John Heartfield

John Heartfield (1891-1968), German artist and pioneer of the use of photomontage, a form of collage made by piecing together fragments of various photographs, as an artform and as social commentary. He was born Helmut Herzfelde in Berlin, the son of German poet Franz Held. Up to 1914 he was trained both by private teachers and at schools of applied arts and craft in Munich and Charlottenburg, Berlin. In 1916, after two years' military service, he changed his name in protest against the nationalism which accompanied World War I (1914-1918). That year he also became art editor for Malik-Verlag, a publishing company founded by his brother Wieland Herzfelde. Heartfield and his brother became founder-members of the German communist party in December 1918. Heartfield also joined the Berlin dada group (see Dada), which produced such absurdist journals as Jeder Mann sein eigener Fussball (Every Man His Own Football, 1920), for which he made his first photomontages.

After designing scenery and sets for plays produced by Austrian director Max Reinhardt and German director Erwin Piscator, Heartfield joined the staff of the weekly magazine Die Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (The Workers' Illustrated Newspaper), or AIZ, in 1927, producing photomontages satirizing both the Nazi party (see National Socialism), and the institutions of the previous German regime, the Weimar Republic, which had allowed Nazi power to grow. Deutsche Eicheln (German Acorns, 1933), for example, shows a miniature Adolf Hitler watering an oak tree, from which sprout “acorns” composed of soldiers' helmets and Nazi storm troopers' caps on top of bombs and missiles.

Following the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933, Heartfield went to what was then Czechoslovakia and continued to work for AIZ until it ceased publication in 1938, having become Die Volks Illustrierte Zeitung (The People's Illustrated Newspaper) in 1936. He then moved to Britain but returned to Germany in 1950, settling in Berlin and designing stage sets for the Berliner Ensemble and other theater companies. Like the work of other Marxist artists—for example, many of the surrealists (see Surrealism)—Heartfield's photomontages, discounting their political content, have had an enormous influence on both modern art and the popular media, including press and television advertising.