John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld; 19 June 1891 – 26 April 1968) was a German visual artist who pioneered the use of art as a political weapon.

[1] In 1899, Helmut, his brother Wieland, and their sisters Lotte and Hertha were abandoned in the woods by their parents after Franz Herzfeld was accused of blasphemy.

In 1916, he and George Grosz experimented with pasting pictures together, a form of art later named photomontage, and which would become a central characteristic of their work.

During the 1920s, Heartfield produced a great number of photomontages, many of which were reproduced as dust jackets for books such as his montage for Upton Sinclair's The Millennium.

His political montages regularly appeared on the cover of Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung from 1930 to 1938, a popular weekly whose circulation (as many as 500,000 copies at its height) rivaled any other contemporary German magazine.

[5] In 1934, he combined four bloody axes tied together to form a swastika to mock the "Blood and Iron" motto of the Reich (AIZ, Prague, 8 March 1934).

He was interrogated[note 1][7] and released having narrowly avoided a trial for treason, but was denied admission into the East German Akademie der Künste (Academy of the Arts).

Using Heartfield's minimal props and stark stages, Brecht interrupted his plays at key junctures to have the audience be part of the action and not lose themselves in it.

In 1967, he visited Britain and began preparing a retrospective exhibition of his work, which was subsequently completed by his widow Gertrud and the Berlin Academy of Arts, and shown at the ICA in London in 1969.

[14] From 15 April to 6 July 1993, the New York City Museum of Modern Art hosted an exhibition of Heartfield's original montages.

Hurray, There's No Butter Left, was the text on the bottom of a photo of a German family, which can be found in a political comic posted into a banned communist magazine, in 1935.

Slovenian and former Yugoslav avant-garde music group Laibach has a number of references to Heartfield's works: the original band's logo, the 'black cross', references Heartfield's art Der alte Wahlspruch im "neuen" Reich: Blut und Eisen (1934), a cross made of four axes, as can be seen on the inner sleeves and labels of their 1987 album Opus Dei.

British hardcore punk band Discharge used Heartfield's work "Peace and Fascism" for the cover artwork of their 7-inch EP Never Again, 1981.

Armenian-American alternative metal band System of a Down used Heartfield's poster for the Communist Party of Germany (The Hand Has Five Fingers) as cover art on their 1998 self-titled debut album.

German experimental group Einstürzende Neubauten reference Heartfield and his brother Wieland Herzfelde, as well as other Dadaist and Futurist artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, George Grosz and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in the track "Let's Do It a Dada" from their 2007 album Alles wieder offen.