What Does Cut With The Kitchen Knife Show?
Cut with the Kitchen Knife is a photomontage, made by cutting photographs from mass media publications and pasting them onto a support to create new juxtapositions and new meanings. This is a layered and complex artwork that speaks to the tumultuous moment it was created. As Höch later put it:
It seems fitting that the instrument used to excise this “fatty flesh” is Höch’s “kitchen knife”—an instrument aligned with women’s work. Women, then, take on an active role in this new Dada world, moving and expressing themselves freely, working to bring on the Dada revolution.
You’ll get access to all of the Cut with the Kitchen Knife content, as well as access to more than 30,000 additional guides and more than 350,000 Homework Help questions answered by our experts. Already a member? Log in here. In Germany during the 1920’s, there was a wave of mass media images of the so-called New Woman.
A conversation with Dr. Juliana Kreinik, Dr. Steven Zucker, and Dr. Beth Harris Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919–1920, collage, mixed media, (Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin)
What does the cut with the kitchen knife mean?
While mocking Weimar politicians, Cut with the Kitchen Knife also celebrates women’s victories. A map at lower right indicates the countries where women had the right to vote—a right only recently ratified in Germany with the signing of the new constitution in 1918.
In Cut with the Kitchen Knife such well-known female figures as Käthe Kollwitz, dancer Niddy Impekoven, and actress Asta Nielsen, are aligned with the Dada axis—from the word “dada” on the upper left to “die große welt dada” (the great Dada world) spelled out at lower right.
The cut-and-paste technique was, in fact, a popular 19th-century process long used by amateurs to produce photography albums. Höch and her lover (and fellow Dadaist) Raoul Hausmann both claimed to have discovered photomontage in 1918 while vacationing on the Baltic Sea.
George Grosz and John Heartfield holding a sign that states “Art is Dead Long Live the Machine Art of Tatlin,” photo at the First International Dada Fair in Berlin, 1920. The group’s new experiments with photomontage dominated at the fair.
What is cut with the kitchen knife?
Cut with the Kitchen Knife is a photomontage, made by cutting photographs from mass media publications and pasting them onto a support to create new juxtapositions and new meanings. This is a layered and complex artwork that speaks to the tumultuous moment it was created. As Höch later put it:
Cut with the Kitchen Knife was initially shown publicly at the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920 . Although hard to believe now, Höch had to fight for the opportunity to show her work in the Dada Fair.
The cut-and-paste technique was, in fact, a popular 19th-century process long used by amateurs to produce photography albums. Höch and her lover (and fellow Dadaist) Raoul Hausmann both claimed to have discovered photomontage in 1918 while vacationing on the Baltic Sea.
In Cut with the Kitchen Knife such well-known female figures as Käthe Kollwitz, dancer Niddy Impekoven, and actress Asta Nielsen, are aligned with the Dada axis—from the word “dada” on the upper left to “die große welt dada” (the great Dada world) spelled out at lower right.
Dada images and text cut diagonally across the picture to the upper left where Albert Einstein proclaims that “dada is not an art trend.”. At lower left, images of the masses seem to imply a coming revolution headed by assassinated Communist leader Karl Liebnecht who advises us to “join dada.”.