Hannah Höch – from Dada firebrand to poet of collage

I suspect I am not alone in finding it surprising to encounter at the close of this exhibition an unexpected Hannah Höch — a gently spoken elderly lady filmed wandering among the overgrown flowers in her garden, talking of beauty. A far cry from the radical firebrand and Dada collagiste of interwar Berlin whose works epitomised the edgy fragmentation of Weimar life and culture. It was a long journey, and one traced with admirable even-handedness by this first and welcome UK survey of Höch’s works on paper, at the Whitechapel.

Hannah Höch arrived in a Berlin teetering on the brink of the first world war, a student of applied arts whose avid curiosity about modernism quickly led her into friendships with Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp and other artists of the Dada undergrowth. Her day job as pattern designer for the Ullstein Press and its women’s magazines exploited her natural flair for composition, but the demands of decoration were not going to sustain her restless spirit for long.