John Heartfield - photomontage

Of the group dada, John Heartfield remains the best known and revered as a result of his single-minded devotion to anti-Nazi political activism. but, his early montages were collaborative efforts that resemble the work of all the other Dadaists. He and George Grosz experimented with cut-up pieces of newspaper and photos of their fellow artists, and produced many of the early designs for Dada posters and manifestos.

He had never been afraid to express his views, even to the point of anglicising his German name in response to the horrors of the First World War. Heartfield and his brother Wieland Herzfelde founded a publishing house Malik-Verlag, which provided an outlet for his highly provocative propaganda. Much of Heartfield's best work was for the front cover of the newspaper AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung) which continued to publish in Germany until 1933, when artist and newspaper moved to Prague to escape Nazi persecution.

 

Whereas all the other Dada exponents of montages produced art, for Heartfield the message was always primary, and most of his output has the appearance of newspaper photographs. He avidly collected thousands of photos of all the leading political figures of the age, and conveyed his messages with the minimum of artistry, but with great technical precision. In many ways he acted more as an originator of ideas, and as film director, since he employed professional photographers to carry out his detailed darkroom instructions.

 

For Heartfield the definition of "photomontage" was wider than for most, insisting that it should include the single photo with caption, since text and image interacted with each other in a similar way to multiple images. Heartfield's use of captions was, and perhaps still is, unsurpassed. Many of his best works utilise famous quotes of leading Nazis, and subtly undermine the intended message by quite ingenious visual puns. So, when Hitler said,"millions stand behind me", he was boasting of his popular support, whilst Heartfield used this to reveal the fact that the Nazis were being bankrolled by leading German industrialists.

Herbert Bayer - photomontage

Herbert Bayer was born on April 5, 1900 in a village near Salzburg in Northern Austria.  At age 19, the young Bayer became an apprentice of Linz artist Schmidthammer.  While studying in Schmidthammer's workshop Bayer designed letterheads, posters and advertisements.  The next year, Bayer left the workshop in Linz and went to the German city of Darmstadt where he worked in the workshop of Viennese architect Emmanuel Margold at the Darmstadt Artists Colony.  While there, Bayer was trained in the Art Nouveau styles and began to gain an interest in Gropius' book Bauhaus-Manifest.  He left Darmstadt in 1921 and was interviewed by Gropius in Weimar. 

 Bayer was accepted to the Bauhaus and during the next four years Bayer studied under the guidance of the school's great professors.  After passing his final examination, the journeyman's exam, Bayer was appointed by Gropius to direct the new "Druck und Reklame" (printing and advertising) workshop to open when the Bauhaus moved to the city of Dessau in April, 1925.1925 was possibly Bayer's busiest year.  In October, he instituted the lowercase alphabet as the style for all Bauhaus printing.  To accompany this, Bayer founded "universal", a geometric sans-serif font.  This year Bayer also designed signage for the Bauhaus' new building complex in Dessau, the Bauhaus workshops descriptive product catalogue. 

 

 It is during this year that Bayer, while on a vacation in Paris, gained an appreciation for the art of photography and began to experiment with his cameraIn 1928, Bayer left the Bauhaus and became the art director of Vogue magazine in Berlin.  Until 1938, when he moved to New York City, Bayer worked on the German publication "Die neue Linie."  When Bayer became settled in America he worked in association with his friend Walter Gropius to design the exposition "Bauhaus 1918-28" at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

When he died at the age of 85 in 1985, Herbert Bayer left behind him an outstanding career which affected nearly every field of the arts, from painting to photography and typography to teaching.

max earnst - photomontage

During the 1920s, Max Ernst was involved in Dada & surrealism works. He invented the graphic art techniques of "frottage", which involves pencil rubbings being used as an image source and "grattage" which showcases image's imprints being revealed by scraping away paint.

