Feminism and Political Issues: Barbara Kruger and Hannah Höch

2180 Words5 Pages

Feminism and Political Issues: Barbara Kruger and Hannah Höch
Feminism and political issues have always been centered on in the art world and artists like to take these ideas and stretch them beyond their true meanings. Female artists such as Hannah Höch, who thrived during the Dada movement in the 1920s in Germany and Barbara Kruger who was most successful during the 1980s to 1990s in the United States, both take these issues and present them in a way that forces the public to think about what they truly mean. Many of Kruger’s works close in on issues such as the female identity and in relation to politics she focuses on consumerism and power. Höch, like Kruger, also focuses on female identity but from the 1920s when feminism was a fairly new concept and like Kruger focuses on politics but focuses more on the issues of her time such as World War I. With the technique of photomontage, these two artists take outside images and put them together in a way that displays their true views on feminism and politics even though both are from different times and parts of the world.
Feminist issues have played an important role in creating ideas for female artists to use in their work. Putting out controversial themes such as this promotes individual thought on the topic of feminism. Kruger and Höch both took it upon themselves to put out these ideas through many of their key artworks. In 1920, Höch came out with her photomontage, Das Schöne Mädchen (The Beautiful Girl) (Fig. 1), which at the time was one of very few photomontages that Dada artists had included female figures in. (Hemus, 104). In this particular work she puts together many different images that create a certain meaning that the viewer is left to interpret. She uses a fema...

... middle of paper ...

...riginators may have led Kruger to the style of art that she still produces to this day. It is easy to see that both artists, though from different times and places, share similar ideas and techniques about political issues

Works Cited

1. Bishop, Claire. "Interview With Barbara Kruger." MAKE Magazine 90 (2000): 8-11. Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 25 Nov. 2013.
2. Goodeve, Thyrza. “The Art of Public Address.” Art in America (1997): 1-20. Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 25 Nov. 2013
3. Hemus, Ruth. “Dada’s Women.” New Haven & London. Yale University Press, 2009. Online.
4. Linker, Kate. “Love For Sale: The Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger.” New York. Harry N. Abrams, 1996. Print.
5. Mitchell, W.J.T and Kruger, Barbara, “An Interview with Barbara Kruger.” Critical Inquiry. Vol. 17, No. 2, 1991. pp. 434-448, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343844.

Open Document