The Dada art movement (1916-24) was one the first group of artists to use photomontage against the senseless massacre of the First World War. The term photomontage was created by the Berlin Dadaists for the technique of making pictures by assembling pieces of photographs, in combination with other types of graphic material. The most radical participants of the Berlin group were George Grosz, Hannah Höch, John Heartfield and Raoul Haussman
John Heartfield was a German artist whose politically charged photomontages were proscribed in Germany during the Nazi regime. He even changed his name as a way to protest and also pretended madness to avoid returning to the military service. He was part of the Berlin DADA group, and used his collage work as a political medium, incorporating images from the journals of the day. He edited "Der DADA" and organized the First International DADA Fair in Berlin in 1920.
Sharply critical of the Weimar Republic, Heartfield’s work was forbidden during the Third Reich, and rediscovered in the Democratic Republic in the late 1950s. Since then, his art has influenced generations of artists and graphic designers.
Hannah Höch was the only female member of the Berlin DADA movement, and a pioneer of photomontage. In her work, she confronted the modern and the colonial German woman, and raised questions concerning women's sexuality as well as their gender role in the new society. She used photographs from magazines to explore the fragmented life of women within a male dominated pre-war and post-war society in Germany.
In 1945, after the end of the war she was one of the first to work for restoring the artistic life in Berlin. During the 50s and 60s Höch produced abstract works and a large number of color collages, in which she seems to transform her reality into a fantastic and ironic world.