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John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld; 19 June 1891 – 26 April 1968) was a German visual artist who pioneered the use of art as a political weapon. Some of his most famous photomontages were anti-Nazi and anti-fascist statements. Heartfield also created book jackets for book authors, such as Upton Sinclair, as well as stage sets for contemporary playwrights, such as Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator.
In 1899, Helmut, his brother Wieland, and their sisters Lotte and Hertha were abandoned in the woods by their parents after Franz Herzfeld was accused of blasphemy. His family had to flee to Switzerland and later they were deported to Austrian Empire. When their parents disappeared in 1899, Heartfield and his siblings were left abandoned in a mountain hut. The four children went to live with an uncle, Ignaz, in the small Austrian town of Aigen. Heartfield biodata, sartle.com. Accessed 16 December 2022.
In 1908, he studied art in Munich at the Königliche Kunstgewerbeschule München (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, when Berlin crowds often shouted "Gott strafe England!" ("May God punish England!") in the streets.
During the same year, Heartfield, his brother Wieland and George Grosz launched the Malik publishing house in Berlin. In 1916, he and George Grosz experimented with pasting pictures together, a form of art later named photomontage, and which would become a central characteristic of their work.
In 1917, Heartfield became a member of Berlin Club Dada. 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).
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."Heartfield in Context" by Maud Lavin, February 1985 He mainly worked for two publications: the daily Die Rote Fahne ("The Red Flag") and the weekly communist magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung ( AIZ; "Workers' Illustrated Newspaper"), 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 Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung 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.
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).
In 1938, given the imminent German occupation of Czechoslovakia, he was forced once again to flee from the Nazis. Relocating 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.
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 be part of the action and not 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.
After his widow Gertrud Heartfield's death, the East German Academy of the Arts took possession of all of Heartfield's surviving works. When the West German Academy of Arts absorbed the East German Academy, the Heartfield Archive was transferred with it.
From November to December, 1974 the Ministry of Culture and the Academy of Arts of the Democratic Republic of Germany (East Germany) hosted an exhibition of John Heartfield photomontages at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.(John Heartfield catalogue from the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris)
From 15 April to 6 July 1993, the New York City Museum of Modern Art hosted an exhibition of Heartfield's original montages.
In 2005, the British Tate Gallery held an exhibition of his photomontage pieces. The Museum Ludwig in Cologne held a retrospective exhibition of Jacob Kjeldgaard and Heartfield in 2008.
In 2023, an animated documentary about Heartfield was released, directed by Katrin Rothe.
Hurray, There's No Butter Left, was the text on the bottom of a photo of a German family, which can be found in a political comic posted into a banned communist magazine, in 1935.
Slovenian and SFR Yugoslavia avant-garde music group Laibach has a number of references to Heartfield's works: the original band's logo, the 'black cross', references Heartfield's art Der alte Wahlspruch im "neuen" Reich: Blut und Eisen (1934), a cross made of four axes, as can be seen on the inner sleeves and labels of their 1987 album Opus Dei. The cover art of their self-titled debut album Laibach (Ropot, 1985, Ljubljana), also references Heartfield's Wie im Mittelalter… so im Dritten Reich (1934). A track called Raus! (Herzfelde), originally on Slovenska Akropola, but also included in Krst pod Triglavom and Opus Dei as Herzfeld (Heartfield), is about Heartfield.
British hardcore punk band Discharge used Heartfield's work "Peace and Fascism" for the cover artwork of their 7-inch EP Never Again, 1981.
English post-punk band Blurt recorded a song called "Hurray, the Butter is All Gone!" on their 1986 album Poppycock.
Armenian-American alternative metal band System of a Down used Heartfield's poster for the Communist Party of Germany ( The Hand Has Five Fingers) as cover art on their 1998 self-titled debut album.
German experimental group Einstürzende Neubauten reference Heartfield and his brother Wieland Herzfelde, as well as other Dadaist and Futurist artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, George Grosz and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in the track "Let's Do It a Dada" from their 2007 album Alles wieder offen.
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