A picture built from the mass-media stream

Here is the first thing that makes this work a break, and it is so basic it is easy to walk past: there is almost no painting in it at all, no invented figures, effectively no brushwork (a little watercolor tints a few edges, and that is the whole of the paint). Every face, every wheel, every letter, every scrap of map was cut from something already printed: illustrated magazines, newspapers, broadsides, product catalogues, journals. Höch went through the mass-produced picture-stream of 1919 Germany with a pair of scissors, lifted out the pieces she wanted, and pasted them onto paper into a new arrangement. This technique is photomontage: a picture assembled from cut-up photographs and printed type instead of drawn or painted from life.

Think about how strange that was as a thing to call art. For four hundred years a serious picture meant the trace of an artist’s own hand: paint laid down by a skilled person to invent an image that did not exist before. Photomontage threw all of that out. The raw material was not pigment but the machine-made, mass-reproduced image, the same photographs millions of people were seeing in their newspapers. The artist’s job was no longer to invent the image but to cut it out and rearrange it, to take the modern media stream and turn it against itself. The flood of printed pictures that the new century had unleashed became, in Höch’s hands, the paint.

You will read, often, that “Höch and Hausmann invented photomontage.” That sentence is contested. The two of them told an origin story from a 1918 holiday on the Baltic Sea, where they saw a cheap commercial souvenir: a print of a uniformed soldier with a blank space for a head, so a customer could paste in his own photograph and own a picture of his “heroic military life.” They said they grasped, in that moment, the strange power of cut-and-paste. It is a good story. But cutting and pasting photographs together was a commercial trick going back to the 1850s, decades before Dada, and inside the Berlin group at least three other men, George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Johannes Baader, each separately claimed to have invented it too. No early works survive to prove any of the claims.

The Berlin Dadaists, with Höch and Hausmann at the front, did not invent cutting and pasting out of nothing; what they did was take a commercial novelty and make it a serious medium for art and for politics. The “who was first” argument inside the group is a memoir feud between rival old men, not a fact anyone can settle. What is not in dispute is that this picture is one of the founding monuments of political photomontage.

The second part of the break is what the medium is aimed at. Collage already existed: a decade earlier, Picasso and Braque had glued scraps of newspaper and oilcloth onto their Cubist canvases. But they used those scraps as neutral texture and form, a piece of caned chair, a fragment of headline, chosen for how it looked, not for what it said. Höch does the opposite. She keeps the photographs legible, the Kaiser is recognizably the Kaiser, Lenin is recognizably Lenin, and arranges them into a partisan map of a real political moment. This is not abstract play. It names the establishment, names the revolution, and physically takes a knife to the old order. Art has become agitprop.

And the third part of the break is who is making it, and what she points the scissors at. Inside a movement that nearly shut her out, Höch used the same technique to ask a question the men were not asking: how were women being pictured in this new flood of mass media? The dancers, the film stars, the fashion plates, the cheerful magazine ideal of the modern “New Woman”: all of it was raw material she could cut up and re-aim. The standard reading of the title plays on this, treating the kitchen knifeas a wink at a woman’s domestic tool, scissors and shears doing the work that brushes and chisels did for the men. That reading is widespread and it is a fair one, but it is an interpretation, not something Höch ever said, so hold it as a reading and not a quote. What is plain is that the break here is double: photomontage as a new medium, and photomontage turned by a woman onto the question of who gets to make, and who gets pictured by, the modern image.