The works are from Hannah Höch’s series of watercolors produced during her travels. In the spring of 1924, the artist traveled to Paris for the first time, equipped with addresses, letters of introduction and gifts. Establishing contacts with the European avant-garde was her goal, deepening old friendships and forging new ones. That is how she met the Dutch pianist and the founder of De Stijl Nelly and Theo van Doesburg with whom a lifelong friendship would follow.

A year later she accepted the invitation to spend a vacation together on the Atlantic island of Belle-Île, a round trip via London to the island where the friends had rented “in the most wonderful location” on the Côte Sauvage, the wild coast, a house in a secluded bay directly on the sea. A broad beach stretched out from the inlet. “On the right and on the left, like giant stage sets/giant stage flats, the rocks thrust forward. Indescribably beautiful,” she writes in her calendar. The artist spent ten wonderful days here, and on June 21 she was back in Paris, accompanied by numerous landscape studies. The watercolors Belle île Felsenküste bei Donnant im Juni 1925 and Belle île Bucht bei Donnant im Juni 1925, painted with a light touch, convey the wild, solitary beauty with great immediacy.

Seekofel (2810 m) Pragser Wildsee, Braies vecchia/Dolomiten, Sommer 1935 was produced during a hiking trip to the Dolomite Alps in 1935. On this vacation trip to the South Tyrolean region around Braies vecchia, Höch met her future husband Heinz Kurt Matthies, an economist and pianist who was a passionate mountaineer.

—Dr. Karoline Hille, 2021