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John Heartfield: Anti-Nazi photomontage 1930-1940.
Heartfield is important as a media content innovator (co-inventing the photo-montage, and as a graphic designer - creating new, non-grid, spontaneous graphic layouts, new dispositions, juxtaposi- tions and conjunctions of type and image) - but underpinning all this we must not forget that he is remembered most for his anti-Nazi, anti-Capitalism, pro-Communist posters - Heartfield joined the Communist Party of Germany as soon as it was established in December 1918, for whom he made stage props, posters, and artwork. ”There are a lot of things that got me into working with photos. The main thing is that I saw both what was being said and not being said with photos in the newspa- pers... I found out how you can fool people with photos, really fool them... You can lie and tell the truth by putting the wrong title or wrong captions under them, and that’s roughly what was being done...” John Heartfield.
“John Heartfield is one of the most important European artists. He works in a field which he created himself, the field of photomontage. Through this new form of art, he exercises social criticism. Stead- fastly on the side of the working class, he unmasked the forces of the Weimar Republic driving to- wards war; driven into exile he fought against Hitler. The works of this great satirist, which mainly ap- peared in the workers’ press, are regarded as classics by many, including the author of these lines.” - Bertolt Brecht
In a period when Germany was under the vicious totalitarianism of Adolf Hitler, and under surveil- lance by the Gestapo secret police, backed up by the SS and State police, freedom of the press was severely limited. Heartfield - and a few others - risked their lives bitterly satirising the Nazi leadership - Hitler (above left), Goering (centre - ‘the executioner of the third Reich’) and Joseph Goebbels (min- ister of propaganda - (‘By Light at Night’), Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ - Workers’ Illustrated Magazine) was a German illustrated magazine 1924-1933. When Hitler took power in 1933, AIZ and Heartfield fled to Prague.
Other photographic envelope-pushers in the 1930s include Francis Bruguière, Janusz Brzeski, Erwin Blumenfeld, Robert Capa, Dorothea Lange....
https://www.johnheartfield.com/John-Heartfield-Exhibition/helmut-herzfeld-john-heartfield-life/famous-political-artist/photomontages-nazi- years