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Capturing Chaos: The Photomontages of John Heartfield
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11554 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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8 / 1994 |
1,810 Words |
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Darwin Marable
Darwin Marable is a photo historian, writer, lecturer, and
independent curator based in the San Francisco Bay area. |
Social criticism in the visual arts dates back to the nineteenth century and beyond. For example, Honore Daumier, the French lithographer, satirized the policies of King Louis-Philippe in the popular journals Le Charivari and La Caricature. In the twentieth century Kathe Kollwitz, the German graphic artist, expressed the tragedy of life and death while relying on the wide accessibility of prints to disseminate her message. Similarly, the German artists Otto Dix and George Grosz were both severe critics of German society and used the visual arts as their weapon. However, it was John Heartfield (1891-1968-he changed his name from Helmut Herzfeld as a form of protest -who, after inventing photomontage, became the artist-activist and made his art a revolutionary act.
Calling himself a monteur (an assembler) rather than an artist, he merged technology, mass communication, and mechanical reproduction in creating his images. To create a montage, Heartfield cut and pasted photographs, words, and images that he found in periodicals. However, he considered his montages to be "working drawings," not works of art, because they were made for reproduction rather than for hanging in galleries or museums. He also appropriated large glossy prints that he found in the bourgeois photo agencies. Heartfield would go to great lengths to stage a photograph, posing friends and models and employing carpenters or other craftsmen to build props. He involved himself totally in the process of construction by pasting and assembling the components together and using a brush or air brush to complete the image. His assistant then photographed and rephotographed the assembled images under Heartfield's careful direction.
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