An owl holds a magnifying glass in its talons high in the clouds.

This is tiny and upside down, so that Africa and Europe are south instead of north.

The seemingly Dadaist collage comes from the inventor of this fragmenting technique of turning everything upside down herself – Hannah Höch.

It was probably created shortly after the capitulation on May 8, 1945. The colored world of clouds as a thrust reversal of the view and perception does not seem so DADA: The whole world wasn't upside down for 1012 years, but wouldn't all the problems and catastrophes of the crazy earthlings in the Magnifying glass view from space vanishingly small, at least in the burning glass of this wise owl as a kind of God the Father who has many other worlds to devote himself to?

A simple resolution in this direction is tempting,

but too simple in view of the severed fingertips floating around this owl of Minerva.

The puzzle pictures of the artist, who was born in Gotha in 1889 just a few hundred meters from one of the most bizarre chambers of art and curiosities in Europe at Friedenstein Castle, are so easy to solve, in which colorful feather pictures of the Amazon jungle were and are countercut with the most filigree ivory carvings.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

Höch's second, different, more angry view of the madness that took place in Germany and the world for twelve years is embodied in the picture "The End" from 1945. The pictorial world of strangely gnomish creatures that Höch had formulated many years earlier drives there representative of the deformed society: a mask-like mother does not hold her son in her lap in mourning like in a perverted Pietà, rather she seems to be pushing the bloody one in front of her.

The harrowing Vespers picture of the inability of the surviving Germans to mourn was created shortly after the end of the Second World War and until recently hung in one of the most important exhibitions of the year, "Art for Nobody 1933-1945" in the Frankfurt Schirn.

Because the two different views of the “end” in 1945 described above, as well as Höch’s personal desire for “millions and millions of views”, show one thing clearly: This artist should by no means refer to her history book illustration classics such as “Cut with the kitchen knife DADA through the last Weimar beer belly epoch of Germany” (1919) or even reduced to Raul Hausmann’s girlfriend at the time.

Throughout her life she wanted the permanent change of perspective, often in one and the same picture, for example when the perspectively coherent view into a room is immediately thwarted by an opposite broken one.

Branded "degenerate".

In all phases of the roughly chronologically hung halls of the Würzburg Kulturspeicher, eyes stare out of the pictures;

In many collages and paintings, instruments that extend or focus the view, such as telescopes (she is very interested in Maxwell's and Einstein's research on the curvature of space and time, in physics and in the universe as such), binoculars, microscopes or even magnifying glasses appear.

In the endlessly reprinted DADA collage "English Dancer", this reversal of perspective from macro to microcosm is found in such a way that it does not seem trivial.

The ballerina with an oversized photographic head tiptoes on the boards that mean the world with her little feet, which mean the world, and with her sideways gaze also leads out into this wide world.

Her left eye, however, seems to be out of joint in the collage – the eyeball hangs downwards, in the space between the eyelid and the eye socket there is an open gap that reveals the inner workings of this head: plant stalks and a kind of mechanism appear.

Is the dancer, who is so physically present, just a wind-up automaton of the kind that populated hundreds of cabinets of curiosities?

It's always an artificial person, as she makes clear using collage techniques, and perhaps all role-playing people are artificial without being aware of it.

Is the dancer, who is so physically present, just a wind-up automaton of the kind that populated hundreds of cabinets of curiosities?

It's always an artificial person, as she makes clear using collage techniques, and perhaps all role-playing people are artificial without being aware of it.

Is the dancer, who is so physically present, just a wind-up automaton of the kind that populated hundreds of cabinets of curiosities?

It's always an artificial person, as she makes clear using collage techniques, and perhaps all role-playing people are artificial without being aware of it.