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John Heartfield (1891-1968): Photomontages
The Fundació Joan Miró will open the exhibition John Heartfield (1891-1968): Photomontages on 2 April at 7.30 pm. The show highlights the evolution of Heartfield’s work since 1917, when he took over the editorship of the second series of the magazine Neue Jugend. From 1918, Heartfield continued his political activity on the basis of Marxist principles and participated with his brother and George Grosz in the activities of the Berlin Dada group. By 1919, he was already known as the ‘Dada photomontage artist’ because of his use of photomontage, a technique that he would never abandon. He was co-editor of the journal Der Dada at the time and in 1920 one of the main organisers of the Berlin Dada exhibition. From 1921, Heartfield distanced himself from the Dada movement, which was more concerned with aesthetic issues, in order to devote himself to his political vocation, in the service of which he used the technique of photomontage. In this way, he sharply criticised post-war bourgeois society and, later, the rise of Nazism.
The exhibition demonstrates the huge revolution represented by the transformation of technical means of reproduction into means of direct production of works of art. Heartfield’s work did not involve the reproduction of a pre-existing, unique original, but rather the original work was each and every one of the thousands of weekly copies of the magazine AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung) that he managed to print between 1927 and 1931.
Heartfield’s work can be seen as the first foreshadowing of the techno-scientific revolution in the direct production of works with a new universal vocation and function.
The opening act will include a screening of the film John Heartfield as well as a talk by Joan Fontcuberta on ‘Photomontage: Evolution and Methods’.
