struggle and individual handsturninginto fists,respectively–confirms once
more the importance of (gendered) embodimentsinthe making of the proletar-
ian dream.²
Defining proletarian art fromacommunist perspective meant,first of all, es-
tablishingalternativestothe institutions of bourgeois art. As Heartfield’sbroth-
er,Wieland Herzfelde (1896–1988), explained:“The artistisaworker and, like
others, exploited. Nonetheless, he is no proletarian. [...]Hehas no comrades
but onlyrivals and competitors; his existenceisbourgeois.”³Changingthe con-
ditionsofartistic production for Seiwert and Heartfield meant to become active
in artists’groups–the Cologne Progressivesand Berlin Dada,respectively–and
to align the project of the artisticavant-garde with thatofthe communist van-
guard.Accordingly, they approachedartistic innovation asacollective project,
showingtheirworkingroupexhibitionsandnontraditionalvenuesandpublish-
ing in new art journals and party newspapers. Expanding the parameters of aes-
thetic experience also meant making extensive use of new mass media and tech-
niques of massmobilization and developing the elements ofatrulymodern
Volkskunst(popularart). The combination of these artistic, institutional, and
ideological interventions will henceforth be called proletarian modernism in rec-
ognition of its class-based perspective,collaborative ethos, interventionistmeth-
od, multimediaaesthetic, and internationalist orientation.⁴
See DebbieLewer,“Revolution and theWeimarAvant-Garde: Contestingthe Politics of Art,
1919 – 1924,”inWeimar CultureRevisited,ed. John AlexanderWilliams (NewYork: Palgrave,
2011), 1–22. The best introductions toWeimar leftwingart and politics can be found in twomon-
ographs on George Grosz,Beth Irwin Lewis,George Grosz: Art and Politics in theWeimar Republic
(Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press, 1991) and BarbaraMcCloskey,George Grosz and the Com-
munistParty:Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936(Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press,
1997). On the marginal roleofthe visual arts in the labor movement and its historiography,
seeW. L. Guttsman,“BildendeKunst und Arbeiterbewegunginder Weimarer Zeit: Erbe oder
Tendenz,”ArchivfürSozialgeschichte22 (1982):331–358.
WielandHerzfelde,“Gesellschaft,Künstler undKommunismus”(1921), reprintedinZur Sache.
Geschrieben undgesprochenzwischen 18 und 80(Weimar:Aufbau, 1976), 66.
Proletarian modernism isascholarlyterm used to describe the proletarian art and literature
producedduringthe late1920s and 1930s in theUnitedStates, Latin America, and East Asiaand
examined in several monographs on the so-called proletarian moment or wave citedinthe in-
troduction (fn. 6). The absenceofanequivalentterm in the German contextsuggests continued
adherencetothe standardhistories of modernism and theavant-garde. ForanearlyGerman
studyonthe Soviet Proletkult movement,see Peter Gorsen and EberhardKnödler-Bunte,Prolet-
kult,2vols. (Stuttgart:FriedrichFrommann-Holzboog, 19 74 – 75). Arecentexample focused on
the British contextisBenjaminKohlmann,Committed Styles:Modernism, Politics, and Left-
Wing Literatureinthe 1930s(Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press,2014).
206 Chapter 11