During the height of the War, they ridiculed the German government and produced political magazines. The Dada artists were completely anti-establishment. Richard Huelsenbeck, Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann were also members of the Berlin Dada group. All three became members of the Dada artists group in Berlin that same year. In 1917, Heartfield, brother Weiland, and Grosz started the publishing house Malik-Verlag. He and Grosz experimented with making photomontage works, pasting photos together in collage forms, then taking photographs of the resulting collages. It was during this time that he met the artist George Grosz, who was known for his satirical works about German society. He was in Berlin during WWI, and it was here that he heard chanting crowds shouting “May God punish England!” He was so angry about the anti-England sentiments that he changed his name to John Heartfield. Two commercial designers there, Albert Weisgerber and Ludwig Hohlwein, were early influences for the young artist. In 1908, he enrolled in the Royal Bavarian Arts and Crafts School, in Munich. Young Helmut showed a talent for art, and studied at Berlin and Munich. Throughout his life, Heartfield maintained a close relationship with his brother. The children stayed with an uncle for a short while, but were eventually separated and raised in a series of foster homes. When he was about eight years old, Helmut’s parents abandoned him, his brother, Weiland, and their sisters Lotte and Hertha in the woods. His father was Franz Herzfeld, a writer, and his mother was Alice (née Stolzenburg), a textile worker. It concludes with a brief consideration of three conspicuously Klucis-related photomontages that Heartfield produced for the AIZ in 1934 during his Prague exile.John Heartfield was born with the name Helmut Franz Josef Herzfeld, on June 19, 1891, in Berlin, Germany. Analyzing in detail for the first time his contribution to the photo-illustrated propaganda magazine USSR in Construction-on the reconstruction of Moscow and the Soviet oil industry-the essay probes the relation of Heartfield's production to that of Klucis. An examination of Heartfield's visual production on the ground in the Soviet Union shows how the German monteur responded to the challenge of working in the overwhelmingly affirmative culture of the Five-Year Plans, rather than simply how he was instrumentalized by others in the story of the great undoing of constructivism. The essay provides a new narrative that moves beyond the polarity of realism and constructivism that has shaped our understanding of their work and relationship and has also tended to squeeze out the contradictions of the visual objects to which it supposedly pertains, rendering them mere epiphenomena. Despite their formal and procedural differences, both artists promoted photomontage as the premier agitational weapon of world communism and Soviet propaganda, contra the rise of documentary photography as well as various modes of realist painting. Drawing on archival and recently published documents, this essay examines the historical encounter of two major communist photomonteurs in Moscow in 1931-John Heartfield, visiting from Weimar Germany under the auspices of the Comintern, and Gustavs Klucis, a Latvian resident of the city and thus a member of one of its diaspora nationalities.
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