He never received any formal art training, and studied psychiatry and philosophy at the university level. After serving in the first world war, he found Dada and fellow artists who worked in a manner similar to his. 
His own work, which reflected his university studies of art history and psychology, as well as his World War I battle experience, conjured up fantastical dream worlds with disparate parts. Calling himself "Dada Ernst"—a pun on the German meaning of his last name ("serious")—the artist believed that beneath its absurdity, Dada had an earnest point. 

The moral underpinning is suggested in a photomontage, in which Ernst collaged human arms atop the wings of an airplane, conflating the corporeal and industrial—a recurring Dada theme. In the lower corner, three civilians demonstrate how arm holds would be used to carry wounded soldiers, an unsettling reminder of the destructive capability of World War I's new technologies.

Richard Hamilton - photomontage

Hamilton was born in Pimlico, London. Hamilton was born in London. He was educated at the Royal Academy Schools from 1938 to 1940, then studied engineering draughtsmanship at a Government Training Centre in 1940, then worked as a 'jig and tool' designer.

 He returned in 1946 to the Royal Academy Schools, from which he was expelled for 'not profiting from the instruction being given in the painting school' , then From 1948 to 1951 he continued to study at the Slade School of Art in London, where he mainly concentrated on etching. His study of James Joyce's novel "Ulysses", which he first illustrated in 1948, formed Hamilton's understanding of images.

In 1952 Richard Hamilton founded the "Independet Group" at the "Institute of Contemporary Arts" in London together with Eduardo Paolozzi, Lawrence Alloway and several other architects. This group turned out to be decisive for the development of English Pop Art. At that time he taught at the "Central School of Arts and Crafts" in London and at the "Royal College of Art" from 1957 to 1961.
In 1956 he created his most famous work "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?", which was initially intended as a poster for the now legendary exhibition "This is tomorrow". This collage is said to be the beginning of English Pop Art.

After a trip to New York in 1963, Richard Hamilton began to combine elements of photography and painting in his pictures. During the 1980s he intensively studied the opportunities provided by digital media and their effect on image perception and fine arts.
In 1992 the Tate Gallery in London showed a retrospective. In 2003 Museum Ludwig in Cologne hosted a work show organized in co-operation with the artist himself, entitled "Introspective". In 1993 Richard Hamilton represented Great Britan at the Venice Biennale.

Hamilton's early work was much influenced by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's 1913 text On Growth and Form. In 1952, at the first Independent Group meeting, held at the ICA, Hamilton was introduced to Eduardo Paolozzi's seminal presentation of collages produced in the late 1940s and early 1950s that are now considered to be the first standard bearers of Pop Art

man ray - photomontage

Man Ray was an American Dada and Surrealist artist. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Man Ray showed evidence of being artistically and mechanically inclined from childhood. After graduating from Boys' High School in 1908, he was offered a scholarship to study architecture but chose to pursue a career as an artist instead.

 In 1911, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray, a name selected by Man Ray's younger brother Sam, in reaction to the ethnic discrimination and anti-semitism prevalent at that time. Emmanuel, who was called "Manny" as a nickname, thereafter used the single name Man Ray. In 1915, Man Ray had his first one-man show of paintings and drawings. His first proto-Dada object, an assemblage titled "Self-Portrait", was exhibited the following year.

 He produced his first significant photographs in 1918. While living in New York City, with his friend Marcel Duchamp, he formed the American branch of the Dada movement, which began in Europe as a radical rejection of traditional art. He co-founded the group of modern artists called Others. After a few unsuccessful experiments, and notably after the publication of a unique issue of New York Dada in 1920, Man Ray stated, "Dada cannot live in New York", and in 1921 he went to live and work in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris, France during the era of great creativity.

There he fell in love with famous French singer named Kiki, often referred to as "Kiki de Montparnasse", who later became one of his favorite photographic models. For the next 20 years in Montparnasse, Man Ray revolutionized the art of photography. Great artists of the day such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Cocteau posed for his camera. With Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso, Man Ray was represented in the first Surrealist exhibition at the Gallerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. In 1934, Surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim, known for her fur-covered tea cup, posed for Man Ray in what became a well-known series of photographs depicting Oppenheim nude, standing next to a printing press.

