Hannah Hoch

A central figure in the Berlin Dada circle, friend to Kurt Schwitters and Piet Mondrian and lover of Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch (1889-1972) is probably the most important female artist from the German modernist period. She is best known for her pioneering works of photomontage, which briskly juxtapose mechanical and organic forms, ancient and contemporary bodies, symbols and text drawn from brands and headlines, also edging feminism, commodity critique and other political concerns into the mix. "It is striking how contemporary to us much of Höch's work feels," Luc Sante wrote recently, "in its sexual politics, its humor, its gleeful appropriation of anything and everything at hand." In 1945, Höch made this fantastical full-color children's book, which chronicles the adventures of the four mythical creatures Runfast, Dumblet, Snifty and Meyer in an enchanted garden, combining photomontage with the hallucinatory plant imagery she had come to favor. It is published here for the first time.