History of Modern Art with Klaire
Explore Modern Art history including Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and other key Modernist art movements. Join artist and educator Klaire Lockheart as she examines famous artists and artwork through a 21st century intersectional feminist lens. Whether you’re an artist, student, or patron of the arts, you will hopefully learn something new about Modern Art.
Dadaism: Early 20th Century Nonsense and Chaos
Dadaists made photomontages, sculptures, and readymades that were weird and absurd. Artists such as Hannah Höch, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Marcel Duchamp pushed the boundaries of what could be considered art. If you’ve ever felt like the world doesn’t make sense, then you’ll want to tune in for Klaire Lockheart’s explanation of Dada.
Art and Artwork: Marcel Duchamp (Fountain ), Jean/Hans Arp (Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance), Sophie Tauber-Arp (Dada Head), Hannah Höch (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum), Raoul Housmann, Alfred Stieglitz, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (Enduring Ornament, God, Fountain), Morton Schamberg, and André Breton
Additional Topics: Existential Crisis, World War I, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Cabaret Voltaire, Tristan Tzara, World War II, “The Painter,” American Society of Independent Artists, Beatrice Wood (“The Richard Mutt Case”), and Richard Mutt
Art and Artwork: Marcel Duchamp (Fountain ), Jean/Hans Arp (Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance), Sophie Tauber-Arp (Dada Head), Hannah Höch (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum), Raoul Housmann, Alfred Stieglitz, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (Enduring Ornament, God, Fountain), Morton Schamberg, and André Breton
Additional Topics: Existential Crisis, World War I, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Cabaret Voltaire, Tristan Tzara, World War II, “The Painter,” American Society of Independent Artists, Beatrice Wood (“The Richard Mutt Case”), and Richard Mutt
Transcript
Hello, my friends! Welcome to the History of Modern Art with Klaire, an inspection of Modern Art history viewed from a contemporary intersectional feminist perspective. I’m your host Klaire Lockheart, and I’m pleased that took the time to join me for Dadaism. Regardless of if you’re a student, artist, or you just want to know how on earth a regular piece of plumbing is considered art, I hope you’ll find this episode informative.
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Before I get into the details of Dadaism, I want to help you understand the mindset of the people who were Dadaists. They were young artists living during World War I. Millions of people were dying, and the world didn’t make sense to them. They were upset because everything they were told to do didn’t work. Everything they were taught about the modern world didn’t pan out. They were promised a utopia, but they were living in chaos. I want you to think back to the last time you were on the verge of an existential crisis. The year 2020 certainly provided multiple reasons to feel like the world was a terrible place and you were completely powerless to make any changes for the better. If a global pandemic, social injustice, or crippling student debt makes you feel as though everything you were told to believe and do was false, you can relate to the Dadaists.
The most iconic Dadaist work was Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain from 1917, but before I address the sculpture or the controversy on the authorship of this urinal, I need to back up and provide context for the origin of Dada. Dadaism began in 1916 in Switzerland, and the movement spread from there. Art historians will often say that it was a global movement because Dada occurred in Switzerland, Germany, Paris, and New York. I would like to rebut this claim by saying the world is vast, and there was a lot of art made between 1916 and 1924, but those four locations and the few artists that participated in Dada barely scratch the surface of what was happing worldwide. Yes, Dada was impactful, but I just want to take a moment to note that the canon of Modernism excludes most of the artists on the planet who lived during that era. (Unfortunately, art history typically ignores the contributions made by women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ artists the most.) However, I must commend art historians for finally including locations other than Paris, and I’m particularly excited about Dadaism because we get to include women in art history once again even though there were many attempts to erase them from the canon.
Switzerland was neutral during the Great War, and artists converged in Zurich. Poet Hugo Ball and performer Emmy Hennings establish Cabaret Voltaire, where they and their artist friends could get as weird and angsty as they needed to be! They would make strange costumes out of cardboard, recite poems that were nothing but noise, and encourage randomness because the world was plunged into pandemonium and they sought out catharsis. In 1916, they coined the term “Dada” to describe what they were doing, but there are many conflicting stories about why that term was chosen. Did they actually select a word at random from the dictionary? Did they enjoy baby babble? Was it amusing that the word meant “hobby horse” in French, “goodbye” in German, and “yes, yes” in Romanian? According to Jean/Hans Arp, “I hereby declare that on February 8th, 1916, Tristan Tzara discovered the word Dada. I was present with my twelve children, and I wore a brioche in my left nostril. I am convinced that this word has no importance and that only imbeciles and Spanish professors can be interested in dates. What interests us is the Dada spirit and we were all Dada before the existence of Dada.”
Hans Arp was born in Strasbourg, which was a German city, but after it was recovered by France, he switched to Jean. He would swap his name depending on what language he was speaking, and he reveled in the randomness of art. In 1916 and 17, he created Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance. This vertical composition is a wee bit over 19 inches tall, and it’s housed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There are 10 roughly torn blue squares and 5 white rhombuses on a grey background. None of the shapes overlap and they somehow provide a balanced composition despite the origin story that Arp tore up paper, dropped the pieces to let them randomly fall, and then he glued the pieces in place. This collage looks a little too nice and clean for something that was apparently completely random. This is part of the reason I feel that the origin of the name “Dada” probably wasn’t entirely left to chance either. Dadaists did embrace chaos, but I feel that they did exert some control over their output.
