Publié : 01 Déc 2002, 08:05Bonne idée. =D>
Pour changer un peu je vous expose un :staline: ien.
John Heartfield
Germany, like all other countries during the First World War, was gripped by a "patriotic" frenzy. Supporters of the German empire had succeeded in creating a political environment where "God punish England" became a common greeting on the street. Protesting this idiocy, the young artist Helmut Herzfeld changed his name to John Heartfield.
The young Heartfield was influenced by the soldiers on the western front, who unable to get their reports passed military censors, turned to pasting photographs together in order to relate the horror of the battlefield to their friends and relatives back home. Inspired by this as well as the collage of the cubists, Heartfield and his close friend and fellow artist George Grosz, invented photomontage.
During the twenties Heartfield created photomontage bookcovers for the Malik Verlag, a Berlin publishing house which published the best of the world's left-wing literature, from Upton Sinclair and Richard Wright to Maxim Gorky. Heartfield worked for several radical newspapers and began to contribute regularly to the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung or Workers Illustrated Paper (AIZ).
As Germany spiraled ever downward into the abyss of fascism, Heartfield's art became increasingly acrid and aggressively political. In unrelenting denunciations of the Nazis and their backers, his works became ingrained in the mind and eye of a generation. Everyweek, a half a million copies of AIZ would be distributed to anti-Fascists impatient for the latest Heartfield photomontage. His art would fulfill what Picasso once considered to be the purpose of painting, to create works that would be the "instruments of war for attack and defense against the enemy."
The situation had become dire. There were mass arrests and executions, the concentration camps were beginning to fill up. Recognizing the power of Heartfield's art, the Nazis were determined to arrest him, but he escaped to Prague in 1933, where he continued his artistic work against the terror in his homeland. The Nazi regime protested his being able to exhibit in exile and demanded his extradition, ultimately depriving him of German citizenship. After the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia he made a narrow escape to London, where he organized anti-Fascist groups, spoke at political rallies and wrote on the relationship of art and politics.
In 1950 Heartfield returned to East Germany and was welcomed with a retrospective exhibition. Celebrated as a cultural leader, he kept busy doing stage design, posters and book jackets. On occasion he paralleled the power of his earlier works, taking on the issues of Atomic weapons and the Vietnam war, but the days working for freedom during the Nazi period were his most brilliant and productive years. John Heartfield died in Berlin on April 26 1968.
1930 Whoever reads bourgeois newspapers becomes blind and deaf. Away with the stultifying bandages!
1932 Adolf, the Superman: Swallows gold and spouts rubbish.
This photomontage was published after Hitler's important speech to Rhineland Industrialists in Dusseldorf 1932, before he became Reich Chancellor in 1933.
1932 Do you want to fall again, so that shares rise?!
