Photomontage

Introduction to Photomontage, Dawn Ades (ed), Thames & Hudson, London, 1976

Introduction

Manipulation of the photograph is as old as photography itself. Fox Talbot’s ‘photogenic drawing’, one of the earliest photographic processes, developed during the 1830s, involved the direct contact printing of leaves, ferns, flowers, drawings, and was rediscovered and put to use with an almost infinite repertoire of objects by Man Ray, Christian Schad and László Moholy-Nagy in their ‘photograms’ of the 1920s. Double exposures, ‘spirit photographs’ (sometimes the outcome of an unexpected result when an old collodion plate was imperfectly cleaned and the previous image dimly appeared on the picture), double printing and composite photographs are all enthusiastically discussed in popular nineteenthcentury books on ‘photographic amusements’ and trick photography. Cutting out and reassembling photographic images belonged on the whole to the realm of popular diversions – comic postcards, photograph albums, screens and military mementoes.

The term ‘photomontage’, however, was not invented until just after the First World War, when the Berlin Dadaists needed a name to describe their new technique of introducing photographs into their works. (The Futurist painter Carlo Carrà and the Suprematist Kasimir Malevich had already used photographs, but as isolated examples, not, as with the Dadaists, more than one photograph or parts of photographs combined.)

The word gained currency, therefore, in the context of an art (or anti-art) movement. The name was chosen with rare unanimity by the Berlin Dadaists, although they were later to dispute its exact historical origins within their own group. ‘Seized with an innovatory zeal’, Raoul Hausmann wrote, ‘I also needed a name for this technique, and in agreement with George Grosz, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, and Hannah Höch, we decided to call these works photomontages. This term translates our aversion at playing the artist, and, thinking of ourselves as engineers (hence our preference for workmen’s overalls) we meant to construct, to assemble [montieren] our works.’1 Montage in German means ‘fitting’ or ‘assembly line’, and monteur ‘mechanic’, ‘engineer’ or fitter. John Heartfield, perhaps the best-known practitioner of photomontage, was known as the Monteur Heartfield by the Dadaists, not simply because of his photomontages, but in recognition of an attitude, which they all shared, towards their work and its relation to existing artistic hierarchies.

The Berlin Dadaists used the photograph as a readymade image, pasting it together with cuttings from newspapers and magazines, lettering and drawing to form a chaotic, explosive image, a provocative dismembering of reality. From being one element among several, the photograph became dominant in Dada pictures, for which it was peculiarly effective and appropriate material. Its use was part of the Dadaists’ reaction against oil painting, which is essentially unrepeatable, private and exclusive. Photomontage belonged to the technological world, the world of mass communication and photomechanical reproduction. When Hannah Höch said of photomontage: ‘Our whole purpose was to integrate objects from the world of machines and industry in the world of art’,2 I think she meant it in the sense that the materials of photomontage, particularly newspaper photographs and newsprint, were made by mechanical processes, as well as in the iconographical sense. The Russian Constructivists were to value photomontage for very similar reasons. There was also a close connection between Dada photomontage and the Dada poetry of, for instance, Jean (Hans) Arp, Tristan Tzara and Kurt Schwitters, which involved the random use of sentences from newspapers, scraps of conversation and clichés out of context, words wrenched from their normal associations.

When Dada photomontage was invented it was within the context of, although in opposition to, collage. The name was chosen, clearly, to distance the two activities, and Dada recognised a very different potential in the new technique. Louis Aragon, in his essay of 1923 on Max Ernst’s collages and photomontages, sees a fundamental difference between Ernst’s works and Cubist collage: ‘For the Cubists, the postage stamp, the newspaper, the box of matches that the painter sticks on to his pictures, have the value of a test, an instrument of control of the reality itself of the picture… With Max Ernst it is quite different… collage with him becomes a poetic procedure, completely opposite in its ends to Cubist collage, whose intention is purely realist.’3 In a later essay, ‘La peinture au défi’ (1930), Aragon distinguishes between the two quite distinct categories of collage: the first is that in which the stuck element is of value for its representational qualities, the second for its material qualities. In the second, he suggests, collage operates only as an enrichment of the palette, while the first is prophetic of the direction it is to take, ‘where the thing expressed is more important than the manner of expressing it, where the object represented plays the role of a word’4 – the direction taken by Ernst. While Ernst, who explicitly distanced himself from Berlin Dada, moved in one direction, away from Cubist collage, Richard Huelsenbeck, who returned to Berlin from Zurich in 1917, had found that Dada in Zurich pushed collage further in the Cubist direction:

With the new medium, the picture, which as such remains always the symbol of an unattainable reality, has literally taken a decisive step forward, that is, it has taken an enormous step from the horizon across the foreground; it participates in life itself. The sand, pieces of wood, hair that have been pasted on, give it the same kind of reality as a statue of the idol Moloch, in whose glowing arms child sacrifices are laid. The new medium is the road from yearning to the reality of little things, and this road is abstract.5

Huelsenbeck here criticises the Zurich Dadaists for not taking the logical step – which, in fact, Marcel Duchamp had already taken in his

3 Louis Aragon, ‘Max Ernst, peintre des illusions’, in Les Collages, Hermann, Paris, 1965, author’s translation, p.29.

4 Aragon, ‘La peinture au défi’, op. cit., p.44, author’s translation.

5 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘En avant Dada’, in Robert Motherwell (ed), The Dada Painters and Poets, Wittenborn, Schultz, New York, ny, 1951.

