Salute to Beauty

63 SALUTE TO BEAUTY Helmut Herzfeld was born in Berlin, 1891. In 1916, to protest the German nationalist antiBritish campaign, he changed his name to John Heartfield. That was not all he changed. John Heartfield turned bourgeois beauty (ideology) insideout , cut it up, and with the pieces documented reality. It was grotesque. Yet, because of what he did, 'beauty' was no longer a shameless word. It could be spoken of. This first master of photomontage could not himself produce beauty—only human masses can, and lives within the mass, and only through struggle—but he could live it. Through his work he is living it still. In 1935 the communist poet Louis Aragon was writing JOHN HEARTFIELD AND REVOLUTIONARY BEAUTY. Through Heartfield's eyes even Aragon could see. See not only their future but our own as well. Not that the forms of repression and resistance could be the same, but their essence remains. We are still living this history. It is not done with. Aragon: "Because of this, the lessons of a man moved by events....are all the more precious today. I am speaking of John Heart- 64 field, for whom the entire destiny of art was brought into serious question by the German revolution in the aftermath of the war and whose entire oeuvre was destroyed by Hitlerian fascism in 1933.... "John Heartfield wasn't playing anymore. The pieces of photos he had arranged in the past for amazement and pleasure, under his fingers began to signify. The social forbidden was quickly substituted for the poetic forbidden ; or, more exactly, under the pressure of events, and in the course of the struggle in which the artist found himself, these two forbiddens merged: there was poetry, but there was no more poetry that was notalso Revolution .... "John Heartfield today knows how to salute beauty." revolutionary beauty because he sees with the brains bowels eyes of the oppressed because he X rays theführer president who swallows gold and spouts shit 65 because he pastes up war + corpses the last * hope of the rich and peels back shuffled paper layers of bosses makeshift rigged scales of justice the the the corporate congressional relchstag mask to expose attack —among the bodies maggots banks of oil, shell casings cathedrals steel plants— the fascist hyena In a top hat 66 1931 1932 1933 skull In a helmet dove on a bayonet 1936 vultures ring Madrid "It is a known fact that it was from a poster depicting a clenched fist which Heartfield did for the Communist Party that the German Proletariat took the gesture of the 'Red Front.' It was this same fist with which the dockworkers of Norway saluted the passage of the Chelyuskin, with which Paris accompanied those who died on 9 February, and with which only yesterday at the movies I saw a huge crowd of Mexican strikers [rage at] the swastika -emblazoned image of Hitler. It is one of John Heartfield's constant concerns that the originals of his photomontages be exhibited adjacent to the pages of A-I-Z, the illustrated German [workers'] magazine where they are reproduced, because, he says, it must be indicated how these photomontages penetrate the masses. "That is why during the existence of the German 'democracy' under the Weimarconstitu- 67 tion the German bourgeoisie prosecuted John Heartfield in the courts.... When it liquidated 'democracy,' its fascism did more than just prosecute: twenty years of John Heartfield 's work was destroyed by the Nazis." years seem to pass, wars and corpses pile up pass through 1979 bankrolling the American Nazi Party the KKK In a dunce cap softspoken lizard In a business suit coast to coast TV into 1981 82 83 riot gear hairs bristling back of the neck 68 the war of 19— what? "Heartfield....is the prototype of the antifascist artist.... "John Heartfield today knows how to salute beauty. He knows how to create those images which are the very beauty of our age, for they represent the cry of the masses—the people's struggle against the brown hangman with his trachea crammed with gold coins. He knows how to create realistic images of our life and struggle which are...