Social Kunst (Social Art), no. 8: Fotomontage (1932). Gurli Ketner and Torben Gregersen, issue eds. Letterpress, 10 1/4 x 8” (26 x 20 cm). One of nine issues of Social Kunst (Copenhagen: Mondes Forlag, 1931–1932), Harald Rue, series ed.
Scroll down (or click here) for full issue.

Social Kunst was a Danish periodical published by the international, left-wing (and until 1932, independent of the Danish Communist Party [DKP]) “Monde” group in 1931 and 1932.[1] It was premised on the idea that art, like society, had been transformed by the First Word War, and that art must be “subordinated” to the political and the social to remain relevant. In its nine issues, Social Kunst offered models of effective and accessible artistic form. Six issues were monographic—Aksel Jørgensen (no. 1), Anton Hansen (no. 2 and no. 7), Käthe Kollwitz (no. 3), Robert Storm Petersen (no. 5), and George Grosz (no. 9)—two were nation-based—art of the United States (no. 4) and in the Soviet Union (no. 6)—and one was dedicated to a technique: photomontage (no. 8).

Appearing in 1932, the photomontage issue included reproductions of thirty works by fourteen artists. Most dated from the previous three years and many had appeared in recent publications such as Foto-Auge (1929) and Moholy-Nagy: 60 Photos (1930).[2] Works by John Heartfield, the artist most amply represented in the volume, had appeared in Kurt Tucholsky’s Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles (1929) and in recent issues of the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (1930 and 1931).[3] By 1932, photomontage not only proliferated in such publications, but was the subject of critical debate in both Russia and Germany. In September 1931, Gustav Klutsis published his richly illustrated essay “Photomontage as a New Kind of Agitational Art” in the anthology Izofront (Art Front).[4] In November to December 1931, John Heartfield’s major exhibition in Moscow sparked policy debates regarding the relative virtues of Klutsis’s and Heartfield’s respective approaches.[5] In Germany, where photomontage had been introduced into contemporary artistic discourse by the Dadaists in 1920, its use-value and ubiquity in the illustrated press was also the subject of discussion. In 1930, a book on Fotomontage edited by Jan Tschichold promising to include “reproductions of numerous examples which will show the many possibilities offered by this new mode of form creation” was announced, but never appeared.[6] In spring 1931, the first synthetic exhibition of photomontage was presented at the Kunstbibliothek Berlin accompanied by a historically-conscious, well-illustrated catalogue reproducing examples of fine art, advertising, and political propaganda.[7] In the early 1930s, photomontage was closely aligned with left-wing ideology, but in 1932 even the early Nazi propaganda machine briefly tested its persuasive power toward their own ends.[8]

The 1932 photomontage issue of Social Kunst is far less well-known than Klutsis’s 1931 article or the Kunstbibliothek’s 1931 catalogue, but it is nonetheless notable as yet another publication to register the significance of the technique at this politically consequential moment when, despite Raoul Hausmann’s concern that “in our period of ‘new objectivity,’ photomontage is already outdated and unlikely to develop further,”[9] the technique was clearly recognized as the day’s most vital mode of (mass) visual communication. The author(s) of the unattributed introduction to the issue—possibly Gurli Ketner and Torben Gregersen, the issue’s editors, or Harald Rue, the series editor—were cognizant of the contemporary debates surrounding photomontage, but they had no stake in weighing the relative merits of Klutsis’s and Heartfield’s respective approaches. Both artists were well-represented: Heartfield featured on the cover; Klutsis in two color plates. Nor did they aspire to present an historical overview of the technique. Rather, their aim was to celebrate this form of revolutionary artistic expression as among the most powerful weapons in the contemporary artist’s arsenal to transform society. Photomontage combined the “objective,” “documentary” value of photography, with “a progression in thought, an unfolding of an idea.” Technological printing capabilities allowed it to appear in the “small, condensed format it has in Germany” or in the “emotive and monumental form” it had taken on in Soviet Russia. But it was ultimately photomontage’s critical, destabilizing qualities, its critical/analytical potential born of its dialectical mechanism, that set it in contrast to other forms of cohesive, reassuring propaganda, and insured its efficacy in transitional times. For these authors, photomontage’s agitational, critical thought-value qualified it as the “social art” of the present: “[…] an expression of the strongest and broadest unfurling of societal forces.”