Sophie Tauber was another founding Dada artist, and she created tapestries, sculptures, and paintings. In 1920, she made Dada Head, which is a simplified wooden head on a stand, and the entire work is about 13 inches tall. It’s kind of lightbulb shaped with a thin geometric nose jutting forth. This sculpture is in France at Foundation Arp. She painted the head with abstract shapes and primary colors. She inscribed the forehead with “1920” and “DADA” in all capital letters. She decorated other wooden heads, which are in various museum collections across the globe. Tauber married Jean Arp, and her name changed to Sophie Tauber-Arp. The two of them moved to France in the 1920s, where they continued to make innovative avant-garde art. Sophie Tauber-Arp tragically died when she was in her early 40s from carbon monoxide poisoning on accident. Her husband then worked to keep her legacy alive.
Not only is this a good time for me to apologize for any inadvertent mispronunciations I make, but this is also a good time to take a break. Please stick around so I can share about photomontage artist Hannah Höch and German Dadaism in just a moment.
[Break]
German Dada arose in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. German avant-garde artists were also disappointed with the state of the world, and they expressed their subversion through art. While there were many notable German Dadaists, I want to focus on Hannah Höch because she faced many obstacles not only during her lifetime but also in the context of Western art history. In addition to living through World War I, she actually worked for the Red Cross during the war. Afterwards, she faced constant discrimination as an artist because of her gender.
In the early 20th century, Germany had the concept of the “new woman,” and she was pretty comparable to the American flapper. This was a woman who was educated, smart, independent, cut her hair short, dared to wear lipstick, and wore boxy, comfortable dresses. These women were also politically active. Women in Germany could vote in 1918, and American women finally could vote in 1920. However, not all American women were permitted to vote at that time because institutional racism often prevented Black and Indigenous women from voting. Unfortunately, there is a lot of legislation still being passed at this time in order to disenfranchise women of color from voting in the United States.
Anyway, avant-garde German men artists loved to proclaim that they were all for women’s rights and supported the new woman; however, their actions proved otherwise. They were basically the equivalent to that one bro you know who yells that he is the “most feminist person on the planet” all while he secretly harasses women on the internet and abuses his partner in private. I believe Joss Whedon is the most recent hypocritical man who profited from waving a false flag of feminism while being terrible to the women in his life both personally and professionally. The German Dada artists were pretty much the same. They claimed to stand for progress, but there was only one Berlin Dadaist who was a woman, and they treated her horribly. Hannah Höch was a pioneer of photomontage, which means collaging photographs together in a new way to create a message. Höch worked in publications by day, and she appropriated these images to make subversive statements about the German government and modern culture by night.
Her most famous artwork is a photomontage from 1919-20 called Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic. This artwork is in Berlin, and it’s about 45 inches tall by 35 inches wide. The composition is almost completely warm shades of brown, black, and white, but there is a vertical strip of blue in the top left corner, and there is one blue cutout of what appears to be a topless woman with a big headdress or big white hair near the top edge. If you’ve never seen this artwork before, imagine Monty Python animations by Terry Gilliam, but it’s a little more chaotic and a lot more political. There are many figures, industrial parts, and some typography. The top right corner is the “anti-Dada” section. The center of the composition has a dancer surrounded with some breathing room of the off-white background. She is tossing her over-sized head into the air, but her head is that of the German Expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz!
Even though Hannah Höch was extremely important to the history of Dada, her peers did not appreciate her. Hans Richter claimed that her only contribution to the movement was “…sandwiches, beer and coffee she managed somehow to conjure up despite the shortage of money.” The men Dadaists actively tried to prevent her from exhibiting her artwork with them. At the time, she was in a relationship Raoul Housmann, and he was physically abusive towards her. He told her that they couldn’t get married because it was too bourgeois, even though he was already married at the same time to a different woman. Housmann also had the audacity to tell Höch that she should get an extra job to support him financially since he was the artist. He obviously didn’t respect her artwork, her day job, or her contributions to the movement.
No wonder Höch wrote “The Painter” in 1920. If you haven’t read this short story yet, I highly recommend it. This is a tale about a man named Heavenlykingdom who was a Modern painter bestowed with “genius” and was bitter that he was required to believe that there was equality between men and women. Heavenlykingdom actually thought that if his wife ever asked him to do anything other than paint, she was trying to degrade him as a man and enslave his soul. This man had an existential crisis because, as Höch wrote, “At least four times in four years, he was forced to wash dishes - the kitchen dishes.” He cleaned the dishes once because his wife was giving birth to his son, but he didn’t think there was any good reason he should have been forced to wash the dishes the other three times. It was outrageous to suggest that an important Modern artist would have to wash his own dishes once a year!
If you feel your blood boiling already, you’re not alone. In the 1920s, it was expected for women to do all the housework regardless of their other responsibilities, and that stereotype still permeates contemporary society, at least in the United States. During World War II when many women worked outside of the home, culture dictated that in order for them to stay feminine they had to meet all their household responsibilities in addition to working full-time. We are conditioned to believe that women should be obligated to do the housework regardless of their other responsibilities. In heterosexual couples, women statistically do the bulk of the housework even if both partners work full-time. The only time Americans typically see someone doing housework outside of their homes is in advertising, and contemporary advertisements still use tropes set in place 100 years ago. This reinforces the notion that housework is a woman’s obligation. While there is minor progress being made, I want you to know that 2009 was the first time a man was shown cleaning a bathtub in an American commercial.
