ABSTRACT

Photomontages produced as a part of the extraordinary culture of giftgiving at the Bauhaus tell us much about the atmosphere of creative play that thrived there and how Bauhäusler represented themselves and commemorated one another.1 These remarkable works have been overlooked for years as mere ephemera and are largely missing from conventional accounts of the school. Born out of later nineteenth-and early twentiethcentury advertising, composite portraiture, and other forms of juxtaposed imagery, photomontage became a new, nontraditional practice that was embraced by a number of avant-garde groups in the interwar period. Montage allowed artists to create representations out of found images and to reorder the “blizzard of photographs” produced by the interwar illustrated press that Siegfried Kracauer described as threatening to overwhelm his contemporaries.2 Photomontage also embraced the dynamic views of modernist photography that László Moholy-Nagy would term the “New Vision”; it was part of a broader attempt to see the world anew through use of the latest visual and photographic technologies including X-ray, film, and photography.3 In the face of the early twentieth-century avant-garde’s experiments in abstraction, and in light of an increasingly sleek-yet-practical design aesthetic at the Bauhaus, photomontage was embraced by many Bauhäusler as a way of exploring the human figure and gendered imagery.