cover image Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch

Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch

Maud Lavin. Yale University Press, $70 (278pp) ISBN 978-0-300-04766-0

In her jolting photomontages, Hannah Hoch (1889-1978), a member of the Berlin Dada movement, critiqued mass-media images of the ``New Woman'' in Weimar Germany. Although German women enjoyed greater mobility, power and sexual freedom during Weimar than they had previously, the ``New Woman'' portrayed in ads, films and magazines was subjected to old inequalities. In her whimsical, ironic, celebratory montages, Hoch exposed the contraditions of the new female stereotypes by melding images of female gymnasts, dancers and movie stars with those of politicians and machines. Her androgynous figures encourage a sense of gender oscillation in the viewer. By splicing torsos of modern European women with African masks and tribal objects, Hoch devised provocative commentaries on the politics of race and gender. Amplified by 178 plates (20 in color), this study presents Hoch as a utopian whose potentially liberating fantasies transform anger into feminine pleasure and protest. Lavin teaches in New York University's art department. (Mar.)