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John Heartfield
German photomontagist, draftsman, and typographer
German,
(1891–1968)
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).
