Style combination · Pairs well
AIZ Political Photomontage × Simplicissimus Satirical Style
Simplicissimus frames a drawn caricature between a set title and a one-line caption; once it dulled its satire in the First World War, the sharpest graphic satire passed to Grosz, Kollwitz and Heartfield. Keep that title-picture-caption sentence and swap the drawing for a seamless montage to make the satire look like evidence.
Mix them and make something AIZ Political Photomontage Simplicissimus Satirical Style
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield) Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)
- Type from Simplicissimus Satirical Style
- Colour from Simplicissimus Satirical Style
- Form from Simplicissimus Satirical Style
-
AIZ Political Photomontage avoids stylised figuration: this is where the two pull against each other.
- Composition from AIZ Political Photomontage
- Surface from AIZ Political Photomontage
-
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Simplicissimus Satirical Style
Sure.
UnifrakturMaguntia, standing in for Set Fraktur for the title centred above each drawing and for the parenthetical artist credit ('(Zeichnung von Rudolf Wilke)', '(Th. Th. Heine)')
Text · AIZ Political Photomontage
The political photomontage John Heartfield made for the communist weekly AIZ from 1930 to 1938, in Berlin and, from 1933, in Prague exile. Press photographs were cut, joined, retouched with airbrush and rephotographed into one seamless, believable picture that usually takes an opponent's slogan or symbol, most often a Nazi one, literally and, less often, raises a heroic emblem such as the clenched fist. It was printed full-page in single-ink photogravure between a short headline and a deadpan caption or quotation in plain bold sans.
Jost; AIZ Political Photomontage used Bold geometric or grotesque sans capitals of the Erbar and Bold geometric or grotesque sans upper- and lowercase, often with a double-storey a, for the punchline, often reversed white out of the dark gravure ('Kleiner Mann bittet um große Gaben', 1932; 'Hurrah, die Butter ist alle!', 1935; 'Die Stimme der Freiheit in deutscher Nacht – auf Welle 29,8', 1937)
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Simplicissimus Satirical Style, with a counter-accent from AIZ Political Photomontage. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield) Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)
-
#f0e6ccground · 36% -
#1b1a18ink · 14% -
#c4382caccent · 18% -
#c6a67caccent · 14% -
#d6a444accent · 10% -
#86603faccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f0e6cc;
--ink: #1b1a18;
--accent-1: #c4382c;
--accent-2: #c6a67c;
--accent-3: #d6a444;
--accent-4: #86603f;
--font-display: "UnifrakturMaguntia", serif;
--font-text: "Jost", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield): The montages turn swastikas and portraits of Nazi leaders against the regime; displaying Nazi symbols is restricted by law in Germany and several other countries outside contexts such as art, satire, education and history, so keep any reuse unmistakably critical and check the rules where the work will be shown. AIZ was also a communist magazine informally financed by the Comintern: before 1933 its montages attacked the Social Democrats as well as the Nazis, and in 1934 it devoted a special issue to seventeen years of the Soviet Union, so treat the style as partisan propaganda, and do not turn its literal, accusatory montage on named living people without checking defamation and image-rights law.
Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich): Its caricature works by types, and that cuts both ways. Some pages drew colonised Africans as caricatures even when the target was the colonisers (Heine's Kolonialmächte, 1904). From August 1914 the magazine backed the war and turned its satire on the enemy nations, including racist pictures of non-European and Russian troops, and in the Weimar years it still ran nationalist jokes against the Allied victors and France. After 1933 it followed the Nazi line, including antisemitic satire, while Heine, hated by the Nazis not least for his Jewish origin, was forced out and fled. Several of its canonical draughtsmen served the regime: Hitler made Thöny an honorary professor in 1938 and put him on the Gottbegnadeten list in 1944; Schilling, a fierce critic of the Nazis before 1933, became their propagandist; and in the last issue of September 1944 Gulbransson, Schilling and Thöny supplied propaganda drawings. Take the method of 1896–1914 and 1919–1933 (one framed drawing, flat tints, a spoken punchline) and aim it at power. Exaggerate the uniform, bearing and costume of the powerful, not ethnicity, religion, disability or the bodies of the powerless. The profiteer, the usurer and the octopus gripping its victims (Heine's Der Wucher, 1923) were also stock antisemitic codes in these years, so mark a profiteer by class (top hat, monocle, fur collar), never by ethnic features. Gulbransson (d. 1958), George Grosz (d. 1959) and Bruno Paul (d. 1968) are still in copyright in the EU, until the end of 2028, 2029 and 2038; Heine's work has been public domain there since 2019. Draw your own, do not present a new design as a Simplicissimus page, and do not use the bulldog as a mark.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With AIZ Political Photomontage
- NSK Retro-Avant-Garde Contrasts · NSK lifts Nazi and socialist emblems whole into solemn, centred heraldry and over-identifies with power, leaving the verdict open; AIZ builds the same kind of centred emblem, like the axe swastika, but always adds a caption that convicts. Choose by whether the viewer should be left uneasy or told what to think.
