John Heartfield Research Articles

Heartfield's Collaboration

This article argues that the German photomontage artist John Heartfield was in fact a media projection accomplished by at least two people at all times, and sometimes by many more—writers, newspapers, presses, and the Communist Party. John Heartfield was a name adopted by Helmut Herzfeld (1891-1920) about 1917, when he abandoned his painterly ambitions and took up the medium of political, or dialectical photomontage. The argument is based primarily on the history of Heartfield’s reception, which has been dominated by the writing of Helmut’s younger brother, Wieland Herzfelde. Through a close critical reading of Herzfelde’s texts against other texts of close associates (i.e.George Grosz) and the work itself, it constructs a picture of the Herzfeld brothers working closely together, one primarily with images, the other primarily with texts, enacting the tension in their personal relationship as the political antagonism between the National Socialists and the Communist Party, to which they were both committed. The article represents a significant new element in the literature on Heartfield, inasmuch as the focus of this literature has been either on the political impact of Heartfield’s work or on his distinctive use of photomontage. This study presents the first systematic analysis of the way Heartfield staged political antagonism—as spaces carefully blocked and lit, with implied voices and music, often using the differences between what can be seen or heard to convey the difference between lies and truth. The article also contributes a to a growing literature on artistic collaboration, without supporting an unhelpful tendency to make generalizations about such work and so overlook a crucial resonance between the way such work is made and the way it affects its viewers.

Encounters with Levinas by Thomas Trezise (review)

1120 Reviews whereas the materialists of Documents insist on art-as-process. Adamowicz addresses Aragon's fractured narrative of collage (1923-75), exposing the ideological reading that led him to condemn Ernst's collages as frivolous, and to vaunt John Heartfield's satirical photomontages fortheir collectivist political freight.Adamowicz's critique of the erasure of collage in Aragon's slavish socio-realist writings of 1935-60 opens the way for a corrective engagement with Ernst's mesmerically poetic assault on establishment values. The study concludes with a consideration of the post-war struggle to reaffirmSurrealism under pressure from abstract experimentalism. As Breton's voice falters, a new generation deploys esoteric discourse to chart the processes of lyrical abstraction in painting: in this respect the metaphoric texts of the 1950s reprise the rhetorical strategies of the 1930s. This admirably paced study, combining close read? ing and lucid synthesis, offersan incisive examination of textual figurations that lose sight?product ively,provocatively?ofthe art works that were their catalyst. University of Wales Swansea Susan Harrow Encounters with Levinas. Ed. by Thomas Trezise. (Yale French Studies, 104) Lon? don: Yale University Press. 2004. 146 pp. ?15. ISBN 0-300-10216-x. In the useful but tantalizingly short 'Editor's Preface' to this collection of essays Thomas Trezise ascribes Levinas's now uncontested status and influence to the fact that the ethical relation to the other raises more questions than it answers. Trezise goes on to outline some of these questions (p. 2). Does Levinas's philosophical dis? course essentialize the very other whose singularity he wishes to champion? Might not discourses other than philosophy be more appropriate to the preservation of alterity ? How can the purely dyadic encounter of self and other be reconciled with issues such as justice and politics? And might not Levinas's perceived originality derive at least in part from the work of other thinkers, or from long-standing religious, philosophical, or cultural traditions? Rather than offering direct or comprehensive responses to these pertinent questions, the following essays are conceived as a series of encounters which explore some of the intellectual contexts and philosophical resonance of Levinas's work. Interesting and accomplished essays analyse Levinas's defence of subjectivity and trace its Cartesian roots (Leora Batnitzky), unravel the importance of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky in his work (Samuel Moyn and Alain Toumayan respectively), and discuss his equivocations on the image and figuration (Philippe Crignon). If there is no startling new reading of Levinas in these essays, they nevertheless offernumerous fresh insights into aspects of his writing which have been misunderstood or neglected. Of the remaining essays, Paul Ricoeur's discussion of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence is already published in French, though it was certainly worthwhile to make his typically courteous but probing engagement available to anglophone scholars; and Edith Wyschogrod breaks new ground by confronting Levinas's thought with recent developments in genetic theory. Most ofthe contributors are happy to correct or criticize Levinas on occasion, but easily the most overt and challenging attack comes in Luce Irigaray's essay, 'What Other are We Talking About?', which builds upon and clarifies her chapter on Levinas mAn Ethics of Sexual Difference. She vigorously distances herself from Levinas's work, accusing him of understanding subjectivity in exclusively masculine terms and thereby silently appropriating the feminine other despite his desire to avoid fusion or pos? session. Irigaray's reading may be limited by the fact that it is based here primarily on the lectures from the 1940s published as Time and the Other, rather than taking account of Levinas's later self-revisions in, for example, Otherwise than Being or Be? yond Essence. Even so, her lively, provocative engagement is at least as much in the MLRy 100.4, 2005 1121 spirit of Levinasian encounter as the more respectful excavations of Levinas's thought and contexts, and it is to be regretted that Levinas was unwilling to respond in kind during his lifetime. In summary, this is a varied collection of essays, all of which make valuable contributions to the now massive body of secondary material on Levinas. Royal Holloway, University of London Colin Davis Andrei Makine: la rencontrede I'Est et...

