On December 31, 1918, the artists George Grosz, John Heartfield and Wieland Herzfelde joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Working with the party, they practiced and promoted tendency art (Tendenzkunst), i.e. committed art, an art of use to the working class in the struggle against exploitation and oppression.
In these essays Grosz, Heartfield and Herzfelde discuss tendency arts, its opposition to bourgeois formalist art, and how it is to be used in concrete ways to aid the proletariat in the class struggle. For these artists, art is not for contemplation in museums but for action, for working class neighborhoods and for the streets.
