OCA preloader logo
Visit Report: Hannah Hoch and Stephen Willats - The Open College of the Arts

To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.

Visit Report: Hannah Hoch and Stephen Willats thumb

Visit Report: Hannah Hoch and Stephen Willats

hannah-hoch-2_2789736b (1)Not even unseasonably beautiful weather could deter 12 OCA students from enjoying the study day of Hannah Hoch’s work at the Whitechapel. Admittedly, several of them were less convinced by the Whitechapel‘s companion show of Steve Willatt’s photographs of community activism in seventies housing estates. Hoch’s work, however, proved unanimously popular – not least, perhaps, because unlike some of Willatt’s early work, her political commitment was equalled by her skills as a technician and her gifts as a satirist.
This was apparent as early on in her career as The Father of 1920 in which she presented a male figure wearing a dress and left literally holding the baby. The work recalls the unique role that Hoch played as the only significant woman artist in the Berlin Dada circle and the partner of another collage artist, Raoul Hausmann. It would have been interesting to know what he made of a piece that she wrote in the same year as The Father in which she observed that ‘unlike the real painters of earlier times the (male) painter was not asked to work only with brush and palette. This was his wife’s fault…. At least four times in four years he was asked to wash the dishes.’
What is striking, however, is that The Father, in keeping with Hoch’s writings, is not a dreary exercise in agitprop. Instead she established an immediate contrast between the male boxers and the women gymnasts that cavort around the figure. In a similar work, High Finance of 1923 she introduced what became her familiar repertoire of unsettling juxtapositions and sudden changes of scale. A good example of her wit and humour is her counter-intuitive portrayal of a lorry cresting the rim of a tyre. A few years later she began to explore ethnographic imagery that evoked the darker side of Europe’s post-war fascination with eugenics. At the same time she began to undermine the image of the ‘new woman’ as a vamp or bathing beauty. Her attitude to such stereotypes is shown by the way that she presents them with swollen heads and predatory lips or slices the top of their heads off in ways that anticipate the fetishised violence of late twentieth century advertising.
In the early 1930’s, as Hitler came to power, Hoch put down her scalpel and simply disappeared from view. No doubt her relentless criticism of German society was less acceptable after the burning of the Reichstag. After all, Goebbels’ notorious Exhibition of Degenerate Art in 1937 demonstrated that the Nazis were all too aware of the power of visual images. Indeed Leni Riefenstahl’s films of Nazi rallies and of the Berlin Olympics provide an eerie counterpart to some of Hoch’s earlier critiques of race, gender and athleticism.
During this lost decade Hoch kept herself busy cutting out images from magazines and pasting them into her scrap-book. The group were able to see some of these images – from pictures of household goods and African elephants to photographs of film and celebrity culture – in the second gallery at the Whitechapel. When she returned to making art after the war she was able to exploit the technical advances in magazines that had taken place in the early thirties and to make full use of their tones, textures and colours.
Take the contrast between the source material of High Finance and The Swamp Spirit of 1961. In High Finance the quirky, clockwork quality is reminiscent of Jules Verne: cogs, wheels and ratchets weave themselves around the legs of serious frock-coated gentlemen. There are echoes of Max Ernst’s collages and of her most famous work Cut with a Kitchen Knife. By the end of her career the less tangible shapes of Seaweed or Swamp Spirit melt together in a wash of ice-cream colours that look almost good enough to eat.
For some critics the gorgeous textures of these late collages indicate that she was seduced by the sheer beauty of the new colour printing techniques. Hence these critics imply that the import of her work became less political. Certainly, from the mid-fifties there are more references to the natural world, to astronomy and even to science fiction. But these more personal and allusive references are overshadowed as much by her apparent joie de vivre after the end of the Nazi era as by her enjoyment of the new reprographic techniques that the post-war world could offer. In High Finance the poor quality of the newspapers that she was using required her to maintain the integrity of individual images for the sake of legibility. Once newspapers and magazines ceased to be printed, as Orwell said, with the equivalent of ‘blackberry jam’, the greater subtlety of their tones allowed her to fuse one image with another with much greater ambiguity.
Since her death much has been made of Hannah Hoch’s role as a woman artist and her subsequent excision from art history. However, it should not obscure our understanding of Hoch’s almost equal importance as a pioneer of new media. In 1995, just as many artists in Britain were beginning to use computers, the Afro-Caribbean artist, Maud Sulter, received a commission to attend a seminar about Hannah Hoch’s work in Berlin. Her later collages provide a fascinating comparison to the earlier artist’s’ exploration of race and gender. Together they provide a perceptive response to the increasingly alienating effect of society’s relationship with new technology.


Posted by author: Gerald

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

> Next Post Cocktail of Signs

< Previous Post Sarah Gallear

Back to blog listings