Kurt Schwiiters - photomontage

Kurt Schwiiters is generally acknowledged as the twentieth century's greatest master of collage. Born in Hanover on 20 June, 1887, the only child of affluent parents, he was a loner in his youth, plagued by epileptic attacks, introverted and insecure, and as a student at the Royal Academy of Art in Dresden he proved as apt as he was unimaginative. Although his contact with Expressionist artists in Hanover after 1916 gave him more confidence to develop his own style, even his most impressive works were little more than competent imitations of his contemporaries.

In 1919, Schwitters approached Tristan Tzara, the spokesman of the Zurich Dadaists, and the group greeted his work with enthusiasm. He found further stimulus in the activities of the Berlin Dadaists, whose scandalous activities were making headlines in the same year. Raoul Hausmann’s anecdote that Schwitters was rejected by the Berlin Dadaists is, however, dubious, for their self-appointed leader, Richard Huelsenbeck, supported Schwitters from May 1919 onwards and visited him in Hanover at the end of the year.
 The two finally fell out in 1920,probably because of an argument about Dada publications. Certainly there are no grounds for the tale that Schwitters invented Merz because he was rejected by Dada, for he used his Merz pictures to introduce himself both to Tzara and Huelsenbeck.

 With the rise of National Socialism in Germany after 1929, Schwitters found himself in serious difficulties. The international network of the avant-garde community disintegrated and Schwitters gradually ceased his public activities. The death of his father and of Theo van Doesburg in 1931 mark the start of a new phase of his work, as Schwitters himself makes clear in 'New Merz Picture', with its contemplative mood and coarse dabs of colour. The sombre restraint of Pino Antoni is likewise in sharp contrast to the works of the exuberant early Merz period.

Schwitters’ work was ruthlessly defamed by the Nazis, and he kept a low profile during the Third Reich. His works were exhibited in a series of ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibitions that began early in 1933 and culminated in the infamous 'Entartete Kunst' exhibition in Munich in mid-1937. The printed edition of his literary masterpiece, a sound poem named the Ursonate, was seized by the SS in the same year and publicizing the Merzbau became impossible in Germany. His careers as an artist, writer and typographer came to an end, and he was robbed of much of the urban impetus that had been crucial to his work.

As his professional sources of income dried up, he spent more and more time in Norway painting portraits and landscapes and selling them to tourists. He emigrated to Norway in January 1937, for reasons that have never been fully explained, though the Gestapo were certainly on his trail, possibly because of his connections with the Hanover Resistance, which had been uncovered in autumn 1936. I like Schwiiters photomontage work as it has a verity of techniques within it, he uses a rough, rugged and torn look for some pieces and then uses a neat, tidy and computerised look for others. I prefer the rougher and older looking images as I think they look better because you can see how they are pieced together and this shows you that you can do something of the same quality as Shwiiters yourself and by hand.

hannah hoch - photomontage

Hannah Hoch was born the daughter of a painter and insurance company manager in Gotha, Germany in 1889. Hoch attended the College of Arts and Crafts in Berlin studying glass design and graphic arts. She also studied calligraphy, embroidery, fabric, and wallpaper design. She took a short break to work under the Red Cross in the beginning of World War I, but later continued her studies of graphics in 1915 at the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts working with women’s handicrafts and fabric designs under Ullstein Verlang from 1916-1926.

In post-war Berlin Hannah Höch met and established a relationship with Raoul Hausmann, one of the driving forces behind Dada. Together they set about learning the techniques of photomontage. Whereas for many of the other Dadaists, this art form was an interesting experiment, later discarded, for Höch it was the beginning of life-long love affair. Hoch became friends with Raoul Hausmann in 1915 and was influenced to join the Berlin Dada movement. She is recognized as the only German woman participant in Dadaism, and although this was a great feminist achievement Hans Richter described her as, “the girl who procured sandwiches, beer and coffee, on a limited budget”. Hoch used these negative views to strengthen her work in the future and she first exhibited her work in the Novembergruppe in 1920.

