John Heartfield

John Heartfield was born Helmut Herzfeld on 19 June 1891 in Berlin-Schmargendorf, Berlin under the German Empire. His father was Franz Herzfeld, a socialist writer, and his mother was Alice (née Stolzenburg), a textile worker and political activist.

In 1899, Helmut, his brother Wieland Herzfelde, and his sisters Lotte and Hertha were abandoned in the woods by their parents.[1] The four children went to live with an uncle in the small town of Aigen (Salzburg city district).

In 1908, he studied art in Munich at the Royal Bavarian Arts and Crafts School. Two commercial designers, Albert Weisgerber and Ludwig Hohlwein, were early influences.

While living in Berlin, he began styling himself "John Heartfield," an anglicisation of his German name, to protest against anti-British fervour sweeping (Germany) during the First World War, during which Berlin street crowds commonly shouted "Gott strafe England!" ("May God punish England!").[2]

During the same year, Heartfield, his brother Wieland and George Grosz launched publishing house Malik-Verlag in Berlin. In 1916, he and George Grosz had experimented with pasting pictures together, a form of art later named photomontage, and which would be a central characteristic of their works.

In 1917, Heartfield became a member of Berlin Club Dada.[2] Heartfield would later become active in the Dada movement, helping to organise the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (First International Dada Fair) in Berlin in 1920. Dadaists were provocateurs who disrupted public art gatherings and ridiculed the participants. They labeled traditional art trivial and bourgeois.

In January 1918, Heartfield joined the newly founded German Communist Party (KPD).[2]

Heartfield's The Hand has 5 Fingers.

In 1919, Heartfield was dismissed from the Reichswehr film service because of his support for the strike that followed the assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. With George Grosz, he founded Die Pleite, a satirical magazine.

Heartfield met Bertolt Brecht in 1924, and became a member of a circle of German artists that included Brecht, Erwin Piscator, Hannah Höch, and a host of others.

Though he was a prolific producer of stage sets and book jackets, Heartfield's main form of expression was photomontage. Heartfield produced the first political photomontages.[3] He mainly worked for two publications: the daily Die Rote Fahne and the weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ), the latter of which published the works for which Heartfield is best remembered. He also built theatre sets for Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht.

During the 1920s, Heartfield produced a great number of photomontages, many of which were reproduced as dust jackets for books such as his montage for Upton Sinclair's The Millennium.

It was through rotogravure, an engraving process whereby pictures, designs, and words are engraved into the printing plate or printing cylinder, that Heartfield's montages, in the form of posters, were distributed in the streets of Berlin between 1932 and 1933, when the Nazis came to power.

His political montages regularly appeared on the cover of the communist magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ, Workers' Illustrated Newspaper) from 1930 to 1938, a popular weekly whose circulation (as many as 500,000 copies at its height) rivaled any other contemporary German magazine. Since Heartfield's photomontages appeared on this cover, his work was widely seen at newsstands.

Heartfield lived in Berlin until April 1933 when the Nazi Party took power. On Good Friday, the SS broke into his apartment, but he escaped by jumping from his balcony and hiding in a trash bin. He fled Germany by walking over the Sudeten Mountains to Czechoslovakia. He eventually rose to number five on the Gestapo's most-wanted list.[4]

In 1934, he combined four bloody axes tied together to form a swastika to mock the "Blood and Iron" motto of the Reich (AIZ, Prague, 8 March 1934).[5]

In 1938, given the imminent German occupation of Czechoslovakia, he was forced once again to flee from the Nazis, this time to England. He was interned as an enemy alien, and his health began to deteriorate. Afterward, he lived in Hampstead, London. His brother Wieland was refused a British residency permit in 1939 and instead left for the United States with his family.

In the aftermath of World War II, Heartfield was denied his written applications to remain in England for "his work and his health", and was convinced in 1950 to join Wieland, who had been living in East Berlin, East Germany. Heartfield moved into an apartment next to brother's, at 129A Friedrichstrasse. However, his return to Berlin was seen with suspicion by the East German government due to his 11-year stay in England and the fact his dentist was under suspicion by the Stasi. He was interrogated[note 1][6] and released having narrowly avoided a trial for treason, but was denied admission into the East German Akademie der Künste (Academy of the Arts). He was prohibited to work as an artist and was denied health benefits.

Due to the intervention of Bertolt Brecht and Stefan Heym, Heartfield was formally admitted to the Academy of the Arts in 1956. Although he subsequently produced some montages warning of the threat of nuclear war, he was never again as prolific as in his youth.

In East Berlin, Heartfield worked closely with theatre directors such as Benno Besson and Wolfgang Langhoff at Berliner Ensemble and Deutsches Theater. He created innovative stage set designs for Bertolt Brecht and David Berg. Using Heartfield's minimal props and stark stages, Brecht interrupted his plays at key junctures to have the audience to be part of the action and not to lose themselves in it.

In 1967, he visited Britain and began preparing a retrospective exhibition of his work, which was subsequently completed by his widow Gertrud and the Berlin Academy of Arts, and shown at the ICA in London in 1969.

• Adolf, the Superman (published in the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung [AIZ, Workers' Illustrated Newspaper], Berlin, 17 July 1932),[8] used a montaged X-ray to expose gold coins in Adolf Hitler's esophagus leading to a pile in his stomach as he rants against the fatherland's enemies.
• In Göring: The Executioner of the Third Reich (AIZ, Prague, 14 September 1933), Hermann Göring is depicted as a butcher.[9]
• The Meaning of Geneva, Where Capital Lives, There Can Be No Peace (AIZ, Berlin, 27 November 1932),[10] shows the peace dove impaled on a blood-soaked bayonet in front of the League of Nations, where the cross on the Swiss flag is changed into a swastika.
• Hurrah, die Butter ist Alle! (Hurray, There's No Butter Left!)[11] was published on the front page of the AIZ in 1935. A pastiche of the aesthetics of propaganda, the photomontage shows a German family at a dinner table eating a bicycle, with a portrait of Hitler hanging on the wall; the wallpaper is emblazoned with swastikas. A baby gnaws on an executioner's axe, also emblazoned with a swastika, and a dog licks an oversized nut and bolt. The title is written in large letters, in addition to a quote uttered by Hermann Göring during a food shortage. Translated, the quote reads: "Hooray, the butter is all gone!". Göring once said in a Hamburg address: "Iron ore has made the Reich strong. Butter and dripping have, at most, made the people fat".[12]