Now available in paperback, this book on the celebrated Dada artist Hannah Höch explores her use of collage as the artistic medium of choice for both satire and poetic beauty. World-renowned for her work during the Weimar period, Hannah Höch was a pioneer in many aspects, both artistic and cultural. She was the lone woman of the Berlin Dada movement — the riotous form of art that deconstructed sound, language, and images to re-assemble them into new objects, texts and meanings. A determined believer in women’s rights, Höch questioned conventional concepts of partnership, beauty and the making of art, her work presenting acute critiques of racial and social stereotypes, particularly that of her native Germany. Focusing on Höch’s collages, this book examines the artist’s career from the 1920s to the 1970s, charting her oeuvre from early works influenced by fashion and mass media, through to her later compositions of lyrical abstraction. It reveals her rapid development of a personal style, which was both humorous and often moving. Included are essays that examine themes such as the concept of the »New Woman« and the legacy of German colonialism. Featuring international scholarship on a groundbreaking artist, this volume brings together important source texts and reference material, which were first translated into English for the original edition of this book.
Cecile Debray-Amar Book order






- 2022
- 2022
Dali
- 127 pages
- 5 hours of reading
The author, Robert Descharnes, a long time friend of Dali, is the most authoritative writer on the artist. He relates the events of Dali's personal life and of the amazing couple, Dali/Gala; he analyzes his major paintings and the sketches leading to them; he discusses Dali's writings, his work for the theatre, movies, ballets, and book illustrating. A wonderful guide, Descharnes comments in detail about the volume's forty remarkable full-page colour plates.
- 2021
Photomontage
- 176 pages
- 7 hours of reading
One hundred seventy-one monochromes are reproduced in an overview of the nature and evolution of photomontage
- 2021
Marcel Duchamp (World of Art)
- 240 pages
- 9 hours of reading
Genius. Anti-artist. Charlatan. Impostor! Since 1914 Marcel Duchamp has been called all of these. No artist of the 20th century has aroused more passion and controversy, nor exerted a greater influence on art, the very nature of which Duchamp challenged and redefined as concept rather than product by questioning its traditionally privileged optical nature. At the same time, he never ceased to be engaged, openly or secretly, in provocative activities and works that transformed traditional artmaking procedures. Written with the enthusiastic support of Duchamp's widow, this is one of the most original and important books ever written on this enigmatic artist, and challenges received ideas, misunderstanding and misinformation
- 2021
Enchanted Ground is about the challenge to modernist criticism by Surrealist writers-mainly André Breton but also Louis Aragon, Pierre Mabille, René Magritte, Charles Estienne, René Huyghe and others-who viewed the same artists in terms of magic, occultism, precognition, alchemy and esotericism generally. It introduces the history of the ways in which those artists who came after Impressionism-Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh-became canonical in the 20th century through the broad approaches we now call modernist or formalist (by critics and curators such as Alfred H. Barr, Roger Fry, Robert Goldwater, Clement Greenberg, John Rewald and Robert L. Herbert), and then unpacks chapter-by-chapter, for the first time in a single volume, the Surrealist positions on the same artists. To this end, it contributes to new strains of scholarship on Surrealism that exceed the usual bounds of the 1920s and 1930s and that examine the fascination within the movement with magic.
- 2017
The first publication to explore the friendship between Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali, two of the most important artists of the twentieth century. The book features previously unpublished material and accompanies a ground- breaking exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
- 2015
Surrealism is one of the most influential cultural movements of the twentieth century. While its contribution to the art and literature of the century is well known, its relation to the development of intellectual ideas has only recently become a matter of serious investigation. twentieth century.
- 2013
Dawn Ades
- 608 pages
- 22 hours of reading
Art historian and curator Dawn Ades is a leading voice on Dada, Surrealism, abstraction and art from Latin America. This volume collects her important essays for the first time, addressing themes fundamental to the history of modern art and the avant-garde.Arranged thematically, this collection of essays represents the breadth of Dawn Ades’s critical and curatorial interests, ranging from avant-garde poster design to the representation of the female in Mexico, but with an overarching foundation in abstraction, identity and the influence of new media.As well as working as a professor and curator – which earned her an OBE for her services to art history – Ades has written on a wide range of artists since 1980. Spanning the likes of Francis Bacon, Richard Deacon, Salvador Dalí and Hannah Höch, this body of essays is ingrained with Ades’s consistently clear and intellectually stimulating observations.To introduce the book, Ades is interviewed by Doro Globus who explores the writer’s relationship to curating, teaching and art history.
