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Global Patterns: Hannah Hoch, Interwar Abstraction, and the Weimar Inflation Crisis
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Global Patterns: Hannah Hoch, Interwar Abstraction, and the Weimar Inflation Crisis

Max Boersma
Grey room, Vol.93(91), pp.6-35
04/01/2023
DOI: 10.1162/grey_a_00372

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Abstract

Boersma talks about artists Hannah Hoch, interwar abstract art, and the Weimar inflation crisis. Restless, aleatory, and quietly discordant, Hoch's Von zarten Dingen (Of Delicate Things; dated 1919 and 1925, most likely ca. 1924-1925) is collage preoccupied with craft and its reproducibility, but also with abstraction--its limits and exclusions and, in spite of them, its possibilities. Von zarten Dingen speaks of these issues through its forms and materials and, above all, through its making, which deviates as much from the standard procedures of craft as those of interwar abstract art. At the moment of Hoch's series, these patterns also came to be unexpectedly enmeshed in financial crisis, international markets and colonialism. A venerable institution of Weimar life, the Berlin-based Ullstein operated more than nineteen newspapers and magazines during the interwar period. Hoch's pattern collages should thus be understood within a curious nexus of commodified craft, financial crisis, and abstract art.
Abstract art Collage Creative process Economic crisis Hoch, Hannah Interwar period Visual artists Weimar Republic

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