Hannah Hoch: A continuation...

Frances Connelly. Modern Art and the Grotesque. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University                 Press, 2003. Print.

Here is another source about Hannah Hoch.  In chapter 9, it discusses Hannah Hoch and her obsession with grotesque bodies.  The chapter compares her work with Connelly's definition of grotesque.  For instance, "the grotesque is an aesthetic strategy that cuts across or against boundaries and categories.  By combining the primitive and modern, the male and female, the natural and the man-made, grotesque images like Sweet One challenge presumed universals of classical beauty as the pertain both to art and to the body.  Photo-montage, by its definition brings together unlike things from disparate worlds and thus transgresses and destabilizes boundaries more naturally than any other medium.... The photograph is intuitively felt to be a mirror of reality, photo montage, with its surprising juxtapositions of disparate photographic images, is is inherently more unsettling than paintings or sculptures that similarly jumble categories."

In the text there are various images that combine photographs of naked women and various ceremonial masks.  This juxtaposition creates strange imagery that takes the viewer aback.

The text goes further to explain Hoch's extensive use of the female form."[The} historical and theoretical construction of the grotesque likewise tends to evoke the female, though it builds more on the bodily metaphor.  Dark and cavernous, earthly and material.As Marsha Meskimmon has recently argued, monsters are all about maternity, about a "misshapen birth, an abortion, the result of bestiality or a woman's union with a demon, the product of some trauma delivered to a pregnant woman."

I found this description of the association of the female form with the grotesque interesting.  It makes sense because if you look at various scary movies, i.e. The Exorcist, Carrie, Rosemary's Baby, evil, ugliness, or the grotesque emerge or come from the female form.

Various works commented on medical debate about sexual identity and beauty enhancement.

Anyway, I enjoy her work because it is weird and somewhat controversial.


Strange Beauty (Fremde Schonheit), 1929.  Photo-montage with watercolor.


Sweet One (Die Sui be).  Photo-montage with Watercolor