Sabine T. Kriebel. Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield.

Abstract

John Heartfield (1891–1968) was one of the most significant visual artists of the twentieth century. Sabine T. Kriebel's sophisticated study contributes enormously to our understanding of how and why. During World War I, Heartfield was one of the Berlin Dadaists who originated photomontage. From 1929 to 1938 his brilliantly montaged satires played a serious role in Communist publications, especially Willi Münzenberg's Comintern-aligned Workers' Illustrated Newspaper (AIZ). Adolf the Übermensch: Eats Gold and Spouts Junk, among others, provides a textbook illustration of Heartfield's caustic anti-Nazi propaganda and of photomontage technique: editing and combining images and texts to infiltrate them with alternative meanings. Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield analyzes this middle period in Heartfield's career, from the decline and fall of the Weimar Republic through his exile from Nazi Germany in Prague, Paris, and England. Kriebel's interest is at heart thematic and theoretical. She draws on primary and archival sources and on previous scholarship, particularly the pioneering work of the East German scholar Roland März, as well as on a range of theorists, including Louis Aragon, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer, to explicate these images' complex resonances on two planes: the political and the psychological.