I really wish I would have read “The Painter” when I began making my Feminine Attempts paintings a few years ago. This is a series of life-sized oil on canvas portraits that look like a cross between Betty Crocker and Bettie Page, and I made these paintings to critique the rigid, arbitrary, and absurd expectations of femininity. If you’re curious, you can see these paintings under the “Artwork” section on my website, klairelockheart.com. If I read “The Painter” when I developed this series, I would have been comforted knowing that other women artists struggled with the unfair expectations pushed upon them simply due to their gender. Young women who are enduring everyday misogyny need more role models. Hannah Höch was treated poorly, but she at least she ended her relationship with her abusive partner. I hope that her subsequent relationships with women were more respectful.
After Höch left Housmann, she stated, “Poor Raoul… He needed constant encouragement to carry out his ideas and achieve anything at all lasting. If I hadn’t devoted so much of my time to looking after him I might have achieved more myself.” I also recall hearing a story that after their relationship ended, Housmann retrieved some of his artwork that Höch generously stored for him for forty years, and he had the audacity to complain about how she stored it. I’m sorry, but if you end a relationship with a person you are not obligated to store their stuff for free, let alone for decades! Furthermore, let’s not forget that Housmann was abusive. She did not need to keep any of his stuff for him. If you or someone you care about is in a relationship where the other party is derogatory, dishonest, abusive, manipulative, and won’t do their fair share of the household labor, this is not a healthy relationship. This is not okay, and I strongly encourage you or that person you know to end it. Escaping from an abusive or toxic relationship is extremely difficult, but Hannah Höch did it, and I hope that can provide inspiration for whoever needs it today.
Höch created many photomontages, including a 1930 piece called Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum. This work is at the MoMA. This little collage includes the face of a woman who is wearing a headdress of metallic paper that represents silverware. Höch often commented on the domestic duties and normative gender roles women were expected to fulfill, but her subversive artwork got her labeled as a degenerate artist by the nazis, and she pretty much had to spend her life in hiding during World War II. Unfortunately, she was pretty much written out of the history of Dada art, which sucks because that makes it seems like art historians agreed with the nazis. If we use the rubric that Modern Art is good as long as nazis hate it, then we need to celebrate Hannah Höch as an extremely important artist. When I learned about Dadaism during the early 2000s, Höch was added back into the history, but the context of the obstacles she faced was omitted. The H. H. Arnason History of Modern Art textbook from 2004 includes one whole paragraph on Höch out of the entire 30 page chapter on Dada. The authors also neglected to mention the sexism she faced, which is why I feel it is imperative to illuminate that she was written out of history for decades. I also don’t feel guilty about neglecting to cover the men Dadaists from Germany since there are many more resources about them available, and they were also terrible to Höch.
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Since I’m on the topic of women Dada artists who were forgotten, I want to smoothly transition to Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She was a German artist who was the walking personification of Dada, and I feel terrible that I never knew about her until 2021 when I was doing a deeper dig into Dada when I was preparing a lecture for my class “Art 305 Modern Art History.” This artist was never mentioned in any class that I ever took, and her name wasn’t in any Modernism book I owned. Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven referred to herself as the Dada Baroness, and so I shall call her as the Baroness because I think that would be respectful. The Baroness was born in Germany, and she trained and worked as an actor. She helped her husband fake his own death, and then they moved to the Kentucky. However, her partner abandoned her to move to Fargo, and so she moved the New York. I’ve been to Fargo, and I’ve travelled to New York, and I feel comfortable in asserting that even though being abruptly abandoned by a spouse like that would have been traumatic, I’m glad she wound up in New York. North Dakota isn’t exactly well-known for being an inclusive and artsy place. In 1913, she married the Baron, and she reveled using the title of “Baroness” to subvert the upper class especially because she never had much money. Basically, everything she did was a rebellion On her way to her wedding, she found a rusted metal ring about 3.5” across and declared that it was art. She picked it up and titled it Enduring Ornament, and it is currently in a private collection. This is one of the first documented readymades in Modernism.
A readymade is a mass-produced object that an artist looks at, acquires, and declares to be art. The object itself isn’t important, but the artistic intent the artist bestows upon the object is what transforms it into Art with a capital “A.” Keep in mind that in the early 20th century, the world was in turmoil. Nothing made sense! These artists thought that if the world didn’t make sense, why should art? Additionally, the history of Modern Art is a succession of artists trying to out-weird the previous generations. The Baroness wasn’t a rich man from France, but she certainly embraced the rebellious spirit of the avant-garde and pushed the boundaries of what was art at the time. In 1917, she made a sculpture out of piece of plumbing, and called it God. It’s a plumbing trap, and so it is that piece of pipe that has the curl to it to prevent bad smells from escaping. It’s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and for the longest time it was attributed to an artist named Morton Schamberg. Historians thought this dude made it because he was the one who photographed it. However, it was reattributed fairly recently and now both Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Schamberg are listed as the artists.
One of the most famous Dadaist artworks is called Fountain. This sculpture was photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, and I would like to note that no one claimed that Stieglitz was the artist. The attribution of Fountain is a little messy, and I will share the details after the break.
