Chapter 17
John Heartfield’sProductive Rage
John Heartfieldtodayknows how to salute beauty.He knows how to create those images
which arethe very beauty of ouragesince they represent the cry of the people. [...]His
art is art inLenin’ssense for it isaweapon in the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat.
[...]Heknows no signpost other than dialecticalmaterialism, none other than the reality of
the historical process,which he, filled with the anger of battle (rage du combat), translates
into black and white.Louis Aragon,“Jo hn Heartfield and RevolutionaryBeauty”Anger andrage are powerful artistic weapons.NoWeimar artist was more aware
of their strategic function than the famousphotomonteurJohn Heartfield (1891–
1968), and no fellow communist knew this better than theFrench writer Louis
Aragon whose paean to revolutionary beauty singles out Heartfield for uniting
aesthetics and politics in the name of the proletariat.¹During the Weimar
years, Heartfield systematicallydevelopedfurther the connection between aes-
thetic and political emotions that chapters 10 and 11 have examined under the
heading of proletarianmodernism.
Definedless by anyspecific artistic form or style than by its class-based, in-
terventionistapproachto formal innovation, proletarian modernism emergedat
the intersection ofavant-gardemovementsand left-wingradicalisms in close
dialoguewith new media technologies and cultural theories. The main propo-
nents faced manychallenges in asserting their socialist commitments,among
them the antimodernist positions prevalent among KPD critics, the enduring
preference of Social Democrats for nineteenth-century forms and styles,and
the mass-producedattra ctions offered by the culture industry andrealized in
the democratic modalitiesofwhat MiriamHansen has calledvernacular modern-
ism. Likethe writerFranzJung (discussed in chapter 10) and the artistFranzWil-
helm Seiwert (discussed in chapter 11), Heartfield setout to expose the power
structures in capitalist societies byrejecting conventional notions of realism as
verisimilitude, and like the others, he aimedtostrengthenclass-based attach-
ments without recourse to traditional forms of identification. Choosing photo-
montageashis preferred artistic medium,Heartfield though was unique in draw-
Louis Aragon,“Jo hn Heartfield and Revolutionary Beauty”(1935),citedinWendyAnn Parker,
“Political Photomontage:Transformation, Revelation, and‘Truth’”(PhD diss., University of
Iowa,2011),Appendix A, 129–130.