 Hoch experimented with non-objective art through painting, collage, photography and graphics. She pieced these together and worked with a style that would later become known as photomontage. More often than not her work was centered on women as they are depicted in media in comparison with actuality. She formed women from mannequins, brides, children, and dolls; everything deemed unimportant or small in society. To combat the stereotyped idea of objectified women she created many pieces combining males and females. Among her major works, Cut with the Kitchen-knife set Hoch apart from her male colleagues, portraying a balance in composition and expressing her opinions of the power of women. Her most exciting work of the 1920’s included From the Ethnographic Museum, 17 montages of females and their identities.

 Peter Boswell wrote in a catalog entitiel The Photomontages of Hanna Hoch that her work evolved “from mordant social commentary to surrealist fantasy to outright abstraction. Her genius lies in the sensitivity with which she took in the world around her. The image of Hoch in her old age, peering owl-like through her magnifying glass, is indelible,” He continued. ”Hunched over her worktable, looking through her glass at the printed ephemera of her world, she slices it delicately apart and pieces it carefully back together so that we may see it more clearly.” Photomontage became an accepted and celebrated medium during the late 1920’s and Hoch became recognized as a great pioneer of the artform.

lino printing

Lino printing is fairly easy, Firstly a design is choose to be printed. A mirror image of this design is transferred to the lino block. Typically this is done using tracing paper or sometimes the sketch is made directly to the lino block Areas of the design are then carved from the lino block.

The areas of the block witch you haven’t cut away are the areas that get printed. once you have finished removing the areas you wish to remain white the block is then ready to be inked, select the colour of ink you wish to use and roll out a thin layer onto a smooth flat surface with a roller and then roll the ink onto the surface of the tile so that it covers all of the uncut areas. then place the material you wish to print on over the top of the tile and use a clean roller to roll over the back of the material to print the image from the tile onto it.


once you have made your first set of prints you can cut away more sections of the tile if you wish and print in a different colour over the top and still have the same image but with different colours on it instead of just one colour.

Typically this printing process is carried out manually but it can also be done using a printing press. For most people the manually process is just fine but if you are looking for professional quality prints then a printing press is the next step.

for the prints that i have done, i used an image that was created by an artist called Keith haring but to make things more interesting i looked at another artist named Andy Warhol and took influence of block colours and put that technique into my own work which turned out very successful

Tracey Emin - prints

Tracey Emin was born 3 July 1963 in Croydon and is an English artist. She is part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs (Young British Artists).

Emin's monoprints are a well documented part of her creative output. These unique drawings represent a diaristic aspect and frequently depict events from the past for example, Poor Love , From The Week Of Hell '94  and Ripped Up , which relate to a traumatic experience after an abortion or other personal events as seen in Fuck You Eddy and Sad Shower in New York which are both part of the Tate's collection of Emin's art

Often they incorporate text as well as image, although some bear only text and others only image. The text appears as the artist's stream of consciousness voice. Some critics have compared Emin's text-only monoprints to ransom notes. The rapid, one-off technique involved in making monoprints is perfectly suited to immediate expression, as is Emin's scratchy and informal drawing style. Emin frequently misspells words, deliberately or due to the speed at which she did each drawing

Emin created a key series of monoprints in 1997 with the text Something's Wrong or There Must Be Something Terebley Wrong With Me written with spelling mistakes intact in large capital letters alongside "forlorn figures surrounded by space, their outlines fragile on the page. Some are complete bodies, others only female torsos, legs splayed and with odd, spidery flows gushing from their vaginas. They are all accompanied by the legend There's Something Wrong."

In 1997 her work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, a tent appliquéd with names, was shown at Charles Saatchi's Sensation exhibition held at the Royal Academy in London. The same year, she gained considerable media exposure when she appeared drunk and swearing on a live Channel 4 TV discussion.

