The Spanish artist Josep Renau and the Soviet artist Aleksandr Zhitomirsky were inspired to take up political photomontage by the satirical images of the German communist artist John Heartfield. Studying Heartfield’s work “remotely” in the magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung, both artists produced significant bodies of magazine work that similarly traveled across borders. All three artists suffered from the political hardships of the mid-20th century, enduring exile, displacement, and persecution. During the Cold War, Renau and Zhitomirsky independently produced significant bodies of photomontage work that critiqued the politics and culture of the United States, employing similar themes and techniques. Both students finally met their master in person within a few months of each other in the late 1950s, and all three would cross paths in Berlin the following decade. Despite the similarity of his students’ American photomontages, Heartfield responded quite differently to the two art – befriending and exhibiting with Zhitomirsky while dismissing the work of Renau. This lecture will clarify why Renau became the “odd man out” by examining the paths of the artists and their work across exile, war, late Stalinism, and the Thaw.