The Artists Who Redesigned a War-Shattered Europe
The Museum of Modern Art debuts a transformative acquisition of Soviet, Polish, German and Dutch graphic arts from after World War I.
“The Hand Has Five Fingers,” a photomontage by John Heartfield, was the election poster of the German Communist Party in the Weimar Republic elections of 1928. The party was designated with the number 5 on the ballot, and the caption reads: “The hand has five fingers! With five, you seize the enemy!”Credit.John Heartfield and The Museum of Modern Art
Dec. 17, 2020
Hostile times don’t automatically engender great art. Let’s put to rest that chestnut, which resurfaced during and after the 2016 election and which, as the presidency of Donald J. Trump draws to a close, is looking pretty deflated. A crisis can inspire your vision, but just as easily it can wash you out. And rising to the challenges of an anxious age takes ambition, stamina and not a little bravery.
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