[Break]
Fountain was a white ceramic urinal set flat on its back upon a pedestal. On the rim, the artist scrawled “R. Mutt” and “1917” with probably black paint. This readymade was submitted to the American Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York, and Alfred Stieglitz photographed the entry. Marcel Duchamp served on the board, and he wrote a letter to his sister about the entries. He recorded, “One of my female friends who had adopted the masculine pseudonym Richard Mutt sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.” The urinal was rejected from the show, even though everyone who paid the fee was supposed to get in. Duchamp resigned from the board, and this sculpture caused a stir, even though no one bothered to keep it after it was rejected.
Someone later wrote an anonymous essay called “The Richard Mutt Case” to defend Fountain. Duchamp is often attributed as the author, but he never verified that he wrote it. It’s rather likely that avant-garde artist Beatrice Wood wrote it. Regardless of the author, they wrote, “Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object.”
Even though Fountain caused a commotion in New York at the time, no one claimed authorship. This readymade pushed the boundaries of what could be considered art, and many important and influential people enjoy arguing about it. There are many who believe that Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven created it because it aligns with her body of work and the handwriting matches hers. She also enjoyed potty humor and referred to Duchamp as “Marcel Dushit.” However, in 1935 another artist named André Breton declared that Duchamp was the one who made it. It wasn’t until after the Baroness and Stieglitz died that Duchamp publicly claimed that he was the artist and started to issue replicas of the lost urinal. Hundreds of urinals were mass produced and sold on Duchamp’s behalf in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Since then, Fountain has become an infamous work of art, even though very few people saw the original. When I was initially taught about Fountain, I was fed a narrative that unquestionably identified Duchamp as the as the artist, and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven wasn’t even mentioned. It appears to me that many Duchamp fans are offended even at the mere suggestion that someone else conceived of Fountain, but if the artwork is actually that important then the artist shouldn’t matter. Many people love to argue that we have to separate the art from the artist whenever the artist is problematic, but that rule doesn’t seem to apply if that means reattributing artwork to less famous artists. Those who own the replica Fountains that were authorized by Duchamp could still argue that the duplicates are valuable because it’s part of the tradition of appropriation. Duchamp is famous for scribbling a mustache on a postcard of the Mona Lisa, and so it makes perfect sense for him to sign reproductions of Fountain, even if he didn’t come up with the original idea.
If Dadaism leaves you confused and perplexed, that’s exactly what some of the artists intended. The Cabaret Voltaire developed in Switzerland during World War I so artists, poets, and performers could purge their artsy angst. If you easily understand this movement and appreciate it’s absurdity, you’re probably experiencing some mayhem in your own life, and I hope you’re doing alright. Dada, at its core, is nonsense. The Arps made strange collages, sculptures, and other weird art in France. Dadaism also developed in Germany, but the leading Dadaists did not support Hannah Höch. Unfortunately, this art movement included a heaping dose of misogyny, but it was common to exclude women from the art world in Western culture. The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was another woman artist who has been overlooked for far too long as well. At least we are now aware of these issues, and this gives us the potential to do better. I hope this inspires you to dig deeper into art history to seek out artists beyond the ones who get the most recognition.
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Thank you very much for joining me to investigate the Modern Art movement of Dadaism, and I hope you’ll join me in the future for Surrealism. To find a transcript of this episode, the resources I consulted, or to become a patron, please visit klairelockheart.com and click on the “Media” tab. That’s spelled K-L-A-I-R-E-L-O-C-K-H-E-A-R-T dot com. Please join me on Instagram @klairelockheart to see my artwork and projects, or you can find me on Facebook by going to facebook.com/klairealockheart.
The History of Modern Art with Klaire was conceived, written, and performed by me, Klaire Lockheart. This podcast was recorded with equipment provided by the amazing Aaron C. Packard of Aaron C. Packard Productions. View his strange and unusual artwork at aaronpackard.com, that’s A-A-R-O-N-P-A-C-K-A-R-D dot com.
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Before I get into the details of Dadaism, I want to help you understand the mindset of the people who were Dadaists. They were young artists living during World War I. Millions of people were dying, and the world didn’t make sense to them. They were upset because everything they were told to do didn’t work. Everything they were taught about the modern world didn’t pan out. They were promised a utopia, but they were living in chaos. I want you to think back to the last time you were on the verge of an existential crisis. The year 2020 certainly provided multiple reasons to feel like the world was a terrible place and you were completely powerless to make any changes for the better. If a global pandemic, social injustice, or crippling student debt makes you feel as though everything you were told to believe and do was false, you can relate to the Dadaists.
The most iconic Dadaist work was Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain from 1917, but before I address the sculpture or the controversy on the authorship of this urinal, I need to back up and provide context for the origin of Dada. Dadaism began in 1916 in Switzerland, and the movement spread from there. Art historians will often say that it was a global movement because Dada occurred in Switzerland, Germany, Paris, and New York. I would like to rebut this claim by saying the world is vast, and there was a lot of art made between 1916 and 1924, but those four locations and the few artists that participated in Dada barely scratch the surface of what was happing worldwide. Yes, Dada was impactful, but I just want to take a moment to note that the canon of Modernism excludes most of the artists on the planet who lived during that era. (Unfortunately, art history typically ignores the contributions made by women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ artists the most.) However, I must commend art historians for finally including locations other than Paris, and I’m particularly excited about Dadaism because we get to include women in art history once again even though there were many attempts to erase them from the canon.
