John Heartfield Revolutionary Beauty, The Radical Photomontages Of John Heartfield, Sabine Kriebel

Revolutionary Beauty offers the first sustained study of the German artist John Heartfield’s groundbreaking political photomontages, published in the left-wing weekly Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) during the 1930s.Sabine T. Kriebel gives the background of the artistic practices with which Heartfield directly confronted the turbulent, ideologically charged currents of interwar Europe. Heartfield’s collage art exposed the cultural politics of the crucial historical moment that was the rise of National Socialism (Nazi Party). Heartfield’s medium of photomontage, the cut-and-paste assemblage of photograph and text, deconstructed the visual world and galvanize viewers on a mass scale. Kriebel transforms our understandings of montage as a quintessentially modern practice. Central to that transformation is suture, a concept integral to film theory. It is used in Revolutionary Beauty to explore the psychic operations of Heartfield’s seamlessly welded AIZ magazine photomontages.Revolutionary Beauty proposes the language of sutured illusionism constitutes one of the most important and overlooked critiques of modern media. A media where a radical reassessment resides in suture. Scholars of photography, modern and contemporary art history, media studies, and European history will embrace this Sabine Kriebel’s book.