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John Stezaker is a contemporary British Conceptual artist best known for his collages of found images taken from postcards, film stills, and commercial photographs. Stezaker's work resembles early-Surrealist and Dada collages made by artists like Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, and Man Ray. In the collage series Marriage (2006), juxtaposed portraits of classic film stars create newly formed but still disjointed characters-forcing the viewer to shift their frame of reference. "My ideal is to do very little to the images, maybe just one cut: the smallest change or the most minimal mutilation," he stated of his work. "What I do is destructive, but also an act of deliberate passivity." Born in 1949 in Worcester, United Kingdom, Stezaker attended the Slade School of Art in London and graduated in the 1973. He was a major influence on YBA artists like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst when they first emerged in the late 1980s. His works have been featured at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, among others. The artist lives and works in London, United Kingdom.

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John Stezaker is a contemporary British Conceptual artist best known for his collages of found images taken from postcards, film stills, and commercial photographs. View John Stezaker's 60 artworks on artnet. Find an in-depth biography, exhibitions, original artworks for sale, the latest news, and sold auction prices.

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From its roots in European Dadaism in the early years of the twentieth century, shadowing modernism and tracing its way through photography, collage is a medium as diverse as it is politically charged. Emerging as a reaction to the First World War, collage allowed artists to interact with existing materials - anything from newsprint and magazines to maps, tickets and propaganda and photographs - to rip them apart and then reassemble them, creating visually dynamic hybrids.

Coined by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, the term 'collage' points towards a medium simultaneously serious and tongue-in-cheek; a technique that is deeply referential of the political world in which the works were produced. Via the assemblage of different objects and images, collage interrogates the fundamental concept of what it is to create art, whilst offering a prismatic reflection of the social change and upheaval of the twentieth century. From the originators and pioneers of the form to more contemporary practitioners, AnOther presents its top 10 collage artists.

1. Hannah H ö Höch's most famous work, effortlessly titled 'Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany', shows her ideals and techniques in synthesis. A collage of newspaper clippings, the work challenges the racist and sexist codes upholding Weimar Germany. Throughout her career, Höch would challenge the marginalised place of women in twentieth century Germany. She drew together fashion magazines, illustrated journals and photography to pioneer a form bent on demonstrating that art itself could be collected from the everyday clutter of modern life.

2. Kurt Schwitters
Unlike the other Dada artists, Schwitters was not based in Berlin, but in Hanover, where he worked until the Nazis exiled him from Germany, when he came to live in The Lake District in England. Throughout his montages, collages and assemblages, Schwitters developed the concept of Merz - 'the combination, for artistic purposes of all conceivable materials' - in which he argued that everyday found objects including wood, plasterboard, wheels, cotton were equal in expression to paint itself.

3. Raoul Hausmann
Friends with Schwitters, Hausmann abandoned painting in 1923 and centred his work on photography. He invented an apparatus known as the Optophone, which turned kaleidoscopic forms into music. As well as sound poetry, Hausmann's oeuvre contains photograms, rayograms and pictograms.

4. Man Ray
Though informally related to the Dada and Surrealist movements, the American artist Man Ray contributed impressively to avant-garde, fashion and portrait photography, in particular with his solarised and isomorphic portraits of Lee Miller. Ray's photomontages play with femininity and form, as in his multiple exposures of Alice Prin, better known as Kiki de Montparnasse, and Dora Maar.

5. Eileen Agar
British artist Eileen Agar was one of the only female members admitted into the Surrealist group on her own artistic terms, and not simply as a model or a muse. Like Höch's, Agar's works are social critiques and show humour and irony. In 'Precious Stones', she superimposes a classical cut-out profile over a catalogue page showing antique jewellery.

6. Joseph Cornell
Influenced by the Surrealists, Cornell took collage into new directions with his pioneering work in assemblage. Cornell lived in New York, daily collecting the materials for his art from the bookshops and antique shops of Manhattan. He is most famous for his intricate wooden boxes, filled with lithographs, colourful birds and other trivia.

7. Nancy Spero
Nancy Spero's engagement with political, social and cultural concerns throughout her career as an artist in New York is best illustrated in her collage on paper 'Notes in Time'. Inspired by Grecian scrolls and the story of Troy, the frieze-like collage is comprised of twenty-four panels, each nine-feet long, punctuated by 96 quotations, including poetry by H.D., and multiple female figures. It is a grand non-narrative celebration of the female form, but also documents a female struggle against political stereotype.

