John Heartfield Research Articles

PROPAGANDA ANTINAZI PADA FOTO MONTASE KARYA JOHN HEARTFIELD DENGAN PENDEKATAN ANALISIS SEMIOTIKA

This research focused on the relationship between art and social context, politic, and culture. The artwork is photomontages. Visualization on photomontage sometimes describe the social reality that emerged and developed at the era before World War II started. In Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung magazine which was a working class magazine during World War II there was one photomontage artist named John Heartfield who published his photomontages containing anti-Nazi propaganda. The purpose of this research was to determine the meaning of four photomontages by John Heartfield. The research method is carried out by observing and collecting data at the level of denotation and connotation with Roland Barthes' semiotic theory, as well as knowing how John Heartfield communicates propaganda through his works. The results of this research indicate that the photomontages of antiNazi propaganda by John Heartfield denotatively contains the meaning of criticism through visuals combining the figure of Adolf Hitler, Swastika, and goddess Themis with symbols based on ancient Europeans culture. In connotation, the meaning of criticism contained shows criticism of political and war crimes committed by the German people, from The Prussian Empire to The Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler.

The Photographic Metaphor: Heartfield, Brecht, Sebald

From a semiotic point of view, photography is still considered a different kind of sign. Then, how can imagetext works be studied, formed by photography and word? This article argues that fictional texts expose the semiotic nature of photographs, showing that photographs are signs, different from their referents. The fictional, intermedial texts studied here are John Heartfield’s, Bertolt Brecht’s, and W.G. Sebald’s: three authors linked by German history. In the light of Umberto Eco’s semiotics, photographs can also be considered metaphors, enable to provide a new kind of iconicity and to overcome their realistic weight.

From Photobook to Digital Book: Curating Weimar Germany’s New Visual Literacy Online

This contribution focuses on the digital curation of Weimar Germany’s new visual literacy, using Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield’s photobook Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles as a case study to examine in which ways a photobook and accompanying research can be showcased online. Tucholsky and Heartfield’s work is an example of the photobook genre that rose to prominence in the 1920s, also for its potential to serve as an “Übungsatlas” (Walter Benjamin) for the new visual literacy. In curating the photobook online, using the publishing platform Scalar and the media repository Critical Commons, the photobook and the accompanying research not only become easily accessible to fellow researchers, students, and the public, but it also becomes possible to emulate and thus explore Weimar Germany’s new visual literacy online. Curating Tucholsky and Heartfield’s photobook and the related analysis online allows for a reflection on digital curation as scholarship, its use in the classroom, and its implications for the trajectory of photobook research.

From compassion to distance: Hannah Höch’s ‘Mother’

This article addresses the work of the German artist Hannah Höch in the light of the struggle for abortion rights in the Weimar Republic. I attempt to show how Höch’s uses of the technique of photomontage can be read as a way of introducing a distance between the work and the viewer that allows us to question the beliefs we use to make sense of the world. Specifically, I discuss her photomontage Mutter (‘Mother’), a version of a photograph taken by John Heartfield, and some of her writings and interviews. I also examine closely the material conditions and political debates in which Höch’s work – as a social practice – developed. After a brief introduction and a methodological outline, I present Höch in the context of Berlin Dada and summarise the main underlying arguments of my hypothesis. Namely, that the major interest of Höch’s photomontages lies in the complex articulation of activism and philosophy, and in the way in which they put mainstream categories into question by ‘distancing’ fragments of reality.

Inclusive history politics in the arts: Intervention at the Peace Cross St. Lorenz

The text discusses inclusion and social engagement in art, which are central to my practice. My projects operate at the interface between dialogical education and participatory as well as collective art making. By referring to Kester’s critique of New Labour policies of the late 1990s as leading to a de-radicalized Marxism I argue for an agonistic method that I connect with the idea of ‘radical inclusion’ as a strategic approach to democratization. The problem of Austrian history politics and how the country created the myth of Austria as the first victim of Nazi Germany is the main focus of my intervention at the Peace Cross St. Lorenz in Lower Austria, which serves as an example of my artistic practice of ‘radical inclusion’. The peace cross exists since the 1960s and is celebrating the Jockisch task force. Contemporary historical research has revealed that this combat group was actively involved in war crimes during the Second World War. To counter the myth of an innocent Wehrmacht I mounted in front of the cross a photomontage made in 1933 by the antifascist artist John Heartfield. Additionally, the memorial is augmented by five signboards which present collages produced by local school pupils during a workshop that took place over a period of six months.