Switzerland was neutral during the Great War, and artists converged in Zurich. Poet Hugo Ball and performer Emmy Hennings establish Cabaret Voltaire, where they and their artist friends could get as weird and angsty as they needed to be! They would make strange costumes out of cardboard, recite poems that were nothing but noise, and encourage randomness because the world was plunged into pandemonium and they sought out catharsis. In 1916, they coined the term “Dada” to describe what they were doing, but there are many conflicting stories about why that term was chosen. Did they actually select a word at random from the dictionary? Did they enjoy baby babble? Was it amusing that the word meant “hobby horse” in French, “goodbye” in German, and “yes, yes” in Romanian? According to Jean/Hans Arp, “I hereby declare that on February 8th, 1916, Tristan Tzara discovered the word Dada. I was present with my twelve children, and I wore a brioche in my left nostril. I am convinced that this word has no importance and that only imbeciles and Spanish professors can be interested in dates. What interests us is the Dada spirit and we were all Dada before the existence of Dada.”
Hans Arp was born in Strasbourg, which was a German city, but after it was recovered by France, he switched to Jean. He would swap his name depending on what language he was speaking, and he reveled in the randomness of art. In 1916 and 17, he created Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance. This vertical composition is a wee bit over 19 inches tall, and it’s housed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There are 10 roughly torn blue squares and 5 white rhombuses on a grey background. None of the shapes overlap and they somehow provide a balanced composition despite the origin story that Arp tore up paper, dropped the pieces to let them randomly fall, and then he glued the pieces in place. This collage looks a little too nice and clean for something that was apparently completely random. This is part of the reason I feel that the origin of the name “Dada” probably wasn’t entirely left to chance either. Dadaists did embrace chaos, but I feel that they did exert some control over their output.
Sophie Tauber was another founding Dada artist, and she created tapestries, sculptures, and paintings. In 1920, she made Dada Head, which is a simplified wooden head on a stand, and the entire work is about 13 inches tall. It’s kind of lightbulb shaped with a thin geometric nose jutting forth. This sculpture is in France at Foundation Arp. She painted the head with abstract shapes and primary colors. She inscribed the forehead with “1920” and “DADA” in all capital letters. She decorated other wooden heads, which are in various museum collections across the globe. Tauber married Jean Arp, and her name changed to Sophie Tauber-Arp. The two of them moved to France in the 1920s, where they continued to make innovative avant-garde art. Sophie Tauber-Arp tragically died when she was in her early 40s from carbon monoxide poisoning on accident. Her husband then worked to keep her legacy alive.
Not only is this a good time for me to apologize for any inadvertent mispronunciations I make, but this is also a good time to take a break. Please stick around so I can share about photomontage artist Hannah Höch and German Dadaism in just a moment.
[Break]
German Dada arose in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. German avant-garde artists were also disappointed with the state of the world, and they expressed their subversion through art. While there were many notable German Dadaists, I want to focus on Hannah Höch because she faced many obstacles not only during her lifetime but also in the context of Western art history. In addition to living through World War I, she actually worked for the Red Cross during the war. Afterwards, she faced constant discrimination as an artist because of her gender.
In the early 20th century, Germany had the concept of the “new woman,” and she was pretty comparable to the American flapper. This was a woman who was educated, smart, independent, cut her hair short, dared to wear lipstick, and wore boxy, comfortable dresses. These women were also politically active. Women in Germany could vote in 1918, and American women finally could vote in 1920. However, not all American women were permitted to vote at that time because institutional racism often prevented Black and Indigenous women from voting. Unfortunately, there is a lot of legislation still being passed at this time in order to disenfranchise women of color from voting in the United States.
Anyway, avant-garde German men artists loved to proclaim that they were all for women’s rights and supported the new woman; however, their actions proved otherwise. They were basically the equivalent to that one bro you know who yells that he is the “most feminist person on the planet” all while he secretly harasses women on the internet and abuses his partner in private. I believe Joss Whedon is the most recent hypocritical man who profited from waving a false flag of feminism while being terrible to the women in his life both personally and professionally. The German Dada artists were pretty much the same. They claimed to stand for progress, but there was only one Berlin Dadaist who was a woman, and they treated her horribly. Hannah Höch was a pioneer of photomontage, which means collaging photographs together in a new way to create a message. Höch worked in publications by day, and she appropriated these images to make subversive statements about the German government and modern culture by night.
Her most famous artwork is a photomontage from 1919-20 called Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic. This artwork is in Berlin, and it’s about 45 inches tall by 35 inches wide. The composition is almost completely warm shades of brown, black, and white, but there is a vertical strip of blue in the top left corner, and there is one blue cutout of what appears to be a topless woman with a big headdress or big white hair near the top edge. If you’ve never seen this artwork before, imagine Monty Python animations by Terry Gilliam, but it’s a little more chaotic and a lot more political. There are many figures, industrial parts, and some typography. The top right corner is the “anti-Dada” section. The center of the composition has a dancer surrounded with some breathing room of the off-white background. She is tossing her over-sized head into the air, but her head is that of the German Expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz!
