“Embroidery is very closely related to painting. It is constantly changing with every new style each epoch brings. It is an art and ought to be treated like one … you, craftswomen, modern women, who feel that your spirit is in your work, who are determined to lay claim to your rights (economic and moral), who believe your feet are firmly planted in reality, at least Y-O-U should know that your embroidery work is a documentation of your own era.”—Hannah Höch, in Embroidery and Lace, 1918

The Dada movement, from 1916 - 1924, developed out of the horrors of World War I. “World War I produced a collapse of confidence in the rhetoric—if not the principles—of the culture of rationality that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment,” wrote Leah Dickerman, co-curator for the 2006 Dada exhibition at The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Dadaists rejected high art and culture, making “anti-art:” from Duchamp’s readymade sculptures (Fountain, 1917), cutting up magazines and newspapers to make art rather than painting oil on canvas, using chance to make artistic decisions, to creating nonsensical words in poetry.

Höch is now seen as an important Dada artist whose work was a precursor to feminist art. During her life, she was marginalized by her (male) peers until the 1950s, even though she knew artists like Kurt Schwitters, Sonia Delaunay, László Moholy-Nagy, and Piet Mondrian. As Madeleine Boucher wrote on artsy.com, “Her work often violently attacks the ideals of femininity and glorified domesticity that those magazines (for whom she worked) repackaged and popularized as fashionable.”

The Museum of Modern Art describes Hannah Höch: “[She] became familiar with knitting, crocheting, and embroidery while working as a designer in Berlin, creating handwork patterns for crafting magazines. Cut-and-pasted images met elements of the applied arts in her pieces, whether in needlepoint diagrams, images of lace, or the texture of thread suggested by the flower petals of Watched. In these works, Höch feminizes the Dada movement’s engagement with the every day by pairing craft techniques, traditionally seen as women’s work, with the avant-garde strategy of photomontage—the cutting and recombining of mechanically reproduced images.”

In Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum, 1930 Höch collaged a photo of the actress Renée (Maria) Falconetti (also known simply as “Falconetti”), appearing in a publicity still for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc. Half of Falconetti’s face is replaced with the ear, eye, and mouth of a wooden dance mask from Cameroon. A crown of cutlery– cutout shapes of spoons and knives, set against glinting metallic foil– rests on her head. She was playing the ideas of the cultural Other, after having visited the Ethnographic Museum in Leiden, NL, and the “New Woman” of the Weimar Republic. Women, granted the right to vote in 1919, were now wearing looser, more “masculine” clothes, cutting their hair to a short bob, and going out to bars and nightclubs more frequently. (Side note: Did you watch the German series Babylon Berlin? It’s fantastic!)

When I first saw the above much later piece (from1967) online, I first thought of embroidery seeing those striated lines! Just gemstones after all. The ruffled skirt with the stones and smiling lips over a bed of spikes is brilliant.

I’m guessing she stitched the patterns she contributed to magazines and therefore some of the images that went into her collages. What else did she embroider?

I feel connected to Höch’s lineage in my art practice, where I combine photography, drawing, and stitching in a collage-like layering process. A ruffle, pleat, or floral embroidery on clothing from 19th century or current fast fashion, ideas of folk culture, how we decorate our homes and our bodies, the window as a metaphor, and the Surrealist idea of the uncanny enter into my work. I am interested in honoring craft, women’s work, art made by women, and the layers of history beneath a city sidewalk or under a thick pile of street posters. In contrast, my images overlap and flow into and through one another. The photograph directs the drawing, stitching, and layering. I cut lines with a blade, creating a different form rather than adhering to an object's contours. Often, I turn the photo over, so that only a ghost is visible, like a memory or a dream just below the surface of consciousness. Then, what was the back side of the stitching becomes the front.

Looking back, we see the relationship between art and history. There’s no need to worry about making something relevant. Whatever you make naturally comes from who you are and your experiences, as Hannah advised. I appreciate being part of the long lineage of makers before me documenting their lives: women weaving fibers for clothing, spinning wool for yarn, stitching a darning sampler as job training, making a dowry, embroidering to show artistry or wealth, or artists working with a needle and thread. We are all holding onto a long thread that stretches back in time and around the world.

Along these lines, I teach a six-session online class called Drawing With Thread: From Tradition to Contemporary Art. I support participants to develop a creative practice with stitching and create an art piece beyond patterns and kits. We look at embroidering as drawing and mark-making following each person’s interests and ideas. No drawing experience or art background is needed! I share the history of embroidery, stitched textiles from around the world, and contemporary art to expand the possibilities. The current offering with a great group from the US and The Netherlands is about to finish. The next class will be in the fall: Sept 10 - Oct. 15. Interested? Email me with questions or register now.

I am also offering this class in person in a week-long intensive at The John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina! Join me at this magical school for learning, community, and self-discovery, May 6 - 13!

Sources:

Parker, Rozsika, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and The Making of the Feminine, London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 1984.
smithsonianmag.com
moma.org
artsy.net
artlandmagazine
awarewomenartists.org