The Cut-and-Paste World: Recovering from War
Photomontage – work made from cut and pasted photographic images – was pioneered as a technique for forward-thinking art in central Europe in early 1919, and it flourished there through to the end of World War II. The artists of German Dada - a radical movement that questioned the status of art itself - such as John Heartfield, Max Ernst, and Hannah Höch, evoked in a radically critical way the awful mechanization and fragmentation of bodies during World War I.
At the same time, the aftermath of war brought benefits such as political autonomy to several countries in the region. The Polish group Blok and the Czech collective Devětsil developed constructive, even upbeat themes that turned photomontage into a form of visual poetry or popular street theatre. The jubilantly leaping and competing athletes in Apotheosis of Sport seem to bound into view: a celebration of post-war mobility from art into the spaces of everyday life.