- Surrealist Graphics Pairs well · Surrealist photography also makes the impossible look photographed; take its dream logic when a brief needs strangeness, and add the AIZ headline and caption when that strangeness has to land a political point.
- Russian Constructivism Contrasts · Constructivist photomontage drives heroic figures along diagonals with bars, red ink and exploding type; AIZ uses the same cut photographs in a centred, single-ink picture with a quiet caption, mostly to mock and sometimes, as in the 1937 radio-wave fist, to rally. The debt is direct: Heartfield spent April 1931 to January 1932 in the Soviet Union, looked after by Sergei Tretyakov and, it seems, getting on well with Gustav Klutsis, and the Art Institute of Chicago traces the 1934 many-arms fist cover to Klutsis's 1932 election poster of one raised hand repeated into a crowd.
- Situationist Détournement Graphics Pairs well · Both turn the opponent's own words and pictures against their source; take détournement's scattered press fragments and rewritten speech balloons for a looser, cheaper attack, and AIZ's seamless single picture when the charge must look like a photograph of fact.
- ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics Pairs well · Both put a photograph under a one-line charge against named people; set Gran Fury's facts and demands in small print beneath a Heartfield-style literal metaphor when the accusation needs evidence.
- West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow) Pairs well · Heartfield tied four bloody axes into a swastika in 1934; Rambow's broken pencils laid into a swastika over a 1938 PEN list (1983) make the same move of an object turned into an emblem. Borrow the AIZ caption when the poster must accuse, and Rambow's wordless object when it should commemorate.
- Israeli Political Poster (Tartakover to Lemel) Pairs well · Compare how a recognisable photographed object becomes an accusation, but keep the Hebrew slogan and local reference specific; resemblance in the montage method is not evidence of direct historical influence.
- Stenberg Brothers Constructivist Film Poster Pairs well · Borrow the political photomontage cut-and-assemble method, then add the Stenbergs' exaggerated scale for dynamism.
With Simplicissimus Satirical Style
- Expressionist Woodcut Graphics Contrasts · Both distort the figure in protest, but Expressionist prints gouge it from the woodblock with angular, raw marks; Simplicissimus keeps a clean brush contour and flat tints, and adds a punchline.
- Art Nouveau Contrasts · The parent: Heine took over the Jugendstil idiom, but where Art Nouveau spends the whiplash line on flowers and idealised women, Simplicissimus spends it on a grotesque type and a caption. Choose it when the curve should mock rather than adorn.
- Japonisme Pairs well · Heine drew on Japanese woodcuts: add japonisme's cropped asymmetry and silhouetted figures against blank grounds to give a caricature more air and bite.
- Plakatstil / Sachplakat Pairs well · The NDB places Heine's posters at the start of the new poster style: borrow the Sachplakat's single object and bold block lettering for a satirical poster that keeps Simplicissimus's flat silhouette and red-on-black.
- Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) Contrasts · A later weekly humour magazine of the same satirical stance: Gırgır, Penguen and Uykusuz pack covers with speech balloons, comic strips and colour; Simplicissimus gives one framed drawing and one caption.
- Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Tradition Pairs well · Set the title and the spoken caption in Fraktur, as the magazine did on almost every page, to anchor a caricature in German print culture around 1900.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Contrasts · A contemporary in cheap satirical print around 1900 (Simplicissimus cost 10 pfennig an issue), but Posada's broadsheets pair a heavy relief cut with white-line hatching and shouting mixed display type above columns of verse, black on coloured paper; Simplicissimus gives one clean-contoured drawing with flat tints and a Fraktur caption.
- Dada Contrasts · George Grosz drew for Simplicissimus but in Berlin Dada turned satire into photomontage and typographic chaos; choose Simplicissimus for a drawn, legible joke, Dada for a cut-up assault.