Proletarian Modernism and the Politics of Emotion: On Franz Wilhelm Seiwert and John Heartfield

Proletarian Modernism and the Politics of Emotion: On Franz Wilhelm Seiwert and John Heartfield Sabine Hake (bio) An art form that relates to a particular social class does not exist, and if it did, it would be entirely irrelevant to life. We ask those who want to create proletarian art: “What is proletarian art?” Is it an art created by the proletarians themselves? Or an art only in the service of the proletariat? Or an art intended to arouse proletarian (revolutionary) instincts? There exists no art created by proletarians because a proletarian who creates art no longer remains a proletarian but becomes an artist. —Theo van Doesburg, “Manifesto of Proletarian Art” (1923) The spirited defense of autonomous art by Theo van Doesburg, Hans Arp, and Kurt Schwitters and their denunciation of “proletarian” as a symptom of everything wrong with politically engaged art attest to the deep divides that haunted the culture and society of the Weimar Republic.1 Their manifesto presented formal innovation as the conduit to aesthetic autonomy and celebrated modern art as liberation from social determinations, national differences, and historical influences. According to van Doesburg, one of the founders of the De Stijl movement, a worker transcended his class origins when he became an artist. But could an artist also stand with the working class? Most Weimar artists associated with the KPD (Communist Party of Germany)—from Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Käthe Kollwitz to lesser-known ones such as Otto Nagel, Curt Querner, Oskar [End Page 735] Nerlinger, and Alice Lex-Nerlinger—would have answered with an enthusiastic “yes,” including those who, unlike Nagel and Querner, did not come from working-class backgrounds. Known for their realist, expressionist, constructivist, and new objectivist styles, all of these artists experimented with new media and techniques to uncover the structures of class society and support the struggle for revolutionary change. Modernist strategies such as typization and abstraction played a key role in the process—a connection first recognized in the late nineteenth-century Social Democratic debates on modern literature and working-class culture and revisited during the early 1930s in the famous Marxist debates on modernism involving Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor W. Adorno. What has not yet been considered in greater detail is in what ways the question of workers’ representation in the artistic and political sense is inextricably linked to the process of emotional mobilization—that is, of envisioning and prefiguring collective bodies in the name of the revolutionary working class. Here the notion of proletarian modernism provides a useful critical tool for reconstructing the elusive configurations of politics and emotion that, under the influence of the October Revolution, brought together the political and artistic avant-gardes and redefined the complicated relationship between modernism and communism.2 For Franz Wilhelm Seiwert and John Heartfield, in particular, advancing the goals of proletarian art was inseparable from developing alternatives to the institutions and practices of bourgeois high culture. This included addressing the difficult position of the modern artist between classes. As Heartfield’s brother Wieland Herzfelde explained: “The artist [i.e., in capitalist society] is a worker and, like others, exploited. Nonetheless, he is no proletarian. . . . He has no comrades but only rivals and competitors; his existence is bourgeois.”3 Working through these contradictions for Seiwert and Heartfield meant to become active in artists’ groups—the Cologne Progressives and Berlin Dada, respectively—and to equate artistic innovation with political intervention. It meant showing their work in group exhibitions and nontraditional venues and publishing in new art journals and party newspapers. Last but not least, foregrounding the emotional qualities of political art meant drawing on elements of folk culture and religious culture and appropriating their didactic and rhetorical qualities for class-based interventions. In this article, the usefulness of political emotions as a critical category in the study of proletarian modernism will be tested on two specific works of art: Seiwert’s painting Demonstration (1925) and Heartfield’s photomontage Fünf Finger hat die Hand (Five Fingers Has the Hand, 1928). Seiwert and Heartfield are uniquely suited for such an exercise—firstly because of their self-identification as communist artists and secondly because of their use of political...

