John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld) was a pioneer of modern photomontage. Working in Germany and Czechoslovakia between the two world wars, he developed a unique method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect. The exhibition focuses on Heartfield’s designs for books and magazines, exploring the close relationship between his photomontage and the troubled context in which it was published. It draws particular attention to the magazine articles his montages illustrated, the original press photographs used as source images, and the contemporary political commentary that served either as Heartfield’s model or foil.

The strength of his work is evident in how his montage process transformed the meaning of the source photographs. To Heartfield, his process disclosed the “truth” obscured by the mainstream press and by the propaganda of his opponents. He concentrated on photographs that had been published in the illustrated press and had thus already played a crucial role in shaping public perception. Appearing in magazine spreads, posters, book covers, and stage sets, his photomontage sought to reshape public perception by challenging the photographs that had helped form it. At a time of great political uncertainty, Heartfield’s agitated images forecast and reflected the chaos Germany experienced as it slid toward political and social catastrophe. Their impact transformed photomontage from a vehicle of avant-garde art and advertising into a broadly useful mode of visual communication.

Biography

Born Helmut Herzfeld in 1891 in Berlin, Germany, John Heartfield anglicized his name as a protest against Germany’s aggression in the First World War. Despite a traumatic childhood, Heartfield managed to train as a professional artist from an early age. He graduated from Munich’s Konigliche Kunstgewerbeschule in 1912, and continued his studies at the Kunstgewerbe und Handwerkerschule in Berlin. The outbreak of the war brought his studies to a halt.

In 1918 Heartfield joined Berlin Dada and the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD). When the KPD rejected Dada’s works as “bourgeois decadence,” in July 1920, Heartfield withdrew from the group. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he contributed photomontages to two KPD publications: the newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag) and the satirical magazine Der Knüppel (The Cudgel), as well as designed book covers for his brother Wieland Herzfelde’s Malik Verlag. Between 1930 and 1938, Heartfield was a regular contributor to the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, or AIZ (The Workers’ Illustrated Magazine), first from Berlin, and after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in1933, from Prague. In December 1938, as German troops occupied the Sudetenland (part of Czechoslovakia), Heartfield went into exile in England.

Heartfield returned to the newly declared German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in 1950. In the intervening years, the Stalinists had condemned him as a “formalist,” a term used in Russia for any art form that seemed to stress technique over content. Yet with the unceasing support of his brother and of friends such as dramatist Bertolt Brecht, Heartfield was returned to official favor by 1957. In that year, his first postwar retrospective, held in East Berlin, elevated him to a national hero. He died there in 1968.

Image featured:
Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers Becomes Blind and Deaf: Away with the Stultifying Bandages!
John Heartfield (German, 1891–1968)
AIZ 9/6 (1930)
© 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Reproduction, including downloading of John Heartfield works is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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