Museum of Art acquires self-portrait of photomontage pioneer
Senior curator Ihor Holubizky, left, and Museum director Carol Podedworny, right, take a first look at the Hannah Höch self-portrait after unpacking it at the McMaster Museum of Art.
The McMaster Museum of Art has landed a piece by one of the first artists to “Photoshop” images.
The Museum has acquired a 1931 self-portrait by German artist Hannah Höch – one of the pioneers of photomontage.
Artists including Höch originated photomontage by manually cutting and joining two or more photographs into a final image. The technique is now often performed with the popular photo editing software Photoshop.
The self-portrait is the first work by the artist to enter the collection, adding to the Museum’s considerable Expressionist and Weimar period holdings. It could also be the only Höch painting in a Canadian public collection.
“We are thrilled,” says Museum director Carol Podedworny. “For a collection built on important early 20th century German art, this Hannah Höch is long overdue.”
Höch, born in 1889, studied design and graphic art in Berlin prior to the First World War and was a member of the avant-garde art movement known as Dada – though she was never fully accepted by her peers.
“It was not easy for a woman to make it as a modern artist in Germany [and] most of the male colleagues considered us for a long time a charming, gifted amateurs,” she said in a 1959 interview.
She died in 1978 and is now recognized as having developed a distinct visual language that addressed the social attitudes of the modern age and women as subjects.
The Museum of Art has added more than 100 new works of art to its internationally recognized collection over the past year. It now houses approximately 7,000 objects.
The portrait was purchased with funds from the Donald Murray Shepherd Trust.
