Frank Whitford (1941–2014)

review of
Hannah Höch 1889-1978
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 10, 2019

I have a more or less undying love for dadaists, including Hannah Höch. This is just a small catalog, w/ only 3 color prints, but it's worth it to me to have it, I enjoy looking at the work. I don't even have much to say about it, perhaps the best I can do is quote at length from Frank Whitford's brief introductory essay "Hannah Höch and the Dada Spirit":

"The last and least-known of the great Berlin Dadaists, Hannah Höch, died at her home in 1978 at the age of 89. She had once helped Kurt Schwitters build a Merzbau and her home was not unlike one of those elaborate, fantastic constructions in the way it had grown over the years apparently more by accretion than by intention.

"She lived in the far north-west of Berlin in a house that was originally the watchman's hut on an airfield. The airfield had given way to allotments and to shacks made by hand from spare timber and scrap metal by city-dwellers unable to afford proper weekend cottages. Scarcely touched by public transport and almost an hour's drive from the centre of West Berlin, it was a place "in which", Höch explained, "one might be forgotten".

"She moved there in 1939 because she wished to be forgotten. As a "degenerate" artist she was in danger from the Nazis. Alone among the Dada pioneers she had chosen "inward" rather than actual emigration, not least because she was reluctant to abandon her unique collection of Dada art and memorabilia. She succeeded in eluding the Nazis, spent the war untroubled by the bombing raids but often went for months without saying a word to anyone. She managed to preserve her possessions by burying them in metal-lined trunks in her garden. After 1945 she transferred them to her house where she continued to live alone and to which only very few were permitted access."

[..]

"What distinguishes Berlin Dada from its counterparts in Zürich, Paris and elsewhere is its political bite — even more vicious after the war than during it. In Switzerland, Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp were content to poke fun at art and polite society and leave others to draw the political inferences. In Germany, Georg Grosz and John Heartfield produced their cartoons and photomontages for the radical press. Johannes Baader campaigned for the presidency of the new Republic. In 1923 Franz Jung hijacked a German freighter in the Baltic and sailed it to Petrograd where he handed it oer to the local Soviet." - p 2

Hhmm.. I don't recall ever encountering that Franz Jung hijacking story before. That's really SOMETHING.… (mehr)

My time appears to have been apt - I read this in a single day at the start of 2021, with the latest flu pandemic raging all around us, and the number of dead from the virus approaching one and a half million globally; and here I read, at the conclusion of this fine book, that first Klimt, then Schiele's young, pregnant wife, and then finally Egon Schiele himself, all succumbed to the flu pandemic that raged even more fiercely a hundred years ago. A warning if ever one was needed.

This superb biography covers not only the life of the artist Egon Schiele, but also the art circle he was a part of in Vienna between the start of the twentieth century and his death just after the Great War. Schiele's art continues to fascinate, but as a person he must have been extremely hard work. Is that at all surprising? Perhaps not - Schiele provides another lesson, in case one were needed, that we ought to dissociate the artist from the art.… (mehr)