Weltrevolution
This photograph reproduces a detail of Höch's large photomontage "Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch". In it, Höch takes aim at the hypocrisies and moral bankruptcy of the Weimar Republic through the radical techniques of disorientation, negation, and disjunction.
This new, fragmented art of cut and pasted clippings from the mass media allowed the Dadaists, in the words of George Grosz, to say "in pictures what would have been banned by the censors." Here, Höch sets into motion a swirling, anarchic panoply of military leaders, crowds, spinning machine parts, cabaret dancers, and Dadaist pranksters; the work's engagement with the social praxis--in terms of both its subject and its construction--marks a decisive rupture with traditional bourgeois modes of expression. Höch often reworked her photomontages, and this image records a crucial revision in the image's development: the removal of the charged textual fragment "Weltrevolution" (World Revolution) and its replacement by the relatively innocuous "Die grosse Welt Dada" (Big Dada World).
This new, fragmented art of cut and pasted clippings from the mass media allowed the Dadaists, in the words of George Grosz, to say "in pictures what would have been banned by the censors." Here, Höch sets into motion a swirling, anarchic panoply of military leaders, crowds, spinning machine parts, cabaret dancers, and Dadaist pranksters; the work's engagement with the social praxis--in terms of both its subject and its construction--marks a decisive rupture with traditional bourgeois modes of expression. Höch often reworked her photomontages, and this image records a crucial revision in the image's development: the removal of the charged textual fragment "Weltrevolution" (World Revolution) and its replacement by the relatively innocuous "Die grosse Welt Dada" (Big Dada World).
Artwork Details
- Title: Weltrevolution
- Artist: Hannah Höch (German, Gotha 1889–1978 Berlin)
- Date: 1920
- Medium: Gelatin silver print
- Dimensions: 13.3 x 9.9 cm (5 1/4 x 3 7/8 in.)
- Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
- Object Number: 1987.1100.132
- Rights and Reproduction: © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
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