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
In moments of turmoil, what does it mean to be an artist? A quiet show of small works on ageing paper might not, at first glance, be the resounding answer that this kind of big question seemingly calls for. Then again, in a year that cannot stop shouting, the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) capsule show,
Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: the Artist Reinvented, might well be the small, still voice to heed.
The New York exhibition opening this weekend heralds the addition to MoMA’s drawings and prints holdings of a core set of works from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, considered one of the greatest to focus on political art. From John Heartfield’s communist poster designs to Kurt Schwitters’s lesser-known page layouts and Liubov Popova’s splendid linocuts and collages, the show highl