From the Dada fair to the national collection

After the 1920 Dada Fair, where it had been one of the most-noticed pieces, the picture went where Höch went, which was nowhere far. Berlin Dada burned out within a couple of years; the men scattered and feuded. Höch kept working, in collage and photomontage, for another half-century. The years were not kind to that work’s reputation in Germany: under the Nazis, who came to power in 1933, modern art of exactly this kind was branded “degenerate,” and Höch, blacklisted, spent the Third Reich living quietly on the edge of Berlin, keeping her own pictures and those of friends hidden. She survived the war, kept making art, and died in Berlin in 1978, at the age of eighty-nine.

The picture’s ownership history (its provenance, the documented chain of who has held a work, from the artist’s hand to now) is short and stayed close to Höch. It remained associated with her through her long Berlin life, and then entered the Nationalgalerie, the national gallery of (then West) Berlin, under the inventory number NG 57/61. That “57” points to an acquisition around 1957, in Höch’s own lifetime, while she was still living and working in the city. (The exact route into the collection, whether the gallery bought it, took it from the artist, or acquired it through a dealer, is not documented in the sources we have, so we will not guess at a buyer or a price.) It hangs there today, in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

One note on the rights, because museum pages will show a “©” on this image. The work was published in 1920, which makes it public domain in the United States (US copyright on a work this old turns on the date of publication, not on when the artist died). In Germany and the rest of the European Union, where copyright runs for the artist’s life plus seventy years, it stays protected until the end of 2048 (Höch died in 1978). The copyright notice you see is a European claim; it does not govern use in the United States.

For decades Höch was filed away as a minor figure, a footnote to the more famous Dada men, the girlfriend who did collages. That verdict has been almost entirely overturned. Cut with the Kitchen Knife is now read as the central masterpiece of Berlin Dada photomontage and one of the founding works of political collage, the technique that her circle-mate John Heartfield would soon turn into ferocious anti-Nazi photomontages, and that artists have used as a weapon ever since. It is also read as a landmark of feminist art, a woman cutting up the image-world to ask who controls it, decades before that question had a name.

There is a neatness to where it ended up. The men of Berlin Dada nearly kept Höch out of their own fair; one of them sniffed that she had “never been a member of the club.” A century later, the picture she made for that fair, with her own face pasted into the signature corner beside a map of women’s votes, hangs in the national gallery as the work the whole movement is best remembered by. The knife cut through more than the beer-belly order. It cut her name into the center of a story that had tried to leave her at the edge.