John Heartfield

Contemporary Culture
Critically evaluate contemporary visual culture
Task 2 Artwork Case Study

John Heartfield

Mary Tancred

1. Review the elements of design. (line, shape, form, tone, colour, texture, space)

• Space: the images have been placed predominantly in the centre of the artwork so as to focus the viewers' attention.
• Form: the images except for "Hurray the butter is finished" have strong contrasts in black and white and also have uncluttered backgrounds to once again focus the viewers' attention. In "Hurray the butter is finished" there is a lot of information from the people sitting around the dinner table eating iron to the portrait of Hitler and the swatstikas on the wall.
• Shape: in "The meaning of the Hitler salute", the figure of the industrialist is much larger than the image of Hitler. Hitler gives the appearance of being subservient to the industrialist. Money is depicted in the centre of the photomontage between the two.
• Tone: both "Hurray the butter is finished" and "As in the Middle Ages...as in the Third Reich" use tone. In "As in the Middle Ages...as in the Third Reich", the swastika is all black. The tonal representation in "The meaning of the Hitler salute" and "Never again" is present but both containing more striking contrasts of black and white.

2. Identify the subject matter. (What is depicted or referred to?)

• Nazis, Hitler and Nazi symbols including the swastika.
• Meant to undermine and ridicule the Third Reich. Heartfield was a Communist and opposed the Nazi regime.

3. Discuss the materials. (What is it made out of, what are those materials associated with etc?).

Photomontage is similar to collage whereby photographs or photographic reproductions culled from the press are used. The Berlin Dadaists used this technique for their scathing critiques of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.

• Heartfield’s process:

• detailed pencil sketch.
• search archives and magazines for pictures.
• hired photographers to enlarge, reduce or reverse existing images or take photos of what was needed.
• after cutting out the parts and assembling the image, a retoucher would paint out or highlight areas as directed by Heartfield.
• a large film negative was made of the image.
• Strips of type were attached to the negative which was then retouched and printed as a positive.
• The positive print was used to make the printing plate.

4. Discuss the presentation and display (What context is it shown in, how it is placed, where it is placed, how is it framed, what is close to it etc?).

• Four images

Hurrah, die Butter ist alle! (Hurrah, the butter is finished) 1935 printed in 1957 (top left)

Der Sinn des Hitlergrusses (The Meaning of Hitler Salute) 1932, printed in 1957 (top right)

Niemals wieder! (Never again) c.1940 printed in 1957 (bottom left)

Wie im Mittelalter...so im Dritten Reich (As in the Middle Ages...so in the Third Reich) 1934 printed in 1957

• Photo lithographs on paper.
• lack and white, cream background, thin pine wood frame.
• The four images were displayed on the third level of the GOMA in the section entitled, "Propaganda".
• They were placed near a didactic with the heading of "Prints and Posters".
• The images were beside the work of several Vietnamese artists' prints representing the War of Resistance against the French in 1953 before the American involvement in the Vietnam War. The works were of a similar tone and colour and size as to the works by John Heartfield. They were also made at approximately the same time in history.

5. What genre/s does it belong to? (What type/s or kind/s of art could it be classified as?).

• Political Art
• Agitprop - plays, pamphlets, films and other art forms with showing a fully expressed political message.
• Culture jamming - coined in 1984 and is a method used by anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert mainstream institutions such as corporate advertising. John Heartfield was a preceding influence.

6. Identify the codes you need to understand or access the work. (What are you expected to know about, or have seen before?)

• Nazis
• Hitler and World War II
• Plight of the German people
• Holocaust

7. Research contemporary ideas and events that may have influenced the creation of the work (What popular concepts or historical events were occurring in or around the time of the works production?).

• World War II
• The Nazi propaganda in Germany at the time. In "Hurray, the butter is gone!", a hungry German family sits around a kitchen table, attempting to eat pieces of metal, including chains and rifles, as Hitler looks on from a portrait hanging on the wall. The wallpaper is of swastikas. This image emphasizes the importance of Germany’s military might and weapons at that time instead of being concerned as to how it was going to feed its people.

