Works
He is best known for the political montages he created during the 1930s to expose German Nazism. During the 1930s and 1940s, he created some of his most famous montages.
- Adolf, the Superman (published in the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, Berlin, July 17, 1932), used a montaged X-ray to expose gold coins in the Fuehrer's esophagus leading to a pile in his stomach as he rants against the fatherland's enemies.
- In Göring: The Executioner of the Third Reich (AIZ, Prague, September 14, 1933), Hermann Göring is depicted as a butcher.
- The Meaning of Geneva, Where Capital Lives, There Can Be No Peace (AIZ, Berlin, November 27, 1932), shows the dove of peace impaled on a blood-soaked bayonet in front of the League of Nations, where the cross of the Swiss flag has morphed into a swastika.
- Hurrah, die Butter ist Alle! (English: Hurray, no more butter is left!) was published on the frontpage of the AIZ in 1935. A parody of the aesthetics of propaganda, the photomontage shows a family at a kitchen table, where a nearby portrait of Hitler hangs and the wallpaper is emblazoned with swastikas. The family — mother, father, old woman, young man, baby, and dog — are attempting to eat pieces of metal, such as chains, bicycle handlebars, and rifles. Below, the title is written in large letters, in addition to a quote by Hermann Göring during food shortage. Translated, the quote reads: "Iron has always made a nation strong, butter and lard have only made the people fat".
Heartfield's artistic output was prolific. His works appeared as covers for the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ, Workers' Illustrated Newspaper) from 1929 to 1933, a popular weekly whose circulation rivaled any magazine in Germany during the early nineteen thirties. During 1931 Heartfield's photomontages were featured monthly on the AIZ cover, an important point, because most copies of the AIZ were sold at newsstands.
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.
His photomontages satirising Adolf Hitler and the Nazis often subverted Nazi symbols such as the swastika in order to undermine their propaganda message.
Read more about this topic: John Heartfield
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Now they express
All that’s content to wear a worn-out coat,
All actions done in patient hopelessness,
All that ignores the silences of death,
Thinking no further than the hand can hold,
All that grows old,
Yet works on uselessly with shortened breath.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste.”
—Benjamin Haydon (1786–1846)