The Dada Archivist

«With astuteness and feeling, Stina Barchan captures the wonderful friendship between Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters and their artistic affinities. She deftly traces how each threaded together archival treasures and different forms of three-dimensional montage in their homes and workspaces to create living art in difficult times.»

(Maud Lavin, Professor Emerita, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and author of Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch)

«Focusing on Hannah Höch’s archive (rather than her artworks) and her post-Second World War activities (rather than the Dada period), Stina Barchan bypasses conventional approaches to the artist and compellingly argues that Höch’s holistic approach to art and life in this period was among the most fundamentally subversive and radical of her career.»

(Adrian Sudhalter, author of Dadaglobe Reconstructed)

The archive of the German artist Hannah Höch (1889–1978) has long been an important source of material for historians researching the interwar avant-garde and artists associated with Berlin Dada. This book explores Höch’s practices of organisation when assembling the documents in her house outside Berlin from 1939 until her death. Through extensive research, the author argues that Höch’s archive should be considered not just a collection of documents but a work in its own right, intimately connected with the artist’s daily life. Noting the importance of understanding the mechanisms of this work, the book suggests that Höch took charge of both preserving and exploring the possibilities of Dada long after the group had been officially dissolved.

The file that Höch assembled on her friend, the artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), plays an important part in the book, its content revealing how domestic habits infused both artists’ practices. Juxtaposing Höch’s archive and Schwitters’s Merzbau, the author argues for an interactive movement between the two that has fundamental implications for how we understand both artists’ oeuvres.