Blinding sarcasm

POOR, poor propaganda. Such a misunderstood practice. So derided, so suspect. By definition, the term is a benign relative of the verb “to propagate” (reproduce, disseminate), applied to information or doctrine. The danger comes when it’s used for destructive purposes, and used well. What propaganda has incited people to do (or not do) in the name of religious or political ideology has caused the deaths of millions.

In his effort to attain and secure power, Adolf Hitler engaged in a fierce propaganda war. He not only had a minister of propaganda, the notorious Joseph Goebbels, who scowled that “a sharp sword must always stand behind propaganda, if it is to be really effective.” He also had some shiny new tools at his disposal: public radio broadcasts (introduced in the 1920s) and the new wide-circulation, photographically illustrated magazines (made viable by improved printing methods and the advent of small, hand-held cameras, spurring the field of photojournalism). With Hitler, the art of psychological warfare reached a lethal level, but he wasn’t the only one to recognize its potency. Hitler’s opponents had a powerful weapon too, and his name was John Heartfield.

A tight, thoughtful exhibition at the Getty Research Institute titled “Agitated Images” is essential viewing for those who missed the traveling Heartfield retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1993, or who want a refresher course in socially critical art at its best. In 65 objects, the show, guest-curated by Rutgers University photo historian Andres Mario Zervigon, succinctly introduces Heartfield’s work and its context in the decades between the two world wars. Heartfield was widely influential in his time and ought to be even more so today for his barbed combinations of image and text, and as a model artist-activist, brilliantly allying visual energy and ideological passion. His work restores faith in the positive potential of propaganda.

Born Helmut Herzfeld in 1891, he changed his name in 1916 to John Heartfield, erasing the German influence in protest against his country’s wartime chauvinism toward the British. He did so in concert with his friend and Dada cohort George Grosz (formerly Georg Gross).

Heartfield trained as a commercial artist and designed some snappy dust jackets for German editions of books by Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos. The covers were innovative in their use of photographic rather than drawn or painted images. The fundamental thrust of advertising -- getting the message across immediately, vividly, memorably -- remained key to Heartfield’s work designing political posters and magazine montages. Instead of products, he pushed ideas.

He joined the German Communist Party upon its inception in late 1918. Later, he described his shift from Dadaist to Communist as a refinement of intent and practice, from “protest against everything” to “a systematic and consciously guided art propaganda in the service of the working class movement.”

Heartfield’s most searing works were the 237 photomontages he made for the magazine Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers Illustrated News), known as AIZ. The general-interest magazine with a strong leftist slant was a product of the Communist International’s United Front campaign to attract fellow travelers, citizens not affiliated with the party but sympathetic to issues of working-class justice. Like its mainstream rivals, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated News) and the Munchner Illustrierte Presse (Munich Illustrated Press), the AIZ helped define the newly evolved format of the photo essay, which married sequences of photographs with text. Heartfield’s photomontages, many appearing on the front or back covers of the AIZ, compacted the power of the photo essay into a single, incisive image.

Using photographs from press clippings and photo agencies, as well as pictures he staged, Heartfield cut and glued, retouched, rephotographed and retouched some more. The images that resulted, printed in sepia or gray-toned rotogravure, were seamless and disjunctive, canny exposes of political hypocrisy, corruption and exploitation.

A few months before Hitler was sworn in as chancellor in early 1933, the AIZ ran a Heartfield montage on its cover that indicated, with graphic sarcasm, the source of Hitler’s real support. “The Meaning of the Hitler Salute” features Hitler in the lower right corner, his right arm raised in the familiar gesture. Behind him stands a much larger, hefty figure in a suit placing a bundle of bills into Hitler’s upturned palm. The motto “Millions stand behind me!” exposes through double entendre the hypocrisy of the Nazis -- the National Socialist German Workers Party -- bankrolled by the country’s industrialists. Whereas the symbolism of the right overlapped that of the left in references to work, strength and bread, Heartfield excelled at stripping away rhetoric and baring the Nazi party’s ties to big business and the military.

Photographically illustrated magazines and daily papers reached millions in Germany and were edited, left, right and center, by journalists savvy to their power to influence public opinion. AIZ editors regularly clamored against the mainstream press’ tepid coverage of a country in crisis. Heartfield’s first regular contribution to the magazine, in 1930, was a portrait of a man in the militia uniform of the centrist Social Democratic Party, his head enrobed in pages from popular dailies. “Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers Becomes Blind and Deaf,” said the caption below. “Away With the Stultifying Bandages!”

When Hitler assumed power and clamped down on the opposition, Heartfield and the editors of the AIZ joined the intellectual exodus and shifted their operations to Prague, smuggling copies of the magazine into Germany. They continued publishing there (changing the name in 1936) until the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938. The final issues were produced in Paris in early 1939. By then, Heartfield had headed to London, where he continued to work until he was interned as an enemy alien. In 1950, he resettled in the former German Democratic Republic, where he died in 1968, a national hero whose images illustrated history textbooks.

Germany ran through 17 different governments in the years between the first and second world wars. The times were not just intensely politicized but also heavily oriented toward the visual. Photographs filled the press and posters densely freckled the urban landscape. Within this culture of “general visual promiscuity,” as one Berlin commentator put it, Heartfield gravitated to the most technologically advanced image-making tool available, photography. “The pencil,” he said, “turned out to be too slow a medium.”

Heartfield exploited the legibility, authority and familiarity of photographic images in the popular press to subvert the messages those images carried. He turned the medium inside out, in a sense, exposing how manipulable it really is. By doing so, he nurtured the kind of critical literacy necessary to navigate visually promiscuous times such as his -- and even more so, ours.

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‘Agitated Images’

What: “Agitated Images: John Heartfield and German Photomontage, 1920-1938”

Where: Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; closed Mondays

Ends: June 25

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 440-7300, www.getty.edu