Even though Hannah Höch was extremely important to the history of Dada, her peers did not appreciate her. Hans Richter claimed that her only contribution to the movement was “…sandwiches, beer and coffee she managed somehow to conjure up despite the shortage of money.” The men Dadaists actively tried to prevent her from exhibiting her artwork with them. At the time, she was in a relationship Raoul Housmann, and he was physically abusive towards her. He told her that they couldn’t get married because it was too bourgeois, even though he was already married at the same time to a different woman. Housmann also had the audacity to tell Höch that she should get an extra job to support him financially since he was the artist. He obviously didn’t respect her artwork, her day job, or her contributions to the movement.
No wonder Höch wrote “The Painter” in 1920. If you haven’t read this short story yet, I highly recommend it. This is a tale about a man named Heavenlykingdom who was a Modern painter bestowed with “genius” and was bitter that he was required to believe that there was equality between men and women. Heavenlykingdom actually thought that if his wife ever asked him to do anything other than paint, she was trying to degrade him as a man and enslave his soul. This man had an existential crisis because, as Höch wrote, “At least four times in four years, he was forced to wash dishes - the kitchen dishes.” He cleaned the dishes once because his wife was giving birth to his son, but he didn’t think there was any good reason he should have been forced to wash the dishes the other three times. It was outrageous to suggest that an important Modern artist would have to wash his own dishes once a year!
If you feel your blood boiling already, you’re not alone. In the 1920s, it was expected for women to do all the housework regardless of their other responsibilities, and that stereotype still permeates contemporary society, at least in the United States. During World War II when many women worked outside of the home, culture dictated that in order for them to stay feminine they had to meet all their household responsibilities in addition to working full-time. We are conditioned to believe that women should be obligated to do the housework regardless of their other responsibilities. In heterosexual couples, women statistically do the bulk of the housework even if both partners work full-time. The only time Americans typically see someone doing housework outside of their homes is in advertising, and contemporary advertisements still use tropes set in place 100 years ago. This reinforces the notion that housework is a woman’s obligation. While there is minor progress being made, I want you to know that 2009 was the first time a man was shown cleaning a bathtub in an American commercial.
I really wish I would have read “The Painter” when I began making my Feminine Attempts paintings a few years ago. This is a series of life-sized oil on canvas portraits that look like a cross between Betty Crocker and Bettie Page, and I made these paintings to critique the rigid, arbitrary, and absurd expectations of femininity. If you’re curious, you can see these paintings under the “Artwork” section on my website, klairelockheart.com. If I read “The Painter” when I developed this series, I would have been comforted knowing that other women artists struggled with the unfair expectations pushed upon them simply due to their gender. Young women who are enduring everyday misogyny need more role models. Hannah Höch was treated poorly, but she at least she ended her relationship with her abusive partner. I hope that her subsequent relationships with women were more respectful.
After Höch left Housmann, she stated, “Poor Raoul… He needed constant encouragement to carry out his ideas and achieve anything at all lasting. If I hadn’t devoted so much of my time to looking after him I might have achieved more myself.” I also recall hearing a story that after their relationship ended, Housmann retrieved some of his artwork that Höch generously stored for him for forty years, and he had the audacity to complain about how she stored it. I’m sorry, but if you end a relationship with a person you are not obligated to store their stuff for free, let alone for decades! Furthermore, let’s not forget that Housmann was abusive. She did not need to keep any of his stuff for him. If you or someone you care about is in a relationship where the other party is derogatory, dishonest, abusive, manipulative, and won’t do their fair share of the household labor, this is not a healthy relationship. This is not okay, and I strongly encourage you or that person you know to end it. Escaping from an abusive or toxic relationship is extremely difficult, but Hannah Höch did it, and I hope that can provide inspiration for whoever needs it today.
Höch created many photomontages, including a 1930 piece called Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum. This work is at the MoMA. This little collage includes the face of a woman who is wearing a headdress of metallic paper that represents silverware. Höch often commented on the domestic duties and normative gender roles women were expected to fulfill, but her subversive artwork got her labeled as a degenerate artist by the nazis, and she pretty much had to spend her life in hiding during World War II. Unfortunately, she was pretty much written out of the history of Dada art, which sucks because that makes it seems like art historians agreed with the nazis. If we use the rubric that Modern Art is good as long as nazis hate it, then we need to celebrate Hannah Höch as an extremely important artist. When I learned about Dadaism during the early 2000s, Höch was added back into the history, but the context of the obstacles she faced was omitted. The H. H. Arnason History of Modern Art textbook from 2004 includes one whole paragraph on Höch out of the entire 30 page chapter on Dada. The authors also neglected to mention the sexism she faced, which is why I feel it is imperative to illuminate that she was written out of history for decades. I also don’t feel guilty about neglecting to cover the men Dadaists from Germany since there are many more resources about them available, and they were also terrible to Höch.
