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John Heartfield was born "Helmut Herzfeld" on June 19, 1891, in Berlin-Schmargendorf.

His father was Franz Herzfeld, a socialist writer, and his mother was Alice (nee Stolzenburg), a textile worker and political activist.

Eight years later in 1899, Helmut, his brother, Wieland, and his two sisters, Lotte and Hertha, were abandoned in the woods by their parents. For a while, the four children resided with an uncle in the small town of Aigen before each was sent to various other guardians. Helmut landed in a monestary.

Throughout his life, he maintained a very close relationship with his brother, Wieland, who along with Heartfield and Grosz, would launch the publishing house, Malik-Verlag in 1917, a vital outlet for Heartfield's work.

In 1908, he studied art in Munich at the Royal Bavarian Arts and Crafts School. Two commercial designers, Albert Weisgerber and Ludwig Hohlwein, influenced his work.

Two early events in Heartfield's life foreshadowed the direction of his life.

Although he demonstrated a gift for oil painting, Heartfield destroyed all his paintings (mainly landscapes), believing they were unworthy and irrelevant. He was searching for a new way to express himself. From the beginning, Heartfield was infused with a passionate belief that art existed not to glorify the artist but to serve the common good.

When he was drafted into the German military in 1914, he chose to fake a nervous breakdown rather than actively participate in a conflict that he considered immoral and unnecessary. This action was purely an ethical choice. His incredibly courageous struggle against Fascism and the Nazi Party in particular are proof that his courage could never be doubted.

On the back of the photograph at left taken in 1912, he wrote his name "Helmut." However, in 1916, while living in Berlin, he anglicized his name from Helmut Herzfeld as a protest against anti-British fervor sweeping Germany.

Soon, John Heartfield was to become the central figure in the development of a new form of art that would have a profound effect upon culture, politics, and society. It began very early one morning in 1920 when he and George Grosz were experimenting with pasting pictures together. From this grew Heartfield's lifetime obsession with what was to be known as photomontage.

On December 30, 1918, Heartfield joined the newly founded German Communist Party (KPD). [4] The German Communist Party was the greatest political threat to the rise of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party. It is important to note that throughout his life Heartfield was a devoted pacifist and never believed in violent revolution. He had faith in both people and the truth and believed that if he brought the two together, the result would be an improvement for the vast majority of society.

In 1918, Heartfield became a member of Berlin Club Dada. Heartfield would become highly active in the Dada movement, helping to organize the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (First International Dada Fair) in Berlin in 1920.[5] Dadaists were the young lions of the German art scene, opinionated provocateurs who often disrupted public art gatherings and ridiculed the participants. They labeled traditional art trivial and bourgeois. Heartfield was a vital member of a circle of German titans that included Dada playwright Edwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Hoch, and a host of others. In 1919, he was dismissed from the Reichswehr film service on account of his support for the strike that followed the assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. With George Grosz, he founded Die Pleite, a satirical magazine.

The members of Club Dada had a profound effect upon Heartfield and his work. In turn, he deeply influenced their work as well. His theater sets were vital elements in the early works of Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. Heartfield played a major role in helping Brecht to realize the concept of the "alienation effect" (Verfremdungs-effekt). This new theater technique was to remind spectators that they were experiencing an enactment of reality and not reality itself. Using minimal props and stark stages such as those created by Heartfield, Brecht interrupted his plays at key junctures to encourage the audience to be part of the action and not to lose themselves in it.

Soon after Heartfield met Brecht in 1924, they became lifelong friends. John Heartfield is buried within steps of Bertolt Brecht's Home.

Though he was a prolific producer of stage sets and book jackets, Heartfield's obsession was political photomontages. Heartfield developed photomontage into a form of political and artistic expression. He worked for two communist publications: the daily Die Rote Fahne and the weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ), the latter of which published the works for which Heartfield is best remembered.[6]

Heartfield preferred reality to artistic pretension. While he referred to himself as a monteur, he enjoyed the title engineer. In the Museum of Modern Art in New York hangs a George Grosz Montage entitled, "The Engineer Heartfield."

Although he did not wish to be labeled an artist, he had a full measure of an artist's passion. His Dada contemporaries tied him to a chair and enraged him just to experience the unbridled intensity of his emotions.

His strongest emotion, however, was his hatred of German Fascism. During the 1920s, Heartfield had produced a great number of stunning photomontages, many of which were reproduced as dust jackets for books such as his montage for Upton Sinclair's The Millennium.

