On December 31, 1918, the artists George Grosz, John Heartfield and Wieland Herzfelde joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Working with the party, they practiced and promoted tendency art (Tendenzkunst), i.e. committed art, an art of use to the working class in the struggle against exploitation and oppression.
Before joining the KPD, Heartfield and Herzfelde had already begun to publish anti-military and anti-government art and literature. This evolved into the Malik Verlag, a small press which they and Grosz used to oppose the policies of the Socialists who headed the Weimer Republic and who had, then, joined forces with the old imperial powers against the workers. In 1919, for instance, there were 5,000 strikes in Germany, almost every one a battle with the government, its troops and its paramilitary allies (the Free Corps).
In these essays Grosz, Heartfield and Herzfelde discuss tendency art, its opposition to bourgeois formalist art, and how it is to be used in concrete ways to aid the proletariat in the class struggle. For these artists, art is not for contemplation or for museums but for action, for working class neighborhoods and for the streets.
|
