Hannah Hoch Heads of State (1918-20)

Hannah Hoch was one of the rare females practicing arts in the 20th century. She was also an active member of the Dada movement which collapsed during her time. She was a supporter of female working creatively in the society. In her artwork, she clearly addressed the issues gender and the plight of women in the modern society, mainly in her pioneering artwork inform of photomontage (Rainbird, Sean, 1987, pp 447)

Her ability to transform visual elements of other people by joining them into her own creative projects showed a good example of appropriation, which was adopted as an artistic technique. As a political iconoclast, she critiqued the happening in her society using her renowned art work

I choose to talk about her work, Heads of State (1918-20). This piece was build around the German minister of defense Gustav Noske and the German president Friedrich Ebert. (Nochlin, Linda, 2018)She has cut the men out and proceeded to create a characteristics that make the men look quit foolish and out of context as they are in their bathing suit. She places the men against a background butterflies which surround a woman and iron-embroidery pattern of flowers.

The message in her art was to represent the political happenings where the president and her ministers had ruthlessly stopped a Spartacist Rebellion. She presents them as being in a fantasy world where they did not understand the hardship the Germans were going through politically and financially at that period. The embroidery-pattern background represents a source of income and occupation of many German women and contrasts the role of men and women. The composition attacks the patriarchy and questions the arbitrary values projected onto different art forms by society. The college represents the head of state as worth of ridicule as they are stripped off.

Works cited

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Nochlin, Linda. Women, art, and power and other essays. Routledge, 2018.

Rainbird, Sean. “Hannah Höch. London, Goethe Institute.” (1987): 478-478.