From an Etnographic Museum by Hannah Höch

Lecture about Hannah Höch by Alexandra Foradas recorded at The 20th Annual Spring Symposium of Williams College, 2015.

Alexandra Foradas talks about ‘From an etnographic museum’, a series of 18 photomontages made in the period 1924-1931 by German artist Hannah Höch (1889 – 1978).

About Hannah Höch

Wikipedia writes about bisexual artist Hannah Höch‘s personal life in the 1920s and 30s: “Höch left her seven-year relationship with Raoul Hausmann in 1922. In 1926, she began a relationship with the Dutch writer and linguist Mathilda (‘Til’) Brugman, whom Höch met through mutual friends Kurt and Helma Schwitters. By autumn of 1926, Höch moved to Hague to live with Brugman, where they lived until 1929, at which time they moved to Berlin. Höch and Brugman’s relationship lasted nine years, until 1935. They did not explicitly define their relationship as lesbian (likely because they did not feel it necessary or desirable), instead choosing to refer to it as a private love relationship. In 1935, Höch began a relationship with Kurt Matthies, whom she was married to from 1938 to 1944.” (…) “Many of her political works from the Dada period equated women’s liberation with social and political revolution. In particular, her photomontages often critically addressed the Weimar New Woman, collating images from contemporary magazines. Her works from 1926 to 1935 often depicted same sex couples, and women were once again a central theme in her work from 1963 to 1973.”