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Lot Essay
Created in the same year the artist began to disentangle herself from the Berlin DADA group, Poesie (Poetry) is an elegant example of Hannah Höch's richly complex, multi-layered collages from the early 1920s. At this time, her photomontages and work in collage were becoming more ordered and restrained under the growing influence of Constructivism and the Merzbilder of Kurt Schwitters, with whom the artist shared a close personal friendship. In Poesie, Höch draws together fragments of coloured paper, pieces of string and clippings of printed text, which are placed in a haphazard arrangement atop geometric drawings in pen and ink, to assemble a 'poem' made up of disjointed phrases and elements.
Discussing the use of text in her practice, Höch explained: 'Our whole purpose was to integrate objects from the world of machines and industry into the world of art. Our typographical collages or montages also set out to achieve similar effects by imposing, on something which could only be produced by hand, the appearances of something that had been entirely composed by a machine; in an imaginative composition, we used to bring together elements borrowed from printed books, newspapers, posters or leaflets, in an arrangement that no machine could yet compose' (quoted in E. Roditi, Dialogues: Conversations with European Artists at Mid-Century, San Francisco, 1990, p. 69).
There is a deliberately strange, almost absurdist pattern to the words that Höch has pasted together in Poesie, with phrases such as 'Die Jungfrau/pumpt feierlich Träume' (The virgin/Solemnly pumps dreams) conjuring an almost Surrealist narrative. At the same time, Höch references classical German literature by including the word 'Tandaradei', an onomatopoeic imitation of the nightingale song that appears in the minstrel song Under der linden, written by the medieval poet Walther von der Vogelweide. Though echoing the patterns and structures of Dada tone poems, Höch's choice of wording and the connections she suggests between each fragment and phrase appear to offer a cutting critique of the tropes and leitmotifs used by writers to express romance, desire, and love.
POEM
Die Jungfrau
pumpt feierlich Träume
Nacht verstopft
Tandaradei.
dunkel ist das Weltgewissen
balzt
Trott
Poesie
Trott
____
The virgin
Solemnly pumps dreams
Night congested
tandaradei
dark is the world conscience
she mates
grind
poetry
grind
Discussing the use of text in her practice, Höch explained: 'Our whole purpose was to integrate objects from the world of machines and industry into the world of art. Our typographical collages or montages also set out to achieve similar effects by imposing, on something which could only be produced by hand, the appearances of something that had been entirely composed by a machine; in an imaginative composition, we used to bring together elements borrowed from printed books, newspapers, posters or leaflets, in an arrangement that no machine could yet compose' (quoted in E. Roditi, Dialogues: Conversations with European Artists at Mid-Century, San Francisco, 1990, p. 69).
There is a deliberately strange, almost absurdist pattern to the words that Höch has pasted together in Poesie, with phrases such as 'Die Jungfrau/pumpt feierlich Träume' (The virgin/Solemnly pumps dreams) conjuring an almost Surrealist narrative. At the same time, Höch references classical German literature by including the word 'Tandaradei', an onomatopoeic imitation of the nightingale song that appears in the minstrel song Under der linden, written by the medieval poet Walther von der Vogelweide. Though echoing the patterns and structures of Dada tone poems, Höch's choice of wording and the connections she suggests between each fragment and phrase appear to offer a cutting critique of the tropes and leitmotifs used by writers to express romance, desire, and love.
POEM
Die Jungfrau
pumpt feierlich Träume
Nacht verstopft
Tandaradei.
dunkel ist das Weltgewissen
balzt
Trott
Poesie
Trott
____
The virgin
Solemnly pumps dreams
Night congested
tandaradei
dark is the world conscience
she mates
grind
poetry
grind