The Berlin Dada Movement

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Many associate the Berlin Dada movement with Raoul Hausmann, Johannes Baader, Hans Richter, George Grosz, John Heartfield and Weiland Herzfelde, and very few associate the art movement with Hannah Hoch. Although Hoch was overshadowed by her male contemporaries, she did not hesitate from being an active member of the Berlin Dada creating timeless and critical artworks. She is best known for being a pioneer in photomontage, a technique that was instrumental not just for Hoch, but for many Berlin Dadaists. Her most well-known photomontages are satirical and political commentaries on Weimar’s redefinition of the social roles of women, also known as the concept of the “new woman”. If during her early years she would create artworks that attempted to portray the concept of the “new woman”, in her later years she began creating artworks that responded to this new Weimarian …show more content…

In a time when the Weimar Republic presented a new definition of the Weimarian woman, Hoch found it important to exhibit the “new woman” through a Dadaist language. The concept of the “new woman” emerged in the early 1900s when the Weimar woman was living the most modern and liberal lifestyle in her lived life. She had now access to vote, ability to interrupt unwanted pregnancies, offered a job in a professional field that was outside of her home, but she was also accepted as to act in a “masculine” fashion, such as smoking in the public, wearing a short hairdo and dressing in a boyish style that helped her be comfortable in her new active life. Although the “new woman” represented a progress to a utopian gender equality, the majority of the Weimar’s men didn’t quite see it as such. Even many Berlin Dadaists, that “paid lip service to women’s emancipation” still made gender differentiation comments to the women around them.

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