Album

📖 The Scoop

An important representative of the Berlin Dada movement, Hannah Höch (1889-1978) was a dedicated collagist, noting in her appointment calendar for 1939 that she had been "busy for days going through magazines and cutting things out." The sheer abundance of Höch's collection of visual material is suggested by an album that was presumably compiled in 1933, a singular work that poses a number of fascinating questions. Was it used as a collection of motifs for collages and photomontages? Was it a kind of modern sketchbook? Could it have been a first step toward conceptual art? The album, which contains a remarkable number of female numes, is comprised of 114 pages--two issues of the journal Die Dame were used as backing pages--and combines more than 400 photographic images of nature, technology, sports, dance, the new woman, film and ethnology, all cut out and mounted by the artist. This astonishing Album, only a few pages of which had been published before, was presented for the first time in its entirety as a reproduction of near-facsimile quality in 2004. Now it is available as a deluxe special edition, presented in the original format and accompanied by a booklet of texts in a slipcase.

Genre: Art / European (fancy, right?)