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Wikipedia entry
Introduction
John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld; 19 June 1891 – 26 April 1968) was a 20th-century German visual artist who pioneered the use of art as a political weapon. Some of his most famous photomontages were anti-Nazi and anti-fascist statements. Heartfield also created book jackets for book authors, such as Upton Sinclair, as well as stage sets for contemporary playwrights, such as Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator.
Wikidata
Q168671
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Getty record
Introduction
Best known for his politically-themed photomontage work of the 1930s lampooning the machinery of war and the rise of fascism. He studied at Munich's Königliche Kunstgewerbeschule with the Jugendstil poster artists Weisberger and Hohlwein, and later with Ernst Neumann, an advertising designer. The outbreak of World War I ended his studies in 1914. His earliest photo-based works involved juxtapositions of combat photographs with government war propaganda. He shared a studio with his friend, the painter George Grosz, and together they anglicized their names as a protest against the war. In 1918 he joined both the Berlin Dada movement and Germany's Communist Party. He designed book jackets for leftist literature at his brother's publishing house Malik Verlag, and from the mid-1920s his photomontages began to appear in left-wing periodicals. He is most noted for the satirical montages targeting Adolf Hitler and his followers that he created in the 1930s for the magazine AIZ (Die Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung).
Nationalities
German, East German
Gender
Male
Roles
Artist, Journalist, Designer, Typographer, Graphic Artist, Painter, Photographer, Photomontagist
Names
John Heartfield, Helmut Herzfeld, Helmuth Herzfelde, Helmut Herzfelde, Herzfelde Heartfield, Helmuth Heartfield, Dzhon Khartfilʹd, G'on Harṭfild, ג׳ון הארטפילד, John (born Helmut Herzfelde) Heartfield, John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfelde)
Ulan
500018521
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Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

21 works online

Exhibitions

View all 12 exhibitions

Publication

  • Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, 1918–1939. The Merrill C. Berman Collection at MoMA Edited by Jodi Hauptman and Adrian Sudhalter, 2020 Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 288 pages
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