Hannah HÖCH. Lot n° 129

Fremde Schönheit [Strange Beauty]. No place or date [Berlin, circa 1929]. Original photographic collage on coloured paper, signed "H.H." lower right (10.5 x 20.2 cm); under glass, wooden frame painted black. Exceptional and famous original photographic collage by Hannah Höch from the series of seventeen in the Ethnographic Museum. "From the late 1920s into the mid-1930s, Höch was involved in a lesbian relationship with Dutch poet Til Brugman. During these years her work often treated the equivocal nature of individual identity - particularly female - within the constraints of bourgeois society. One of the most provocative and challenging of Höch's several series of photomontages is the one created between 1925 and 1930, collectively entitled From an Ethnographic Museum. Each of these conjoins photographs of Caucasian body parts - usually female - with "primitive" sculptures from non-Western societies. Often set on pedestals, these sometimes sinister, sometimes comic hybrids draw a parallel between Western attitudes toward both women and the "primitive", even as they caustically comment on woman's complicity in her societally imposed definition. Frequently using one sort of prejudice to locate another, the Ethnographic Museum series equates woman with the underdeveloped, the foreign, and perhaps the feared, while at the same time mocking Western fetishisms pf makeup, fashion, and behavior" (MoMA, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, 1997: the photomontage is reproduced in the catalogue published for this exhibition, page 101, no. 47). The collage has been shown on several occasions, notably in the United States in the travelling exhibition The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, which during 1997 was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, at MoMA in New York and then at the Los Angeles County Museum. It was also shown in Passions privées in 1995 (p. 194, no. 31 of the catalogue). Provenance: Marlborough Gallery, London (label on the