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Schwitters carves his own way through 20th century art, playing a small part in the creation of what
we now call ‘Pop Art’ - which emerged really from the late 1940s, in the wonderful collections of the
Scottish-Italian Eduardo Paolozzi, which he assembled from a variety of pulp magazines acquired
from American troops in the UK. Paolozzi later used these collages in his Bunk! lecture - made in
early 1952 to fellow members of the Independent Group at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts
- including John McHale, Richard Hamilton, and Reyner Banham - all influential in the evolution of
Pop Art. Schwitters was drawing upon similar materials for a number of his collages made and
dated in 1947. Schwitters also developed Hausmann’s idea of opto-phonetic sound-poetry (see
Schwitters: Ursonate 1932). https://www.researchgate.net/figure/URSONATE-SCHWITTERS-K-1932-SCORE-BY-SCHOEN- BURG-K-AND-OX-J-2011-ACCESSED_fig4_265597418
Hannah Hoch: It was Hausmann and the poet and psycho-analyst Richard Huelsenbeck who formed the Berlin group of DADA in 1919, inspired by Huelsenbeck’s period of recuperation in neut- ral Switzerland after being wounded at the front in 1916. In Zurich, Huelsenbeck had met Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings at the famous DADA nightclub, the Cabaret Voltaire. A second even more pro- pitious meeting - for Hausmann and for our mediated culture generally - was his relationship with Hannah Hoch a year earlier. Hausmann and Hoch together discovered and expanded the medium of photo-collage. They were staying with a veteran soldier in 1920. On the wall of their room, a photo- graph of an army group had been customised by the lndlord with cut-out photographic portraits of his sons: Hausmann - “It was like a thunderbolt: one could – I saw it instantaneously – make pic- tures, assembled entirely from cut-up photographs. Back in Berlin that September, I began to real- ize this new vision, and I made use of photographs from the press and the cinema.” (Hausmann, 1958). So Hannah Hoch and her lover, Raoul Hausmann ‘discover’ photo-montage. But as we have seen, others played a role in this evolution of a new medium - Princess Alexandra and her contem- poraries, Braque, Picasso, John Heartfield, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters - and Gustav Klucis and others in the Soviet Union.
Hannah Hoch: Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar BeerBelly Cultural Epoch in Germany (Schnitt mit Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoch Deutschlands)
Organised - not haphazardly, but in a loose grid with main sections devoted to the principle ‘ingredi- ent factors’ - politicians, bourgouisie, radical anti-establishment heroes and factions including the Dadaists, this became a defining work of Hoch’s contribution to the Dadaists - note the integration of newspaper half-tones, clips from engineering catalogues (roller-bearings, cogs, wheels), headline clips - cryptic messages, composite montage of disparate heads and bodies, exclamatory remarks, crowded city streets...for a detailed description of components of Kitchen Knife see:
http://feastjournal.co.uk/article/hannah-hoechs-dada-kitchen-knife/