John Heartfield

Art Brokerage: John Heartfield German Artist: b. 1891-1968. John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld; 19 June 1891 – 26 April 1968) was an artist. He was a pioneer in the use of art as a political weapon. Some of his photomontages were anti-Nazi and anti-fascist statements. Heartfield also created book jackets for authors such as Upton Sinclair, as well as stage sets for such noted playwrights as Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator. John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfeld) was born on 19 June 1891 in Berlin-Schmargendorf. In 1920, John Heartfield and George Grosz experimented with pasting pictures together, a form of art later named "photomontage." In 1917, Heartfield became a member of Berlin Club Dada. Heartfield later became active in the Dada movement, helping to organise the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (First International Dada Fair) in Berlin in 1920. Dadaists were the young lions of the German art scene, provocateurs who disrupted public art gatherings and ridiculed the participants. They labeled traditional art trivial and bourgeois. Heartfield was a member of a circle of German titans that included Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Höch, and a host of others. 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. Heartfield lived in Berlin until April 1933, when the National Socialists took power. On Good Friday, the SS broke into his apartment, and Heartfield escaped by jumping from his balcony. He left Germany by walking over the Sudeten Mountains to Czechoslovakia. In 1967, he visited Britain and began preparing a retrospective exhibition of his work, "photomontages", which was subsequently completed by his widow Gertrud and the Academy of Arts, Berlin, and shown at the ICA in London in 1969. John Heartfield died on April 26, 1968 in East Berlin, German Democratic Republic. He was buried close to Brecht's former home. In 2005, the Tate Gallery, Britain held an exhibition of his photomontage pieces. He is best known for political montages which he had created during the 1930s to expose German Nazism. Some of his famous montages were created during the 1930s and 1940s. 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 in 1932 and 1933. Listings wanted.