What Are Artists For? Merrill C. Berman Collection: MoMA [ART]

John Heartfield's The Hand Has Five Fingers (1928), a campaign poster for German Communist Party 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Merrill C. Berman Collection

“The title ‘artist’ is an insult,” the German Communists George Grosz and John Heartfield declared in 1920. Grosz subsided into satirical painting and drawing, but Heartfield became a dedicated propagandist who cast Hitler as a puppet of capitalism and savaged centrist opposition to the tyrant’s rise. The cover of the show’s catalogue features Heartfield’s photograph of a worker’s soiled, forward-grasping hand, which was used for a poster promoting the Communist Party in a Weimar election in 1928. The image seems rather more menacing than rallying. It is at an extreme of the era’s politically weaponized design, which generally took less inflammatory forms in Germany and other European democracies. These countries incubated movements that are well represented in the exhibition but tangential to its Russian focus—Futurism, Dada, the Bauhaus. In Russia, there was no partisan campaigning because there was only one party. After 1917, it won the ardent allegiance of a generation of creative types who reconceived of the artist as a self-abnegating servant of the masses and the state—or who professed to, whatever their private misgivings. 

What is an artist, anyway? moma’s show stalks the question. The works on paper from the Merrill C. Berman Collection include designs for Communist posters and salad oil advertisements

Read more over at The New Yorker