Art History Research Lecture --- Dr Talia Kwartler Suzanne Duchamp, Hannah Höch, and the Politics of Dada Collage

Join us for Dr Talia Kwartler's Research Lecture on ‘Suzanne Duchamp, Hannah Höch, and the Politics of Dada Collage' and a reception afterwards at 79 North Street.

This research seminar draws from the larger book project Suzanne Duchamp: A Phosphorescent Life, which examines Suzanne Duchamp's radical expansion of the potential of painting as part of the transatlantic Dada group and beyond. In this chapter on Suzanne Duchamp and Hannah Hoch, I consider how these two significant women members of the Dada group used the possibilities of collage to such different ends. I approach Hoch's invention of photomontage as part of a larger collage practice developed by the Dadaists and place her work in dialogue with Duchamp. In doing so, I investigate the role that politics played within the international Dada collective and how collage could be used to either probe, as Hoch did, contemporary culture and politics, or, as Duchamp did, to obfuscate politics through cryptic humor and enigma. The paper will move from the particularities of individual artworks, especially Duchamp's Solitude entonnoir (1921) and Chef d'oeuvre accordeon (1921) and Hoch's Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919), to the specifics of national contexts, that being Paris for Duchamp and Berlin for Hoch. It will then open outwards onto broader questions about the role of politics and collage in the history of Dada, and how women artists made particularly significant contributions to these dynamics.

Talia Kwartler is a curator and art historian of the early 20th-century avant-garde. She holds a PhD in the History of Art from University College London where she wrote her doctoral thesis on Suzanne Duchamp. She is the author of Suzanne Duchamp, par elle-meme (Fondation Giacometti and Fage editions, 2024) and she organized Suzanne Duchamp: Retrospective (2025-2026), the critically acclaimed exhibition that was presented at the Kunsthaus Zurich and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Prior to her PhD, she worked as a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on the exhibitions Francis Picabia (2016-2017) and Max Ernst (2017-2018). She has taught and lectured internationally, and her writing on modern and contemporary art has been published in The Art Bulletin, Oxford Art Journal, The Cambridge Quarterly, Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, The Burlington Magazine, and Artforum.