Mash-Up: The Enduring Fusion of High Art & Mass Culture

Mash-UpThe Enduring Fusion of High Art & Mass Culture Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution Alexey Kondakov [End Page 121] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Adam, Eve & Medor, Rennes, France, 2009 In 1912 at his Boulevard Raspail studio in Montparnasse, Picasso hung a changing installation of collages on a beige wall over a cot scattered with pillows and papers. He displayed six or seven pieces of new work selected from the nearly hundred collages he had created that year. Most notably, he shared variations on a study of a guitar, a paste-up of wallpaper and cardboard on newsprint. When artists heard about Picasso's new work, they flocked to his small studio to get a look. Intrigued by the method, futurists such as Gino Severini, Umberto Boccioni, and Giacomo Balla began using collage as a method of enriching the surfaces of their works. Picasso's displays of simple cutting and pasting of the detritus of daily life were declared "a pasted-paper revolution." The idea moved quickly; collage became a favorite medium among international modernists for [End Page 122] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Mickey Mouse Is Dead, Paris, 2009 [End Page 123] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Clair-obscur, Saint-Malo, France, 2010 its playful, ephemeral style and quick, spontaneous process—what Picasso called "one mad rush." ________ Picasso's work on collage had really begun five years before, when he forged an artistic friendship with Georges Braque. The French artist often compared their closeness to "two mountain climbers tethered together," and for years, in the evenings, they visited each other's studios to critique the day's work. They challenged each other to discover new techniques. When Braque began to add sand, cinder, sawdust, and coffee grounds to his works to increase the texture of his images, it launched in Picasso a flurry of activity. "I am using your latest papery and powdery methods," he wrote to Braque in a letter. He was referring to the scraps of wallpaper, sheet music, and oilcloth that he was pasting to his canvases. For Braque and Picasso, the medley of scraps salvaged from [End Page 124] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Escaping Criticism, Paris, 2011 ordinary existence and employed in their work replicated the chaotic spirit of the times. By coupling unlikely images and materials, they were commenting on the frenetic world of modern Europe, with its escalating technologies, proliferation of handbills and posters, and blaring newspaper headlines of mounting political unrest. While the explicit definition of collage refers to the pasting-on of scraps that originate beyond the artist's studio, the definition loosened as different artistic traditions engaged the practice and made it their own, and the technique evolved. The futurists embraced the fundamentals of collage, but the Dadaists found the method too dainty and precious for a crumbling civilization on the brink of disaster. Artists such as John Heartfield and Hannah Höch explored Picasso's and Braque's innovations in photomontage, releasing them from standard artistic [End Page 125] Click for larger view View full resolution Alexey Kondakov limitations in favor of foraging for and then reassembling fragments of photographic material. Through the process of cutting and pasting ready-made images from cast-off periodicals, they became, as Heartfield describes, "engineers" who sought to express the absurd nature of the times. While the basic technique of cutting and pasting offered the Dadaists a way to dissolve barriers between fine art and wider culture, the surrealists reveled in collage's tendency to synthesize contradictory pictorial elements, which perfectly suited their recurring themes of the unreliability of logic, the value of dream, and the embrace of the absurd. Selecting, arranging, and making connections between disparate images gave their compositions a higher level of expressiveness and emotional impact. In their associative leaps and juxtaposed imagery, the pieces became [End Page 126] Click for larger view View full resolution Alexey Kondakov came picture-poems of a world that existed somewhere between imagination and reality. In the 1940s, when artists and intellectuals escaping World War II made New York City the new hub of modern...

Law-as-Literature Workpiece: a Montage of the Law

This paper depicts law through prosaic and photographic montage. In matters of law, every interpretation necessarily concerns a claim in right to administer violence through enforcement. Montage as form in writing about law gives a greater scope for interpretation to the reader, more so than traditional narrative. This work incorporates elements of literary and photographic montage as developed by John Heartfield and Walter Benjamin, and as described by Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. The Frankfurt School's perspective on critical theory informs montage in this paper.