Print Making

many famous artists do print making, such as andy warhol and trasi henen, so we decided to have a go at print making ourselves. We used a type of printing called mono print which is quite straight forward, you roll out a thin layer ink onto a surface then place a piece of a material of your choice over the top and draw onto the material which creates a print of your drawing in ink on the side of material that is faced down. But the hard part is not to touch any part of the material other than what you are drawing as the ink will print onto the material where you have touched it and give you an unclean looking image. to create the image you can use many different objects, for example you could use a thicker object for thicker lines or something very small for sharp lines also the more pressure you apply to the object the darker the lines would come up.

after doing a few testers with random images and techniques to get the hang of things, we had to find an image to use that linked to a specific artist that we were given as part of a "doodle" project, in our case the artist was Keith haring. I chose to do a print of a man in the style of the image of Keith's work show above and i printed it onto backgrounds that i had successfully constructed myself of materials such as newsprint, cartridge paper, parcel paper, sugar paper and news print. A few of the prints i created are shown below.

This is my favourite print of the series i created, I did this by printing in blue ink onto newsprint and tissue paper of multiple colours. I got quite thick and bold lines with this print as i applied more pressure to the object i was using to create the print which was a thick graphite stick. I think that this print came out nicely even though i accidentally placed my finger in two places and causing a slight transfer of the ink.

This was my first attempt at creating my own background and i do not like the outcome i did not use enough colour and do not like the thin lines that are quite faint, this image was printed using a pencil which is why the lines are thin and i could not apply much pressure to darken the lines as the pencil would have snapped.

Julien Renault - digital illustration

Julien Renault is a french art director and also a graphic designer and illustrator.

From looking at julien's work you know that she has a wide range of skills and a lot of When you look at Juliens work you can see that she likes to combine made up charactors and objects with real life objects for example she takes a pain of trainers and places cartoon caractors on the image with them to make it seem as if they are playing and climbing on the object.


i like juliens work as it combines surreal and real in a way that is not too over the top and is just right, her use of colour in her work is something that i feel she has really took into concideration as the colours in one image all go well together and are not too bright or too dull which makes the image even nicer to look at. 

The charactors that Julien has created are unusual and have abnormal features that are "monster" like but they also come across as friendly and cute.

Chris Dent, digital illustration

London-based illustrator Chris Dent focuses on incredibly detailed but sparsely colored bird’s eye views of cities. Chris Dent has a talent for visually lifting a city’s skeleton, and then applying a depth of detail in his illustrations to reveal its suggestive soul.

Captivating his love of architecture, metropolitan cityscapes and environments, his precise pen work showcases a style solitary to his own. Chris graduated from Camberwell College of Arts in London in 2006, where he studied Illustration.


 His work explores his fascination and intrigue within all forms of buildings, cities and inner city life. Chris creates obsessive energetic visions of city life, with the majority of his work in mono. Much of his early work has been based on his fascination with NYC and street culture incorporating his love for music; this can been seen in recent publications for Capital Records, Zoo York, Jones LaSalle, Pernod, Don't Panic, The Great Eastern Hotel, Oki-ni, Swindle Mag, Kingpin, Dazed and Confused, Lodown, Noise, Purpose, Point, Illustrated Ape.

I really like Dent's work as it has a lot of detail that is made up of simple lines, He uses a minimum ammount of colour that is not bold and in your face but is a calm more natural wich gives his work the "nice to look at effect.


Although his work is busy the pale colours help it to seem more relaxed and still stay interesting at the same time.

Tommy Penton, digital illustration

Tommy Penton is a successful graphic designer and a freelance Illustrator who is best known for working with artists such as Embrace, Babyshambles, New Order, Morcheeba and Talvin Singh, creating posters and CD artworks. Tommy has worked on nationwide advertising campaigns and worked for major brands such as British Airways, Kenzo, Virgin, Fabric, CIMA& Edinburgh Film Festival. Tommy created a book that was an "illustrated walk", it gave its readers a view of London that was both familiar and bizarre to them, like a wonderful panorama, it allowed people to follow the river Thames from Tate Modern to Tate Britain in a way that was even more exciting.


