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.

The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield

Revolutionary Beauty

Kathleen James-Chakraborty

Bringing together an international team of scholars, this book offers new perspectives on the impact that the Bauhaus and its teaching had on a wide range of artistic practices. Three of the fields in which the Bauhaus generated immediately transformative effects were housing, typography, and photography. Contributors go further to chart the surprising relation of the school to contemporary developments in hair-styling and shop window display in unprecedented detail. New scholarship has detailed the degree to which Bauhaus faculty and students set off around the world, but it has seldom paid attention to its impact in communist East Germany or in countries like Ireland where no Bauhäusler settled. This wide-ranging collection makes clear that, a century after its founding, many new stories remain to be told about the influence of the twentieth century’s most innovative arts institution. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, design history, photography and architectural history.

Bauhaus Effects in Art, Architecture, and Design

Andrés Mario Zervigón

Recent decades have seen photography’s privileged relationship to the real come under question. Spurred by the postmodern critique of photography in the 1980s and the rise of digital technologies soon thereafter, scholars have been asking who and what built this understanding of the medium in the first place. Photography and Doubt reflects on this interest in photography’s referential power by discussing it in rigorously historical terms. How was the understanding of photographic realism cultivated in the first place? What do cases of staged and manipulated photography reveal about that realism’s hold on audiences across the medium’s history? Have doubts about photography’s testimonial power stimulated as much knowledge as its realism? Edited by Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón, Photography and Doubt is the first multi-authored collection specifically designed to explore these questions. Its 13 original essays, illustrated with 73 color images, explore cases when the link between the photographic image and its referent was placed under stress, and when photography was as attuned to its myth-making capabilities as to its claims to authenticity. Photography and Doubt will serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars in art history, visual and media studies, philosophy, and the history of science and technology.

Photography and Doubt

Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

Leah Dickerman

National Gallery of Art (U.S.)

Centre Georges Pompidou

Brigid Doherty

Dorothea Dietrich

Janine Mileaf

Michael Taylor, L.Th., B.Th.

Michael Taylor, Sr.

Matthew Witkovsky

Dada includes many of the key figures in the history of modernism, such as Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield, Francis Picabla, Kurt Schwitters, and Sophie Taeuber, and introduces artists who are less well known. This book explores the variety of art-making practices that emerged between 1916 and 1924 in the movement's primary centers: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, and Paris. Six city essays by scholars of the movement; an illustrated chronology; more than forty artists' biographies; period photographs; and extensive plate sections document a provocative and influential artistic era. This illustrated book accompanies Dada, the most comprehensive museum exhibition of Dada art ever mounted in the United States, on view in 2006 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition was on view at the Musee national d'art moderne-Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2005.

Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris

Dada

Sabine T. Kriebel

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