From Dada to Memes

John Heartfield, a German artist active in Berlin’s Dada scene, designed covers for the Communist weekly Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, lampooning Hitler and other high-ranking officials in the Nazi party with funny juxtapositions of image and text. Ara H. Merjian, an art historian who researches Fascist and anti-fascist aesthetics of the twentieth century, sees a parallel between these century-old collages, which came from Dadaist experiments spurred by the increasing presence of photogra