DIRECTION
Volume 2, Number 8: December 1939
John Heartfield [Cover Designer]
W. L. River, William Gropper, Thomas Cochran and M. Tjader Harris [Editors]: DIRECTION. Darien, CT: Volume 2, Number 8, December 1939. Original edition. Slim Quarto. Stapled printed wrappers. 40 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Wrappers lightly worn, creased and lightly embossed from the bound in BRC. The original photomontage cover by John Heartfield is a reworked version of an AIZ cover from 1932. Faint dampstain to lower edge of the first half of the textblock, so a nearly very good copy.
8.25 x 10.75 saddle-stitched magazine with 40 pages of fiction, social commentary and art. Early issue of the legendary Progressive journal that chronicled the troubles of its times through the prisms of fiction, photography, music, art, drama and humor.
- Nazi Christmas—for all this we thank our Fuehrer by John Heartfield: photomontage
- German Writers Against Hitler: Wieland Herzfelde
- Interview with Thomas Mann by Curt Riess. Illustrated with a portrait by Lotte Jacobi.
- Andrew Sittinger Votes: Oskar Maria Graf
- Die Stimme Des Gormordeten: Erich Muechsam. Illustrated with an author portrait by Lotte Jacobi.
- The European War and the Christian Churches: Paul Tillich
- A Traitor is Born: Ferdinand Bruckner
- Poems: Bertolt Brecht
- Peace Angels Made in Germany by John Heartfield: full-page photomontage presented here for the first time.
- Disrupted Language, Disrupted Culture: Ernst Bloch
- The General's Secret: Raoul Auernheimer
- Exiled German Art: work by Max Beckmann, Paul Klee Oskar Schlemmer, Kurt Roesch, and Wilhelm Lehmbruck.
- The Fourth of August: Friedrich Alexan
- The Old Jew: Bertolt Viertal
- Why Mr. Flint Took Up Arms: Manfred Georg
- American Literature: Klaus Mann
- Elegy of the Frogs: Walter Schoenstedt
- New Blood for American Democracy: Hans Meyer
- German-American League for Culture: Walter Mueller
- Emigre Art Fair: work by Arthur Kaufmann and Siegfried Ziegler.
- Books: Henry Hart
- Art: Jerome Klein
- Music: Elie Sagmeister
- Cultural Front
Helmut Herzfeld [John Heartfield, 1891-1968] is known primarily as one of the inventors of photomontage, and as a member of the Berlin Dada group. Heartfield's Dada pieces, virulent photomontages, posters, theatre sets, and book designs show his technique of combining ironic political slogans with stirring imagery. Very strong stuff, much more acerbic than similar work produced by his contemporaries Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Klutsis or Moholy-Nagy.
He broke with the Dadaists, since they did not fulfill his radical conception of the artist's role in society. He had a distaste for the materialism, greed and immorality rampant in Germany in the 1920s. His aim was to mobilize social energy, to expose with his forceful political art the evils, corruption, dangers, and abuses of power in the Nazi regime.
Heartfield trained as a graphic artist in Munich and collaborated extensively with George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann and Hanna Hoch and played a key role in founding the Berlin wing of Dada. Heartfield and Grosz began experimenting with photomontage in 1915-16, later to develop photomontage into a powerful satirical tool. His best known images were published between 1930 and 1938 in the magazine Arbetier-Illustrierte Zeitung, renamed Volks Illustrierte.
Edited by William Gropper, et al, including contributing editors Richard Wright, Kenneth Burke and Edwin Seaver. A dynamic, frequently visually striking, consistently left of center journal of literature and the arts, drawing on the foundations left by the WPA for much of its brilliance. A substantial roster of contributors appeared through its tenure, including Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Le Corbusier, Erskine Caldwell, Kenneth Rexroth, Richard Wright, Kees, Larsson, Abel, Kemp, Anderson, Herbst, Scott, Brown, Art Young, Halper, Komroff, Macleod, Margaret Bourke White, Burke, di Donato, Woody Guthrie, Seldes, Lorentz, Hughes, Maltz, Chaplin, Sandburg, R. Lowry, Ellison, Morris, et al. A major 20th century American periodical which is increasingly difficult to acquire in decent condition.
Marguerite Tjader (1901 – 1986) was born in New York City, the daughter of Richard Tjader, a big game hunter, explorer, and evangelist, and Margaret (Thorne) Tjader, daughter of the financier Samuel Thorne. She attended Bryn Mawr College and Columbia University, where she received the A.B. degree in 1925. Her marriage to Overton Harris ended in divorce in 1933. Their son, Hilary (1929-1999), became a documentary filmmaker, receiving an Oscar in 1962 for his direction of 'Seaward the great ships'. From 1937 until 1945 Mrs. Harris edited 'Direction', the left-wing journal of the arts she founded with the support of Theodore Dreiser. She had met Dreiser at a dinner party in 1928 and their intimate relationship continued off and on until 1944 when he finally married Helen Patges Richardson, his companion of almost 30 years. In 1944 Mrs. Harris and her son moved to Los Angeles where she became one in a long succession of Dreiser editorial assistants. In addition to typing and editing drafts of his work she acted as a sort of 'spiritual advisor' to Dreiser while he completed his penultimate novel 'The bulwark', published posthumously in 1946. Marguerite Tjader Harris is probably the model for the title character of 'Lucia', one of the fictional sketches in Dreiser's 'A gallery of women', published in 1929. During the 1930's, presumably after the dissolution of her marriage, Mrs. Harris, who had been raised a Baptist, converted to Roman Catholicism. In the 1950's she helped Mother Elisabeth Hesselblad establish the U.S. foundation of of the Order of the Most Holy Saviour of Saint Bridget (Bridgettines) by donating Vikingsborg, her family's summer home in Darien, Conn., to the order. She died on April 7, 1986 in East Windsor, Conn.