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.