| Description |
Hannah Höch’s Bilderbuch [Picture Book] from 1945 is now finally also available in English – in the ingenious translation by Brian Currid.
This book presents the fantastic adventures of Runfast, Dumblet, Snifty and Meyer 1, mythical creatures which seem like a dream in a zoological garden, surrounded by fairy tale flowers and plants. Yet, the Picture Book is not only a wonderful book for children, but an important cultural and historic document. Hannah Höch (1889—1972) is the most important female artist of the Modernist period in Germany and this book is designed through the Dadaistic principle of photomontage which Höch developed, together with Raoul Hausmann, in the early years of the 20th century.
Without subscribing to a canon of form, Höch opened up new and unnerving worlds of images through the manifold combination of contradictory sequences, formed out of cutouts from magazines, brochures and photographs. Her criticism of the political situation and gender roles is subtly cloaked in hallucinatory plant representations and grotesque scenes of absurd hybrid figures. |