8. John Stezaker
British artist John Stezaker studied at the Slade School of Art in 1973, and went on to produce work which challenged the predominance of Pop art. Stezaker's collages are irreverent; his use of glamourous 1950s portraits, of dapper suited men and Hollywood stars, mashed together with postcards of landscapes and with other faces, has the effect of the uncanny. In 2012, Stezaker won the Deutsche Börse photography prize to a mixed reception, as a few critics questioned whether a conceptual artist - who deals with the destruction of photographs - could win a prestigious photography award, proving that collage as an art form continues to be nothing if not controversial.

9. Jesse Treece
Using vintage magazines and books, Jesse Treece creates surreal and simple works, often using images of space and children to create an inimitable perspective on everyday life.

10. Annegret Soltau
German artist Annegret Soltau constructs collage using photographs of her own face and body, stitched with black thread, confronting explicit issues in an imaginative manner.
Hannah Höch runs at the Whitechapel Gallery from January 15 to March 23, 2014.

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Top 10 Collage Artists: Hannah Höch to Man Ray

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As the first retrospective of the work of Hannah Höch opens at the Whitechapel Gallery, AnOther presents a collection of the best collage art

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Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 - 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany.

Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures.

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Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 - 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art.

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Saying, "I always had an experimental turn of mind," Hannah Höch transformed her experience working with textiles and mass media images for commercial women's magazines into pioneering Dada photomontages with a gender-bending feminist slant.

Dada Puppen (Dada Dolls)

Höch's darkly playful Dada Dolls are quite distinct from any work created by the others in the Berlin group of Dada artists with which she was affiliated early on. Given that the Berlin chapter of Dadaists only formed in 1917, these small-scale sculptural works suggest her awareness of Dada ideas more generally from its inception in 1916 in Zurich. She was likely influenced by writer Hugo Ball, the Zurich-based founder of Dada, given Höch's doll costumes' resemblance to the geometric forms of Ball's own costume worn in a seminal Dada performance at the Swiss nightclub Cabaret Voltaire.

Ball achieved notoriety for his declamation there of sound poetry, which he recited while wearing a mechanical looking outfit comprised of geometric shapes. The costume can be read as a commentary on contradictory feelings held towards developing technology. Technology was both revered and feared at this time, since it both aided social and economic progress but also threatened humanity with its destructive power. A common belief among Dadaists was that technology caused humans to become more machine-like themselves. One intent of the Dada movement was to use art as a satirical critique of such elements of culture that were both intimidating and absurd.

As Paul Trachtman has portrayed it, in a description that is apt for both Ball's and Höch's work: "When Dadaists did choose to represent the human form, it was often mutilated or made to look manufactured or mechanical. The multitude of severely crippled veterans and the growth of a prosthetics industry struck contemporaries as creating a race of half-mechanical men."

Fabric, yarn, thread, board, and beads - Berlinische Galerie. Landesmuseum fur Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur

Heads of State

Heads of State is built around a newspaper photograph of the German president Friedrich Ebert and his Minister of Defense, Gustav Noske. Having carefully cut the men out, Höch proceeded to create a composition with characteristically disjunctive and unexpected outcomes. The two statesmen look decidedly foolish out of context in their bathing suits, and Höch places them against a background of an iron-on embroidery pattern of flowers and butterflies surrounding a woman. At this point, in time she was still working for magazines designing similar patterns, and this work is testament to her ability to converge her disparate experiences to create new and striking images.

The effect is deliberately comical, but it also sends a powerful message. The President and his minister, who had recently and ruthlessly put down the Spartacist Rebellion, are presented frolicking in a whimsical fantasy land, as if they are unaware of the intense hardships and political and financial problems being faced by Germany and its citizens during this period.

The embroidery-pattern background alludes to a source of income and occupation for many German women at this time, including Höch herself, and serves to contrast the role of women with that of men. The collage is arranged so that it looks like the two figures have been caught in the net of the embroidery pattern, and it positions these paunchy heads of state as worthy of ridicule in the process of stripping them of their usual trappings of masculinity. At the same time, the composition attacks the patriarchy and questions the arbitrary values projected onto different art forms by society.

Photomontage

Cut With the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany

Though one of Höch's earliest works, this ambitious collage is unusual within her canon for being particularly large; it measures 35 x 57 inches. Here she uses cuttings from newspapers and magazines to create one cohesive image out of a myriad of disparate parts. This technique of taking words and images from the established press to make new and subversive statements was highly innovative.

The piece was exhibited in the First International Dada Fair, which took place in Berlin in 1920, and it was reportedly one of the most popular pieces in the show. In the top right corner Höch has pasted together images of "anti-Dada:" figures of the Weimar government and representatives of the old empire. Elsewhere in the collage, the proponents of Dada including photographs of Raoul Hausmann are ranged in opposition to these establishment figures.

