#SALUTE MEANING FREE#

It was later adopted by the surrealists who exploited the possibilities photomontage offered by using free association to bring together widely disparate images, to reflect the workings of the unconscious mind.

It was first used as a technique by the Dadaists in 1915 in their protests against the First World War. Sometimes the resulting composite image is photographed so that a final image may appear as a seamless photographic print. This refers to the process of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. Heartfield was influenced and helped form a new artistic language. In this climate, communists, Nazis, and other partisans clashed in the press, at the ballot box, and on the streets. Heartfield's agitated images forecasted and reflected the chaos Germany experienced in the 1920s and '30s as it slipped toward social and political catastrophe. Meanwhile, the rich got richer and looked to mavericks like Hitler to support their interests. Coupled with a fervent nationalism and an extreme right wing party combined with an ineffective social democratic party the future for most people looked bleak. It was led by politicians whose empty slogans only dramatised the gap between them and the people. Germany after the First World War was a country wracked by poverty, suffering and despair. Although he subsequently produced some montages warning of the threat of nuclear war, he was never again as prolific as in his youth. He was suspected of 'collaboration' with the West by the Stasi.Due to the intervention of Bertolt Brecht and Stefan Heym, Heartfield was formally admitted to the Academy of the Arts in 1956. He was unable to work as an artist and was denied health benefits. He was denied admission into the East German Akademie der Künste (Academy of the Arts). His brother Wieland was refused a British residency permit in 1939 and, with his family, left for the United States.įollowing the war, Heartfield settled in East Berlin, East Germany and worked closely with theatre directors such as Benno Besson and Wolfgang Langhoff at Berliner Ensemble and Deutsches Theater.He was greeted with suspicion by the Stasi (East German Secret Police) because of the length of his stay in England. He was interned for a time in England as an enemy alien, and his health began to deteriorate.Īfterwards, he lived in Hampstead, London. In 1938, he was forced once again to flee from the Nazis after they invaded Prague, this time to England, given the imminent German occupation of Czechoslovakia. The power of his images earned him the number five slot on the Gestapo’s Most Wanted List. His montages conveyed moral, not literal, truths. His art was “a weapon.” Its ammunition was his imagination, scissors, glue pots, retoucher’s paint, and stacks of photographs and magazine articles. This artist who openly attacked the Nazi Party while living in Berlin was five-foot-two inches tall, with red hair and blue eyes. His stunning political art became famous on both sides of the Atlantic as courageous effective artistic weapons that revealed, satirized, and opposed the worldwide threat of fascism and the Nazi Party.įrom his early work as a fledging painter to his embrace of Dada to the anti-fascist montages that made him a Nazi target, Heartfield’s life and work was a profile in courage. This outspokenness and the prolific outpouring of his photomontages for the AIZ (workers’ magazine) ultimately made him a target of the Nazi Party, who sought to silence him. Heartfield’s work continuously satirised the ‘madman' who seized control of his country. He joined the Communist Party in 1920 and was an early and ferocious enemy of Hitler and the Nazi movement. Heartfield was both a pacifist and Marxist. This outspokenness and defiant attitude characterized his art. This was seen as a particularly unpatriotic thing to do. His name change occurred in a period of fervent nationalism and anti-British feeling as the First World War raged and was a response to what he felt to be an anti- foreigner attitude throughout Germany. This proved to be bold action for the German-born artist. He changed his name in 1917 to the English John Heartfield. He came to the view that fine art was a waste of time, and explored other forms of art to express his views. He had no more than primary education.Īs a teenager he worked in a relative’s bookshop and from there worked his way into art school in Munich. Threatened with prison for public sacrilege, the father fled from Germany to Austria. His father was an unsuccessful poet and anarchist. John Heartfield, formerly known as Helmut Harzfeld, was born in 1891 in Berlin.

Salute meaning