Available From UC Press

Revolutionary Beauty

The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield
Sabine T. 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 foregrounds the critical artistic practices with which Heartfield directly confronted the turbulent, ideologically charged currents of interwar Europe, exposing the cultural politics of the crucial historical moment that witnessed the consolidation of National Socialism. In this period of radicalization and mass mobilization, the medium of photomontage—the cut-and-paste assemblage of photograph and text—offered a way to deconstruct the visual world and galvanize beholders on a mass scale.

Kriebel transforms our understandings of montage as a quintessentially modern practice. Central to that reconceptualization is suture, a concept integral to film theory but recruited in this book to explore the psychic operations of Heartfield’s seamlessly welded AIZ photomontages. Revolutionary Beauty proposes that the language of sutured illusionism constitutes one of the most important and overlooked critiques of modern media, wherein a radical reassessment resides in suture. Scholars of photography, modern and contemporary art history, media studies, and European history will doubtlessly embrace this book. 

Sabine Kriebel is Lecturer (permanent), Modern and Contemporary Art, at University College Cork, Republic of Ireland. She completed her PhD in 2003 at UC Berkeley.
"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  
352 pp.7 x 10Illus: 99 b/w photographs
9780520276185$65.00|£55.00Hardcover
Feb 2014