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Since I’m on the topic of women Dada artists who were forgotten, I want to smoothly transition to Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She was a German artist who was the walking personification of Dada, and I feel terrible that I never knew about her until 2021 when I was doing a deeper dig into Dada when I was preparing a lecture for my class “Art 305 Modern Art History.” This artist was never mentioned in any class that I ever took, and her name wasn’t in any Modernism book I owned. Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven referred to herself as the Dada Baroness, and so I shall call her as the Baroness because I think that would be respectful. The Baroness was born in Germany, and she trained and worked as an actor. She helped her husband fake his own death, and then they moved to the Kentucky. However, her partner abandoned her to move to Fargo, and so she moved the New York. I’ve been to Fargo, and I’ve travelled to New York, and I feel comfortable in asserting that even though being abruptly abandoned by a spouse like that would have been traumatic, I’m glad she wound up in New York. North Dakota isn’t exactly well-known for being an inclusive and artsy place. In 1913, she married the Baron, and she reveled using the title of “Baroness” to subvert the upper class especially because she never had much money. Basically, everything she did was a rebellion On her way to her wedding, she found a rusted metal ring about 3.5” across and declared that it was art. She picked it up and titled it Enduring Ornament, and it is currently in a private collection. This is one of the first documented readymades in Modernism.
A readymade is a mass-produced object that an artist looks at, acquires, and declares to be art. The object itself isn’t important, but the artistic intent the artist bestows upon the object is what transforms it into Art with a capital “A.” Keep in mind that in the early 20th century, the world was in turmoil. Nothing made sense! These artists thought that if the world didn’t make sense, why should art? Additionally, the history of Modern Art is a succession of artists trying to out-weird the previous generations. The Baroness wasn’t a rich man from France, but she certainly embraced the rebellious spirit of the avant-garde and pushed the boundaries of what was art at the time. In 1917, she made a sculpture out of piece of plumbing, and called it God. It’s a plumbing trap, and so it is that piece of pipe that has the curl to it to prevent bad smells from escaping. It’s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and for the longest time it was attributed to an artist named Morton Schamberg. Historians thought this dude made it because he was the one who photographed it. However, it was reattributed fairly recently and now both Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Schamberg are listed as the artists.
One of the most famous Dadaist artworks is called Fountain. This sculpture was photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, and I would like to note that no one claimed that Stieglitz was the artist. The attribution of Fountain is a little messy, and I will share the details after the break.
[Break]
Fountain was a white ceramic urinal set flat on its back upon a pedestal. On the rim, the artist scrawled “R. Mutt” and “1917” with probably black paint. This readymade was submitted to the American Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York, and Alfred Stieglitz photographed the entry. Marcel Duchamp served on the board, and he wrote a letter to his sister about the entries. He recorded, “One of my female friends who had adopted the masculine pseudonym Richard Mutt sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.” The urinal was rejected from the show, even though everyone who paid the fee was supposed to get in. Duchamp resigned from the board, and this sculpture caused a stir, even though no one bothered to keep it after it was rejected.
Someone later wrote an anonymous essay called “The Richard Mutt Case” to defend Fountain. Duchamp is often attributed as the author, but he never verified that he wrote it. It’s rather likely that avant-garde artist Beatrice Wood wrote it. Regardless of the author, they wrote, “Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object.”
Even though Fountain caused a commotion in New York at the time, no one claimed authorship. This readymade pushed the boundaries of what could be considered art, and many important and influential people enjoy arguing about it. There are many who believe that Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven created it because it aligns with her body of work and the handwriting matches hers. She also enjoyed potty humor and referred to Duchamp as “Marcel Dushit.” However, in 1935 another artist named André Breton declared that Duchamp was the one who made it. It wasn’t until after the Baroness and Stieglitz died that Duchamp publicly claimed that he was the artist and started to issue replicas of the lost urinal. Hundreds of urinals were mass produced and sold on Duchamp’s behalf in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Since then, Fountain has become an infamous work of art, even though very few people saw the original. When I was initially taught about Fountain, I was fed a narrative that unquestionably identified Duchamp as the as the artist, and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven wasn’t even mentioned. It appears to me that many Duchamp fans are offended even at the mere suggestion that someone else conceived of Fountain, but if the artwork is actually that important then the artist shouldn’t matter. Many people love to argue that we have to separate the art from the artist whenever the artist is problematic, but that rule doesn’t seem to apply if that means reattributing artwork to less famous artists. Those who own the replica Fountains that were authorized by Duchamp could still argue that the duplicates are valuable because it’s part of the tradition of appropriation. Duchamp is famous for scribbling a mustache on a postcard of the Mona Lisa, and so it makes perfect sense for him to sign reproductions of Fountain, even if he didn’t come up with the original idea.
If Dadaism leaves you confused and perplexed, that’s exactly what some of the artists intended. The Cabaret Voltaire developed in Switzerland during World War I so artists, poets, and performers could purge their artsy angst. If you easily understand this movement and appreciate it’s absurdity, you’re probably experiencing some mayhem in your own life, and I hope you’re doing alright. Dada, at its core, is nonsense. The Arps made strange collages, sculptures, and other weird art in France. Dadaism also developed in Germany, but the leading Dadaists did not support Hannah Höch. Unfortunately, this art movement included a heaping dose of misogyny, but it was common to exclude women from the art world in Western culture. The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was another woman artist who has been overlooked for far too long as well. At least we are now aware of these issues, and this gives us the potential to do better. I hope this inspires you to dig deeper into art history to seek out artists beyond the ones who get the most recognition.
[Music]
Thank you very much for joining me to investigate the Modern Art movement of Dadaism, and I hope you’ll join me in the future for Surrealism. To find a transcript of this episode, the resources I consulted, or to become a patron, please visit klairelockheart.com and click on the “Media” tab. That’s spelled K-L-A-I-R-E-L-O-C-K-H-E-A-R-T dot com. Please join me on Instagram @klairelockheart to see my artwork and projects, or you can find me on Facebook by going to facebook.com/klairealockheart.
