Höch cut up and combined images to make political and social statements about the world around her, just like so many of her Dada contemporaries across Europe. They were vehemently against war and violence and were anti-bourgeois and against the exclusivity of highbrow art. The movement embraced poetry, music, art and ‘cut-up’ literature in which written narrative is cut up and rearranged to create a new text.
The Dada movement had early centres in Holland, Berlin and Zürich (around the Cabaret Voltaire) and used recognisable figures, everyday objects and real-world events to make social or political statements. They blurred high and low culture, ignored aesthetics and intended to offend. As they said in one of their first exhibitions, the source for their imagery was “the illustrated magazine and the lead stories of the press.”
Other key figures of the movement alongside Hannah Höch were Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, George Grosz and Kurt Schwitters. The Dadaist ideals had faded towards the end of the 1920s and most moved into other art forms such as surrealism and modernism. However, this short-lived European movement laid the foundations of British pop art. It also inspired musicians such as David Bowie, Frank Zappa and Kurt Cobain to adopt the cut-out technique in writing their lyrics.
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