Heartfield's photo-Grenades: during the European interwar period, German artist John Heartfield used satirical photomontage—mass-reproduced in newspapers and on posters—to battle the forces of reaction and hypocrisy. A current show at the Getty tracks his efforts through that tumultuous time

On the night of Apr. 16, 1933, John Heartfield climbed out a window of his apartment on Potsdamer Street and jumped from the first-floor balcony, narrowly escaping the SS men who pursued him. Fleeing Berlin, he crossed the Sudeten Mountains on foot, bound for the temporary safety of Prague. A Communist and a Jew, Heartfield (1891-1968) was anathema to the Nazis; his many political offenses included the notorious photomontage he had published in the AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, or Workers Illustrated News), with the caption "Adolf, the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk." The image X-rays the pernicious orator's chest to expose a column of coins in place of an esophagus and a swastika instead of a heart. The ingested gold also resembles a spine, suggesting that capitalist wealth formed the literal backbone of Hitler's National Socialism. With this conceit, Heartfield boldly put the lie to Nazi claims to represent Germany's working class. When the picture appeared as a poster during the national elections in 1932, fistfights broke out in the streets between outraged Hitler supporters and their Communist opponents.

Long admired for his innovations in photomontage and graphic design, Heartfield appeared to late 20th-century postmodernists as a progenitor who appropriated mechanically reproduced images in a critique of consumerism and the media. As much as the strategies of Barbara Kruger, say, or Richard Prince in the 1980s recall Heartfield's subversive montage, the comparison neglects a crucial aspect of the latter's project: the dissemination of his work in mass-circulation communist newspapers, as posters, dust jackets, and in magazines and books. (1) A recent exhibition at the Getty Center, curated by Andres Mario Zervigon, effectively restored Heartfield's oeuvre to its embattled political context and reminded viewers of the historical conditions in which it was so passionately produced. "Agitated Images: John Heartfield and German Photomontage, 1920-1938" includes examples of Heartfield's early contributions to Dada periodicals; montages in AIZ and its incarnation in Czechoslovakia, Die Volks Illustrierte (Peoples Illustrated); and designs for his brother Wieland Herzfelde's publishing company, Malik Verlag.

Side by side with Heartfield's work were competing images and other materials from mainstream publications such as BIZ (Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, or Berlin Illustrated News), Illustrierter Beobachter (Illustrated Observer) and Das Magazin. In venues like these and in posters plastered throughout the cities, an ideological "struggle of signs" was waged in interwar Germany. (2)

To convey a sense of this struggle, the exhibition opens with a group of photographs documenting campaign posters in situ in 1932, when Hitler and the Communist candidate Ernst Thalmann challenged the incumbent Reichsprasident Paul von Hindenburg. A hammer and sickle at the top of a column displaying Thalmann's thrice-repeated image advertised his goals for constituents: "Work, Bread, Freedom." Nazi posters on kiosks rehearsed the same rhetoric, in one case depicting a worker with a sledgehammer over his shoulder proclaiming, "We want work and bread! Vote Hitler!" Also photographed in several urban locations, a huge poster in red and white, designed by the expressionist Mjolnir, hangs high in the gallery. In this apparently ubiquitous image, a barechested man with raised fists and broken manacles wears a swastika on his belt buckle. "Enough already!" he cries, "Vote Hitler!" Identifying no issue other than mere dissatisfaction, the poster vied at the time with a similarly uninformative advertisement for Hindenburg declaring, "Vote for a man, not for a party!" A focus on personality over substance proved effective then as now: Hindenburg won the election, and appointed Hitler chancellor the following year.

Scenes of Hindenburg's previous presidency appear in copies of BIZ, where we see him marching in parades, glad-handing voters, meeting disabled veterans. Displayed nearby, a photograph of the president outside his home, facing reporters with their cameras, suggests how strategically managed such apparently candid images were, even in the 1920s. Heartfield's contempt for the subservience of the mainstream press to manipulations by the ruling class is expressed in a fullpage photograph he published in AIZ in 1930, which also taunts an uncritical readership. He shows the bust of a man in a workshirt--and harness--whose head is entirely wrapped in newspaper. Beneath this suffocating image, a caption admonishes, "Those who read bourgeois newspapers become blind and deaf. Away with these debilitating bandages!" Heartfield staged this particular photograph, to brilliant effect; mostly, however, he relied on familiar, preprinted materials and rendered them disturbingly strange. A grotesque photomontage of a snarling hyena in a battlefield strewn with dead soldiers occupied a two-page spread in AIZ in 1932. Weirdly, the animal wears a top hat and a cross-shaped medal of honor on a ribbon around its neck. The medal parodies the distinguished Prussian decoration "Pour le Merite" by a subtle intervention: Heartfield modified its inscription to read "Pour le Profit." Below the montage, a caption declares "War and corpses--the last hope of the rich," comparing the hyena who feasts on carrion to wealthy profiteers who grow fat off war.