8. Research the artist’s biography and cultural background and discuss any connection that this may have to the artist’s work?

• Born as Helmut Herzfeld in Germany in 1891.
• Heartfield had a disturbing upbringing. Heartfield's parents who were socialists as well as political activists had to escape Germany to avoid incarceration. He was eight years old at the time and along with his siblings spent the rest of his childhood living with relatives and guardians.
• Heartfield's reputation as an artist came about because of his innovative use of photomontage and his attack on the policies in Germany at the time.
• In 1914, World War I began and Heartfield was drafted into the army. He feigned insanity and was discharged.
• With German nationalism intensifying, Heartfield felt alienated from his government. He changed his name from Herzfeld and anglicized it to John Heartfield.
• Heartfield became an influential figure in the Dadaist movement.
• Heartfield was an organizer of the first international DADA fair in Berlin in 1920 and edited the Dadaist journal Der DADA.
• In 1924, Heartfield met Bertolt Brecht, a German poet, playwright, and Marxist who had a strong influence on Heartfield's art and his use of it as a political tool. That same year, Heartfield began producing photomontages.
• In 1933, when the Nazi’s came to power he moved to Czechoslovakia. In 1938, concerned that Germany would invade Czechoslovakia he relocated to England. The Nazi Regime banned Heartfield’s photomontages during the Third Reich. It wasn’t until the 1950’s that his work was rediscovered.
• Heartfield published his political photomontages in the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ). This was a workers' newspaper (500,000 readers in 1931).

9. Discuss the influence of internationalism (globalisation, multi-culturalism and/or the legacy of colonialism in their work).

• The policies of the Third Reich before and during WWII was experienced in Germany and the countries invaded by Hitler. It was not part of the global community although it became part of the global community during and after the War as the effects of war were widespread with the loss of life, the returning soldiers, the world coming to terms with the Holoucast and eventually the idea of the formation of the European United Nations.

• Germany was not a coloniser as England, France and Portugal. It did invade and occupy countries during the War years.

• German artists had to deal with the suppression of their art. Heartfield was banned from publishing his art. It was considered contraband and if you were caught with it, you could be shot. German artists such as Hearfied were pursecuted and they had to escape Germany.

10. Research and identify precedents for the artwork produced by other artists.

• The Berlin Dadaists came together primarily after WWI as a protest as to what had happened to Germany at the end of the war.

• The Berlin Dada group of George Grosz (1893-1959); Hannah Hoch (1889-1978); Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948); Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971); Johannes Baader (1875-1955) and Heartfield collectively developed photomontage.

• In Cologne France, Max Ernst (1891-1976) also experimented with photomontage, frequently using military photographs as source material. Pasting together images of planes or bombs with humans, he created haunting machine figures that reflected the destructive capacity of the new technologies used in World War I.

• Heartfield's art has profoundly influenced modern advertising, which has borrowed his idea of photomontage, combining seemingly unrelated images in a single ad to create fascination, shock, humor, or to put across a message.

• His influence was widespread especially with the generation of young artists who discovered his work in the 1950s and 1960s. Among these were the pop-artists, e.g., Andy Warhol. 

• Heartfield's work has been also quoted and referenced by pop and rock musicians and in theater and film. Below are some of the influences of his particular photomontages:

• Siouxsie and the Banshees

• Discharge are a hard core punk band formed in 1977

• Peter Kennard, Broken Missile, 1980

11. Identify how electronic and information technologies have impacted on the presentation and or creation of the artwork.

• Heartfield’s art is the precursor of the photo-shopped digital image.

12. Consider the differing audiences and venues the artwork has had.

• Following his death in 1968 in East Berlin, the East German Akademie der Kúnste took all of his surviving works. Behind the Berlin Wall, Heartfield's physical archive was kept from everyone, artists and the public alike, for more than twenty-five years. At the end of the cold war, MOMA in New York held a four month (April 15 to July 6, 1993) exhibition of his work.