BRITISH DISCOVERIES
MELLOW, JAMES R.
On Art BRITISH DISCOVERIES BY JAMES R. MELLOW London The current art season here has been marked by few surprises. Most galleries are showing the customary modern masters and select salon...
...Now at the Leicester Museum after a stay at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank, it gives a thorough account of the development of Biederman's art, and includes a well-documented catalogue...
...He has in fact maintained a somewhat Thoreauvian isolation from the New York art scene, despite occasional showings...
...The irony, of course, is that Biederman, now 63 and the artist of Red Wing, Minnesota, for the past 27 years, has never been given such attention in New York...
...Born Helmut Herzfeld in 1891, the son of a radical German poet, Heartfield anglicized his name during World War I and attempted, unsuccessfully, to have it legalized as a protest against anti-British feeling in Berlin...
...It worked admirably...
...Most galleries are showing the customary modern masters and select salon groups...
...Perhaps New York viewers will be granted an opportunity to see, if not the complete English showing, at least a significant portion of it...
...one-man exhibitions by the young turks now familiar in New York-artists like William Tucker or Tim Scott, for instance-have not been much in evidence...
...It is impossible to know how Heartfield, a lifetime opponent of political oppression, would have responded to the betrayal of his political principles and to the invasion of a country that had once afforded him refuge...
...It is the brilliant particularity of his political montages that works most often...
...Behind him the larger figure of a German industrialist is cropped to nothing more than a great paunch and a benevolent hand dropping thousand-mark notes into Hitler's open palm...
...Another of the more striking montages, entitled Millions Stand Behind Me: The Origins of the Hitler Salute, shows a small Adolf, not in the familiar rigor mortis salute, but with his arm raised slackly above his head...
...in collaboration with Grosz, around 1916, he produced collages for Dada publications, incorporating bits of photographs and typography...
...The current exhibition-handsomely installed at the Institute of Contemporary Art Galleries in Nash House-presents some 236 items, including Heartfleld's early Dadaist collages, political montages, book-jacket designs (a number of them for works by Upton Sinclair, who seems to have been very popular with German radicals), and the theater sets and posters he designed for the Kammerspiele Theater and the Berliner Ensemble...
...For the most part, though, the structure of Brecht's play (a series of sourly comic vaudeville turns) follows the march of historical events: Hitler's rise to power, the Reichstag fire, the Roehm purge, the murder of Austrian Chancellor Dolfuss...
...The London exhibition constitutes a very unusual tribute to an American artist in recognition of his influence (though more through his theoretical writings than his work) on a cluster of well-established English constructivists, of whom the most notable is probably Victor Pasmore...
...In his later years, he reworked several of his earlier photomontages (substituting, for example, images from the Vietnam war for pictures of a Japanese raid on Manchuria) to prove that his efforts were still topical...
...Like Heartfleld's montages, the play succeeds more often as a brilliant historical farce rather than (as in the salute scene) for any profundity or complexity in its message...
...Following World War II, Heartfield returned to East Berlin, there creating set designs and posters for a number of theatrical pro-ducions, including some for his friend Bertolt Brecht...
...It was not, however, until after World War I that he turned this adaptation of Cubist collage into his own unique genre...
...The scene-and it brought down the house-Is one in which Ui, preparing for his future glory, takes lessons in elocution and stage presence from a drunken Shakespearean actor, and tries to attune his fumbling body to the pompous, sweeping gesticulations of his mentor's delivery of Marc Antony's funeral oration...
...The two events had some striking similarities, for Brecht had created a kind of theatrical montage, transposing the figures of Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, and Roehm to Chicago's gangsterland of the '20s...
...From Prague, following the Munich agreement and the German demand for his extradition, he fled to England in 1938...
...With the rise of Hitler's Third Reich, Heartfield began pasting together images found in the illustrated weeklies and old books, producing caustic political satires that soon appeared regularly in the pages of the Arbeiter Illus-trierte Zeitung, an anti-Nazi paper...
...The exhibit's special emphasis is on his brightly colored planar constructions of the past several decades...
