An inexhaustible well of inspiration
John Heartsfield was an absolute badass, if you ask me, and it’s a shame not many people know about him. He was a visual artist from Berlin, Germany, and the Nazis hated him as much as he hated them — which tells you a lot about him.
He’s known as the father of photomontage, something he started experimenting with early in his career. Over time, photomontage became the centerpiece of his work. Let’s not forget, millennial’s and Gen Z that photoshop and computers were not the thing back at the beginning of the 20th century, so you can imagine how hard it would be to cut and glue everything by hand.
I stumbled across John while researching anti-fascist artists and the history of Dadaism, something I’ve been fascinated by for a while. I found his art to be very bold and deep, and anyone who stood up to fascism (especially during Hitler’s reign) is already a hero in my book – add using art on top of that, they are a definite inspiration. He was a part of the Berlin Dada club and one of the people who helped organize the First International Dada Fair and also one of the first members of the German Communist Party.
A bit about his life
His father was a socialist playwright and his mother was a textile worker. Because of his father’s harsh critiques of the church and state in the late 1890s, the family had to flee Berlin to avoid his father’s imprisonment – they ended up in a secluded cottage in the Austrian woods, where they lived for a few years. One day his father disappeared and his mother suffered a mental breakdown in which she abandoned her children, leaving him and his three siblings alone in the woods. Adopted by an Austrian Catholic family, he never actually settled down in that surroundings. As a teenager, he returned to Germany to study art, eventually immersing himself in Berlin’s avant-garde scene.
He was never fond of military authority and war and that prompted him to join the Berlin Dada Club in 1917. Dadaism had many forms around Europe, but in Germany, it was very political which gave him a good place for his activism and art against war.
Heartfiled broke through the graphic and printing techniques and was a part of revolutionary mass production that was then taking place. At that time he was one of the leading political artists in Germany. His political montages regularly appeared on the cover of Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (a German illustrated magazine) from 1930 to 1938.
In 1933 an SS broke into his apartment, taking most of his work with them. Luckily he was able to escape them, running to Czechoslovakia where he used to hide until 1938. When Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, he was forced to flee again—this time to England. Despite constantly being on the run (he was on the Gestapo’s top-five most-wanted list), he never stopped creating anti-fascist art.
In 1951 he returned to East Berlin, but he wasn’t warmly received, even by the Communist Party. He worked on creating stage set designs for Bertolt Brecht and David Berg at the Berliner Ensemble and Deutsches Theater.
He died in 1968 in East Berlin and was buried in the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery. After his widow, Gertrud Heartfield’s death, the East German Academy of the Arts took possession of all of Heartfield’s surviving works. When the West German Academy of Arts absorbed the East German Academy, the Heartfield Archive was transferred with it.
John’s life is a testament to the idea that artists can fight just as hard as anyone else — both in and against war.
I find John to be one of the most inspirational artists I came across in my life. His art reflects everything he believed in and fought for, and no matter where he was in the world or what challenges he faced, he never stopped creating and resisting.
Interesting fact, former Yugoslav music group Laibach has a number of references to Heartfield’s works, British hardcore punk band Discharge used his work “Peace and Fascism” for the cover artwork and, System of a Down used poster for the Communist Party of Germany (The Hand Has Five Fingers) as cover art on their 1998 self-titled debut album.
And now finally, some of John’s work.
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