that pioneering work with photomontages and their use in political commentary. New York’s MoMA, for example, gave her a solo exhibition in 1997, and her work has appeared in over 30 other exhibitions there.
The Assembled Worlds exhibition comes to Vienna from the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, who produced it in collaboration with Belvedere.
The inevitable focus of this retrospective is on Höch’s collages; around 80 photomontages feature. But the exhibition also includes archival material and other media (paintings, drawings, etc.)
Many works feel remarkably ahead of their time. 1920’s The Father photomontage, for example, has a man in high heels holding a baby. You can only imagine how that might have gone down with many people a hundred years ago.
(Hannah Höch, Liebe, 1926; this work is part of the ifa art collection; press photo © Christian Vagt; © Bildrecht, Vienna 2024)
Those early works feel pointed but gentle: seemingly produced with a wry or disarming smile. A theme complementing (not dominating) the aesthetics.
Later, Höch moved away from art as (or with) commentary into what we might call art for art’s sake, drifting into surrealism toward the end of her life. And she used other media than the montage.
I loved, for example, the linocut miniatures from student days portraying simplified and expressive black and white landscapes. And enjoyed Höch’s ink and pencil drawings of classical concerts turned into symbolic forms.
In the exhibition, Höch’s works also appear in dialogue with silent movies by filmmakers she knew. She drew significant creative inspiration from film, recognising the medium as both art and a form of montage in its own right.
Assembled Worlds certainly reminds us how quickly the new becomes the normal. Nobody blinks at a photomontage today.
And yet if we allow ourselves to picture the sociopolitical and historical context, then we realise just how innovative Höch was and how important for the development of modernist approaches to art.
Dates, tickets & tips
Enjoy the works of this pioneering artist from June 21st to October 6th, 2024. An entrance ticket for or from Lower Belvedere includes access to Assembled Worlds.
For much of the same time at Lower Belvedere, catch another female artist who disrupted the male hegemony of the past: Broncia Koller-Pinell in the attached orangery.
How to get there
Follow directions for Lower Belvedere. The exhibition takes place in the main wing of the building (on your left as you enter, with a ticket counter beyond the shop on your right).
Address: Rennweg 6, 1030 Vienna