Jonh Heartfield

Adolf, der Übermensch. Schluckt Gold und redet Blech, 1932

(Adolf, the Superman. Swallows gold and spouts rubbish)

Marco Pinkus Collection

One of the outstanding characteristics of John Heartfield, whose real name was Helmut Herzfeld (Berlin, Germany, 1891–1968), was his ability to survive: at the age of eight he was abandoned by his parents, together with his brother and his two sisters, and he spent his childhood and adolescence in foster homes and schools until he was able to earn a living. In April 1933 the SS, the armed unit of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party, raided his Berlin apartment, but he succeeded in escaping and headed for Prague. By then Heartfield was an important artist who devoted himself to graphic design and who was recognised as a master of photomontage, a medium that in his hands became an effective political weapon, initially to provoke and later to attack. He joined the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1918 and considered that, with his work as a designer and with the tools of photomontage, he could be useful to the party in the class struggle and in the achievement of a world revolution.

He met Georg Grosz in Berlin in 1915 and through him discovered his definitive artistic vocation. Grosz became a fundamental figure in his life, and with him he began practising collage and was introduced into a circle that included Richard Huelsenbeck, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters and the members of the Dada group who had come from Zurich. In 1918 Heartfield was one of the founders of the Club Dada group in Berlin, and two years later he took part in the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (First International Dada Fair). As a political artist and activist, he made an impact in the political context of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), which was marked by social tensions and economic crisis and culminated with Hitler’s rise to power. His work attacking German imperialism and Nazism was sharp and biting. In the room that he curated in the Film und Foto exhibition (1929), on one of the walls there was a slogan, “Use photography as a weapon!”, which might well be taken as a summary of his artistic aims.

The early compositions in which he used collage and photomontage include some excellent book covers that he designed for Malik, one of the most important left-wing publishing companies in Germany at the time, of which his brother, Wieland Herzfelde, was the editor-in-chief. However, his most important work, which had the greatest artistic and political impact, was his long association with the magazine AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, Workers’ Illustrated Paper), between 1930 and 1938, first in Berlin and then in Prague and London.

Willi Münzenberg was the director of AIZ (1924–1938), a publication that became an instrument of cohesion and dissemination between the Communist Party and the network of German workers’ associations. Heartfield designed 240 covers for this magazine and numerous photomontages and graphic series for the inside pages, and many others that were produced as posters. An analysis of them reveals a series of constant features or devices, such as quotations of works of art, the appropriation of photographs and their possibilities, caricature and human–animal hybridisation, a typical feature of nineteenth-century humour and political satire (Grandville and Daumier, among others), using humour that left his readers with a wry smile.

The photomontage Adolf, der Übermensch. Schluckt Gold und redet Blech, published in 1932, shows some of those characteristics, such as the use of scientific photography and radiography as a basis for the final image. Also, employing photomontage as a device with which to practise political satire and fight against National Socialism, it points directly and unambiguously – the German marks of which Hitler’s digestive tube consists and the swastika instead of a heart – at the contradictions of the Nazi anti-capitalist rhetoric and its real practices in favour of an economy based on industry and the capitalist market.

The practice of photomontage, together with the broad field of experimentation and discovery of possibilities that was opened up by printed images, photography and typography was welcomed enthusiastically by Constructivist avant-garde artists and activists connected with revolutionary projects and political change in the 1930s. Among them were Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and Gustav Klutsis, whom Heartfield met in Moscow, to which he went in 1931 to conduct a workshop. Various articles and manifestos about photomontage, its origin and its uses, were published that year, and the Fotomontage exhibition was held in Berlin, curated by César Domela. Klutsis described photomontage as an art of agitation and propaganda and Raoul Hausmann said that there were only two possible forms, for purposes of politics or advertising, and this conditioned its gradual advance towards the construction of clear, concise images, moving on from the element of entertainment characteristic of the early stages. Heartfield swung from his early Dada use of collage and photomontage to a political use, and he also demonstrated a deliberate refusal to become involved with the world of advertising. With AIZ, a magazine that aimed to provide a counterpoint to the middle-class press, he helped to formulate a specifically proletarian style that, in photomontage, found a form of art that was no longer neutral.

References

David King and Ernst Vollard: Laughter is a Devastating Weapon. Tate Publishing, London, 2015.

Jorge Ribalta (ed.): El movimiento de la fotografía obrera (1926–1939). Ensayos y documentos. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía / TF Editores, Madrid, 2011.

Emmanuel Guigon and Frank Knoery (eds.): John Heartfield. Photomontages politiques, 1930–1938. Éditions des Musées de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, 2006.

Rocío Robles Tardío, 50 Obras maestras 1900-1950, IVAM, València, 2019, p. 42.