Penton's work to me is appealing in the way that alot of it features bright colours and a lot of people may find this a good element about his work but for me it is a bit of an eye strain. I do like that he brings the element of surrealism into his work as this makes it unique, and a lot more interesting.

Penton adds more detail by drawing patches instead of using lines. For example the patches drawn onto the man in the image to the right. I find this to be quite unsuccessful as it makes the things like the clothes and faces look quite shabby.

Pentons plain black and white images to me work a lot better than those with colour as there is more for you to work out yourself rather than than whats happening being right there in your face element of wonder to the image.

In my opinion penton's work is more interesting and more successful in black and white.

olivier kugler, digital illustration

Olivier Kugler, was born in Germany in 1970, he served in the military and upon completion of his period with the forces he became a student of graphic design in Pforzheim in Germany and worked as a designer in Karlsruhe for a few years he soon got terribly bored with it and ended up receiving a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service to do a masters degree in illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

I like Kugler's work because it is reality but it seems realistic in an unusual way, for example the block colours of clothing and skin makes it pleasant to look at and helps you to identify what it is that but you know that in reality this would not occur and this is one of the reasons that his work intrigues me.

 I also like how Kugler trys to include as much detail as possible but still limits himself to using simple and minimum amounts of lines. When drawing a roof he only puts small clusters of rectangles on the surface that was drawn in as the roof and this lets us identify that it is tiled as shown on the image on the right hand side of this paragraph, this to me is very effective and just adds to the quality of his work.

andy warhol - pop art

Andy Warhol is a great artist and he is known all over the world for his outstanding work. After studying fine art in college, Warhol moved to New York City and began illustrating for magazines and creating advertisements. He became very popular, especially for his drawings of shoes. Warhol's artwork ranged in many forms of media that include hand drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, and music. He was a pioneer in computer-generated art using Amiga computers that were introduced in 1985, just before his death in 1987.

During the 1960s, Warhol began creating the paintings he is best known for today. Warhol loved pop culture and he decided to paint what he loved.Warhol painted large pictures of Coca-Cola bottles, Campbell’s soup cans, and dollar bills That are still observed by the public and other artists today. He also painted pictures of celebrities, and he painted a beautiful multicoloured image of Marilyn Monroe that became of of his most famous pieces. It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of iconic American objects such as dollar bills, mushroom clouds, electric chairs, Campbell's Soup Cans, Coca-Cola bottles, celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, Troy Donahue, Muhammad Ali and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as newspaper headlines or photographs of police dogs attacking civil rights protesters.

Andy Warhol's work leaves you wanting to see more of it as it is bold and beautiful, his work intrigues me and i believe that the bright colours were used as they make things bolder and show that the image was made to be happy and warm looking. I recommend that people who haven't seen his work should take a look at his creations as it is inspirational as well as beautiful.

noel fielding - Brilliantly bizzare

fieldings with a piece from his second exhibition

Noel fieldings work is in the style of surrealism and in my opinion is brilliant. He held his first exhibition, entitled Psychedelic Dreams of the Jelly Fox at Maison Bertaux in early 2008. He claimed that he was inspired by Henri Rousseau, René Magritte, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, and Dexter Dalwood, He has also revealed that he feels inspired by Salvador Dalí.

A second exhibition entitled "Bryan Ferry vs the Jelly Fox" took place at the same place as the first at Maison Bertaux, from 5 July 2010 through to 5 January 2011. On 6 September 2011, Fielding received Honorary Masters Degrees from Buckinghamshire New University for his ongoing interest in the graphics area and support for many art organisations. In October 2011, Fielding released an art book called 'Scribblings of a Madcap Shambleton', which he produced alongside a co star from a program called The Mighty Boosh Dave Brown. It features many of his old and new paintings, drawings and photography.

fieldings with a piece from his first exhibition

I like how noel goes over the top when enlarging parts/features of the face on some paintings and how he only uses minimum amounts of details.I love how he puts bright colours together to make the image really attract your attention and think this makes what makes the images brilliant.