From Carnival to Satire: Photomontage as a Commentary on Photography

This article discusses two eras of manipulated photography –that of trick photography before 1914 and that of photomontage of the 1930s. The former had a carnivalesque character, while the latter highlighted political satire. Although profusely discussed in its days, trick photography was largely anonymous. By contrast, the 1930s brought about distinct personalities such as John Heartfield or the Soviet cartoonist Boris Klinch as well as prominent theorists, including Karel Teige or Günther Anders. Despite formal differences the article argues for a continuity of approaches: both periods represent steps that question photography as a medium that claims stable signification.

Sparks of Discomfiture: On the Promise of Photomontage (or Back to Suture)

Far from being ‘over’, photomontage has proliferated in our digital age, most commonly as meme. Although seemingly based on wit’s lowest common denominator, memes illustrate the mass reach and cohesive function of the medium but also tell us something about the mood of the moment. It is the untapped potential of the medium that interests me here. Drawing on the anticipatory history of Marxist practitioners in the 1920s and 1930s, including Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and John Heartfield, this article traces the coordinates of a potential radical practice that sparks discomfiture and cognitive reorientation. Rather than reproducing knowledge, photomontage can produce new forms of understanding; it can do so in complex and continually generative ways that remain underexplored in the digital age, in which an epistemology of suture predominates.

Sheida Soleimani, Cyborg: Photomontage in an Expanding Network

This article examines the photomontages, photo-sculptures, installations, and videos of contemporary artist Sheida Soleimani in light of earlier Dadaist practices. In particular, it focuses on similarities and differences between Soleimani’s work and that of Dada artists John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, demonstrating how Soleimani has evolved Dada photomontage and performance strategies in novel and important ways. Soleimani’s development of earlier avant-garde strategies with the help of digital technologies, I argue, proves the continuing relevance of photomontage today. In addition, it also reveals Soleimani’s interest in combining a Dadaist approach to photography, which – through photomontage – emphasizes the artist’s position as a social critic and commentator on reality, with a Surrealist attitude, one that mobilizes the indexical aspects of the photograph to disclose the uncanny and mysterious aspects of the world.

From Photomontage to “Functional Montage” Staging an Intermedial Assembly Line in Kurt Tucholsky’s and John Heartfield’s Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles

This essay demonstrates that Kurt Tucholsky’s and John Heartfield’s photobook Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles (DD), published in 1929, aimed to unveil the actual condition of the Weimar Republic by addressing and educating the working class. The worker-readers of DD are supposed to see themselves differently with the help of the photobook’s combinations of texts and images that imitate an assembly line – a view familiar to the worker. This essay shows that, what I call “functional montages” – an extension of the photomontage that combines industrial and cinematic montage – allow worker-readers to both recognize themselves in DD, while at the same time gaining the ability to take a critical stance on their position within the German public sphere. This shows not only how Tucholsky and Heartfield are educating workers by employing the technique of montage; DD also exemplifies how the idea of intermediality is not just a procedure of translating images from one medium to another. Instead, it is the images’ potential to create visual narratives that allows for a juxtaposition of photographs and texts in the target medium, following a combination of cinematic and industrial montage principles. This shows that intermediality is less a transfer of media elements than a transfer of their narrative potential.

John Heartfield’s Photomontages as a Political Tool

It is the fact that art often involves with politics. It can work both of sides, either with a political ideology or against of it. The strong relationship between art and politic was occurred during the World War I and World War II. As a member of Berlin Dadaist Art Movement, John Heartfield made sharp opposition with his photomontage works against the Hitler regime in Germany. Since photomontage became anti-art technique against traditional painting in Dada Movement, Heartfield used this technique to criticize his opponents, Adolph Hitler and Mussolini. This research will focus on how Heartfield attacked and disrupted with his photomontages to his opponents. Later on, I will analyze photomontages of Peter Kennard and Klaus Staeck, contemporary artists and designers, who were inspired by Heartfield’s photomontage methodology and his artistic activism. The qualitative research and comparative methodology were used in this research. The findings of the research showed that Heartfield became the pioneer of using photomontage technique in his time. He realized that he could use photography to express his politic thoughts and ideas in collage making. He used photomontage as a political weapon against his political oppositions. Kennard and Staeck, like Heartfield, used photomontage to support and defend their political issues in their time, too. Finannly, this research shows that Dada artist, John Heartfield as well as contemporaray designer and artist Peter Kennard and Klaus Staeck used the photomontage to make a social criticism through their conceptual and powerful works. Their initial approaches were not making design for a client or gallery to sell their works, but they wanted to be, as “artists-activists”, part of social changes in their time.