An Archival Impulse

OCTOBER 110, Fall 2004, pp. 3–22. © 2004 Hal Foster. Consider a temporary display cobbled together out of workday materials like cardboard, aluminum foil, and packing tape, and filled, like a homemade studyshrine, with a chaotic array of images, texts, and testimonials devoted to a radical artist, writer, or philosopher. Or a funky installation that juxtaposes a model of a lost earthwork with slogans from the civil rights movement and/or recordings from the legendary rock concerts of the time. Or, in a more pristine register, a short filmic meditation on the huge acoustic receivers that were built on the Kentish coast between the World Wars, but soon abandoned as outmoded pieces of military technology. However disparate in subject, appearance, and affect, these works—by the Swiss Thomas Hirschhorn, the American Sam Durant, and the Englishwoman Tacita Dean—share a notion of artistic practice as an idiosyncratic probing into particular figures, objects, and events in modern art, philosophy, and history. The examples could be multiplied many times (a list of other practitioners might begin with the Scotsman Douglas Gordon, the Englishman Liam Gillick, the Irishman Gerard Byrne, the Canadian Stan Douglas, the Frenchmen Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, the Americans Mark Dion and Renee Green . . . ), but these three alone point to an archival impulse at work internationally in contemporary art. This general impulse is hardly new: it was variously active in the prewar period when the repertoire of sources was extended both politically and technologically (e.g., in the photofiles of Alexander Rodchenko and the photomontages of John Heartfield), and it was even more variously active in the postwar period, especially as appropriated images and serial formats became common idioms (e.g., in the pinboard aesthetic of the Independent Group, remediated representations from Robert Rauschenberg through Richard Prince, and the informational structures of Conceptual art, institutional critique, and feminist art). Yet an archival impulse with a distinctive character of its own is again pervasive—enough so to be considered a tendency in its own right, and that much alone is welcome.1

From Dada to Neo-Dada and Back Again

Several years ago, went to a John Heartfield exhibition with a non-art historian friend. He walked around for about fifteen minutes and then said I get this, it's like punk. This understanding of Dada as similar to a contemporary phenomenon made implicit sense to me; for Dada, as an art historical movement or entity, is often clearest in my mind in the guise of Neo-Dada. Even by the time of William Rubin's famous 1968 exhibition on Dada and Surrealism at the

A fotomontagem como função política

O movimento dadá em Berlim distingue-se por um projeto de intervenção política, em sintonia com a orientação ideológica de vários de seus integrantes. Entre estes pode ser destacado John Heartfield, interessado, desde 1915, em desenvolver uma linguagem ao mesmo tempo moderna e acessível a um público de massa. Para tanto, lança mão da fotografia nas capas executadas para a editora Malik e é responsável pelo desenvolvimento da fotomontagem política, que divulga sobretudo numa revista do Partido Comunista Alemão, o Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung.

Art and Politics in Interwar Germany: The Photomontages of John Heartfield

Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, the environment, theory, and method.

Reviews

The English Way of Death by Julian Litten, London: Robert Hale, 1991, 254 pp., 30 col. plates and 110 b. & w. illus., £25.00The Art of Death by Nigel Llewellyn, London: Reaktion Books, in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1991, 160 pp., 101 b. & w. illus., £9.95Painted Love. Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era by Hollis Clayson, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991, 202 pp., 29 col. plates and 64 b. & w. illus., £25.00John Heartfield: Exhibition Catalogue, edited by Peter Pachnicke and Klaus Honnef, New York and London: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1992, 342 pp., 83 col. plates and 206 b. & w. illus., £65.00Printing the Written Word. The Social History of Books, circa 1450–1520, edited by Sandra Hindman, Cornell University Press, 1991, 332 pp., 96 b. & w. illus., $49.50 hdbk, $16.45 pbkThe Italian Renaissance Interior 1400–1600 by Peter Thornton, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991, 407 pp., 379 col. and b. & w. illus., £65.00