However, he is best known for the scathing political montages he created during the 1930s to expose German Nazism. During the 1930s and 1940s, he created some of his most famous montages: Adolf, the Superman (published in the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung [AIZ, Workers' Illustrated Newspaper], Berlin, July 17, 1932), used a montaged X-ray to expose gold coins in the Fuehrer's esophagus leading to a pile in his stomach as he rants against the fatherland's enemies.

In Gohring: The Executioner of the Third Reich (AIZ, Prague, September 14, 1933), Hitler's designated successor is depicted as a butcher.

The Meaning of Geneva, Where Capital Lives, There Can Be No Peace (AIZ, Berlin, November 27, 1932), shows the dove of peace impaled on a blood-soaked bayonet in front of the League of Nations, where the cross of the Swiss flag has morphed into a swastika.

Heartfield's artistic output was prolific. His works appeared regularly in the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ, Workers' Illustrated Newspaper), a popular weekly whose circulation rivaled any magazine in Germany during the early ninteen thirties. During 1931 Heartfield's photomontages were often featured on the cover, an important point, because most copies of the AIZ were sold at newsstands.

As Germany careened into fascism, Heartfield's montages filled the streets of Berlin. His work was also circulated throughout the city in the form of posters. Heartfield believed the best way to distribute his work to his audience was to distribute it through forms of mass media such as periodicals, posters, and book jackets.

It was through rotogravure—an engraving process whereby pictures, designs, and words are engraved into the printing plate or printing cylinder—that he was able to reach the audience he coveted.

Heartfield lived in Berlin until April, 1933. On Good Friday, the SS broke into his apartment, and he barely escaped by jumping from his balcony. He then walked around the Sudeten Mountains to Czechoslovakia.

There, he continued to use the National Socialists' own words to expose the truth behind their twisted dreams. In 1934 he montaged four bloody axes tied together to form a swastika to mock The Old Slogan in the "New" Reich: Blood and Iron (AIZ, Prague, March 8, 1934).

In 1938, he was forced once again to run for his life—this time to England—before the imminent German occupation of Czechoslovakia. He was interned for a time in England as an enemy alien, and his health began to seriously deteriorate. He lived for some time in Hampstead.[7] His brother Wieland was refused an English residency permit in 1939 and, with his family, left for the United States. John wished to accompany his brother, but was refused entry.

Following the war, Heartfield who had applied for citizenship in Czechoslovakia, had no strong desire to return to Germany. He and his new wife, Gertrude, found themselves with limited options. He was offered a professorship of satirical graphics at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. His response was, "Do I have to be a professor?"

He settled in East Germany and Berlin after World War II, in 1954, and worked closely with theater directors such as Benno Besson and Wolfgang Langhoff at Berliner Ensemble and Deutsches Theater.

He returned to East Berlin in 1948 and was greeted with suspicion by the authorities because of the length of his stay in England. He was unable to work as a monteur and was denied health benefits. He was suspected of "collaboration" by the East German Government because of the amount of time he had lived in England and the fact his dentist was under suspicion.

It was only through the intervention of Bertoldt Brecht and Stefan Heym that, after eight years of official neglect, Heartfield was formally admitted to the East German Akademie der Kúnste (Academy of the Arts) in 1956. However his health has deteriorated and, although he subsequently produced some memorable montages regarding the threat of nuclear war, he was never as prolific again.

In 1967 he visited Britain and began preparing a retrospective exhibition of his work, "photomontages", which was subsequently completed by his widow Gertrude and the Deutsche Akademie der Künste, and shown at the ICA in London in 1969.

In April, 1993, MOMA in New York was able to negotiate a short exhibition [8] of Heartfield's original works which are stored in an archive in the West German Academy Der Kunste. It was a triumph. The show was greeted with overflowing crowds and glowing reviews in major newspapers such as The New York TImes. [9] Unfortunately, major exhibitions of Heartfield's work are rare and the Academy's current policy is to not loan pieces of Heartfield's Art to other institutions.

In 2005, Tate Britain held an exhibition of his photomontage pieces.

John Heartfield died on April 26, 1968 in East Berlin, German Democratic Republic.

After his death, the Akademie der Kúnste took possession of all of his surviving works. They were uncataloged and kept from the public for more than twenty-five years. Only after the end of the cold war did it become possible to show his art for the first time in the United States.

From April 15 to July 6, 1993, the second floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City was the American venue for a critically acclaimed exhibit of Heartfield's original montages.