Revolutionary Beauty

"It is difficult to write brilliantly about humor, more difficult to write engagingly about humor and politics, and more difficult still to write with precision about humor, politics, and art. Revolutionary Beauty is indispensable for understanding the singular genius of John Heartfield, the Weimar era avant-garde virtuoso whose photomontages created a new visual language for destabilizing and ridiculing Nazism’s rise and triumph." —Anson Rabinbach, Professor of History at Princeton University and author of The Third Reich Sourcebook

"Historically precise and theoretically astute, this is by far the most wide-ranging study of John Heartfield’s extraordinary project to date. Sabine Kriebel goes beyond a single oeuvre to unearth, patiently but provocatively, the complex visual imaginary of the Left in the darkest moments of its history." —Frederic J. Schwartz, author of Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany and The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War

"This book by Sabine Kriebel fills a void in an exemplary mode of critical cultural scholarship, promising to take a major place in the fields of 20th century photography, mass media, European cultural studies and modern art. I laud the unprecedented depth of analysis in her probing of specific images and their particular relation to ever-changing events in this period. Attention to this book will radiate centripetally, engaging the interest of a new generation of avid and often extra-mural dissenters in this age of new crisis, potentially serving as historic handbook for the Occupy generation."—Sally Stein, Emerita Professor, UC Irvine