Pressemitteilungen

Hannah Höch was not only known as a visual artist and master of modern collage, she also created numerous commercial graphic works. This includes book covers, advertisements, invitation cards and posters. Höch followed the concept declared by Adolf Behne in 1922: “The new art, the new poster, is of a constructive nature […].” In her advertising graphic works there are combinations of typographic and pictorial elements, letters, figurines; abstract shapes are combined to form a new form. “Positive-negative cutouts, their interlocking, the puzzle game of letters and numbers and a signal color scale generally characterize this area.”

Poster as a reflection of the artistic concept

The exhibition catalog places the poster in the context of Hannah Höch’s work: “The poster for the ‘Frühlings-Messe der Kunstgewerbegruppe des Deutschen Lyceum-Club’ (1924) once again reflects the concept. A stylized ‘instructor’ emerges from a constructively designed environment in which lettering and information are embedded, because according to Kurt Schwitters, ‘the individual character, the isolated letter’ is on a par with the ‘triangle, square, circle or a patch of color’. Similarly, László Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky claim a completely new ‘culture of seeing’ in authoritative texts. At Höch, stenciling and typographic innovation are now coming together, creating processes based on handcraft and the latest media.”
(See: Ellen Maurer Zilioli: “Abermillionen Anschauungen” – Hannah Höchs ästhetisches Vagabundieren. In: Exhibit Cat. Hannah Höch. Abermillionen Anschauungen. Bröhan Museum, Berlin / Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg 2022, pp. 12-29.)

The 36 x 47 cm poster is a lithograph in black and red on paper. The paper announced an arts and crafts exhibition in the rooms of the German Lyceum Club, founded in Berlin in 1905, a socially committed association of and for women, which had its own clubhouse on Lützowplatz. Many artists were involved in the German Lyceum Club, including Sabine Lepsius, Käthe Kollwitz, Julie Wolfthorn and Augusta von Zitzewitz.

About the Hannah Höch Exhibition

A comprehensive catalog has been published by Wienand publishers to accompany the exhibition: Ellen Maurer Zilioli, Tobias Hoffmann (Hrsg.): Hannah Höch. Abermillionen Anschauungen. Köln 2022.