Fotomontaje como agente revolucionario

In this article, the practice of photomontage is presented as a revolutionary agent capable of reconfiguring real events and creating new narratives based on political interests. To this end, two different approaches to the role of photomontage are presented, both carried out in a context where the political scenario was undergoing deep restructuring.In the first case, described through an analysis of a set of works by John Heartfield, the photomontage is characterised by a discourse of opposition to a rising fascist political regime in Germany, revealing this practice as a potential medium to propose a rereading of real events and to appeal to the critical sense of the public. In this context we can say that photomontage acts as an (anti)political weapon.In the second case, described through the analysis of a set of works by authors such as Klutsis or El Lissitzky, photomontage is characterised by a discourse in accordance with a new political era taking place in the Soviet Union in the sequence of the October Revolution.

John Heartfield’s Communism

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.

John Heartfield's Thälmann Montages: The Politics behind Images of International Antifascism

The German photomontagist John Heartfield visualized Willi Münzenberg's antifascist position in the Communist Party as early as 1932 and became famous for antifascist photomontages, published exclusively in the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ) from 1929 to 1938. Heartfield contributed the image of Ernst Thälmann as a symbol of antifascism through montages for the AIZ in 1934 and 1936. The Comintern's critique of the April 1936 montage, which is understood to be aimed more at the AIZ's publisher, Münzenberg, entangled him and the AIZ in a double-edged crisis in the Comintern. By investigating the fate of Münzenberg's Thälmann campaign and his supraparty organization the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe, the article examines why the Comintern undermined the AIZ, a forceful proponent of antifascism in the European public sphere, and how Joseph Stalin intended to control Münzenberg's media operation to organize a propaganda campaign in the name of Popular Front unity during the onset of the Spanish Civil War.

First as Tragedy, Second as Farce: Heartfield's Photomontages and the Engaged Viewer

Apart from the work of Eduard Fuchs, there has been little Marxist scholarship on caricature and satire. This is a glaring omission, especially in light of the work of John Heartfield, whose photomontages were viewed across the political spectrum as well as across class boundaries. To discover how Heartfield's photomontages interpellate their subject as a politically engaged viewer, this article investigates the mechanisms by which satire addresses its audience, how it communicates its message, and to what degree we might judge its effectiveness as a means of persuasion. A Benjaminian analysis of the Verfremdungseffekt produced by montage, the alienating distanciation of unexpected juxtapositions, contributes to the construction of a true dialectical image of satire, which allows us to plot the oppositional axes of satire and to extrapolate the characteristics of other forms of mass persuasion such as state propaganda. In this way we can trace how mass persuasion results in political action.

“Nervenaufpeitschende Aufklärung!”: The Melodramatic Satire of John Heartfield's Photomontages

This essay investigates John Heartfield's invocation of the melodramatic mode in photomontages that he produced for the Communist mass-circulation journal Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung in the 1930s. In a reverse strategy of dehumanization, Heartfield loads the photomontages of his National Socialist foes with emotional surfeit — sensationalist pathos, copious weeping, and unhinged rage — in order to destabilize the gravitas of Nazi leadership. Illuminating the psychoanalytic and affective dimensions of Heartfield's project, the essay demonstrates the complex psychological and somatic operations involved in the manufacture of these seemingly simple, populist montages. Melodrama's aesthetics of overstatement charges the quotidian conflicts pictured in these photomontages with greater moral intensity or urgency, generating heightened psychological investment in the embodied reader during a fraught period in Europe's history.

