Art - John Heartfield

John Heartfield (or Helmut Herzfeld) was a dada artist, whose work is very political. Heartfield used photocollage as a powerful political weapon. He was born in Berlin in 1891 and studied at the Schule für Angewandte Künste in Munich.
After his education, Heartfield worked as a designer at a paper factory in 1912. He fell in love with the daughter of his landlord there and married her a year later in Berlin.
John Heartfield won the first prize at the Werkbund Ausstellung in Köln in 1914 and took lessons at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin.
Heartfield against the war fiercely and his mobilization in 1914 must have been a nightmare. He even deserted from time to time. His friendship with George Grosz fed his antiwar ideas. Together they developed the artistic photomontage. John Heartfield sympathized with the British around that time and changed his name from Helmut Herzfeld to John Heartfield. His brother Wieland was closely involved in his activities. The two brothers founded their own publishing-firm, Malik Verlag, and published their own work and material of many other left winged writers. John Heartfield was the designer of the covers and developed his own refined style. They also experimented with typography designers of the Bauhaus in return. Heartfield was one of the cofounders of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands and the dadaist in Berlin.
Around the mid-twenties, John Heartfield started to make brilliantly constructed photomontages, always with strong political message. The artist also directly criticized the nazis that's why he was hated by the nazi-staff. Not long after the nazis had taken over the country, Heartfield's house was raided by the SA in the beginning of 1933 and he had to flee to Prague. Even there, the nazis were after him and they tried to make his life impossible. He escaped from Poland in 1938 and went to London, where he was interned just before the war, just like all the other German anti-nazis in Great Britain. Heartfield became seriously ill during his stays in several camps and this illness caused his choice for less political and demanding work after the war. He designed covers for Penguin Books for example.
John Heartfield went back to Germany (the DDR) in 1950, he led a successful life there with his third wife Gertrude. The artist became friends with Bertold Brecht and won two prizes (Deutsche Nationalpreis für Kunst und Literatur and the Friedenspreis der DDR). Heartfield was also a member of the Akademie der Künste from 1956 and exhibited in the DDR, Moscow, Peking, Shanghai, Italy and Tientsin.
John Heartfield died in 1968 and the Akademie der Künste honored him by started an archive of the artist's work.