Bemused in Berlin

Hannah Hoch was a German artist who worked mainly in Berlin and died there in 1978. She was 88. That chronology afforded her the unenviable privilege of witnessing the loser’s end of two world wars as well as the flowering and destruction of a modern art revolution. Now L.A. has the opportunity to see what she made of all that in “The Photomontages of Hannah Hoch” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She characterized herself as an introvert but one with a “profound interest in everything that is happening during my time here on Earth.” The exhibition, organized by Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, dramatizes the point in a slightly staggering 170 works. Taken together they reveal a delicate, poetic sensibility that nonetheless must have been spun from filaments of steel. Through all she witnessed a quality of amused engagement in life’s absurdity and beauty never flagged.

Born in the Thuringian city of Gotha, she was a nice German girl from a respectable family. At art school she made dress-fabric designs of butterflies and flowers that look like something out of the neo-Medieval crafts movement. By 1919, however, a design called “White Form” has the techno-metaphysical look of a doily by Buckminster Fuller.

She came of age at exactly the right time to be what the Americans called a “flapper,” the Germans, a “new woman.” She wore her hair in a bowl cut and took up with a married man, artist Raoul Hausmann. He got her pregnant twice. She aborted both times, refusing to have his child while he was married. They broke off, but not before both became associated with the radical Berlin Dada group centered around artist George Grosz. Hausmann insisted on Hoch’s inclusion in the First International Dada Fair in 1920, despite the opposition of Grosz and John Heartfield.

The latter artist’s resistance may have been born of a certain competitiveness. He and Hoch were both experimenting with photomontage. Formed by recombining snippets from the popular press, it was a medium with a built-in edge of social criticism.

The best of it still makes much of today’s computer art look pretty lame. Heartfield’s work was overtly political. Hoch’s was in there, but more inclined to Jungian satire. In “Dada Panorama” she jousted at the Weimar leadership by playing up the great men’s fat-slob macho. She laid out their image of women in “The Beautiful Girl” where nubile young things have heads made of mechanical parts. She asserted girl-power in “Marlene.” Dietrich’s legs are used to remind us of Lola-Lola’s triumph over the stuffy professor in “The Blue Angel.”

Hoch’s work is too ironic and aware of paradox to seem hostile. She liked men and had a string of lovers and one husband, 21 years her junior. She was sad when he ran off with a violinist.

In a suite called “The Ethnographic Museum Series” she seems to have a fine, poignant time combining images of traditional African sculpture with those of the European popular press. “Abduction” shows a carving of an animal bearing four passengers. Hoch pasted the head of a white woman on one of them. She seems rather excited to be carried off with three interesting African personages.

The rise of Nazism was not funny. Hoch refused to sign a document swearing she was a non-Jewish party member. Her work grows more anxious but it doesn’t flinch. “The Small P” combines the head of an adult male with that of a bawling baby into an image looking more than a little like Goebbels. “In the Wilderness” shows what she thinks of the great German war machine by turning zeppelins into cacti.

Hoch sat out World War II in a Berlin suburb, avoiding starvation by raising chickens and vegetables. Work of the period feels dark and apocalyptic but curiously ecstatic. One shows a curious winged thing in front of dancer’s legs hanging from clouds. It’s titled “Never Keep Both Feet on the Ground.”

In the aftermath of the Nazi defeat, Hoch’s work turned near-abstract. The sustaining oxymoron of this time combined a sense of grotesque ruin with a feeling of beatitude. It comes across in “Moonfish.”

The last decade of the artist’s life begot art that is like the dream of a fulfilled old age--vigorous, funny and rococo. By then she could borrow Marilyn Monroe’s smile for “Little Sun” and put Audrey Hepburn’s head on a belly-dancer. The world still spawned dirty old men with their eyes literally pasted to young girls’ knees. It still brought forth seductresses who believe their breasts are rockets to the moon.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through Sept. 14, closed Mondays, (213) 857-6000.