Teaching Hannah Höch and Dada Photomontage
Teaching Hannah Höch and Dada Photomontage
Hannah Höch's photomontages taught with the magazines they were cut from: Weimar mass media, Dada Berlin and the New Woman. Written for grades 9 to 12 art history or media classes, with source based tasks, a montage brief and editable analysis sheets.
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The teaching problem
Photomontage needs its source material
A Höch montage without its sources is a jumble of heads and machine parts. Students cannot see the joke, because the joke depends on recognizing a general's face, a dancer lifted from an illustrated weekly, a gear wheel from an engineering advertisement. That knowledge has gone, so the picture reads as random and the class gives up on it. Then there is the politics. Cut with the Kitchen Knife is a picture about a republic coming apart, with named figures on either side of a divide, and it needs enough Weimar context to work without turning the art lesson into a history lesson. Materials have to supply period images and captions so students can rebuild what a Berlin reader in 1920 saw at a glance.
A sequence that works
Five lessons on Berlin Dada montage
The class starts with the printed page as raw material, moves to Höch's specific targets, and ends with students making and defending a montage of their own cut from contemporary media.
- The illustrated magazine as materialStudents handle reproductions of period picture magazines and mark what is photographic, what is captioned and who appears. The habit of reading a printed page starts here.
- How a montage is joinedScale jumps, hard edges and the visible cut examined closely. Students compare a smoothly retouched image with a montage showing every seam, then explain the difference in effect.
- Cut with the Kitchen KnifeA guided tour of one large work with a keyed diagram of who is who. Students sort the figures into camps and justify that sorting from the picture alone.
- The New Woman and the dollHöch's figures assembled from fashion photographs and museum plates. Students discuss what the recombination says about how women were being pictured in the press.
- Making a montage with a targetStudents build a montage from current print or printed screenshots, aimed at one claim they can state in a sentence, then write a short defense of their cuts.
Where it goes wrong
Where montage analysis goes wrong
The commonest failure is description without argument: students list the fragments, note that it looks chaotic, and stop. Give them a question with a shape, such as which two groups the picture divides its figures between, and the writing improves at once. Vocabulary slips too. Collage, montage and photomontage get used as synonyms, when the useful distinction is that photomontage works with photographic images and depends on their claim to be true. Watch for the assumption that Dada meant nothing. Höch's cuts are targeted, and students who dismiss the work as nonsense have usually not been shown the sources. Assess the defense of a montage, not its neatness.
What's in the download
Inside the files
Editable Word and PowerPoint plus print-ready PDFs, with answer keys throughout.
- Period magazine page reproductions
- Keyed diagram of Kitchen Knife figures
- Montage brief with one sentence claim
- Vocabulary sheet on montage and collage
- Editable Word analysis tasks and key
- Weimar context briefing for teachers
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
Do students need Weimar history before starting?
Not in advance. A two page teacher briefing covers the republic's early crises, the figures Höch cut into the picture and why a Dada group formed in Berlin rather than Zurich. Students get a shorter version as a source sheet in lesson three. If your school teaches the period in history class the unit lines up neatly with it, but it does not depend on that happening.
Is this a studio unit or an analysis unit?
Mostly analysis, with one making lesson at the end. That lesson needs scissors, glue and printed images and nothing more; students can print screenshots when magazines are hard to find. Teachers with a longer art block extend it into a two week project on the same brief. Colleagues in history or media classes usually run lessons one to four and leave the making out.
Are the ethnographic images in her work an issue?
Some of the series uses museum photographs of people from colonized regions, and those pictures carry that history with them. The slides include the works that matter for her argument about how women were represented, with a note on introducing the colonial context honestly rather than sliding past it. If that discussion does not suit your group, lesson four runs on the fashion press images alone.
Give the montage its sources back
Period pages, a keyed diagram and a making task with a point, so that Berlin Dada stops reading as noise.
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