John Heartfield

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.


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. The four children went to live with an uncle in the small town of Aigens.


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!").


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. 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).


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. 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.

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