John Heartfield

John Heartfield turned photomontage into a political weapon and spent the Nazi years on a list, having spent the preceding decade putting the party's own imagery back in its face. He was born Helmut Herzfeld in Berlin and anglicised his name in 1916 as a protest against German wartime chauvinism, at some personal risk. He was a founder of Berlin Dada, worked with George Grosz, and joined the Communist Party in 1918. From 1930 he produced covers for the workers' illustrated paper AIZ that are among the most effective political images ever made: Hitler giving the salute while a faceless donor drops banknotes into his hand, captioned that millions stand behind him; the swastika built out of four bloodied axes; Goering as a butcher against the burning Reichstag. The Reichstag fire montage of 1933 is the one that decided his life. SS men came to his flat that year and he escaped over a balcony and through a cemetery to Czechoslovakia, where he kept publishing until the German government demanded his expulsion and the Czechs partly complied. He reached England in 1938, was interned as an enemy alien, and returned to East Germany in 1950, where he was distrusted for years for having spent the war in the West before being rehabilitated. His technique - a scissors, a photograph and a caption - required no press of his own. AIZ sold around half a million copies at its peak and was pinned up in flats and workplaces. His brother Wieland Herzfelde ran the publishing house behind it. The Tate and the MoMA both hold his work now, which took decades: for most of his life the art world classed photomontage as propaganda rather than art, and he agreed with the description while disputing the demotion.

• Lived: 1891 CE – 1968 CE
• Nationality: German
• Roles: artist