...Another artist-no better known in New York-who has just been given an important exhibition in London is John Heartfield, a German inventor of the photomontage technique that is now standard practice in graphic design...
...But following Heartfield's death, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Russian and East German forces intervened...
...Except for a brief period when he was interred as an "enemy alien," he lived quietly in Hamp-stead amid a colony of refugee Germans, working as a designer of book jackets for English publishers...
...His book-cover designs have an historical interest, of course, being among the first of their type, but graphic artists have since put the technique to more sophisticated uses...
...It is a Punch and Judy show with fascist cant being thwacked over the head by liberal and Marxist jargon...
...The title he frequently applied to the very last collections of his work was "Unfortunately, Still Timely...
...The Heartfield exhibition was originally scheduled for the Camden Art Gallery in the fall of 1968...
...Ui's solution is a tour de force in pantomine, the discovery of an official style able to accommodate both his uncontrollable ambitions and his uncontrollable limbs...
...Leonard Rossiter gave a stunning performance as the obsequious and frantic Ui, a creature of diabolical ineptitude and spastic gestures, burning nevertheless with a hard, gemlike flame...
...The play's most outstanding scene was, like Heartfleld's montage, devoted to the origins of the Hitler salute, and of the goose-step...
...What seems evident from the Nash House exhibition is that Heartfleld's most successful works are the montages dealing with Hitler and the history of the Nazi regime...
...An ironic twist, however, is the large retrospective (151 paintings, drawings and constructions) of work by Charles Biederman, an elderly, neglected American constructivist and theoretician (who calls himself a Structurist...
...On occasion, he had to resort to having photographs made just for his montages...
...Together with artists like George Grosz and Hannah Hoch, Heartfield was an influential member of the Berlin Dada circle...
...His campaign against Hitler was obdurate...
...Heartfield's political sympathies were radical and Marxist from the day, in 1918, when he and his brother-wieland Herzfeld, a German publisher, founder of the Malik Verlag-joined the Communist party...
...The attempt was partly a Dadaist gesture, but it illustrates the kind of courage Heart-field demonstrated throughout his career as one of those few able to turn the usual Dada protest into an effective form of political agitation...
...Biederman has not exerted a similar influence on any segment of American art...
...I was told here in London that at least one unnamed New York dealer had flown over expressly to inspect the new "British discovery...
...But ordinarily, Heartfield was a kind of exalted ragpicker, poring through the visual debris of the publication world, turning the art of the found object-or found image-to specifically political account...
...Judging from reminiscenses published in the catalogue (such as brief tributes from Brecht and Louis Aragon), Heartfield was a perfectionist...
...The British tactfully postponed the event rather than risk an incident by showing a German artist who-as one of the East German officials would have it?took up residence in the German Democratic Republic, where he found that his ideals were being implemented...
...On that jacket, designed for Sinclair's Mountain City (translated into German as So macht man Dollars), the figures are shown clambering up a large gilded dollar sign...
...The night before visiting the Heartfield show, I saw a brilliant production of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Ar-turo Ui, directed by Michael Blake-more at the Saville Theater...
...Heartfield died in East Berlin in April 1968...
...There is an amusing blow-by-blow sequence of photographs showing three men, one of them in the stock capitalist garb of top hat and tails, mounting some construction scaffolding to assume the correct positions for a dust-jacket arrangement...
...Hitler, for example, as a hausfrau with knife confronting a French rooster while the leering face of Laval consoles the cockerel with the caption, "Don't be afraid?he's a vegetarian...
...The difficulty with political or propaganda art is that it tends to combat slogans with slogans...
...he continued within Germany until Easter 1933, when?with the Nazis pounding on his door -he barely managed to escape, making his way to Prague...
...His photographic commentaries?including a wry one of Goebbels trying to affix a Karl Marx beard to the face of Adolf Hitler at a time when the dictator was courting the German workers-earned him the hatred of the Nazis...
...Biederman's show has been sponsored by the Arts Council of Great Britain at the urging of English painter Robyn Denny...
Vol. 52 • November 1969 • No. 22
