The suffrage map, and the men who wanted a New Woman

Now go down to the lower-right corner, the small quiet spot where a painter would normally sign the canvas, because what Höch put there is the heart of the whole work. She pasted in a tiny map of Europe marking the countries where women had won the right to vote. This was a live, burning question in 1919: Germany itself had just granted women the vote in the new Weimar constitution that year, and across Europe the map of who could and could not vote was being redrawn. Putting that map in the corner turns the signature spot into a political statement: instead of “made by Höch,” the picture is signed, in effect, “here is where women have power, and here is where they do not.”

And then, at the upper-left of that little map, she pasted a photograph of her own face. A woman’s self-portrait and a map of women’s votes, together, occupying the exact corner where the artist signs, inside a picture made for a movement that nearly refused to let her exhibit. It is the most deliberate gesture in the work. (That the small self-portrait sits with the suffrage map is certain; the best-sourced placement of the map is the lower right, though a few accounts say only “a corner.”) Höch did not sign her name. She signed her face, and she put it next to the question of women’s power.

Look at the cut-out words again, because one of them was changed. At the lower right, near the map, the type reads “Die grosse Welt dada” (“the great Dada world”), and that phrasing is a second thought. Höch first had the word “Weltrevolution” (World Revolution) in this spot, an open call to overturn everything, and then replaced it with the milder, more playful Dada slogan. It is one of the few edits we can actually document in the work, and it tells you something about the moment: a picture that maps a revolution, pulling back at the last second from naming it outright, settling for Dada instead of Welt-revolution.

For everything else in this picture we are reading, but on one subject we have Höch’s own voice, and it is worth quoting because it is the key to why a woman’s self-portrait is wedged into the corner of a Dada manifesto. Reflecting on the Dada men and their fashionable enthusiasm for the liberated modern woman, Höch wrote (here in English translation):

“None of these men were satisfied with just an ordinary woman. But neither were they inclined to abandon the (conventional) male / masculine morality toward the woman. Enlightened by Freud, in protest against the older generation … they all desired this ‘New Woman’ and her groundbreaking will to freedom. But … they more or less brutally rejected the notion that they, too, had to adopt new attitudes …”

(The statement comes down to us as a translation and is excerpted, the ellipses are in the quoted source, so treat it as her sense rather than a polished sentence.) Read it against the picture and the whole thing snaps into focus. The men cut around her demanded a New Woman, free and modern, while keeping every old habit of treating women as lesser. Höch, the one woman they nearly barred from their own fair, answered with a picture that cuts up their generals and their revolutionaries alike, and then, in the corner, plants women’s votes and her own face where the artist’s name belongs. The kitchen knife in the title is cutting through the beer-belly culture of Weimar; it is also, quietly, cutting through the men in her own circle.