AFTER THE GREAT WAR John Heartfield: The Social Critic One might ask, if there was a Third Reich, when were the first two Reichs and where does the Weimar Republic fit in? It’s an interesting question because in answering it, one comes to realize that the...
AFTER THE GREAT WAR Otto Dix and the Broken Soldiers To understand the Treaty of Versailles, everyone should read Magaret MacMillian’s Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. If reading a very long book on a treaty written one hundred years ago does not...
AFTER THE GREAT WAR Artists in Germany: George Grosz and John Heartfield in Dada Georg Groß was so horrified at the idea of doing his patriotic duty for the Kaiser and country that he went quite mad. The idea of descending into the hellish landscape of what would be...
GERMAN ARTISTS AT WAR The Good Soldier, Part Two A battlefield is not an artist’s natural habitat. Fighting in combat is not an artist’s métier. But Franz Marc (1880-1916) wrote very militant and martial tracts for the Blue Rider Almanac. In 1912 he said...
GERMAN ARTISTS AT WAR Part One The Art of Lying In 1928 Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, wrote on a newly significant topic–Propaganda. Bernays was well acquainted with his uncle’s theories of human psychology and injected tools of...