The Efficiency of Ideology and the Possibilities of Art: An Althusserian Account

Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology allows us to account for all kinds of joyful obedience performed by individuals. This theory does not require any assumption of lacking knowledge or “false consciousness” on the side of subjectivated individuals. Therefore, it provides the crucial tools for explaining the specific political efficiency of art. This efficiency does not stem from any new “information,” as the predominant tendencies in alleged “political” or “documentary” art since the 1990s have presupposed, and as the popular notion of “artistic research” may still suggest. On the contrary, in order to be politically efficient, art has to tackle not the knowledge but the specific subjectivations individuals have undergone. When one augments Althusser’s fragmentary account of subjectivation by the distinctions between “belief” and “faith” introduced by Octave Mannoni, and additionally introduces as a third category that of “paranoia,” then one can specify the predominant types of subjectivation in current Western societies—as well as the exits that critical art can offer from these subjectivations. Artistic exit strategies from forms of faith and paranoia will be analyzed with regard to works by John Heartfield, Bernard Mandeville, and Christoph Schlingensief.

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

Reviewed by: Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield by Sabine T. Kriebel Megan R. Luke Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield. By Sabine T. Kriebel. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2014. Pp. xi + 336. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 978-0520276185. Photomontage is an art that cannibalizes and capitalizes on the technologies that made photography a truly mass medium. By cutting and reconfiguring images that purport to show the world as it is, photomontage interrupts the visual rhetoric of a passive, transparent registration of reality to critique its effects. It rejects the voracious consumption of images in order to productively act upon them, and its gestures cannot help but appear to be a violent attack on the uniform surface of its materials and, by extension, the smooth operations of the culture industry itself. The technique, in short, weaponizes its means in the service of “the semiotics of rupture” (7). In Revolutionary Beauty, Sabine Kriebel offers readers a compelling new account of the achievement of John Heartfield, one of the pioneers and unrivaled masters of this technique, which is so often understood to be the quintessential symptom of the fissures of modernity itself. She tackles his most celebrated work, produced in the years 1930–1938 for the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ), an illustrated weekly that sought to advocate for communism among leftist readers not (yet) affiliated with the party. Kriebel makes the crucial observation that Heartfield’s AIZ photomontages “confront rupture by means of its deliberate concealment, repression, or sublimation, securing a virtually seamless bonding of separate pieces that [she] call[s] a suture” (11). Anyone who has attempted to teach the process and politics of photomontage through Heartfield’s work for the mass media will be immediately confronted with this paradox: what are we to make of an artist who wielded his shears to eviscerate and expose the ideological duplicity of capital and social democracy only to mask any traces of his own production? To what extent did Heartfield mimic the procedural operations of the very forces he set out to unsettle, and what are the consequences— then and now—of his approach to a new ecology of images? Kriebel’s book counts among superlative new scholarship on Weimar photographic culture, reconfiguring the artist’s historical position for future readers without firsthand experience of Soviet communism or the Cold War. By setting out to answer these questions about Heartfield’s masterful illusionism in the pages of AIZ, she has crafted a fascinating narrative, recounted with verve and theoretical sophistication that will be a valued resource for students and experts in the field alike. Revolutionary Beauty consists of five chapters, bracketed by an introduction and an epilogue, that tell the story of Heartfield’s shift away from the aesthetics of rupture that had characterized his book jackets for the Malik Verlag to the “sutured illusionism” of his AIZ photomontages. Moving chronologically, each chapter examines the technological, political, and subjective significance of that shift through discrete constellations of Heartfield’s images, each anchored by a single photomontage that Kriebel [End Page 403] takes to be paradigmatic of his resistance against attempts to harness the power of mass media (photography, the press, radio) for human exploitation and state violence. This approach allows her to carry out close readings of specific images grounded in meticulous research into the specifics of their manufacture, reconstructing the very labor that Heartfield sought to conceal in the service of his own self-fashioning, his relentless criticism of the press, a direct address to the reader-beholder, leftwing propaganda, an often puerile and grotesquely bodily humor, and, most importantly, what Louis Aragon called “revolutionary beauty.” What Kriebel ultimately achieves with Revolutionary Beauty is an account of Heartfield’s surreptitious surrealism, which asserts its visibility almost in spite of the necessary legibility of the political critique of his photomontages—be it directed at the perpetrators of police massacres, the titans of the war industry, or an ascendant Nazi party and its bloodthirsty dictatorship. She deftly navigates the complexities of the media theory and fractured politics of the 1930s, laying out with refreshing clarity Heartfield’s difficult relationship to German communism before, during, and after his years in...