Hannah Höch’s Da-Dandy (1919) enters this project as a suggestive and still somewhat open case within the larger referential network. What first recommends it is not simply the title’s play on Dada and dandyism, nor even the repeated strings of pearls, but the treatment of the background itself. That background appears to be halftoned and clipped from a printed source, and within it one can plausibly identify imagery resembling Duchampian subtractive drips alongside what may be a Joseph Stella collage element.
If that reading holds, the implications are considerable. The work would not merely allude to the network through iconographic rhyme; it would incorporate, at the level of its printed material, fragments likely derived from the visual culture of New York Dada. In that case, Da-Dandy would function less as an independent photomontage and more as a recombination of already circulating signals, lifted from print and reassembled in Berlin under Höch’s own logic of cut, juxtaposition, and misdirection.
Once the background is recognized as the likely point of entry, the other motifs begin to register differently. The strings of pearls resonate directly with Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating, where pearls emerge as one of the central lexical hooks later taken up by related works. The silhouetted male profile suggested by the title may also be read as Duchamp-like, though here the identification remains more tentative and interpretive than demonstrable.
This is where Da-Dandy becomes especially interesting. If the profile does in fact point toward Duchamp, then Höch’s image would gather together three distinct but convergent signals: the drip language in the background, the pearls as transferable motif, and a dandy figure that may stand in for Duchamp himself. The result would be a work that does not simply echo one element of the network, but tests several at once through the hybrid grammar of photomontage.
The later page in New York Dada built around the Stieglitz photograph sharpens that possibility. There, the slogans “WATCH YOUR STEP!” and “CUT OUT DADYNAMIC STUFF!” can be read as possible admonishments directed toward Höch’s Da-Dandy, especially given the visual rhyme between the Stieglitz leg and Höch’s imagery and the phrase “cut out” in relation to collage itself. Under that reading, Da-Dandy is not merely adjacent to the network; it may have come close enough to its private code to provoke a semi-comic rebuke in print.
For that reason, Da-Dandy occupies a useful threshold position on this site. It is not as secure a relay as Mistinguett or Theorem, because the argument depends more heavily on printed-source analysis and visual inference. But precisely for that reason, it shows how the network may have extended beyond Duchamp’s immediate circle, surfacing in altered form within Berlin photomontage while still carrying the quiet marks of Tulip Hysteria’s background language.