You can learn more about the artist’s life and work at the official John Heartfield Gallery site, which includes several of the collages displayed in the Canvas video at the top.
Hartfield is a complex figure – a neglected but essential member of the German avant-garde, with his brother Weiland and artists such as Georg Gross, revolutionizing the mediums of photography, printmaking, and printmaking in order to vehemently oppose war, oppression, and Nazism, despite the dangers to their livelihoods and lives. He eventually returned to Berlin in the early 1950s and took up the profession of literature professor. (Hartfield reportedly escaped a “gang of Nazi thugs,” Fox wrote, by jumping from the balcony of his Berlin home.) In Czechoslovakia, he continued his anti-Hitler propaganda campaign through covers behind When the Nazis occupied Prague in 1938, he fled again to London but did not stop working during the war. Artist and Editors behind They were forced to flee to Prague when Hitler took power in 1933. Unfortunately for Heartfield, and for Europe, the German left failed to present a united front against Nazism as the German Communist Party (KPD) also became increasingly ideological and Stalinist. His style internationally until a dead propaganda painting of socialist realism removed Art Nouveau from the party’s style. He traveled to the Soviet Union in 1931 under the auspices of the magazine and gave courses in photosynthesis for the Red Army. This weekly publication “served from the start as a major organ of opposition to the ascendant National Socialist Party.” Heartfield’s provocative covers satirized Hitler and depicted an organized labor force against the fascist threat. The Art Institute of Chicago wrote: “In 1929, after dozens of years of activity in photomontage and publishing, John Heartfield began work on The Left Magazine. Heartfield’s direct attacks on state power were allied with his support for labor movements. John Heartfield, Self-Portrait with Police Commissioner Zurgibel
The 1930 work protesting Weimar’s anti-abortion laws was titled “Forced Mankind Supplier, Cheer Up! The State Needs Unemployed and Soldiers!” But most of his work disintegrated and re-employed the popular press. On rare occasions, Heartfield has included photos of him, as in the selfie below with scissors beheading the Berlin Police Commissioner Or he used his own photography, as in a not-so-glamorous shot, a pregnant young woman whose head Heartfield lays down what appears to be the corpse of a dead young man. The result can have a frightening visual impact.” They also had widespread influence, becoming an almost standard style of radical protest art throughout Europe in the early part of the twentieth century. Heartfield’s most powerful work used differences in scale and stark juxtaposition to activate the fragments of his already gruesome images. “To compose his work, he chose distinctive press photos of politicians or events from the mainstream photojournalism…. “Photomontage allowed Heartfield to create uploaded and politically controversial images,” Getty wrote. John Heartfield, War and Corpses, The Last Hope of the Rich