—Adrian Sudhalter

[1] Social Kunst, Harald Rue, ed., nos. 1-9 (Copenhagen: Mondes Forlag, 1931–1932), complete in nine issues. Between 1928 and 1931, the Danish Monde-Gruppen published a local edition of Henri Barbusse’s journal Monde, before founding their own journal, Plan, in 1932. For more information, click here.
[2] Jan Tschichold and Franz Roh, Foto-Auge: 76 Fotos Der Zeit (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Fritz Wedekind, 1929). Franz Roh, ed. L. Moholy-Nagy: 60 Photos, Fototek, no. 1 (Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann), 1930.
[3] Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield, Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles: Ein Bilderbuch (Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1929). Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ; Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper), Willi Münzenberg, ed. (Berlin: Neue Deutscher Verlag, 1924–1933; Prague, 1933–1936).
[4] Gustav Klutsis, “Fotomontazh kak novyi vid agitatsionnogo iskusstva,” Izofront: Klassovaia bor’ba na fronte prostranstvennykh iskusstv, ed. Pavel Novitskii (Moscow: OGIZ-IZOGIZ, 1931), pp. 119 ff.
[5] See Hubertus Gassner, “Heartfield's Moscow Apprenticeship 1931–32,” in Peter Pachnicke and Klaus Honnef, eds. John Heartfield (New York: Abrams 1991), pp. 256-289 and Maria Gough, “Back in the USSR: John Heartfield, Gustavs Klucis, and the Medium of Soviet Propaganda,” New German Critique, no. 107 (Summer 2009), pp. 133-183. 
[6] The two realized books in the Fototek series—no. 1 (Moholy-Nagy) and no. 2 (Aenne Biermann)—listed Fototek no. 4 (Fotomontage) among the forthcoming books in the series. For a discussion of Tschichold’s plans for this volume, see Jessica Brier’s forthcoming book Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography (University of Minnesota Press, 2025).
[7] Curt Glaser and César Domela- Nieuwenhuis, Fotomontage, exhibition catalogue (Berlin: Staatliche Museen, Staatliche Kunstbibliothek, 1931). Surprisingly, the catalogue reproduced no works by Klutsis or Heartfield, although it included excerpts from Klutsis’s 1931 essay. For a discussion of this exhibition and full facsimile of the catalogue, see Adrian Sudhalter, “The Self-Reflectivity of Photomontage: Writing on and Exhibiting the Medium, 1920-1931,” Photomontage Between the Wars, 1918–1939: Selections from the Merrill C. Berman Collection (Madrid and Ottawa: Fundación Juan March and Carlton University Art Gallery, 2012), pp. 8–22; 125–156.
[8] Sabine Kriebel, “Photomontage in the Year 1932: John Heartfield and the National Socialists,” Oxford Art Journal vol. 31, no. 1 (2008), pp. 97–127.
[9] Raoul Hausmann, “Fotomontage,” A bis Z, no. 16 (May 1931), 61–62. Translated in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, Christopher Phillips, ed. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), pp. 178-81.

The full issue of Social Kunst, no. 8 (Fotomontage) is reproduced below. It is best viewed on a computer as it loses formatting on a mobile phone. The issue’s introduction, offered in English translation for the first time, can be read here. When known, previous reproductions of artworks are listed beneath each spread (in blue).  

According to Merrill C. Berman, both the issues of Social Kunst on Russian art (no. 6) and photomontage (no. 8) provided early guidelines to his collecting. Works in the Merrill C. Berman Collection that are reproduced on the issue’s pages are presented to the left (←) and right (→) of their corresponding spreads. All images can be clicked to increase their size.

←
MCB Collection work:
John Heartfield (German, 1891-1968)
Book cover: Upton Sinclair, So macht man Dollars. Berlin: Der Malik-Verlag, 1931
Offset lithograph, 7 1/4 x 18 1/2” (18.4 x 47 cm), extended

←
Previously reproduced in:
AIZ, vol. 10, no. 27 (1931), p. 531 as: Die letzte Weisheit der SPD: "Nieder mit dem Marxismus!"

→
Previously reproduced in:
Daesh’ (Let’s Produce), no. 10 (1929), n.p. [no caption]

→
Previously reproduced in:
AIZ vol. 10, no. 26 (1931), p. 517 as: Ob schwartz, ob weiß—im Kampf vereint!
John Heartfield, "Privet brot' iam po klassu,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo 37 (July 18, 1931), p. 2.

←
The original German text that accompanied the cover image in AIZ vol. 10, no. 26 (1931), p. 517 is translated into Danish in the colophon:

Whether black or white—
in struggle united! 
We know only one race,
we all know only one enemy—
the exploiting class.

→
Click here for English translation of introductory essay, “Photomontage as Political Art.”

→
MCB Collection work:
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895–1938)
Poster: SSSR - udarnaya brigada mirovogo proletariata (USSR - Shock Brigade for the World Proletariat), 1931
Lithograph, 56 1/2 x 40 5/8” (153.5 x 103.1 cm)
Formerly Merrill C. Berman Collection; now Harvard Art Museums (2023.130)

→
Previously reproduced in:
Cicerone, vol. 13, no. 4 (1921), p. 117, fig. 11 as: George Grosz. Metamechanisches Bild (dada-merika). 1920 (Konstruiert von dem Grosz-Heartfield-Konzern).
Foto-Auge (1929), pl. 8 as: george grosz & john heartfield, dada-merika (fotomontage).

→
Previously reproduced in:
Kurt Tucholsky, Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles (1929), p. 139 as: Das Parlament.