John Heartfield vs. Tadeusz Trepowski
It is amazing that when there is a large-scale war, how much it affects the populace can be seen not only through books and novels but largely through art. Take Guernica, for example, in which the famous painter Pablo Picasso was so distraught by the bombings in the city he painted a mural 3.5 meters high and 7.8 meters wide. The April 26, 1937 bombings induced chaos in the Basque region’s city, and many died as a result of the bombs dropped by German and Italian warplanes. The black, white, and gray mural has become a symbol of anti-war and a reminder of the suffering, shock, and pain experienced by victims of bombings. Graphic Design has been affected in similar ways by the wars of the past centuries, especially including those of World War I (WWI) and World War II (WWII). War posters and war propaganda are some of the most visually impacting and influential pieces to come out of their eras, and the diversity in which designers expressed their opinions on the war is equally amazing.
Designer John Heartfield was born in Germany in 1891 as Helmut Herzfeld, but as a protest against the Weimar Republic and the German militarism occurring in home country, he changed his name to John Heartfield. He criticized the Nazi party in everything he worked in, and was a pioneer in the use of art as a political weapon. A member of the German Dada movement, an offshoot of the Dada movement. The Dada movement sprouted out of the aftermath of WWI as a reaction to a world perceived as mad by many artists and designers. Heartfield specialized in photomontage, and his work was showcased all over the world. For many years, he stayed in Germany to do his work despite the threat of assassination. He ended up dying in East Berlin in 1968.
Tadeusz Trepkowski was a Polish designer born in 1914, and became part of an outgrowth of Dadaism known as Surrealist philosophy. Surrealist philosophy involved juxtaposed images placed in certain ways to help solve problems. This issues were usually complex and the resulting images had a larger visual impact than what was usually seen at first glance. Trepkowski worked mainly in poster design, commercial art, and display design. He lived through both WWI and WWII, so it is easy to understand why Trepkowski had designed powerful war posters.
In regard to these two designers, I specifically looked at John Heartfield’s 1936 photomontage Have No Fear – He’s a Vegetarian, and Tadeusz Trepkowski’s antiwar poster from 1953 commonly known as Nie! Both war posters rely on a strong understanding of the time and the conflicts occurring then. Despite being designed about twenty years apart, the emotions such as anger and frustration that accompanied many who lived through the war are evident. Both also heavily rely on the importance of symbols, such as the Nazi swastika and the French helmet on the rooster in Have No Fear – He’s a Vegetarian or the outline of a bomb in Nie! But what also makes these two pieces of design stand out from each other are just as important. John Heartfield’s use of a black and white photomontage showcases the subject in a brighter light. Unlike Nie! color would be much more distracting and take away from the message that Adolf Hitler is hungrily eyeing France as his conquest, or in this case, his victim. The photographs also make it seem more like it could have been a photo that was real, which also helps showcase the amount of irony Dadaism is known for. Nie!, on the other hand, features a muted color palette of shades of brown against a stony blue background. Trepkowski’s use of a warmer color on the building featured against the background inside the bomb immediately evokes the image of a city burning, such as London during the Blitz. Trepkowski also uses graphic elements instead of photomontage, creating a much more poster-like feel rather than that of a photograph.
