John Heartfield’s Communism

Abstract

Abstract Sabine T. Kriebel’s Revolutionary Beauty is the most thorough study to date of the Communist photomontage artist John Heartfield’s work for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (aiz) in the late 1920s and 1930s. Kriebel analyses Heartfield’s production through the frame of ‘suture’, a concept she derives from film theory. She argues that Heartfield’s work at once stimulated collective solidarity at the same time as it cultivated habits of visual suspicion and active political thinking in ways that may not have always coincided with official Communist aesthetic doctrine. Although Kriebel’s approach yields many valuable insights, there is nonetheless a danger that her theory of subject-formation may preclude a more critical understanding of representative politics as a form of mediation.