Heartfield, John

born Helmut Herzfeld (1891-1968)

   painter and pho-tomonteur; best known for contributions to his brother's Communist-leaning publishing firm, Malik Verlag. He was born in Berlin.* His father, the socialist poet Franz Herzfeld, was imprisoned in 1895 for blasphemy. Orphaned in 1898, Helmut moved to Wiesbaden in 1905 to become a bookshop apprentice. After enrolling in some art courses, he relocated to Munich in 1918 to study at the Kunstgewerbeschule. Briefly employed as a packaging designer, he returned to Berlin in 1913 and was soon part of the Expressionist circle centered on the periodicals Aktion* (Franz Pfemfert) and Sturm (Herwarth Walden*). It was here that he met George Grosz.*

   Heartfield's brief military stint during the war—he was dismissed on grounds of "insanity"—was followed by a growing association with leftist circles. In 1916, with his brother Wieland Herzfelde and the Berlin writer Franz Jung, he began working with Grosz on the monthly Neue Jugend. At this time, amidst the war, he anglicized his name in response to anti-English propaganda. In April 1918 he (with Grosz, Jung, and Raoul Hausmann) helped Richard Huelsenbeck establish Club-Dada; it held together until 1919, when differences over com-munism induced a split.

   Heartfield's political outlook—he joined the KPD in 1919—crystallized soon after the war. Initially marked by light satire, his photomontage was transformed by the brutalities associated with the Republic's early months. With Grosz and his brother, he helped ensure Malik's role as Berlin's leading Dada* advocate— the house sponsored the First International Dada Fair in 1920. In charge of graphic design, he created a succession of short-lived satirical journals (e.g., Die Pleite and Der Gegner); in the late 1920s he began creating title pages for the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ, Workers illustrated newspaper), a publication sharply critical of the resurgent Right. Although he also worked as a designer for Max Reinhardt* and Erwin Piscator,* his best-known work remains the satirical collages he constructed from pasted photographs cut from magazines.

   With his brother, Heartfield escaped to Prague in 1933 and there continued his political activity for Wieland's Neue Deutsche Blatter and the exiled AIZ (renamed the Volks-Illustrierte in 1936). The Sudeten crisis induced his move to London in 1938. Briefly interned in 1940, he worked with Kurt Hiller's* League of Independent German Writers from 1943. A pacifist and Communist, he relocated to East Berlin in 1950 and used his final work to denounce the Vietnam War.

   REFERENCES:Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; Clair, 1920s; Willett, Art and Politics.