In a catalogue essay for a major 1997 Höch show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Kristin Makholm describes how, after a 1918 vacation to the Baltic Sea, Höch and Hausmann began creating photomontages. In the aftermath of World War I, during Weimar rule, they were inundated with propaganda in the form of posters, pamphlets, and advertisements. “They discovered a type of commemorative military picture with the heads of different soldiers pasted in, a practice with deep roots in folk tradition and popular consumer imagery,” Makholm writes. “With photomontage [Dada artists] could call into question the very ways that society viewed itself.”

One of Höch’s early works, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919), is among her most enduring. The poster-sized photomontage features a riot of overlapping images so diverse that the composition at first appears chaotic and impossible to parse—a perfect aesthetic for an artist concerned with the nonsensical noise of modern life, a sentiment reflected by the work’s title.