The History of Modern Art with Klaire was conceived, written, and performed by me, Klaire Lockheart. This podcast was recorded with equipment provided by the amazing Aaron C. Packard of Aaron C. Packard Productions. View his strange and unusual artwork at aaronpackard.com, that’s A-A-R-O-N-P-A-C-K-A-R-D dot com.
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Resources
Loney Abrams, “Duchamp Probably Didn't Make the "Fountain" Urinal—A Look at the Dada Woman Who Likely Authored the First Readymade,” Artspace, May 30, 2019, https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/in_focus/duchamp-probably-didnt-make-the-fountain-urinala-look-at-the-dada-woman-who-likely-authored-the-56084
Madeleine Boucher, “Art or Craft?: Hannah Höch’s Collages Embraced the Conflict Between Art and Craft, Dada and Commercialism,” Artsy, October 14, 2014, https://www.artsy.net/article/madeleineb-art-or-craft-hannah-hochs-collages-embraced
Susan Day, “Hannah Höch: The forgotten sociopolitical commentator?” Medium, January 23 2019, https://medium.com/@susanday_25940/hannah-h%C3%B6ch-the-forgotten-sociopolitical-commentator-b358059a6526
Marcel Duchamp, “The Richard Mutt Case,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 252.
Charlotte Healy, “Sophie Taeuber-Arp,” MoMA, https://www.moma.org/artists/5777
Hannah Höch, “The Painter,” 1920, http://mariabuszek.com/mariabuszek/kcai/DadaSurrealism/DadaSurrReadings/HochPntr.pdf
Sophie Howarth, “Marcel Duchamp: Fountain,” Tate, 2000, tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573
Richard Huelsenbeck, “First German Dada Manifesto,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 257-259.
Siri Hustvedt, “A woman in the men's room: when will the art world recognize the real artist behind Duchamp's Fountain?” The Guardian, March 29, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/29/marcel-duchamp-fountain-women-art-history
Josh Jones, "The Iconic Urinal & Work of Art, ‘Fountain,’ Wasn’t Created by Marcel Duchamp But by the Pioneering Dada Artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,” Open Culture, July 05, 2018, https://www.openculture.com/2018/07/the-iconic-urinal-work-of-art-fountain-wasnt-created-by-marcel-duchamp.html
Peter Kalb, ed., H. H. Arnason History of Modern Art, 5th ed. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, Inc, 2004).
Donna B. Knaff, Beyond Rosie the Riveter: Women of World War II in American Popular Graphic Art. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012).
Jessamyn Neuhaus, Housework and Housewives in American Advertising. (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2011).
Lauren Palmer, “Words of Wisdom from Dada Genius Hannah Höch on her Birthday,” Artnet, November 01, 2015, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/words-wisdom-dada-genius-hannah-hc3ch-birthday-350867
Sam Phillips, …isms: Understanding Modern Art. (New York: Universe, 2013).
Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 252-257.
Madeleine Boucher, “Art or Craft?: Hannah Höch’s Collages Embraced the Conflict Between Art and Craft, Dada and Commercialism,” Artsy, October 14, 2014, https://www.artsy.net/article/madeleineb-art-or-craft-hannah-hochs-collages-embraced
Susan Day, “Hannah Höch: The forgotten sociopolitical commentator?” Medium, January 23 2019, https://medium.com/@susanday_25940/hannah-h%C3%B6ch-the-forgotten-sociopolitical-commentator-b358059a6526
Marcel Duchamp, “The Richard Mutt Case,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 252.
Charlotte Healy, “Sophie Taeuber-Arp,” MoMA, https://www.moma.org/artists/5777
Hannah Höch, “The Painter,” 1920, http://mariabuszek.com/mariabuszek/kcai/DadaSurrealism/DadaSurrReadings/HochPntr.pdf
Sophie Howarth, “Marcel Duchamp: Fountain,” Tate, 2000, tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573
Richard Huelsenbeck, “First German Dada Manifesto,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 257-259.
Siri Hustvedt, “A woman in the men's room: when will the art world recognize the real artist behind Duchamp's Fountain?” The Guardian, March 29, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/29/marcel-duchamp-fountain-women-art-history
Josh Jones, "The Iconic Urinal & Work of Art, ‘Fountain,’ Wasn’t Created by Marcel Duchamp But by the Pioneering Dada Artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,” Open Culture, July 05, 2018, https://www.openculture.com/2018/07/the-iconic-urinal-work-of-art-fountain-wasnt-created-by-marcel-duchamp.html
Peter Kalb, ed., H. H. Arnason History of Modern Art, 5th ed. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, Inc, 2004).
Donna B. Knaff, Beyond Rosie the Riveter: Women of World War II in American Popular Graphic Art. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012).
Jessamyn Neuhaus, Housework and Housewives in American Advertising. (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2011).
Lauren Palmer, “Words of Wisdom from Dada Genius Hannah Höch on her Birthday,” Artnet, November 01, 2015, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/words-wisdom-dada-genius-hannah-hc3ch-birthday-350867
Sam Phillips, …isms: Understanding Modern Art. (New York: Universe, 2013).
Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 252-257.