Montage and Its Comedies

Though still chiefly associated with famous auteurs such as John Heartfield and Aleksandr Rodchenko, photomontage is also widely viewed as the clearest instance of a compositional method that typified and even identified the 'left' avant-garde in the era of classical modernism the era roughly from Dada to the reactionary regimes in Russia and Germany of the mid 1930s. For the art historian interested in the wider reaches of twentieth-century culture, this identification marks the beginning of a series of limitations, which begin to define an agenda for the study of montage today. For to ask how much, or how little, the pioneering principle of rupture can be recuperated in presentday cultural work is also to ask how far the montage of the earlier avant-garde depended for its effectiveness upon an 'official' optic of spatially coherent, continuous and legible imagery, propagated by the organs of the masculinist state for processes of normalisation and indoctrination the suggestion is that montage lived within, but could not exceed, that historical framework. Against that historical anchoring, however, is a good deal of effective contemporary art that uses montage for its technical flexibility and for its capacity to skirt around established genres in the male-dominated canon of modernist and postmodernist approaches I am thinking particularly of recent women's art in a variety of media. On the other hand it is clear that montage still appeals to many 'left' agitational-type artists precisely because of its resonances back to the principal (and principled) male auteurs of earlier decades. These connections and separations already imply that the topic of montage is a hot one, and that a sorting out of methods and affiliations is very much part of on-going culture. A second and very potent question arises out of

Voices: Responses to John Heartfield: Stimulus/Response

Voices: Responses to John Heartfield: Stimulus/Response

Le marchand d’allumettes d’Otto Dix, une œuvre manifeste ?

Otto Dix’s Match Seller, a manifesto-work ? In 1920, after the events of the Kapp putsch at Dresden, and after the mutilation of one of Rubens’ paintings, Bathsheba ai the fountain (held by the town’s Museum of Fine Art), caused by the fighting, Oskar Kokoschka launched an appeal encouraging his artist peers to prevent the destruction of the German artistic heritage. This appeal sets off the Kunstlump controversy, one of the essential episodes in the debates which agitated the Weimar Republic’s artistic community around the question of the social role of artists and of art. In his painting, The Match Seller (1920), in which the main figure is a disabled ex-serviceman, Otto Dix brought his contribution to the polemics launched by George Grosz and John Heartfield. The painting incorporates an extract from the text of Kokoschka’s appeal and also a possibly unconscious quotation from Grünewald ’s Issenheim altar screen. This last is pointed out here by a brief study of the relations between the Big City triptych (1927-1928) and the old master’s masterpiece. These indications bring the debate more directly to bear on the social role that avant-garde artists now supposedly occupied. Consequendy, Dix’s work may not be seen as a purely circumstantial statement, stigmatizing the political attitudes which lead to war and to the Kapp putsch ; on the contrary, it is a deeper reflection on the real possibilities for art and the artist to have an influential role.

Art and Politics: John Heartfield Reconsidered: The Struggle of Humanity

Art and Politics: John Heartfield Reconsidered: The Struggle of Humanity

Mysticism, Materialism, and the Machine in Berlin Dada

The Dada Fair exhibition of 1920 brought the self-proclaimed “central attack on the culture of the bourgeois” of Berlin Dada to its spectacular culmination. The catalogue brashly announced the abolition of the art market, while a placard by George Grosz and John Heartfield proclaimed the death of art itself and the rise of the new “machine art of Tatlin” (Figs. 1 and 2). If the latter claim was based more on the critic Konstantin Umanski's description of “Tatlinismus” as a “conquering materialism” than on any knowledge of how Vladimir Tatlin's art actually appeared, it was typical of the confident, ironic social criticism of Berlin Dada. While a profound disillusionment among the Expressionists was producing somber obituaries, Raoul Hausmann appeared triumphant in his coup de grâce published in April in Der Dada 3: “Dada is the full absence of what is called Geist. Why have Geist in a world that runs on mechanically?”

Picasso's "Guernica" in Its Historical Context

In order to lead up to the complex character of this work, we outline the history of paintings of people suffering from the convulsions of war. This history begins with Goya, who in his Desastres de la guerra pointed out various ways to express this concept; 1) the eyewitness report, 2) the ennobling of suffering by recalling the passion of Christ, as well as, 3) allegorical or symbolic expression. All three ways were made use of in the 19th century, at times combinations of them. The most important was the eyewitness report, a form which with the hell of World War I reached metaphysical heights especially with German artists - Beckmann, Grosz, Dix, and others. The way Picasso marked off snatches of real history with symbols, recalls furthermore the collage technique, which made John Heartfield's commentaries on the Spanish Civil War so forceful. However Guernica cannot be interpreted quite so straightforwardly. The horse, for example, may well represent the suffering Spanish people. However it also bursts with aggression. The oppressed victims upsurge oppressing each other.