The effect is initially one of visual confusion, and yet a kind of nonsense-narrative begins to develop with sustained attention. One figure is transformed into something else by the addition of a de-contextualised newspaper clipping, such as the Kaiser's iconic moustache replaced by a pair of upside-down wrestlers. The work encapsulates the eclecticism and eccentricities of Dadaism, but also makes a pointed political statement against the staid establishment; it is a carefully-crafted homage to anarchistic opposition.

Photomontage

High Finance

Höch's High Finance is a perfectly composed example of her innovative photomontage technique. The viewer is presented with two banker figures, each with a disproportionately large and mismatched head, one of which is a photograph of 19 th-century British chemist and astronomer Sir John Herschel. The effect would be comical, were it not for Höch's intelligent arrangement of the other visual elements. One of the bankers' heads is spliced cleanly in half, and behind it are two shotguns, which look as if they are simultaneously being aimed by and at the banker.

She offers a satirical view of industrialism and financial power in post-First World War Germany, pointing to the hidden link between military complexes and the bankers who finance them. However, the issue is complex, and this comes across in her imagery. The two men carry menacing mechanical tools, but the hand of the man on the left seems to have been taken over by the piston, while his face (cut from a grainy newspaper) is obscured by the trigger of the sharp illustration of a gun.

She presents an image of a world poised on the edge of chaos. The composition is arranged carefully to create an inherent balance, but the implication is that if one small element were relocated, the whole would be pushed out of order, much like in the world of "high finance" that is depicted.

Photomontage

Untitled, From an Ethnographic Museum

This work comes from a series of images made by Höch around 1930. They are said to have been inspired by a trip to an ethnographic museum with her partner Til Brugman. The image makes powerful use of tropes of display, such as the clear framing border, the expansive sea of the red color-field background and the blue rough semi-circle that acts as a plinth for the central figure.

Höch's view of non-European art and Western receptions of it seems implicitly to be more critical and nuanced than that of many other artists at this time, who often saw the 'primitive' artwork as containing an essence of vitality that had been lost in artistic developments in the West. She presents a new image of this art; offering viewers a visual reminder to be conscious that they are seeing the image of this sculpture without context and thus stoking a desire for the erotic and exotic.

Höch combines this imagery of the non-Western sculpture with a picture of a beautiful woman from the European popular press, distorted with the addition of an exaggeratedly large eye. She suggests that society looks at women much as they look at a piece of unknown sculpture: as exotic and erotic objects. She also questions the position of the "New Woman" of the Weimar Republic, looking at her as a fragmented and constructed image that serves particular ends in society, suppressing and disregarding other possible individual choices and desires.

Photomontage

Industrial Landscape

Much of Höch's post-Second World War work is little-known and unacclaimed. However, Industrial Landscape is one work that escaped this status. Here, Höch uses her scalpel with exceptional skill to create a very complex image. Her work in this era was typically characterized by a new approach to her appropriated materials: rather than taking them as they were and putting them in surprising contexts, she started to transform her newspaper and magazine cuttings with her scalpel until they bore little resemblance to their original forms.

In this instance, she has taken images of a crowded swimming pool and of the landscape of Lugarno in Switzerland before cutting and splicing them to create a new image reminiscent of a landscape filled with machinery and an industrial skyline of factories. Fragments are turned into a semi-abstracted city teeming with interesting detail.

Höch's composition has lost the clear legibility and pointed social and political commentary of her earlier work. Instead, her style leans towards abstraction, following wider international trends in art after the Second World War. Artistic abstraction had been repressed by multiple political regimes, including in Germany, and many artists were seeking to explore it after some of the restrictions had lifted, and cultural conditions had changed.

Photomontage

Life Portrait

Lebensbild or Life Portrait is Höch's last work, and a fitting end to her career. It is a photomontage containing multiple images of the artist herself, always sporting her characteristic severely bobbed hair, which made her an emblem of the "New Woman" in her youth. In this unusual self-portrait of sorts, she revisits several themes that she had explored over the course of her career, including fashion templates and patterns, African sculpture and decontextualized images from newspapers. She also makes use of imagery that concerned her later in her life, such as that especially of nature, of plants and animals.

The piece acts as a meditation on Höch's position as an artist, and how that changed over the course of her lifetime. It asks questions about the nature of spectacle and imagery, and particularly how that relates to both art and women, whom Höch is able to view through the same lens. This example of her extreme self-portraiture here presages that of other women artists who developed elaborate projects of self-photography, such as those by Cindy Sherman and Hannah Wilke.

Photomontage

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

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Höch was nearly unique as a female active in the Dada movement - she pioneered photomontage techniques and promoted fellow artists.