Page from Dadaco, Munich, January 1920 with George Grosz and John Heartfield, Der Weltdada Richard Huelsenbeck (Worlddada Richard Huelsenbeck) or Dadabild (Dada Picture), c.1919 dada–constructivism ; The Janus Face of the Twenties, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 1984

This is a preliminary and tentative investigation of a subject that needs closer attention than it has so far received: the relations between Dada and Constructivism. It is not difficult to see why this topic has engaged neither the attention of historians of Dada nor of Constructivism, except in special cases where there is an obvious overlap – that of Theo van Doesburg and his rogue review Mécano, for instance, or of Kurt Schwitters. Dada and Constructivism have at best been seen as the opposing poles of the international avant garde in the period immediately following the First World War. This view has been reinforced by the insistence on the Dada-Surrealism inheritance, with Surrealism’s well-known antipathy to most forms of abstraction, an antipathy which has, with a certain justice, been mapped back onto Dada. But Dada has not always been granted the status of an ‘opposing pole’ to Constructivism, and has quite frequently been presented, often by Constructivists, as performing something of the role of an enema, a destructive but cleansing convulsion preceding the great task of reconstruction. In 1922 El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg wrote in an editorial in the first issue of their review Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet: ‘The negative tactics of the “Dadaists”, who are as like the first futurists of the pre-war period as two peas in a pod, appear anachronistic to us. Now is the time to build on ground that has been cleared.’1 Naum Gabo even denied Dada a separate identity, presenting it rather as the death throes of the Cubist revolution:

There were moments in the history of Cubism when the artists were pushed to these bursting points; sufficient to recall the sermons of Picabia 1914–16 (sic), predicting the wreck of art, and the manifestos of the Dadaists who already celebrated the funeral of Art with chorus and demonstrations. Realising how near to complete annihilation the Cubist experiments had brought art, many Cubists themselves have tried to find a way out… Our generation did not follow them since it has found a new concept of the world represented by the Constructive idea.2

More recently critics have recognised the positive and radical nature of the Dada challenge: ‘During the First World War the Dadaists had initiated an international movement that subverted the traditional categories and supposed “laws” of art. With the conclusion of the War, it seemed imperative to many artists that the dada critique be accepted and the laws of art reformulated from firm and objective bases.’3

It is possible to take this point further, and see the Dada critique not only as a crucial precedent to the objectives of International Constructivism but to see Dada as a continuing and active force in its own right during the early 1920s.

Richard Sheppard ends his thorough chronology of the Dada movement with two events, both of which took place towards the end of 1924: the publication of the First Surrealist Manifesto by André Breton, and the closure of the Bauhaus in Weimar (it was to move to Dessau in October 1925).4 Both of these events then, standing apparently at opposite ends of the artistic spectrum, were of significance in relation to the cessation of Dada activity. By then, most Dada artists had already or were soon to enter into other allegiances. Dada’s permanent state of ironic revolt was impossible to sustain, and yet most Dadaists remained nostalgically loyal to it. Jean (Hans) Arp wrote in 1927: ‘dada is the basis of all art. dada is for the senseless which doesn’t mean nonsense… i exhibited along with the surrealists because their rebellious attitude toward “art” and their direct attitude toward life were as wise as dada.’5

2 Naum Gabo, ‘The Constructive Idea in Art’, in J.L. Martin, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo (eds), Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, Faber and Faber, London, 1937.

3 Bann, op. cit., p.51.

4 Richard Sheppard (ed), ‘Dada: A Chronology’, New Studies in Dada: Essays and Documents, Hutton Press, Driffield, 1981.

70 dada–constructivism

In spite of the fact that Arp exhibited at the first Surrealist exhibition in 1925, La Peinture Surréaliste, his continued relations with Constructivists confirm the strength of the links Constructivism once had with Dada. In 1924 he collaborated with El Lissitzky to write the first ‘dictionary’ of modernism, The Isms of Art, and towards the end of the decade worked with Van Doesburg and Sophie Täuber on the Aubette café in Strasbourg. None of them compromised their style and the now destroyed café, its severe geometrical designs side by side with Arp’s free organic forms, stood as a memorial to the creative oppositions and collaborations between the two movements. While Arp joined the Surrealists (although this barely affected his work), Hans Richter, a fellow Zurich Dadaist, took the opposite path of Constructivism. He still saw Dada as an essential element though, in the constitution of the review he founded in 1923, G.

G as it finally appeared had the traits of Dadaism as well as of Constructivism, two seemingly unrelated movements. It offered articles by Mies van der Rohe as well as Tristan Tzara, by Gabo, Pevsner, Malevich, Lissitzky, Doesburg as well as by Arp, Schwitters, Hausmann, George Grosz, Man Ray. The fact is that the tendencies of Constructivism, or more generally speaking of structure, appeared in Dada itself; though they were not, as in Russian Constructivism, a programme or the single aim of Dada. Dada as a movement had no programme. But the tendencies for an order, a structure, appeared nonetheless as a counterpart to the law of chance which Dada had discovered. In this way the Constructivist involvement in Dada and vice versa may be understood. That is how Doesburg from De Stijl was at the same time a Dadaist. Eggeling made his Generalbass in Dada times, Richter’s black and white counterpoint and even Duchamp’s discs and ‘roto-reliefs’ (all with structural tendencies) were connected with and appeared in Dada. The aims of the new and unrestricted (Dada) and the aims of the enduring (Constructivism) go together, and condition each other. To embrace and integrate these two tendencies was the purpose of the magazine G. 6

Mécano No.3 Red, Leiden, October 1922

Unfolded sheet: 32 × 50 cm | 12⅝ × 19¾ in