Invention of photomontage has been claimed on the one hand by Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch, and on the other hand by Georg Grosz and John Heartfield. But in any case the practice was established by 1919. Photomontage as practised by the Dadaists seized on the subversive potential of the medium.
In 1931 Hausmann described it thus:
"...the idea of photomontage was as revolutionary as its content, its form as subversive as the application of the photograph and printed texts which, together, are transformed into a static film. Having invented the static...poem, the Dadaists applied the same principles to pictorial representation. They were the first to use photography as material to create, with the aid of structures that were very different, often anomalous and with antagonistic significance, a new entity which tore from the chaos of war and revolution an entirely new image; and they were aware that their method possessed a propaganda power..."
At the end of World War One [1914-1918] there was social and political chaos in Germany that would last until 1933, when Hitler seized power.
Several of the Berlin Dada Club joined the German Communist Party in December 1918, including Heartfield, and Grosz. But in any case, the whole group sided with the radical left-wing against the German bourgeois republic.
Huelsenbeck in the first Dada Manifesto of the Berlin group in 1918 called for an art which "presents the thousandfold problems of the day".
The associations between money and war, capitalism and militarism were persistent themes with Grosz and Heartfield in particular.
Hausmann Der Geist unserer Zeit (Mechanischer kopf) Spirit of our time (Mechanical head)1919
To think about:
In the photomontages of Hannah Höch and Hausmann there is the recurring image of the machine. Do you see any ambiguity exhibited in their attitudes towards modernity in such photomontage works? How does this compare to the ambivalence of the Shanghai Modernists, such as Mu Shiying, to machine age capitalist industrial modernity?
You could also reflect upon the practice Chinese montage.Think about the ways in which the political and social concerns of Chinese montage producers in the 1930s parallel or differ from those of the Berlin Dada montage producers.
John Heartfield
Born Hellmuth Franz Joseph Herzfeld.
Born 19 June 1891 in Munich.
Died 26 April 1968 in Berlin.
John Heartfield
In the decades before World War Two photomontage was used by all political factions in Europe, but photomontage was associated especially with the Left. It was deployed with skill by Heartfield against the bourgeois Weimar Republic and then to trace the rise of Nazism and Hitler’s dictatorship. See his Justice (1933) and Adolf the Superman (1933).
Driven into exile from Germany in 1933 by Hitler’s ascent to power, he worked in Prague (Czechoslovakia) until 1938 and then moved to London. He died in 1968 in East Berlin.
Some of Heartfield’s photomontages deploy the device of divided or fragmented surfaces such as the book illustration "The Land of Record Profits" (1927) which uses the direct juxtaposition (putting side by side) of separate fragments and contrasts pictures of beauty queens with a lynching (hanging), scattered American coins and a cheque, and newspaper headlines and advertising slogans such as "I’d rather be safe with my hard-earned money that’s why I take it to the Citizen’s Savings Bank" and "money opens all doors".
Rather than represent reality by a single, unfragmented image, Heartfield by breaking up and juxtaposing images was able to make visible the class nature of social relations and lay bare the contradictions of capitalism and foreground the menace of war and fascism. See for example, The Finest Products of Capitalism (1932) in which an unemployed man (in 1932 six million Germans were unemployed) with a placard reading "Any Work Accepted" stands on the train of an expensive wedding dress of an evidently bourgeois bride.
John Heartfield, Adolph The Superman, 1932
Georg Grosz
Born 26 July 1893 in Berlin.
Died 6 July 1959 in Berlin.
Mit Pinsel und Schere: 7 Materialisationen. Berlin: Malik Verlag, 1922
Le Héro, 1935
Hannah Höch
Born 1 Nov. 1889 in Gotha, Germany.
Died 31 May 1978 in Berlin.
(The following text from online notes to Metropolitan Musem Exhibition 1997:)
While also prolific
in painting, watercolor, and drawing, Höch is best known as one of
the originators of the medium of photomontage and the only female member
of the Berlin Dada group, which protested the carnage of World War I by
calling for the abolition of rules, traditions, and conventions. Höch
created some of the most memorable and radical images of the period from
photographs clipped from mass-media periodicals, a method she employed
throughout her career. The large and complex Cut with the Kitchen Knife...
(191920) juxtaposes pictures of the "anti-Dada" (representatives
of the establishment) with those of intellectuals and artists, and suggests
that the newly enfranchised women of Germany would soon "cut"
through the male "beer-belly" culture.
After the dissolution of Dada in the early 1920s, Höch spent the remainder of the Weimar period creating work that trenchantly commented on prevalent social issues with wry humor, a finely tuned sensibility, and careful attention to pictorial issues. In particular, Höch's work from this period is notable for its focus on gender issues. Weimar Germany was the site of intense debate about the emancipated "New Woman," whose life was typically romanticized by the new illustrated periodicals of the day. Höch's art provided an alternative view of the modern woman as a locus of conflicting values whose liberation was largely illusory. Among the works from this period is her series "From an Ethnographic Museum," which equates contemporary attitudes toward women with those held toward "primitive" cultures.
Unlike many of her avant-garde contemporaries, Höch remained in Germany during the Nazi era. She retreated to a cottage in the Berlin suburbs, creating work that was less socially oriented and more private in nature. Featuring biomorphic imagery, this work represented a withdrawal from the social realm in favor of the worlds of nature and the imagination.
After the war, Höch was enormously productive and exhibited frequently, though she continued to live in relative isolation. Her work from the late 1940s and 1950s is characterized by a foray into total abstraction and a fanciful but sometimes sinister melding of organic and industrial motifs.
In the 1960s Höch again focused on images of women in a group of works that seems to bring her career full circle. The photomontages of this decade intentionally recall her earlier work through their titles and subjects but are less charged with multiple layers ofmeani ng and take a less wicked aim at societal conventions. Instead, they are brash, gaudy, and filled with wit. Failing eyesight finally forced Höch to stop making art in 1973. For all its variety, throughout the decades Höch's work is bound by humor, elegance, and a focus on the media's portrayal of women and their shifting status in the modern world.
Hannah Höch on Dada Photo Montages
Actually, we borrowed the idea from a trick of the official photographer of the Prussian army regiments. They used to have elaborate oleolithographed mounts, representing a group of uniformed men with a barracks or a landscape in the background, but with the faces cut out; in these mounts, the photographers then inserted photographic portraits of the faces of their customers, generally coloring them later by hand. But the aesthetic purpose, if any, of this very primitive kind of photo montage was to idealize reality, whereas the Dada photo monteur set out to give to something entirely unreal all the appearances of something real that had actually been photographed....
Our whole purpose was to integrate objects from the world of machines and industry in the world of art. Our typographical collages or montages set out to achieve this by imposing, on something which could only be produced by hand, the appearances of something that had been entirely composed by a machine; in an imaginative composition, we used to bring together elements borrowed form books, newspapers, posters, or leaflets, in an arrangement that no machine could yet compose.
Hannah Höch Cut With The Kitchen Knife 1919
Links:
Cut and Paste : A History of Photomontage
Le photomontage d'aujourd'hui : Peter KennardSee: Montage and Modern Life by Teitelbaum.