The photomontages of John Heartfield and New Concepts at the Ikon Gallery.

RAOUL HAUSSMANN and Hannah Hoch always claimed that they thought of it first, while holidaying on the Baltic coast in 1918. George Grosz, equally persistently, maintained that 'in 1916 Johnny Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my studio at five o' clock one May morning.' Whoever invented it, Heartfield was, and remains, the greatest exponent of photomontage; clinching evidence, if any were needed, is provided by a small but compelling exhibition of his work at the Goethe Institute.
 
Heartfield lived and worked in Berlin, then Prague, in increasingly dark times. He witnessed the failures, the brutality and oppression of the Weimar Republic, and then watched as things got worse under Hitler and his National Socialists. Abhorrence bred ingenuity; several of Heartfield's most corrosive images are personal attacks on Hitler. Most famously, Heartfield gave the Fuhrer an X-Ray body, showing a digestive tract full of coinage, and entitled the result Adolf the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk. It made the cover of A-I-Z (the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung) and was billposted all over Berlin. You can't help wondering how Heartfield - who was as 'decadent' as they came, in Nazi terms - managed to stick around in Germany for as long as he did.
 
Heartfield began his artistic career as a member of the Berlin Dada group. Photomontage was a medium that proved perfectly adapted to the mood and philosophy of Dada. It was crude, immediate, impeccably anti-fine art. But in the hands of Heartfield, a formal innovation became a polemical tool; as Louis Aragon put it in 1935, 'While he was playing with the fire of appearances, reality took fire around him. John Heartfield was no longer playing. The scraps of photographs that he formerly manouevred for the...

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