John Heartfield

Self-Portrait with the Police Commissioner Zörgiebel

This self-portrait captures Heartfield in the act of "cutting off" with scissors the police commissioner Zörgiebel's head in a printed photograph. It is a literal description of his technique of gathering needed printed and visual material to construct his montaged-images. This is also a mock execution, a satirical critique of this police commissioner's ruthless policies - for example, the unprecedented police violence unleashed against the Communist demonstrators on May Day, 1929 in Berlin. Here in this mock-up of the montage, it is evident how the abutting images of Heartfield with scissors and the head of Zörgiebel are simultaneously hinged together and severed by the scissors. Heartfield intentionally aimed to show his technique and perform his social identity as an artist, as he conceived it in 1929. He designed this violent image for the well-established mass-circulating leftist AIZ. The image insists on being understood in pictorial terms due to the absence of any text. This self-portrait provides an opportunity to see his self-constructed visual utterance about himself and his artistic project to counter social injustice.

This montage-image introduced the readers of the AIZ to the political photomonteur John Heartfield in the magazine's September 1929 issue, as an endorsement for his collaboration with Kurt Tucholsky on the soon to be published book Germany, Germany above All. This endorsement was a practical strategy on the part of the New German Publishing Company (Neuer Deutscher Verlag), the publisher of both the AIZ and the satirical book. This montaged self-portrait of Heartfield showcases his critical art, which boldly fused Dada theatricality with a resolute political stance. Such declarative self-representations were rare, as Heartfield soon became embroiled in internal Communist party politics. His brother Wieland Herzfelde, as the art historian Sabine Kriebel noted, actively participated in the narrative construction and replication of Heartfield's life, but it became more necessary in the thirties for him to adjust facts, simplify the narrative, and emphasize certain details to promote an exemplary account of their lives so they could survive the shifting political climate of the time. For instance, Wieland thought it best for his brother to deny, as of 1936, to have ever worked for Münzenberg, who became a non-person and a renegade in the eyes of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1936.

Mock-up - Akademie der Künste, Berlin

Book jacket design for Upton Sinclair's book After the Flood

Heartfield's book jacket design for Upton Sinclair's book After the Great Flood: A Novel from the year 2000 (1925) visualizes a great wave swallowing a city. Heartfield effectively uses a montaged image of a tsunami-size wave and a skyscraper in the form of a single photograph across the front and back covers. It is simply framed at the top and bottom by a band of red, on which the author's name, the book's title, and Malik Verlag logo are printed. This singular image not only powerfully conveyed Sinclair's core message: the inevitable destruction of humankind by its own scientific experiments, but also Heartfield's clever use of a single image.

Upton Sinclair unwittingly shared the progressive avant-garde's sensing of an impending disaster, here expressed in prophetic terms of a biblical deluge. The critique of rationality during the Weimar Republic expressed dissatisfaction with science and concern about the psychological and social consequences of the mechanized and standardized experience of the individual. Such images of a doomed social and economic order with the specter of utter political disintegration seemed commonplace at the time. More pointedly, Heartfield's montage juxtaposes fantasy and reality, illusion and disillusionment to engage the viewer visually and sensorily.

Adolf the Übermensch: Swallows gold and spouts junk, AIZ 11. no. 29, July 17

This photomontage reveals Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialists, as orator, who speaks mere rhetoric or rather junk. Heartfield playfully integrates an authentic likeness of Hitler with an x-ray image of a torso, which exposes the ribs and esophagus, to show how Adolf, a gluttonous swallower of big industry's money, spouts meaningless words. Monetary exchange is made physically real and at once repulsive as it is presented in the abstract form of a digestive body, which symbolizes a system of ingestion and suggested regurgitation. Heartfield's montage, published in the AIZ, preceded an article that examined the distinction between the anticapitalist rhetoric of the Nazis and their pro-capitalistic practices. It showcases Heartfield's play with fantasy and reality to provoke critical thinking.

The precedent for this photomontage is French artist Honoré Daumier's scandalous Gargantua, a political cartoon, inspired by Rabelais's gluttonous tale about the giant Gargantua and his son Pantagruel, which places the bulbous body of French King Louis-Philippe I at the center of monetary digestion. Exhausted, gaunt workers and tired mothers gather at the bottom of a plank to drop their coins into baskets, which the king's ministers carry up to the his pear-shaped head and deposit them into his gaping mouth with assembly-line efficiency. Heartfield's montage like Daumier's, according to the art historian Sabine Kriebel, is an allegory for the consumption and production of capital, power, and subjugation. Heartfield inherits Daumier's legacy and continues this leftist tradition of mass media caricature, which is evident in this montage about Hitler, who campaigned as the candidate for the NSDAP (German National Socialist Party) in the presidential election in 1932, but lost. Heartfield, like Daumier, used modern media (lithographic reproduction in Daumier's case) adapted to emergent mass media forms to poke fun at power. A Daumier lithograph hung in Heartfield's Berlin apartment and the collector Eduard Fuchs, whom Heartfield credits with making Daumier known in Germany, was a close friend of his and of his father's.

Offset - Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles