He traveled to the Soviet Union in 1931 under the magazine’s auspices and gave photomontage courses to the Red Army. “In 1929, following ten years of activity in photomontage and publishing,” The Art Institute of Chicago writes, “John Heartfield began working for the left-wing periodical Worker’s Illustrated Magazine (Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung ).” This weekly publication “served from the first as a major organ of opposition to the rising National Socialist Party.” Heartfield’s provocative covers mocked Hitler and portrayed the power of organized labor against the fascist threat. Heartfield’s direct attacks on state power were allied with his support for worker movements. John Heartfield, Self-Portrait with the Police Commissioner Zörgiebel The 1930 work protested Weimar’s anti-abortion laws with the title “Forced Supplier of Human Material Take Courage! The State Needs Unemployed People and Soldiers!” On rare occasions, Heartfield included photographs of himself, as in the self-portrait below with scissors clipping the head of the Berlin police commissioner or he used his own photography, as in an unglamorous shot a young pregnant woman behind whose head Heartfield places what appears to be the body of a dead young man. The result could have a frightening visual impact.” They also had widespread influence, becoming an almost standard style of radical protest art throughout Europe in the early part of the 20th century.

Heartfield’s strongest work used variations of scale and stark juxtapositions to activate his already gruesome photo-fragments. “To compose his works, he chose recognizable press photographs of politicians or events from the mainstream illustrated press…. “Photomontage allowed Heartfield to create loaded and politically contentious images,” the Getty writes. John Heartfield, War and Corpses, the Last Hope of the Rich (Heartfield “received his party book,” writes Sybille Fuchs, “from KPD leader Rosa Luxemburg herself.”) they also became “founding members of the Berlin Dadaists,” developing the photomontage style Heartfield used throughout his graphic design career. After the war, they joined the German Communist party. As John Heartfield, he collaborated with his brother, Weiland, and satirical artist George Grosz on the leftist journal New Youth and the revolutionary publishing house, Malik Verlag. Herzfeld began his anti-war art campaign by anglicizing his name to counter rising anti-British sentiment at the start of World War I. He was “one of Hitler’s most creative critics.” As The Canvas video above explains, Heartfield’s work pointedly encapsulates the “anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist, anti-fascist” attitudes of radical Berlin Dadaists. Helmut trained at several art schools in Germany, eventually arriving at the School of Arts and Crafts in the bohemian Berlin of the 1910s, where he abandoned his dream of becoming a painter and instead invented hugely effective anti-war propaganda art during World War I and the rise of the Nazis. Meanwhile, their uncle, a lawyer, appeared with a trust from their wealthy grandfather’s estate to fund their educations. The hungry children were discovered four days later by the mayor of the town and his wife, who took them in and fostered them. In 1899, his parents, ill and poverty-stricken, abandoned Helmut and his three siblings in a mountain cabin at Aigen, near Salzburg. The story of artist John Heartfield - born Helmut Franz Josef Herzfeld in Berlin in 1891 - begins like a German fairy tale.

And yet it moves john heartfield